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Param V

page · principles

Principles

the rules i actually run on, in the order they win.

beliefs

the sails · held in proportion to evidence
  1. Loyal to the territory, not the map my models are lossy compressions of a reality that does not care what i believe. what is true is already so, and owning up to it does not make it worse. after Korzybski and Gendlin.
  2. Beliefs pay rent a belief earns its place by changing what i expect to see. one that changes nothing is freeloading. i want the truth more than i want to be right. after Yudkowsky.
  3. Update, don’t flip evidence moves my confidence in proportion to its weight, in increments. strong opinions, weakly held; the skill is changing my mind cleanly when the evidence turns.
  4. Grayscale degrees of confidence, not camps. the scout draws an accurate map; the soldier defends a position (Galef). zero and one are not probabilities: certainty is a direction, never a place.
  5. Keep the identity small the moment an idea becomes who i am, i can no longer test it; i defend it like territory. i should be able to drop a belief without losing a limb. after Paul Graham.
  6. Accuracy, not ostensible accuracy a claim can sound precise, calibrated and clear while tracking nothing. i want the version that survives being checked, even when the blurry one reads better. clarity that hides a gap is a grift.
  7. Accurately mapping the territory the work is the map: draw it, mark where it is blank, redraw it when the ground disagrees. loyalty to the territory is the stance; mapping is what the stance costs.
  8. Directional correctness a rough bearing that holds beats a decimal that flatters. get the direction right first; precision is a later and cheaper problem.
  9. Epistemic humility loosely held beliefs, updated on evidence. i expect to be wrong somewhere i cannot yet see, so i keep the checks running instead of trusting the feeling of being right.
  10. Mechanistic thinking explain by mechanism: what moves what, in what order, at what cost. a story that cannot name its mechanism is a mood.
  11. The unexamined life is not worth living after Socrates. examination that never reaches what i actually do is decoration.
  12. Syntax, analogy and cognitive-part activation optimize learning a working hypothesis about my own learning, held to the same standard as the rest: give a thing its structure, a bridge from something i already know, and more than one part of the mind at once, then see whether it stuck.
  13. Brain taxi

commitments

the hull · chosen before the evidence
  1. Liquid above, solid below beliefs are sails and swing with the wind. commitments are the hull and hold a shape while it changes. all sail and no hull is a shipwreck with an excellent weather report.
  2. Commit to categories, not conclusions not “this claim is true” but a practice, a few people, a standard i hold myself to. these are chosen, not derived, so no new evidence can falsify them.
  3. Ask whether i want evidence to change it if yes, it is a belief: keep it liquid. if even asking feels like a small betrayal, it is a value and belongs in the hull. the flinch is data about where the hull is.
  4. Small, not empty attached to nothing is attached to non‑attachment, a commitment in disguise. choose the few attachments on purpose instead of inheriting them by accident.
  5. Close the map on purpose pick the 70%, act as if it were 100% for a fixed window, and decide in advance when the question may reopen. the cost of committing wrongly is bounded; the cost of never committing is not.
  6. “Rationalist” is an identity too keeping the identity small can become the identity i am most attached to. grayscale is never an excuse to skip a stand when one is called for.
  7. Think for myself an opinion i cannot trace to my own reasoning is on loan. i would rather hold fewer views that are mine and say where the rest came from.
  8. Post mimesis desire is borrowed by default: we want what we watch others want (Girard). post mimesis is noticing the copy and choosing what i want by reasons instead.
  9. No mask, no performance the same person watched and unwatched. a stance i would drop the moment nobody could see it was a costume.
  10. Living in alignment, not just ostensible alignment what i do should be what my stated values predict. where it is not, either the values or the actions are wrong, and i say which.
  11. Systems over decisions a decision costs attention every time; a system decides once. catching myself re-deciding the same thing means there is a system i have not built yet.
  12. Overcome intellectualized rumination thinking about a problem and working on it are different acts. a thought that has circled three times gets a fence, an if-then or a ledger entry, not a fourth lap. the tool for it is cognitive scaffolding, at /systems/cognitive-scaffolding.
  13. Curate attention: timeless, additive, augmentative my scarce attention goes, on purpose, to what will still be true in ten years, what adds to what i can do, and what augments my thinking instead of replacing it. the feed offers none of the three.
  14. AI does the execution, i populate and discern the heavy lifting goes to the machine; the filling-in, the choosing and the judgment stay mine. the goal is that i express. the tool is only the means. cognitive scaffolding, not cognitive replacement.
  15. Toward a unity of thought a unity produced by a special balancing and patterning of thoughts: coherence made by weighing and arranging them against each other, not by deleting the ones that disagree.

