Essays & reflections
A working collection of ideas.
On building intelligent systems, making sense of them, and deciding what’s worth doing.
Knowledge & discovery
8 essays · newest firstHow understanding forms, what models inherit, and where new ideas come from.
The Symmetry You Choose
The choice of what should remain invariant can matter more than the model that exploits it.
Two Compressions
Finding a pattern in observations is one achievement. Discovering the mechanism that generates it is another.
The Mapmaker's Alphabet
An agent inherits a conceptual vocabulary from human expression. What can it do with maps it did not make?
Beyond the Encoding Gap
Metafeatures, distributed search, and the possibility that AI captures more of discovery than its finished outputs.
The Residue and the Trace
What separates the recorded products of expertise from the experience through which an expert learns to see.
The Archaeological Reversal
AI can recover structure from large systems, while the reasons behind that structure remain harder to recover.
The Composition Problem
The theory that lets parts work together lives in their relationships, not in any single specification.
The Encoding Gap
A working answer is not the same as understanding. Knowledge has to be built through the traversal of a problem.