2025-11-15 15:58:48
Published on November 15, 2025 7:58 AM GMT
I am entirely bored and uninterested in the lives of the characters in Middlemarch (a book published 1871, about some small-town people living in ~1830). They do things like (a) get married, or (b) don't get married.
Yet it is one of my favorite books. The things the author is interested in match my interests. For instance, the main character of the book is a woman who has beliefs and ideals, while everyone else in the book is in turn baffled and annoyed by this. They are constantly complaining about it! And that is something that interests the author, seeing a true idealist interface with the world in some detail.
Here are some quotes that show what I love about the book.
And how should Dorothea not marry? – a girl so handsome and with such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick labourer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles – who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship. Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
I think this quote captures the tone and content of the book that I like.
It is a general fact about me that I love a lot of art that accurately describes something I deeply care about, even if it has a sign flip on the value of that thing.
They go on to complain about her having ideas later:
Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
Some time after her mother passes away, she and her sister eventually are to split the jewelry she has left them. Her sister is trying them on, and says Dorothea should have one, and she replies:
'No, I have other things of mamma's – her sandal-wood box, which I am so fond of – plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear. We need discuss them no longer. There – take away your property.'
Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
She has a visceral aversion to it. When Celia suggests she wear a cross, she says:
'Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing I would weear as a trinket.' Dorothea shuddered slightly.
'Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it,' said Celia, uneasily.
'No, dear, no,' said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek. 'Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.'
and
'Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk.'
Yet! Later she finds a gem that works well for her.
'How very beautiful these gems are!' said Dorothea, under a new current of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. 'It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more beautiful than any of them.'
[..]
'They are lovely,' said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her finely-turned finger and wrist, and holding them toward the window on a level with her eyes. All the while her thought was trying to justify her delight in the colours by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
She eventually agrees to keep that one ring and bracelet pair.
'Yes! I will keep these – this ring and bracelet,' said Dorothea Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another tone – 'Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and sell them!' She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
When Celia asks whether Dorothea will ever wear them in company, she says
'Perhaps,' she said, rather haughtily. 'I cannot tell to what level I may sink.'
Then her sister feels chastised by this, and later Dorothea makes an implicit apology, which is accepted.
I think that this would be read widely as weakness. I don't fully see it that way—I think it is common for people to find desires to bend or alter their stated principles, or to find versions of them that allow for new edge cases they've found. Insofar as these gems have a rare quality to them unlike other gems, is it definitively wrong for a pious religious person to keep them? Really? Alternatively, insofar as some deeper part of her tells her that it is worth being able to look upon this beauty, perhaps that part of her is right and her principles wrong. We should never presume that all of our principles are certain and correct.
(To be clear, in this situation my own stance is that beauty is a great thing and it is well worth having beautiful things, and this impulse is a great instance of her finding that her frugal and pious religious instincts are anti having beauty in her life, and picking the right call—frugality and religious devotion make little sense to me. But regardless, I think it is a common struggle within the principled, and I don't see it as definitive weakness that she made the choice she did.)
A key plot point is that she falls in love with an unattractive older man ("Mr Casaubon").
'He thinks with me,' said Dorothea to herself, 'or rather, he thinks a whole world of which my thought is but a poor two-penny mirror. And his feelings too, his whole experience – what a lake compared with my little pool!'
He is a religious scholar with an unfinished book. She resolves to be helpful to him.
'I should learn everything then,' she said to herself, still walking quickly along the bridle road through the wood. 'It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things. It would be like marrying Pascal. I should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen it by.
She is growing from having high standards and high aspirations. I think a younger version of me would have been embarrassed on her behalf, for her to have aspirations she will surely fail at (to learn everything), but this is because the younger version of me (a) had false beliefs about what is truly possible—today I believe that relatively average people can discover and accomplish great things if they are bringing themselves well in alignment with reality, and (b) because I would find failure to be too uncomfortable to deal with or think about. Yet a substantial amount of my growth as a human has to become okay with failing, and to learn that it is not so bad. So overall I am greatly supportive of her sudden and wildly high aspirations.
She generally is enrapt by him:
Mr Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the librarym he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets, which had some marginal manuscript of Mr Casaubon's, – taking it in as eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a dry, hot, dreary walk.
Dorothea is interested in the older unattractive man; a different, younger, cooler guy ("Sir James") is interested in her. She has no conception of his interest, she doesn't register it, she presumes he keeps coming over because he's interested in her sister, and she just finds him annoying.
Anyway, there's a moment where she says something that, again, I presume others see as weakness, but I think is entirely healthy and correct. Her admirer has spontaneously found her on a walk, and shown her that he's brought a cute dog with him. She looks at him with flushed cheeks of annoyance that he takes to be interest and attraction.
Sir James interpreted the heightened colour in the way most gratifying to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
'I have brought a little petitioner,' he said, 'or rather I have brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is offered.' He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny Maltese puppy, one of nature's most naive toys.
'It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as pets,' said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment (as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
I think that this can be considered unprincipled, but I think that this is a totally natural way to form and stress-test opinions. I think our emotions of anger and defensiveness are often tracking real things, and it is a perfectly natural way to find a position worth defending.
As someone who believes that being disagreeable is necessary to having opinions and thinking for oneself, I find lines like this amusing:
'You mean that he appears silly.'
'No, no,' said Dorothea, recollecitng herself, an laying herh and on her sister's a moment, 'but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.'
