Welcome

TLDR: Orientation Day. README first if you want to get your bearings.

Introduction

You can get some basic facts about me from the homepage of my personal site. I’ll add color here.

I’ve always been drawn to writing, research, and experimentation. This blog is a way to push me to be more precise, more rigorous, and more complete in my thinking about the world and of myself.

I write with regular practice, think with depth, and value play in life, micro and macroscopically. My aim is to take intuitions, or ideas, and build creative output that I can use to test my knowledge against external realities.

What I Do

I co-founded an AI startup called Concordance. We build technology to apply mechanistic interpretability research to real world problems. We’re still quite early, we have some interesting tools that show promise, and we’re releasing our first product within the month.

Aside from that, I exercise (mainly lift weights), write, walk long distances, play chess, create/listen to music, read (currently - a collection of Jung essays & The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times), and support my loved ones however possible. I’m also interested in learning how to sculpt, but I haven’t instantiated that hobby yet.

I’m interested in experimenting with my own creative process, working within a structure that consistently produces creative output, and occasionally, stochastically, produces incredible output.

An Interlude on Values

I value truth. In my personal life, in my professional life, and in my creative pursuits, I’m driven by the desire to uncover new realities. This sounds simple, but in practice it is extremely difficult.

It’s important to note here that while I value truth above most else, I understand there is nuance. It is often unwise to be completely truthful about everything at all points. One must be tactful in which truth they say, when, and to whom, but I believe that people should extend their truth capacity more than they think, and that a rich life is built by those who risk seeing and speaking truth.

I also value beauty. Many things can be beautiful, and I broadly relate beauty to the concept of “evocative”. A thing that is beautiful evokes a response. That response could be calm, it could be energy, it could even be disgust, but the context of each evoked response relative to the source is what creates the opportunity for beauty to be perceived. The same object could be beautiful or abhorrent depending on the context, so there is something within that contextual information that provides structure to beauty. More truthfully, however, beauty is generally best described by “if you know, you know.”

Finally, I value connection. Connection is complicated and somewhat abstract. My working definition of connection is “to see elements of X in Y, and vice versa”. If I am connected to a person, there are elements of them in me, and of me in them. Said another way, my self-perception involves them, and I expect theirs involves me. Similarly, if one sees a connection between two fields of research, they are likely noticing shared patterns between them. Connection is about shared components.

You’ll notice here that I don’t say explicitly that I value love. Love is far too overloaded a concept. Love is attention, and the quality/energy of that attention determines the shape of the love. Almost needless to say, I believe that attention is the only important resource we have as human beings. You might say “Attention is All you Need”.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy poking around. Send me a message on X if you want to start a conversation.