Sometimes you write a beautiful masterplan. You announce it to the world. You start executing with pride and diligence. Down in the weeds, you begin to loose track of what drove you in the first place. The venture sinks.

Resisting to name things too early is a blessing. Anticipation needs silence. Only with silence comes the sense of invitation, which can carve an opening into adjacent futures.

The world is an open system. I am increasingly convinced that the person you are becoming will come unannounced. Personal metamorphosis can grow out only of the unturned soil of your life, the epochs you don't yet understand. We can allow moments of sudden realisation to happen by relaxing the tyranny of forward-looking meaning making. Pausing the goal setting for a minute. Who is the stranger I have become that now looks at me in the mirror?

This is Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned (2015). A dynamical system that converges too quickly wasn’t very interesting to begin with. The seduction of taking continuous methodical small steps towards our end is perfectly legitimate for small goals, but for greater goals? It can even be counter-productive!

Stanley and Lehman make the case that worthy achievements can't be broken up into a mechanical series of conscious and convergent actions. Their phase space of possible outcomes is simply too big to be searchable this way. Often we need to escape local minima to pursue the global ones. A bit of randomness, serendipity and playfulness can bring us further in our journey.

If only embracing uncertainty can lead you to the places you never felt you deserved or could access, what is stopping you?

Take care,
David

Seven things I know was a series of recollections on the lessons I learned by experience or reflection in 2024. I engaged with the hardest personal subjects I manage to. These were my field notes from the frontlines of unlearning.

Maybe they'll spark your own uncomfortable conversations too… Reply to this e-mai if anything resonated with you, constructively or destructively!

Day 6 — The force of habits

Habits are made of glass. Easy to break and hard to build. Today, against all promises, we won’t explore anything radical or original. Rather, something all too habitual.

Whether we succeed or we fail, showing up is half of the work. It’s a victory worth celebrating in itself. Walking down to the battle field already takes courage and practice.

Acting in alignment to duty is hardly what comes to us most naturally. Why? We’re information-maximising systems. Critical phenomena. Inherently sitting on the brink of order and disorder. We live balancing these critical conditions. If we were tuned in as to always prefer duty, we would very quickly converge to some fragile low-entropy configuration. We would be crystals.

Just have a look at the structure of this caffeine crystal! No surprise it can reorder our mind so powerfully.

I wondered often how could I make it easier for myself to sit down and write the next time. No answer arose. “Don't feel like starting again?” is the title of a long private memo, where I keep track of the feelings that come visit me when I can’t set my mind on going to battle. Why doesn’t it feel fun? Where would I even start from this next time?

I discovered that sometimes working on two pieces simultaneously helps reduce the attachment to how our writing will be received. A little distraction, or uncentering of the mind’s compass, can relax its judgment. Some keep a sparks diary, so that you can pluck an old idea that surprised or inspired you, to rekindle the mind's curiosity.

Many have taught that this problem reduces to relinquishing the responsibility of success or failure. Outcomes are beyond our control. We should feel equanimous about them. Yet, this can feel like another prescription we ought to follow and that hardly helps. Also, if success can feel impersonal and lucky, failure and rejection always feel rather personal.

As far as habit is concerned, every day is a war. We wage against the forces that hold us back. Against our beautiful fear of pain and our joyous attachment to comfort. These are forces that drive evolution. Responsible for the self-preservation of our species against all odds. We should be gentle against them. Strike with surgical precision. It’ll save us ammunition and casualties.

Pursuing the easiest meaningful effort. It’s a min-max equilibrium, if you know what I mean. Minimise the losses, not maximise the wins. This way, we keep learning and unlearning.

Thank you for sticking around along this journey!

Day 5 — Haunting questions

What was I most wrong about last year? The question haunted me for a few days.

I like being wrong. There’s new information in a falsified belief. Although, it’s not easy to recount how we were wrong and why. We navigate life equipped with many beliefs that we never get to stress or exercise. Even when we do, we like to forget the feeling fast.

The worst you could be is not even wrong. Living so unconsciously, that you never get to assess the principles that drive you. The risk is making the same mistakes over and over, without even realising the pattern.