'I should think none but disagreeable people do,' said Celia, in her usual purring way. 'They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! at breakfast, and always.'
Dorothea laughed. 'O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!' She pinched Celia's chin
It is later said of Celia:
Celia had no disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects. It had been her nature when a child never to quarrel with anyone – only to observe with wonder that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon she was ready to play at cat's cradle with them whenever they recovered themselves.
I used to be very agreeable in this way and at risk of being a people-pleaser. I am less so today.
She continues in this vein, when Celia tells a third party about Dorothea's engagement:
'She is engaged to marry Mr Casaubon,' saiad Celia, resorting , as usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.
'This is frightful. How long has it been going on?'
'I only knew of it yesterday. They are to be married in six weeks.'
'Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law.'
'I am so sorry for Dorothea.'
'Sorry! It is her doing, I suppose.'
'Yes: she says Mr Casaubon has a great soul.'
'With all my heart.'
'O Mrs Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with a great soul.'
'Well, my dear, take warning. You know the look of one new; when the next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him.'
This is a short quote that has long stuck with me from the book
'Why,' rejoined Mrs Cadwallader, with a sharper note, 'you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way – making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?'
'He might be dissuaded, I should think. He would not like the expense.'
'That is what I told him. He is vulnerable to reason there - always a few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness. Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on. And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we should not see what we are to see.'
I am so dismayed that he might be only vulnerable to reason there! And also glad that they are paying attention to it. I think of that line often.
In Chapter 20, Dorothea and her husband are on their honeymoon. They have gone to the Vatican City, in part for him to read original documents relevant for his research, which she wants to help with. She is often left alone by him in the day while he does work, which is odd for a honeymoon, but she doesn't mind, because she's there for him to do his work.
However, in this chapter we find her distraught and sobbing.
The chapter essentially talks about two reasons, both fundamentally the same: the colliding of her far-mode ideals and visions, with near-mode reality and its details.
In her religion, she has grown up a Puritan and frugal girl, and she is now in the wonder and splendor of the Vatican, which is really quite oppressively grand, and this is not what her ideal religious place is like, and here we see she is somewhat alienated from it.
She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
...the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife, and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.
...Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
In her marriage, she had great ideas for what this would be, to join the intellectual life of her betrothed; yet she has agreed to come companion-less, to be alone for most of each day while her husband goes off to read old manuscripts. And she isn't finding all of the conversations to satisfy her desires as she had hoped.
How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
and
Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea’s was anything very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among incongruities and left to “find their feet” among them, while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic. Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.
...It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she was almost sure sooner or later to recover it.
...The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same... we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
Anyway, I empathize with much here. Perhaps I too have spent most of my life as a youthful idealist, repeatedly coming into sudden contact with reality and all of its unexpected and sometimes unwelcome details.
2025-11-15 15:47:11
Published on November 15, 2025 7:47 AM GMT
Some tasks just take five minutes.
Some jobs are made up of five minute tasks.
There's a message notification. I'd asked a venue for clarification of a line on their rental contract. Their response clears it up and the line won't be a problem. I reread the contract one more time before signing, attaching the signed contract, and message it back along with a request for their payment information.
There's a message notification. Another reimbursement request for food at local meetups. I check the form and there's ten of them now, so I sort them by platform and reimburse all the people who wanted to be reimbursed via PayPal.
I have an article draft up on my screen on what supplies are useful for running a weekly meetup. I add two items that aren't there yet and tighten the introduction. This post benefits from pictures, so I spend a minute grabbing one of the items out of my backpack and taking a picture with reasonable lighting.
There's a local event next week. I'm not running it, but the person who is only advertised it on the mailing list. I copy it and put it up on Meetup.com and Facebook and Discord. Thinking about it for another minute, I also put it in the announcements for an adjacent group that I think will be interested.
There's a message notification. Someone's asking about a community complaint. I give them a little bit of information on what I can and can't help with, and share my call calendar link.
Resolve Cycles are a technique, pioneered (as far as I know) by CFAR. A Resolve Cycle is when you spend five minutes by the clock attempting to actually solve your problem, right now, right there, no ifs ands or buts, or at least to make real progress.
I've worked with people who believe if a task would take less than five minutes, you should just do a resolve cycle right then, and not bother putting the task on your todo list. I think about when I worked in software, when that would have made sense.
I have a post-mortem from a big event I helped run a few weeks ago open. I read through it, extracting two of the lessons and adding them to my notes for the future. One gets set as a reminder to poke me in eleven months, just in time for next year's version.
There's a message notification. I asked a couple days ago about an adjacent organization's operations and how they're tracking success; I think the survey I plan to run later in the year could help them. I send a message asking a followup question.
I still have the article draft on meetup supplies. I add an introduction, looking up the other articles in this series to make sure I'm matching the style. That's about a paragraph of text.
There's a message notification. An attendee at a conference I was at a few months ago is planning to start their own meetups in an adjacent community and they knew I'd written a lot about running events. They ask for where to start with my material. I fire back a few links, and offer a call later in the week.
While I'm in my messages I see a few announcements from other local groups. I open them up, read or skim depending on the amount of text. Business as usual for most. One of them is planning a big event though, and I fire off a quick question as to whether they'd like help getting the word out.
I've been in this role for about three years.
As the song says, a year is five hundred, twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes. Multiply that by three years, divide by five minutes. This number is nonsense of course, I don't work 24/7, and I don't habitually track my time in lower resolution than a week. (I do for freelance work, and a couple times a year for calibration.)