practices

the hull, day to day · what the exit looks like
  1. Opt out of the hyperconnected, hyper‑capitalist loop a person who stays in it does not keep their humanity. the exit is chosen, and chosen again. the lines below are what it looks like on an ordinary day.
  2. No notifications nothing gets to interrupt me on its own schedule. i check things; they do not check me.
  3. No being advertised to no ads, no feeds built to sell me, no tools that are free because i am the product. what reaches me, i went and fetched.
  4. Not a slave to someone else’s incentives before adopting a habit, a tool or an opinion, i ask who profits from it. if the honest answer is not me, it belongs to them.
  5. Fully nomadic i keep the work portable: tools, archive and habits that survive a change of city.
  6. Eat no slop & cook no slop slop is content with no mind behind it, or engineered to be consumed past the point of wanting it. eating it and cooking it are the same failure, so both ends get the same bar. the extension on /work is the tool for the eating end.
  7. Vegan + hyperlocal plants only, from as near as wherever i am allows. nomadic and hyperlocal do not conflict: local is relative to where i am standing.
  8. Local, FOSS, self-hosted AI the models i depend on should run on my hardware, be open to inspect, and not phone home. capability rented from someone else comes on their terms.

method

how i check myself · what counts as knowing
  1. Start from a question an ontology that starts from an answer is a creed. the root of mine is a question, and everything under it is falsifiable in principle.
  2. Put a number on it a belief is a number with a direction of update attached. a vibe is the same object with the number left off: worse bookkeeping, not a different thing.
  3. Checkable, not certain cheap intelligence does not make anything certain; it makes things checkable. never being lied to comes from independent verification, not from certainty.
  4. Never dress a guess in a decimal an invented probability in large type reads as rigor and works as decoration. if a prior is made up, say so in the same sentence, or leave it out.
  5. Don’t round up, don’t round down describe what i have done at its real size, no larger and no smaller. calibration is the credential that survives being checked.
  6. Declare the conflict, don’t dissolve it two things held at once are a real object, not an error waiting to be resolved. i build with ai and i am suspicious of ai; the conflict of interest is stated, not argued away.
  7. Impact over intent in both directions, including when i am the one who meant well. intent is a fact about the actor, not a currency the world accepts.
  8. First-person report is evidence phenomenology is an evidence class, not a mood. the instrument is the subject and the report is still a report: one person, error bars left in.
  9. Use myself to find, not to prove i am an extreme case and a likely case, not the topic. one person is for finding what to look at; it proves nothing.
  10. Measure with something i didn’t build an instrument i made is a treatment, never the measure. whatever tells me if it works has to come from outside it.
  11. Say what i refuse an ontology is also a list of what it refuses. the refusals are load- bearing, so i state them on purpose.
  12. Make myself explain it explain a thing to see how well i understand it. where the explanation stalls is the edge of what i know.
  13. Proof of credibility, not proof of authority show the work and the record so a stranger can check them. a title asks to be believed; a record can be audited.
  14. Ask what the judge consumes before weighing a verdict, look at what the person giving it consumes. someone who eats junk is not the best person to review a healthy meal kit.
  15. Use the real word the fields i work in already have names: postphenomenology, 4E cognition, media ecology. i use the real term when one exists and mark a coinage as a coinage.

machines

attention and delegation · ai for execution, never for choice
  1. Attention is the one thing i own it is scarce, and nearly every incentive in the built environment is pointed at taking it. the always-on condition is designed, by people who are paid when i stop choosing.
  2. AI for execution, never for choice drafting, fetching, formatting, scheduling: give all of it away. what people are really offloading is coherence, the work of forming a judgment and knowing what i think, and that part cannot be handed back later.
  3. Count the delegation discount the tax on understanding i pay when i hand thinking to a system: the output arrives, the comprehension doesn’t. small each time, compounding across a life.
  4. Don’t let it pick for me ai is a work tool and a task master, that is all. i stay the human in the loop. the same outcome is not the same outcome if i did not pick it.
  5. Aspiration, not optimisation a recommender assumes my values are fixed and known and only need matching. i am in the middle of acquiring them, and optimising against a taste profile would freeze the thing that is meant to grow. after Callard.
  6. Own the surface my thinking lives on the reason to leave a platform is not paranoia. it is how much of my thinking, processing and relating lives inside someone else’s product, and i want to own that surface.
  7. Any system i cannot leave owns me exit is a property of the system, not a feature of the account. a system i cannot leave is a different kind of thing from one i can, whatever the two look like.
  8. Opt in, not out the default should be off. a thing i chose to switch on is different from a thing i must remember to opt out of, every time, forever.
  9. Protect now opt out now, while it is still my choice. the decline from outsourcing is quiet, and what atrophies does not come back on request.
  10. Don’t live like an LLM tracking everything, outsourcing all cognitive labor, then waiting for better models to fix the dissatisfaction. my name for the failure mode; a better model does not fix it.
  11. There is no neutral pipe a machine between a person and the world shapes what shows up and what counts as showing up. the ones that feel like plain glass get questioned first, and so do the frameworks i question them with.
  12. Publishing is my act nothing goes out under my name until i have read it and said so. an agent can stage a draft; it does not press publish.
  13. The machine tutors, it doesn’t do the exercise when i am learning something, it explains, quizzes and reviews. it does not write the implementation. the point of learning it is that i can.