Back around the time of the last equinox, I gathered some friends for lunch by the seaside. While we were dining, I asked “What are you most looking forward in the next quarter?”. When my turn came, my answer was simple: I can’t wait to furnish my new place in Barcelona. I thought having the blank canvas of an unfurnished place heightened the excitement of a new chapter. Boy was I wrong.

First a digression. I enjoy enormously questioning guests at the dinner table. I long Asimov’s Black Widowers atmosphere, where after dinner the guest of the night is challenged with a «How do you justify your existence?». Inevitably, they bring up an unresolved story of their life, whose mystery will be answered by the club’s waiter Henry.

While my friends have learnt to tollerate and enjoy the habit, my cousins hate me for it. It makes them feel grilled. They push back, tease me, argue I’m not smooth enough and ignore all questions. Truth is I can’t stand more than a few minutes of small-talk. I feel I’m wasting valuable time by not getting to know the other in an original way. Broad open questions are gift, an invitation to escape from the usual conversation routes. New routes take courage and not everyone can take them.

I understand there’s a power-frame shift implied in direct questioning. It can make the less socially confident stumble. It can sound performative. The same person that would thrive answering the question one-on-one would find it hard in a group setting. Nevertheless, I love it. As a majorly irreflexive society, we need more questioning. Cargo ships more of it.

Back to Barcelona. I thought the white walls of an empty room were like a question. Inviting and staring at me with possibility. All nice and true, but then the actual time for furnishing them came. I had underestimated the pressure surrounding it. Every decision was overwhelmed by analysis paralysis. I looked for advice. “Start with the vibe you want to convey”. I felt dismay. What vibe. How would I know.

I realised I looked forward to the feeling of a well-furnished apartment, not to the actual furnishing process. It wasn’t fun. It was stressful. I had to be pushed by a friend into every buying decision. Consumption does not make me happy. I prioritised building an office. I built a wide desk with pallets. I got one of those floating-arm architect’s lamps and a documents tray. A lot of steel. The vibe turned out to be “industrial, mad architect”. It felt like a workspace, not a home. It was efficient, functional rather than expressive.

This is when I realised how much more of avoidant rather than anxious I was in my attachment style. Showing up with personality, self-expression and colour felt very costly. Especially the latter, as a colourblind person is a nightmare. But by analogy I felt personality-blind, unable to distinguish how I felt around things. Knowing myself is an empiric chase and most of the time I feel like I’m doing highly inaccurate guess work. This is why every failed experiment is so important.

What I am try to gauge here is my personality’s organisation and maybe glimpse at its structure. There’s an important difference between structure and organisation. Structure is inextricable form-and-function. How the subject shaped itself to perform its core function: avoiding pain first and pursuing pleasure later. Organisation is how the parts interact and make up the whole, how the competing goals of different subsystems are negotiated: feeling healthy, happy, financially independent, etc.

On a whim during New Years Eve’s night, I bought a bushy, fully-flowered lavender plant I saw on the streets. It felt good. It immediately reaped dividends later that evening, as some expert guest wondered with admiration how could I grow such a lush plant indoors. I chuckled. The plant had lived less than an hour under my supervision.

Forty-eight hours later, I am happy to report that it is still alive and it hasn’t raised any complaint.

Previously in Seven things I know…

Day 4 — Encountering one’s void

What did I learn about love?

I can’t even begin to answer this question. I don’t have words to describe where I started from, nor where I landed. What was I wrong about? Most likely everything.

This year was a long flight on an silent jet I boarded while I was asleep. Dreaming. Sleepwalking in my fantasies.

In July, I could be hugged by four people telling how much they loved me and feel absolutely nothing. Words of affirmation would leave me cold like frost. I skim through my journals.

Jul, 2. I cry the imaginary tears of a faraway child. He doesn’t know when to call off the prank and come back home. He’s lost. He can’t see his mom, nor a friendly shadow.

He has no roof for the night. I can pull it off. The city won’t kill me. I can stand it. I can sleep anywhere, even on the dustiest mattress. But it’s not dust stinging his eyes. It’s the awareness his mother is dead and won’t be back. I can’t breathe. The chest contracts. The tummy is bruised.