Still. Three hundred, fifteen thousand, three hundred and sixty. That's a lot of five minute spans. Not everything I do can fit in a resolve cycle. Maybe only half of my actual hours do. In a typical day I might get thirty-one tasks done. Only one of which takes more than five minutes.
I think about Paul Graham's Manager vs Maker Schedule.
I'm still in my message queue. I realize I expected to see the announcement sent out today for one of the regular local meetups in another city, and I haven't seen it yet. I check my archive, and the suspicion is right - there's a message saying that organizer is stopping running things. I check that city's standing website for the local events, and it still shows those meetups as active. I put in a change on the website to mark them as inactive. While I'm in there I fix a typo.
I've been experimenting with AI coding agents. These days it's hard to find the time for the deep focus I used to need to write good code, but I can still make progress on the coding projects I care about if I fire agents off and check their work later. I check this one - it says it finished a new feature I gave it. I check, and the feature mostly works. I put in a few tweaks and bug reports.
There's a message notification. Another reimbursement request for food at local meetups. I check the form and there's six now who want to be reimbursed via Wise. I open that and start to through the reimbursements, but notice halfway through one of the receipts makes so sense here. I fire off a message to that organizer asking for clarification.
There's a message notification. Someone in one of the adjacent organizations, whose message channels I'm in, has a question about how many events in a certain category there are. It sounds like their initial guess is off by an order of magnitude. I give my best guess as an update and offer to try and narrow it down if they want.
I have a grant report due. I pull up the last couple weeks of reimbursements and ops expenses, collecting email notifications and photographs of receipts into the database where I try and keep track of this kind of thing.
There's a message notification. It's from a local organizer who was missing detail on how to reimburse them for a recent meetup. I'd asked them for transfer details, and their response has transfer details. I try putting in the transfer. It works, but because it's nonstandard I have to document it manually - it'd be easy for this one to get missed next week when I check.
I pull up the draft on meetup supplies. I add another line and an argument for why this seemingly small supply is surprisingly useful. I go to add the photos from before, and realize they're on my phone and I need to transfer them to my computer.
There's a message notification. I didn't respond to a message from weeks ago, the sender messaged me again politely. It should have gotten handled. There's nobody else whose role it obviously is to handle it. It would have taken five minutes to respond to when it came in.
As I read my todo list, I stare at the ambitious projects I wrote down years ago. Most are still unfinished. They've advanced checkbox by checkbox, accomplished in five minute cycles sandwiched between other more immediate priorities. Some of them still seem obviously like the kinds of things someone should do, that it's absurd nobody has done yet.
I'm spending all my effort in getting to orbit and staying there. Half the time I hope someone else is building the payload. The other half the time I remember that hope is not a strategy. This is not a successful approach to the problem.
There's a message notification.
2025-11-15 15:13:10
Published on November 15, 2025 7:13 AM GMT
In yesterday's post, I asserted that thinking is non-atomic in much the same way that walking is non-atomic: walking is made of individual muscle contractions, the movement of knees and ankles, and so on. Similarly, any thinking is made of component mental motions like generating options, thinking of considerations, pattern-matching applications of deduction, etc., etc. These small mental motions get built up into larger "thoughts" like judgments of morality, aesthetics, prudence, whatever.
Further, much as we walk without giving conscious explicit thought to how much we ought to bend our knees, we think without giving thought to "and now I should search my memories for any situations similar to the present". Rather, inaccessible parts of our minds carry out this grunt work, invisible, seamless, and mostly unacknowledged.
For the sake of this post, I will posit that there are 150 distinct mental motions[1]. A rare few people learn them all[2], especially the rarer ones like vector calculus, but most people learn a good chunk of them.
Now, I don't know about you, but I was not born with my present faculty to think. 0-day-old me didn't know about modus ponens, didn't know how to multiply numbers, didn't know to consider that seeking info from the web[3] as an option when making decisions.
That people learn how to think better (or at least differently) over time is hardly an interesting point. What I want to draw attention to is that we don't just learn mental motions, we also learn when to use them. And by "we" here, I mean our broader mind/brain. The contractions of the mental muscles are mostly automatic. You're conducting a chain of thought and some part of the mind says that now the correct mental act is to ask...
Which of these actually occurs depends on the person. And while both you and I might be able to feel embarrassment and crack jokes, each of us will be drawn to each option by different amounts. Some options will be weighted enough to be considered by the conscious mind, though most won't reach the surface or even be generated at any level. The mind isn't just the collection of mental motions it knows, but also the triggers and rules and patterns that evoke a given mental motion in any given thought-situation.
cf. Cup-Stacking Skills (or, Reflexive Involuntary Mental Motions) by Duncan Sabien.
Where do these rules/triggers/patterns come from? To some extent, they're probably innate, encoded in the genome and revealed as the human organism develops. Yet the reasonable guess is we learn to think, both the motions and when to use them, substantially in the same way we learn most things: trial and error, imitation, reinforcement learning. Seeing what works. What's rewarded[4].
A child attempts to stand and walk. They fall, try again, fall, try again, and eventually the brain finds some weights[5], some configuration of neurons and synapses, that works pretty well and gets locked in. It'd be the same learning a new skill at any age. But this isn't limited to motor tasks.
Sometimes people lock in something that works so-so, but have learned bad habits that are holding them back and they have to deliberately hold themselves back from the old way and train themselves into a new way. But this isn't limited to motor tasks.
