I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog and wanted some advice on that—how to find her voice and so on. A few random thoughts: 1. It is the stuff about you that is odd that is interesting. So, don’t think to much about how you are supposed to do it, or what the genre convetions are. Just try to amuse yourself.

A mistake I did when I was young was that I paid too much attention to what I thought was doable and let that decide what I allowed myself get curious about.

I didn't understand enough to judge what was doable. And I severed myself from my curiosity—my fuel and compass. For example, I was obsessed with essays as a teenager. But in Sweden there are precisely zero ppl who make a living writing literary essays. So I thought I should steer my curiosity toward something adjecent but more doable, like journalism or novel writing.

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life—my relationship, some of my essays, my current career—the "design process" has followed the same pattern. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an "unfolding." If I look at things that have not turned out as well--my education, the books I've written and hidden on a hard drive in our attic--they have followed the opposite design process. I've tried to construct a new reality from nothing. I was caught up in my head, or on paper.

Graph of decision quality among professional Go players. A sudden increase after AlphaGo. It is not only because they are learning from the AI. Players are suddenly inventing new moves at a faster rate too! I saw the graph here, which links to original study: arxiv.org/abs/2311.11388

I decided to be way more ambitious as a writer and dad a while back and it is remarkable how much clear things get. I'm not sure how much the details of my case generalise, but let me think aloud about these two questions.

https://x.com/tomcritchlow/status/1748001286224580668?s=20

AI moderator tools could become a very handy tool to allow larger communities to be high functioning. Would be great for loose public collaboration, and great for learning. I'll think aloud here, trying to expand on the idea gestured at in this tweet

https://twitter.com/phokarlsson/status/1638462377938092033?s=20

Some thoughts on AI, education and intellectual milieus. It is pretty obvious by now that 1-on-1 tutoring at scale is close to being a solved problem. This is great, but change little in and of itself.

If you go back to early anthropology, there is a big discussion about how cultures integrate their "institutions" (like marriage, apprenticeships, etc) to form wholes that make sense for ppl over their lifespans.

We don't have cultures like that these days. I guess you could say that we don't have cultures in that strict definition of the term. We have an assemblage of subcultures. A culture for kids, teenage cultures, nerd culture, workplace culture.

One of the things that really move me about the Swedish music producers in this piece is how generous they are with young musicians.

https://twitter.com/phokarlsson/status/1638240103339290633

There is the story about how Max Martin gives a studio to his girlfriend's brother's 16-year-old classmate when he hears that he likes to play death metal.

Over the last decade, more than 10% of all top ten hit songs in the US were written by Swedish songwriters. Which is pretty impressive for a country the size of North Carolina.

Where did all that talent come from?

An essay
escapingflatland.substack.com/p/scene-creati… The short answer is: Sweden accidentally created an intensely fertile breeding ground for scenes.

I negotiated myself out of two consulting gigs this week so I can have more time to write. It has been a strange experience for me with the blog growing exponentially. By which I don't mean to say that it is big (its 2.3k subscribers) but that it doubles in size every time I get used to its size.

I'm realizing that if the blog is going to keep growing, I will need to have a position on moderation.

I feel conflicted about it. On the one hand, there is a norm that blogs should allow hard debates etc. You shouldn't censor perspectives etc.

If you want to master something, you should study the highest achievements of you field.

What if we take this approach to raising and educating children?

An essay

escapingflatland.substack.com/p/childhoods Over the last year, I read an unhealthy amount of biographies of people that to me are exceptional. I took notes about their childhoods. von Neumann, Pascal, Woolf, Wagner, Curie - and about 30 more.

What are the patterns in how they were raised?