There’s an old man with a white beard at the end of his path he can barely see. He has a blurry face and a deep dry voice. He’s waving to him to come closer. The child cries. He is afraid. The old man approaches slowly.

Their hug is long. It lasts until the boundaries of the two souls melt. The child doesn't want to open his eyes anymore. Remembering the world around him would be too painful. What good remains? (trans.)

This imagined encounter of the homeless child with the wise old man reflects an inner dialogue that I feel I’ve been having often. The task is to recompose a split soul. I am unsure of why I have to reconcile this sense of pure infinite grief with plush and stealthy wisdom.

I know I’ve promised not to borrow unearned insight in this thread. Nonetheless, if there is one thing I’m learning about love, it would be along these lines.

It’s less about what we desire, and more about what sets (our) desiring in motion. It’s the blurry borders of the void we carry, the paper cutouts someone crafted with the pages within our heavy binding.

The original question of desire is not directly “What do I want?”, but “what do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?” A small child is embedded in a complex network of relations; he serves as a kind of catalyst and battlefield for the desires of those around him: his father, mothers, brothers and sisters, and so on, fight their battles around him, the mother sending a message to the father through her care for the son. While he is well aware of this role, the child cannot fathom what object, precisely, he is to others, what the exact nature of the games they are playing with him is, and fantasy provides an answer to this enigma: at its most fundamental, fantasy tells me what I am to my others.

The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek, p. 9

May the subtle dance of imagination deciphering desire, of seeing and feeling seen, accompany you in 2025.

Meet you on the other side.

Previous days

Day 3 — Consequential words

I learned how much I value structure and well-defined interactions. I like people who mean what they say and act accordingly.

Flexibility is a great asset. Humans are adaptive systems that adjust and react to an ever-changing environment. More often than not, the circumstances that surround us will be novel and unique. Rigidity never helps. Intelligence is movement. Nonetheless, in social terms, there is a unique power in accountability. Clarity of mind signals self-respect and opens the possibility of intimacy.

Shame and guilt like to disguise themselves in many forms. Kindness and politeness may hide cowardice. Civil interactions are greedy and like to take all the space away from true intimacy.

We are the affordances we offer the other: what can they reasonably expect from me? Clarity and stability of expression signal that we can be our full selves.

If we are allowed to speak from true desires, we can act accordingly and offer others a space and place to be themselves. Any covert disagreement may surface.

It was never obvious in my upbringing, but I feel it's the only healthy way forward with friends, family, or intimate relationships. When we relate from a standpoint of consequentiality, our words matter. We matter. Modes of behaviour that rely on implicit assumptions, last-minute changes, or unspoken reciprocity will feel archaic and tyrannical afterwards.

Day 2 — Need for action

My present sense of self-worth is dependant on the my perceived state of action.

My waking life unfolds as an inconsequent series of distractions. Among the preferred distractions there is deeply listening to others and being immersed in a game (by which I mean any directed activity with clear feedback loops).

My mood will swing based on how much I feel I am contributing to some present, intangible aim. Nobody needs to care about that goal except for myself. I need to be fully buried in the activity, swimming in its flow, to feel happiness comparable to the bliss of detachment. Work main benefit is that it grants temporary relief from existential boredom.

Some days, I feel miserable but then wonder: am I really sad, or am I just bored?

I learned that I cannot expect myself to function if I'm not ambitiously pursuing something. It does not even matter what the aim is. It might be trivial like tidying up the flat, or indulgent like shopping around for wines. It's been like this since I was a kid.

After school, I used to pester my parents asking "Che facciamo?", "What are we doing next?". Back then, the preferred distraction was a trip to the bookshop to pick up a new punchy detective story. Little has changed.

Today, I find being buried in the short reward cycles of making something work heavily addicting. Longer quests can also be rewarding. Fixing obscure bugs across millions of lines of a legacy IBM codebase was the ultimate chess puzzle. If writing is seldom entertaining, editing often is.