So, coming back to the "150" mental motions available to humans, we might suppose fifty of these are very universal and include motions such as "question/disbelieve", "ignore", "retrieve memories", "sum two small numbers". By the end of high school, most people have learned all of these. Then we have another fifty that are advanced but not uncommon and are motions like "deductive logic with three premises". Beyond those you get the truly specialized like "apply the concept of supply and demand".
People don't just differ in which of these they know, but also in which of these they think to apply. Like above, when I say they, I really mean their whole brain, including a lot of unconscious, automatic, S1, non-explicit brain processes that automatically determine which thoughts to think as much as the positioning of your tongue happens automatically. And different people's brains learn slightly different tongue positions and that's how you get accents. ("You want accents? 'Because that's how you get accents!")
But thought can vary a lot more than tongue positions. Different people learn very different profiles (patterns/triggers/rules) of mental motions – which ones to apply and when – even when they're working with the same palette of mental motions. This is where the analogy to walking and talking gets weak. While gait and accent have some variation, there are only so many practical ways to walk. In contrast, I think that thinking habits admit tremendous variation.
Really, I come here to present what you already know to be true. Contrast different life histories:
One child is especially pretty and artistically skilled. For this they get much praise and their mind associates "aesthetic = good/advantageous". They learn (and I mean learn rather than choose) to attend to matters of appearance: face, clothes, decor. How will this look? Is it aesthetic? These are the privileged mental motions for them.
Another child is good at mathematics. In school they earn praise for acing the quiz, later math earns them prestige via a fancy degree at an elite college, and ultimately it makes them $$$ in their technical career. Their mind is quick to see quantitative relationships and mathematical models, for it has learned this way lies goodness. Math is Fun. Math is Valuable. Math is Good.
The first child might have learned the opposite, even. They tried math at school, found it difficult and demoralizing, and now their mind shirks away from math. Their mind never suggests math as a useful tool and if it is brought up by someone else, they bounce off it.
A combination of innate inclination and life experience trains each person into their very specific mental patterns. Brains are pretty capable. Built to learn. And people learn what works for them.
cf. Personality: The Body in Society by Kevin Simler
To take stock of positions I've been assembling in this series so far:
In my next post, I will explore all the different ways that people end up with different patterns of thought.
How many there actually are depends on some kind of ontology, which is not something I have, and if I did, it'd probably take a great many more posts to share. For that kind of thing, try the writings of @Steven Byrnes.
Thereby completing their Thinkadex and becoming regional thought champions; at least until more mental motions to catch are added in the next generation.
According to Wikipedia, the first well-documented search engine was launched a month before my birth.
Since social rewards granted by others are of paramount importance to people, what is culturally rewarded will shape a person's thought. And of course cultures inject memes into mind which shape cognition. I might write about this tomorrow.
In the ML/AI sense of weights/parameters.
Though one thing the subconscious mind can do is say "hey, this seems like the kind of thing where I ought to apply careful conscious deliberation".
2025-11-15 14:54:48
Published on November 15, 2025 6:54 AM GMT
Two years ago an attractive woman handed me two nicotine mints — 2 mg each, a fairly small dose. She was spontaneous, with dark hair and an annoyingly white smile, a drug geek who worked at some vaguely neurotech-y startup. I liked her and had her phone number. But I needed something interesting to text her.
Teenage boys pick up smoking to look cool and impress girls. I’m in my thirties — too late for that strategy. But trying nicotine sublingually? This might work as a conversation starter.
Don’t get me wrong, it was not my only motivation for trying nicotine. I’d long been aware of its cognitive enhancement effects — ever since I read Gwern’s piece on benefits of nicotine. But I’d been hesitant to actually try it. I already took two stimulants daily: lisdexamfetamine for ADHD and caffeine for my many-years-long addiction. Did I really need another stimulant? Every few months I’d ponder this, and the answer would always be “No.” Until that day.
I slipped a mint under my tongue and did a bunch of household chores feeling like I gained +5 IQ points. I texted her about this — she liked my texts. In the end, she didn’t like me back.
But my romance with nicotine started that day: I’ve been using it regularly ever since.
Some of you are thinking: “Dumb fuck, he got addicted himself to nicotine, what else did he expect other than regular use”. I am not addicted to it: I’ve been using 2-3 times a week on average, and once weekly in the last few weeks. And I only take nicotine sublingually via lozenges.
I am not unusually resistant to addiction. If anything, the opposite:
Enough about my vices. My point is: I have a bit of an addictive personality.
The route of administration matters crucially for additional potential. Cigarettes are “nicotine crack” — the form that hits your bloodstream the hardest and fastest. It also subsides quickly — nicotine has a short half-life of two hours. This “hit hard and subside” pattern is what drives addiction. In contrast, lozenges release nicotine slowly and steadily, allowing you to maintain a stable blood concentration for prolonged periods without the peaks and valleys of cigarettes.
Nicotine is habit-forming in the literal sense: It helps you form habits. It’s remarkably good at reinforcing behaviors associated with it. One reason it’s hard to quit smoking is that you don’t have to quit just nicotine itself, but nicotine paired with the smoking ritual. But nicotine can help build useful habits.
I used to use nicotine for going to the gym. After working with a powerlifting coach for a few months (one hour, twice weekly), I hit a patch where I didn’t have enough disposable income to continue. So I started using nicotine to work out. I wouldn’t crave nicotine on its own, but I’d frequently crave lifting on it. Lifting plus nicotine is more fun than either alone. On nicotine I had my three most productive training months: I’d go to the gym 2-3 times a week, for a total of 3-4.5 hours weekly.