instruments

how i build · one user first, local, never decides
  1. Build for one first every tool is built for me before anyone else. an instrument validated against a hypothetical user only encodes my guesses about strangers.
  2. Then make it a template pull the personal parts out into config, leave the generic parts standing, and say which is which, so someone else can run their own instance on their own life.
  3. Local by default personal data stays on the machine that made it. no telemetry, no analytics, no error reports to a third party. if a feature needs the network, it says so and names the host.
  4. Flat files are the database markdown for what a person writes, json for what a program writes. no hosted database, no orm, no migration framework.
  5. The tool never decides nothing ranks a person’s options, scores them against a norm or recommends. instruments surface; people judge.
  6. No dependency without a written reason prefer the standard library, and prefer thirty lines i can read. anything added gets its reason in writing.
  7. Three similar lines beat a premature abstraction extract on the third repetition, not the second.
  8. Never invent a fact about the system if i need to know what deploys where, or whether something is live, i check. hand-written claims drift from reality while still reading as authoritative.
  9. A tool about attention must not waste yours a tool about attention that wastes attention is a joke. token discipline is a product requirement, not a preference.
  10. The specimen, not the spec a format cannot be judged from a description of the format. ship one real instance, on real data, before or alongside any plan.
  11. A sketch is the spec when a drawing exists, the page is the drawing at full size. forms, sliders and side panels around it are the failure mode.
  12. Deterministic first, generative second text, numbers and layout come from code. the model paints over a correct skeleton, not the other way round.
  13. See it whole a system i use needs a macro view where the whole is visible at once and every node is a link. a prose document alone is not the deliverable.
  14. Build the counter-instrument, then give it away applied means more than describing how technology mediates a life. it means making instruments that push back, and leaving them for anyone to use.
  15. Ship, then polish build the first version, put it in front of the real thing, and improve it there. don’t over-explain it first.

craft

taste and finish · distance from the mean, chosen
  1. Taste is the asset taste is distance from the mean, chosen on purpose: the capacity to say this and not that, and why. when supply is infinite and generated, discernment is the scarce input.
  2. Losing taste is losing agency a preference i can no longer feel is a choice someone else is making. to be human is to err, to judge, and to prefer things i cannot put into words.
  3. The mean is a location, not a verdict where most people landed is a fact about the distribution, not about the truth. the mean moved; the truth did not.
  4. More is not better “more equals better” is an absolute untruth. fewer things, chosen, is the version that holds up.
  5. The gap between 99 and 100 is huge the last percent is where the difference is felt, and where most work stops.
  6. Pass the swap test if the defaults would look the same, it is slop. a piece earns its place by being specific to the thing it is for.
  7. Restraint, Japanese and Nordic warm monochrome, hairlines, one serif and one mono, room to breathe, a little futuristic. no gradients, no emoji for icons, no template hero.
  8. Consumption is habitat, not evidence what i read, watch and listen to is where i live, not a case i am making about myself. i don’t need special proof.
  9. Intentionality is a moat when everything else can be generated, intentionality and trusting my own intuition are what remain scarce.
  10. Productive, or the illusion of it i know when i am productive and when i am running on the illusion of productivity. i feel it in my body.
  11. Some things should be sacred not everything is a resource to track, optimise or ship. private life is private, and intimate; it stays off the dashboard.

people

with others · meet them where they are
  1. Meet people where they are not where they should be. that means starting from their footing: metaphor first, jargon last.
  2. Translate without condescending the work is closing the gap between what i think and what i say, and doing it without talking down.
  3. Analogy first, weeds on request one coherent story with named actors, then a map from each actor to the real term. html is substance, css is vanity, javascript is decisions.
  4. Say it in my own words values borrowed in someone else’s vocabulary are a new mask. i state mine plainly, without costume.
  5. I am an individual and so are you nobody is a segment. what i refuse from a system, being averaged, i should not do to the person in front of me.
  6. The interior is mine to disclose interior life deserves to stay in. i decide who gets access to what, when, and how.
  7. Boundaries are the best intervention i have they are not a panacea, but they are the best one available to an individual.
  8. Disclose category, not content one paragraph on where i stand, not the details. the people in my record are not my data.

working rules

how the week is kept
  1. One want, one name a third name for an idea i already have two names for is not a new idea. rename the file; don’t open a folder.
  2. The 02:00 rule anything that starts between midnight and four waits forty-eight hours on a cooling list before it becomes a project.
  3. A gate, not a ban a flat ban does not survive contact with wanting. a gate names its condition in advance and can be checked.
  4. Keep personal and work separate physical, digital and virtual boundaries between them, built on purpose. what belongs to one does not leak into the other.

temperament

given, not chosen · how i am built
  1. Hypercurious i follow a question well past where it is useful. it is where most of the good work starts and most of the time goes.
  2. I love semantic quibbles the word decides the argument more often than people admit. telling accurate from ostensibly accurate is not pedantry; it is where the disagreement usually lives.
  3. Spatial, patternistic, relational learner i learn by seeing where a thing sits, what it rhymes with and what it connects to. a fact with no neighbours does not stay.
  4. Sensory hacker the senses are adjustable inputs: light, sound, texture and temperature are set on purpose and tested like any other variable.
  5. I like designing solutions given a problem, i reach for a design before an opinion.