Listening offers a different route to escape. You enter someone's home, you start to feel their wounds and sparks. You begin to play with their worldview. For a little while, you get to forget about your daily experience. You disconnect from the habitual thought paths. You relax your judgment more than you ever afforded yourself. You board a cruise to a different planet. The experience of relatedness offers a special kind of existential relief. While the conscious feedback loop moves to the background, you do feel that the quality of your listening impacts the other’s present experience. It’s a game of continuous rewards.

When the state of action is so satisfactory, perhaps the greatest of all is the courage to remain unflinchingly in place when all circumstances seem to cry out for action. To nourish oneself through inaction is to absorb the energy of one's instinctive responses and transform it. Noticing the snappy comment as it surfaces and redirecting its force into attention.

The road to conscious inaction depends on understanding the need for action from up close.

Day 1 — The burden of excellence

When you grow up as a straight-A student, life is insidiously difficult. For one, it's hard to garner any sympathy. Your expectations gradually narrow to accomodate an ever-shrinking set of successful outcomes.

Everything comes easily, so you never reckon with the possibility of failure until it's too late. Perhaps you aren't naturally lazy, but you become so. Any task, exercise, or requirement that school proposes as practice soon becomes distasteful. Why should I do countless repetitions of something I've already mastered? It seems petty and unfair. I understand why others need it, but if I don't, why can't I opt out?

Misaligned incentives turn into mistrust. Mistrust turns authority into the enemy. It's only natural that as demands increase, delinquency follows. Competing priorities begin to scatter attention and commitment. You start doing everything at the last minute: you prepare the day before the oral exam, the minute before submission, the hour before the test. You learn to gamble, take aggressively calculated risk. You become an expert in doing more with less, in avoiding any real skill building. New knowledge gets thrown into the last-minute cauldron too. You start to be picky on the projects you choose. You begin to craft the impostor’s toolkit.

Inner discipline isn't learned. It's inherited. It's absorbed through osmosis, perhaps developed internally through exposure to example.

One might think that this confidence in always being able to extricate oneself, to pull oneself up from any precipice by one's fingertips, would help in learning stress management. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because you expose yourself to fewer and fewer stressful conditions.

Instead, you learn to avoid them. You learn to distinguish between things that come naturally to you and things that don't; and you nest yourself in a cocoon of ease. You cherry pick a major where you can excel without effort. You lean on your academic potential until its steam runs out. Like a skier that is carried by the slopes and never learns to climb up the mountains again.

I was a Mathematics & Philosophy undergrad. In my first year of college, I won awards. In the second, I was comfortably in the top quartile. In the third, my results were barely average. What happened? I was not growing. The curriculum was speeding up and I my pace was constant. I was drawing on my potential without replenishing it.

Bolstered by prejudices, you begin to believe not only that your worth is a property of your achievements, but also that what you can achieve and obtain ultimately doesn't depend on you. Every eventual failure becomes an insurmountable mortification of your worth, a demonstration of your relative unworthiness.

You're never socialised to effort, to rebuild potential, to the value of practice. Difficult things are viewed with increasing suspicion, and you develop what can only be called cowardice. You still love to learn, but only what feels easy to learn.You have no shoulder to cry on. You're alone, in what feels like a white collar prison.

The narrow field of (poorly defined) successful outcomes and possible futures dissociate. So you take refuge in illusion, in escapist dreams where “I could do anything, if only…” When reality knocks back at your door, you feel crushed and paralysed.

Growing up gifted casts a long shadow.

History sometimes yields unexpected surprises. There was a time when you could publish a video from your camera roll in just two clicks. Apple integrated so well with YouTube, that the streaming platform’s mobile uploads grew by over 15x in just six months.

The “IMG_0123” universe had begun.

During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention [ IMG_0123 ]. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos. (From: IMG_0416, Ben Wallace).

I dare you. Pick your favourite 4 digits number. Add “IMG_” before it. Search it on Youtube. Enjoy a random collection of raw moments from the camera roll of stranger’s over a decade ago. You won’t be missing your current feed.

The number I chose was 0226, so I searched for “IMG_0226” on YouTube. As I browsed, I experienced the distinct qualities of a bygone era of the web. It’s like a scavenger hunt down memory lane.