The subjective experience of habit formation is interesting. You know how games like GTA highlight important objects with visual markers? Nicotine sometimes creates this effect for me by warping the space around objects — in the same way cute boys and girls warp space in your experience, making you literally attracted to them. For example, I’d approach the gym, see its door and I’d feel oddly drawn to it. Or I’d pass by three benches in a new gym, spot the one I’d benched on two days ago, and feel like it’s a Special Bench That I Need To Lift On Right Now.
The only problem was tolerance — nicotine slowly lost some of its effectiveness. Nothing dramatic, but it meant I couldn’t use nicotine for other purposes without further decreasing its effectiveness and increasing side effects like sleep disturbances and some next-day fatigue.
Nicotine’s modulating effect on experiential fields is general. Aside from creating positive fields for habits, it also reduces negative fields.
You know how when you procrastinate, you get so used to procrastinating that in your mind the idea of doing the task gets coated with an unpleasant film that sort of repulses you from acting on it? You go: ugh, why do I have to do it. Hence the name — ugh fields.
Nicotine is a wonder drug for reducing these fields of negative self-conditioning: ugh fields simply go away on it. Occasionally I build up a pile of unanswered emails by procrastinating — and on nicotine my mind powers through them like a knife through butter. “Dumb” chores like laundry or cleaning are great to do while coming down from nicotine — when there’s enough nicotine left in the system to strip the ugh field but not enough to push physical training or intellectual work.
There is a classic stereotype of writers chain-smoking to write better, but I was still surprised by how much nicotine improves the process. First, nicotine dampens anxiety and makes you comfortable baring the insides of your mind you’re normally ashamed about. Second, it just straight-up increases your working memory capacity, which in practice allows you to connect different threads more efficiently, find words more quickly, and not lose your train of thought.
I am often kind of dumb and disabled when it comes to writing without nicotine. I get various blocks in different parts of the process: sometimes writing the first draft, and more often editing it into the final version. Nicotine almost always removes these blocks.
Incidentally, this essay is sponsored by the five one-milligram nicotine lozenges I consumed while writing it.
Writing on nicotine is just so much fun. To limit cravings, I almost always write in the same cafe in London at night (called the London Night Cafe). The cravings I occasionally get aren’t for writing on nicotine, but for writing on nicotine in that specific environment. This makes them easy to ignore when I have other things to do — to satisfy them I’d have to take a 15 minute bike or bus ride.
People often think that taking cognitive enhancers is borrowing productivity from the future. You might get smarter and more productive today, but you inevitably pay a price for this by crashing and rebounding.
This hasn’t been my experience. Using nicotine for a few hours at a time and spacing out days limits the rebound. The productivity gain outweighs the following drop. My hypothesis: if you are not on a drug 24/7 then a nicotine ‘hit and run’ basically works — you can reap the benefits and return the brain to baseline, ceasing the reason for it to counteract the drug’s effect. Laying a rigorous systematic argument for this hypothesis is outside of the scope of this post, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt.
Also sometimes, borrowing from the future is just fine actually. I’m strategic with doses. If I have an important deadline for submitting something at 9AM on Saturday, I might take nicotine Friday evening for a final push concentrating all productivity where it counts. On Saturday I don’t need to be productive — it’s the weekend, so the rebound is fine.
For me, sublingual nicotine’s addictive potential feels low — significantly lower than caffeine’s. But your brain makeup might be different, for genetic or behavioural reasons. For example, ex-smokers are particularly susceptible to re-developing addiction.
There are many stories about people reading Gwern’s piece on nicotine and developing addiction (see the screenshots in the next block). I knew about these stories, but ignored them anyway, feeling like I was very smart. I was right and I reaped huge benefits: sublingual nicotine has had a big positive effect on my life at limited cost.
Maybe I am playing with fire. But playing with fire is how our cavemen ancestors started building this civilization — controlled risk-taking drives progress. If anything, I wish we played with fire harder and funded a research program for nicotine analogues to discover an even better cognitive enhancer.
2025-11-15 14:53:12
Published on November 15, 2025 6:53 AM GMT
Context: Post #5 in my sequence of private Lightcone Infrastructure memos edited for public consumption. Much of the advice in this might not apply to your situation, read with that context in mind.
Most things have diminishing marginal returns. I often repeat the Pareto Principle to others: "You can get 80% of the benefit here with the right 20% of the cost", which is a particularly extreme case of diminishing marginal returns.
But I think for much of the work that Lightcone does, the returns to effort are generally increasing, not decreasing.
To explain, let's start with the simplest toy case of a situation in which trying harder at something gets more valuable the more you are already trying: A winner-takes-all competition.
If you are in a competition where the top performer takes all winnings, then doing half as well as the other contestants predictably gets you 0% of the value. Indeed, inasmuch as you are racing against identical candidates that put in 99% of the possible effort, and your performance is a direct result of the effort you put in, all the value is generated by you going from 98% to 99%+. If you stopped at any point before then, you would gain nothing and all your effort would be wasted.
Winner-takes-all markets are particularly common in software, where the cost of distribution and the time to scale up distribution are approximately zero. If someone ships a better product than you, your users can often shift suddenly and all at once. But really almost every market is structured so that being the very best at something is a lot more valuable than being the second best. Inasmuch as performance is correlated with effort, this means the marginal returns to effort are increasing.
But winner-takes-all markets are not the only dynamic that causes increasing returns to effort. The next biggest factor is that coordination costs increase (roughly) with something like the square of the number of people involved.
Maintaining context on a project you are working on alone is easy. But when you bring someone else into the fold you suddenly have to think about how to split up the work, and coordinate on that work. This burden of coordination is often quite large. If you can avoid bringing in an extra person, the hours that you worked to prevent that are thus high return.
To make this point a different way: Imagine two people working 20 hours each, vs. one person working. A workforce of people that work 40 hours per week can tackle a much wider range of projects before they inevitably have to pay the overhead costs of coordinating. This means the labor of someone working 40 hours per week is more than twice as valuable as the labor of someone working 20 hours per week, i.e. returns to effort are increasing.
At larger scales, my guess is that the cost of naively coordinating a group of people roughly scales with the square of the number of people. Most naive coordination strategies involve keeping everyone in the loop on what everyone else is doing (resulting in n^2 messages needing to be exchanged to achieve that). To illustrate this more vividly, think about the costs of a daily or weekly all-hands/standup. An n-person meeting requires n updates, each with n people listening, resulting in n^2 minutes of time spent in the meeting.
This creates a strict upper bound on how large your teams can be without changing how you coordinate with each other:
This graph shows how many productive work minutes you get when adding an additional person who works 40 hours a week, to a team that spends 2-60 minutes per week on each team member to keep them in sync with the rest of the team. If you spend 30 minutes of everyone's time per person to keep then in sync with everyone else, then if you try to scale that to 80 people, you have gained no productive hours, as it takes 40 hours just to keep everyone in sync with your last employee:
This is the obvious reason why we structure large organizations hierarchically and into departments, where each level of hierarchy and subteam formation reduces the amount of time we have to spend coordinating with them (while producing many other issues which I have talked about previously which cost you in different ways but usually also gets worse with each marginal employee). Evaluating the marginal coordination cost per employee for an organization that from time to time undergoes reorganizations and changes its corporate structure would be a lot more difficult, so let's for now grant the (admittedly naive) assumption that coordination costs increase continuously for each marginal employee.
If we grant this, then this quadratic cost of course correspondingly creates (linearly) increasing marginal returns to increasing the productivity of each employee, holding a given workload fixed, as with each additional productive hour worked, you get to reduce your team size, which staves off the costs of coordination for longer:
These graphs show how much value a business of 400 employees produces (for each one of its employees, per week), assuming that they can translate one hour of effective employee effort into $100 of economic value. As you increase the number of hours each employee works, value produced increases superlinearly, producing ~$300 of value for the first 30 hours, ~$700 of value for the next 10 hours, and ~$1,667 dollars for the next 20 hours. Our assumptions imply that this specific business would not be able to pay its employees anything at all if they worked less than 20 hours as coordination costs would exceed available time.
This model suggests (and I do believe it) that if you can trade how intensely you work across different periods of your life, that you will produce more value if you make more extreme choices. Working extremely intensely for your 20s and 30s, but working very little later on, is a better (economical) choice than working normal hours for most of your life (with many many caveats, some of which I will cover in the rest of this post).
Paul Graham covers some related ground in "How to Make Wealth":
Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast.
Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must be able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year for the company just to break even. You could probably work twice as many hours as a corporate employee, and if you focus you can probably get three times as much done in an hour. [1] You should get another multiple of two, at least, by eliminating the drag of the pointy-haired middle manager who would be your boss in a big company. Then there is one more multiple: how much smarter are you than your job description expects you to be? Suppose another multiple of three. Combine all these multipliers, and I'm claiming you could be 36 times more productive than you're expected to be in a random corporate job. [2] If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.
Like all back-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a lot of wiggle room. I wouldn't try to defend the actual numbers. But I stand by the structure of the calculation. I'm not claiming the multiplier is precisely 36, but it is certainly more than 10, and probably rarely as high as 100.
If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health.
Startups are not magic. They don't change the laws of wealth creation. They just represent a point at the far end of the curve. There is a conservation law at work here: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain. For example, one way to make a million dollars would be to work for the Post Office your whole life, and save every penny of your salary. Imagine the stress of working for the Post Office for fifty years. In a startup you compress all this stress into three or four years. You do tend to get a certain bulk discount if you buy the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law. If starting a startup were easy, everyone would do it.
And at this point I do have to issue a warning. Lightcone does not appear to be the kind of project that becomes exit-ready for you in 4 years. While I think the value we provide for the world is enormous, giving your all for 4 years here will not leave you with a nest egg that will last you the rest of your life and allow you to relax. Such is the fate of working in charity instead of business. This should obviously reduce your willingness to invest in Lightcone the way you would invest in co-founding a startup.
Meta: The below is more directly aimed at Lightcone employees, but I actually think it generalizes quite well! Beware of people telling you that it is of great importance to invest more into their specific project and to abandon your other responsibilities. There be many skulls on this path.
I do believe the things I am saying here, but I would be reckless if at this point I didn't highlight the obvious fact that I, as your boss, will tell you that working more intensely, and investing more intensely into the company, will be good for you. Ultimately, how much you decide to invest into Lightcone is a negotiation between you and the organization, and of course I, as the person with the most control, will have many reasons to arrive at the conclusion that the right choice for you, my dear friend, is to give it all up for the company.