Contrast it with today's feeds. It will feel like you suddenly embarked on a trip to a remote island. No catchy intros, click-baiting subtitles, or exaggerated claims. Zero editing. Just moments someone decided to film for some or no particular reason.

The ecology of social media has evolved in front of our eyes. We didn’t notice. The apps stayed the same, their inner universes changed.

Go look for your IMG_0416 videos. They’ll be funny, intimate, cringe, or all of the above. They will feel like a distant reality.

For the pragmatic in heart, those videos might even offer a significant answer to the everlasting and excruciating question: where has yesterday gone?

⏳ Time is a shared creation

The idea that we all see the same universe and that each one of use has their private universe are equally preposterous!

The legacy of quantum physicist John Wheeler - widely known for his delayed-choice thought-experiments - was recently explored on the Quanta essay: John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality.

His last journal entries, before his death in 2008, open up fascinating questions.

Does hope produce space and time?

For Wheeler, it is by choosing what to measure in the present, that we participate in the creation of the past.

“It is not a paradox that we choose what shall have happened after it has already happened, ” he wrote, because “it has not really happened. It is not a phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon.” If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, has it made a sound?

The past is not really the past. Time is not really time. We weave the fabric of the universe, he said, out of “billions upon billions of acts of observer-participancy”.

If the past’s certainty eschews us, what could we expect from the future?

🏪 When do markets stop being a voting machine and turn into a weighting machine?

Some horizons of meaning are clearer, other are more clouded.

In August, investment strategist Joachim Klement made a plausible case that near-term and the long-term are far more manageable than the dreaded yearly forecast. He reasoned from accounting variables and fundamentals, but his message is clear.

Please, stop trying to forecast the next 12 months and focus either on the next three months or the next three years. But my guess is, I will still be asked about the next 12 months and will continue to write annual outlooks and the like because that is what most people want. (Substack)

Intuitively, there seem to be discontinuity across forecasting horizons. We need different gears for the short-term and long-term. The expectations shift: the market no longer acts like a voting machine (picture a herd emotionally-charged chasing momentum) and turns into a balanced, harmonised, weighting machine. It’s the kind uncertainties change.

Meanwhile in the deep and wild derivatives universe of Chicago’s CBOE Futures Exchange, there are now options on implied volatility (VIX) futures available for trade. If that sounds confusing, I won’t even begin explaining it. Traders that wish to speculate on the expectations of near-term volatility have a new tool in their toolbox.

Pricing it won’t be for the faint of heart. If one was just getting accustomed with the concept of Volatility of volatility, now it’ll need to meet vol. of vol. of vol. (!)

🧮 Two is easy, three is hard

Every mathematician knows that a drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever.

In other words, a random walk in two dimensions will eventually visit every point of the plane, while in 3D there’s no such guarantee.

This is an example of the mathematical meta-phenomenon “Two is easy, three is hard”: there are many classes of problems that are easy in two parameters and become computationally intractable when another parameter is added.

The very famous three-body problem of Newtonian mechanics is another case in point. When three bodies (say the Sun, Earth and the Moon) orbit each other, there is no general closed-form solution.

For a broader picture, this MathOverflow thread named “When is 2 qualitatively different from 3” explores a theme that should feel familiar to this readership. It’s what we (poetically) approached in our “Stories with n characters” series (spoiler: it’s far from over).

The MathOverflow thread offers a bird’s eye view into a lot of mathematics, from voting theory to statistics, with a lot of algebra and set-theory in between. The Tarski paradoxes (and implications of the Axioms of Choice) stood out to me. Dividing a set by three without the axiom is a trickier construction than it seems!

Another user points out a fact that’s worth keeping in mind:

Mutual information of two random variables is non-negative and I daresay well understood. Mutual information of three or more random variables can be negative, and is monstrously unintuitive.

In which other circumstances have you encountered this pattern?

David

« Check out this study! There may have been two people communicating in between their lucid dreams. It’s quite the upper echelon of futurity! »

When I get this voice note from my childhood friend Tiziano, his message fills me up with joy. He’s an unusual source for a scientific breakthrough. In our good years, I led in ideas, challenging authority and rule-breaking. He was the one good at sports, picking up girls and video-games.