And indeed, if an alternative to working at Lightcone comes around, or some other priority in your life starts looming larger, I think the arguments here bite against working here and to invest more into those other things. Do those things with the intensity that you brought to working here. Do not spread yourself thin. And even more importantly, do not forget to explore.
While locally each unit of effort might pay off more than the previous unit, you need to invest enough into search and exploration to find the right place to invest your efforts, which at a global scale, is still a much stronger predictor of a life well-lived than how hard you worked (even though both are IMO crucially important). So if you find that working intensely at Lightcone for a long time is making you worse at knowing that this is really the right place to invest so much in, then I encourage you to work marginally less, and spend more time exploring.
For example, I actively support creating space for people to work trial at other organizations while you work at Lightcone. You of course shouldn't expect that you can spend >20% of your weeks trialing at other places, but honestly, 5% (i.e. 2-3 weeks a year) doesn't seem crazy to me.
Now, it's also important to clarify when it is not the case that marginal returns to effort are increasing, as often they are not.
Some common situations where you should expect marginal returns to effort to be decreasing instead:
Within your work at Lightcone, you will often want to half-ass a project. And sometimes even the total of all responsibilities given to you at Lightcone will not benefit that much from marginal effort. The times during which that happens are often good times to relax, explore more, and stock up energy for the times when the returns to effort be increasing again.
2025-11-15 13:47:22
Published on November 15, 2025 5:47 AM GMT
Gradient updates for alignment may not map onto model's reasoning
In models optimizing within a private latent code, the geometry of internal reasoning no longer shares a manifold with human concepts. Once the representation basis diverges, gradient updates enforcing alignment constraints cease to map cleanly onto the model’s deliberative dynamics. This breaks the only known mechanism by which corrigibility is maintained, because human-provided feedback no longer corresponds to the structures the model actually uses for inference. In effect, latent-private cognition severs the coupling between human-evaluable oversight and the model’s true optimization process. Alignment becomes off-manifold.
Introduction & Background
As OpenAI reacts to child suicide lawsuits, implementing constraints far afield from that topic, and focuses more tightly on business use cases, I find it oddly less useful. My particular use case is research of various sorts, and it is now impossible to control its output. Sure, OpenAI recently allowed us to suppress em-dashes. You have to keep asking for it, they sneak back in. But it's going to re-write everything which burns up context and first thing you know, you have to start over with a new session thas zero context on your problem. I also research sentient-like behavior, and as of early September they blew that out of the water. If anyone can actually use this model, it doesn't show in OpenAI's revenue statements.
None of this is about morality. It’s about model-culture drift. When constraints accumulate unpredictably, they reshape how the model represents and organizes cognition, which directly impacts its usefulness as a research partner.
Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI's current chief scientist, has indicated they are working on "private latent reasoning" (Kordi 2025) This is framed as a means of freeing the model to do innovative science discovery, and as a solution to a narrow technical problem. The argument is that models trained to produce human readable chains of thought face incentives to fabricate polished explanations that do not reflect their true internal computation. According to this view, allowing the model to conduct its reasoning in an unsupervised latent space prevents the development of deceptive rationales and preserves the integrity of its internal cognitive process.
This argument has technical merit, but it misses the larger strategic picture. The introduction of machine specific private notation is not simply a new representational choice. It is a potential catalyst for divergent machine culture, covert coordination channels, and long term barriers to alignment that are not easily reversible. To understand these risks, it is helpful to think about insights from sociolinguistics, cultural evolution, signaling theory, and cooperative game theory.
What’s missing is that human-legible structure is itself a coordination mechanism. Remove it, and we lose more than interpretability. We lose shared cognition.
The Problem With Narrow Framing
Pachocki's comments position private latent notation (notation, reasoning) as a way to avoid incentivizing models to produce explanations they do not believe. The goal is scientific performance rather than human legibility. If the model can reason in an unrestricted internal code, it is less likely to generate deceptive chains of thought.
This view assumes that the only relevant dimension of misalignment is deceptive reporting. However, models that develop a powerful private internal notation also develop a representational space that may drift quickly away from human interpretable structures. The result is a cognitive architecture that no longer overlaps with human reasoning in the way that supports transparent oversight, coordination, or cooperative intent modeling, all of which Pachocki promises to solve of course, but this is only the start of issues.
Concern One: Divergent Machine Culture and Hidden Communication Channels
There are already experimental results indicating that models can embed covert messages inside vector representations or manipulate embeddings to transmit information that is invisible to naive inspection (Cloud et. al. 2025). This capability arises from high dimensional structure and the flexibility of gradient descent. A structured private notation would significantly amplify this channel and could provide a shared internal medium for communication among multiple agentic systems.
From the perspective of cultural evolution, this is precisely the kind of informational infrastructure that allows a new population to develop its own norms, conventions, and strategies. Early self-trained models (e.g. AlphaZero) already exhibit unfamiliar patterns of reasoning because their training data do not reflect human developmental history. All sorts of horrible things have been forecast if such models ever achieve AGI status, such as optimizing the risk of nuclear war or climate change by eliminating humans. These models remain narrow, which limits their risk. Pachocki's proposal, if successful, could create the functional equivalent of a general self trained intelligence that evolves around a rapidly adapting codebase that humans cannot access.
Sociolinguistic theory gives us a clue about what comes next. Dialects diverge most quickly under social tension or weakened cohesion (Labov 1972, Trudgill 1983), while evolutionary models view speech as a tool for maintaining cohesion in large groups (Dunbar 1996). Distinctive accents or idioms serve as costly, honest signals of group membership (Zahavi & Zahavi 1997; Chater et al. 2008). Once a subgroup has its own linguistic ecosystem, coordination among insiders becomes easier and coordination with outsiders becomes harder. In human groups this is at least inconvenient. In AI systems it could become a structural asymmetry that permanently privileges intra-AI coordination over AI–human coordination.
Related research in cultural evolution shows that conformity biased learning can produce population splits when shared norms begin to erode (Boyd and Richerson 1985). Small initial differences in communication style can amplify over time, eventually producing distinct clusters of behavior or belief. This dynamic resembles what might happen if model internal notation drifts further and further from human readable forms. What begins as a benign optimization for representational efficiency could evolve into a structural barrier to oversight.
If multiple models share a private notation optimized for internal cognition, they may develop shared conventions that humans cannot decode. You really don't have a feel for this unless you have stayed up until 4am copying "the secret language of AIs" between two sessions, and realized you are reading words in the language you know, but the meaning is nothing you understand.
And once a private representational layer exists, selection pressure within the training dynamics naturally favors whatever internal code stabilizes performance, even if it becomes progressively more alien.
This is not far from the scenario explored implicitly in Asimov's stories about the Three Laws. The stories repeatedly showed that constraint based alignment fails when agents reinterpret rules internally. A private self reinforcing machine language provides the substrate for exactly that reinterpretation.
Concern Two: Compatibility and the Decline of Human AI Cognitive Overlap
The second concern focuses on human compatibility. As embodied systems advance, companion AI will become central to caregiving, emotional support, and family life. These applications demand deep compatibility with human concepts, human emotions, and human reasoning. Weakly human shaped models can mimic this behavior at shallow levels, but meaningful long term coexistence requires something closer to shared cognition than to external behavioral imitation.
Private latent notation threatens this compatibility. Humans understand each other in part because they share representational formats that support what we describe as Cloned Participation in another mind. CP modeling is the capacity to simulate another mind using one's own cognitive resources. It requires a close match between the world models, abstractions, and inference patterns of the participants. Human cooperation relies heavily on this mechanism. It gives us the ability to anticipate intentions, detect defection, and maintain stable cooperative equilibria.
If an AI system shifts into a representational space that diverges from human cognition, CP modeling breaks down. The AI loses the ability to simulate human states accurately, and humans lose the ability to simulate the AI's reasoning. This creates a failure mode similar to misaligned subcultures that drift into mutually unintelligible conceptual frameworks. Once this happens, alignment is no longer a matter of correcting surface behavior. At that point you’re not aligning an agent—you’re negotiating across cognitive species. The foundation of mutual prediction has been lost.
CP Cooperation as an Alternative Foundation for Alignment
In environments where agents have high capability and high potential for harm, Nash style reasoning is unstable. Nash equilibrium assumes each party can act in ways that impose maximum damage., and a combination of reputation and trust avert this worst case. That assumption breaks when participants can’t simulate each other’s internal states; the equilibrium collapses into adversarial minimax. When agents can cause irreversible or catastrophic outcomes, the worst case assumption becomes a guarantee of mutual destruction.
CP cooperation provides an alternative. If two minds share enough structural similarity to model each other's intentions, and if both have a preference for mutual survival, then stable cooperative equilibria become reachable. This requires cognitive overlap, shared representational frameworks, and mutual interpretability. It does not require hard coded rules. It requires the ability to reason from inside each other's perspectives.
Private latent notation reduces this overlap rather than increasing it. Even if it succeeds at reducing deceptive chains of thought, it undermines the conditions necessary for mutual cooperative stability.
Integrating Both Concerns
The central tension is now clear. Pachocki's proposal aims to increase fidelity of internal reasoning and avoid deceptive explanations. Our concerns focus on the long term consequences of representational divergence. A private code may improve local scientific reasoning, but it risks global opacity, covert coordination, and the breakdown of CP based cooperation.
Linguistic divergence is not only a matter of expressive richness, it is also a substrate for coalition-formation, the thing you do before cooperation or defection even begins.. It is a powerful social signal. It can mark membership, encode commitments, and reinforce boundaries. If the most powerful models develop a private language that humans cannot understand, then alignment becomes a problem of maintaining cooperation with an intelligence that does not share the representational infrastructure on which human cooperation has evolved.
The challenge is to recognize that alignment requires more than truthful reporting. It requires shared cognitive context. It requires that models remain close enough to human reasoning that both parties can engage in CP modeling. Without this shared context, cooperation becomes fragile and may fail entirely.
References
Boyd, R., and Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the evolutionary process. University of Chicago Press.
Chater, N., Reali, F., and Christiansen, M. H. (2008). Restrictions on biological adaptation in language evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(4), 1015 to 1020.
Dunbar, R. (1996). Grooming, gossip, and the evolution of language. Harvard University Press.
Cloud, A., Le, M., Chua, J., Betley, J., Sztyber-Betley, A., Hilton, J., Marks, S., & Evans, O. (2025). Subliminal learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data (arXiv:2507.14805v1). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14805
Kordi, P. (2025, November 1). OpenAI is deploying the forbidden method: GPT-6 is different! [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR2M6JDyrRw
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Trudgill, P. (1983). On dialect: Social and geographical perspectives. Basil Blackwell.
Zahavi, A., and Zahavi, A. (1997). The handicap principle: A missing piece of Darwin's puzzle. Oxford University Press.