I need to learn more. After all, significant discoveries belong to the rule-breaking department. It’s a well-known fact.

Subscribe now

🔮 What would you remind your dreaming-self about?

The cranky website of REMSpace.net does not inspire immediate trust. On the surface, it has the idiotic yet reassuring flow of every Californian startup’s sales page. When you explore around, it feels like you have stepped out on the wrong floor of Abi Warburg’s library.

REMSpace is the brainchild of Michael Raduga, an intriguing REM sleep researcher. Skimming at his bio, an odd detail strikes me. Raduga was born in Akademgorodok, a Siberian scientific center. My imagination lights up. The city is fit for a novel. The late Soviet Union hid his brightest scientists away in the middle of the Taiga. Scientists were granted higher standards of living and freedom of expression. In exchange, they were tasked to overtake capitalists’ scientific advances. From the integral to metal! (New Atlantis Revisited, Paul Josephson, 1997).

The city is a masterwork of mathematician Mikhail Lavrentyev, a product of the late 1950s wave of regional devolution and destalinization. In this Baconian utopia, pure sciences were meant to be safeguarded from government’s interference. It’s the final act of a culture that celebrated scientific and technological progress well beyond their means, where its last folding hopes resided.1

Enough detours: I could not find any evidence of early Soviet experiments in the field of lucid dreaming technologies. The discovery of ocular-signalling from lucid dreams seems to date back to 1978, to the PhD research of English psychologist Keith Hearne. The field has been growing steadily in various directions (Nature, 2021): a focus of research is to develop methods to induce lucid dreams, another to characterise them in terms of EEG and neuroimaging activity. A further stream of research, championed by Raduga, samples advanced practitioners and attempts to summon a communication protocol with the dreamer (Guardian, 2024).

How to Lucid Dream

Lucid dreaming is hardly a recent discovery. In his short treaty On Dreams, Aristotle described that “often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream”.

This realisation could be unsettling and wake you up, or it may lead to a special lucid state of consciousness, where everything is possible if you set your intention deeply enough. You could fly. Encounter a loved one who passed away. Or literally anything you can dream of!

How to apprehend such a state? Many techniques exist. For millennia, in the Eastern world, a whole dream yoga discipline provided guidance and practice to their disciples. A reference to Tibetan Buddhism’s Bardo seems here necessary. Bardo are six liminal states of existence, ontologically similar: birth and life, dreaming, meditation, dying, visions and pristine awareness, and becoming or transmigration.

Skimming through Raduga’s book The Phase (an earlier draft is available on the website for free) his technique seem to stem from a brilliant observation: it’s in the moment of awakening that we can most easily induce lucid dreaming. It’s easier to fall back into lucid dreaming from a awakening, then to arise consciousness from within a dream.

We are just waking up. Before we move, open our eyes, or even begin thinking, we relax and ease back into visualisation. We picture effortless active body movements: our trunk spinning, our arms swimming, our hands waving. Waiting to fall back into the dream world. The continuous (imaginary) movement should propagate awareness into the dream state.

Raduga suggests that after six hours of good sleep we drink a glass of water, use the toilet, go back to bed and fall asleep. Every next time we wake up, we use that momentum to induce a lucid dream state by repeated visualisation. I think about it with an instinctive metaphor: it’s like if we used the floor of a pool to reinforce upwards momentum, but before we surfaced, we redirect that force forward.

Sounds easier said than done?

Neuromodulation comes to the rescue

Another start-up that recently stirred up attention on the topic is Prophetic (Slate). They raised $ 1.1 m by prominent VC investors in late 2023 and are currently working on a device called “Halo” capable of inducing lucid dreams by non-invasive neuro-modulation.

Prophetic’s CEO Eric Wollberg describes that his interest about lucid dream came from his time in Jerusalem, where he was reading often about theology, wondering about the prophets’ experience. The company is ambitiously branded towards answering humanity ultimate questions.

But the sales pitch for lucid dreaming is not as hard…

• More focus. What problem you care deeply enough you’d want to explore in a couple of simulated universes? When we anxiously ruminate, we run endless scenarios in our mind. Maybe you’d want to move some of that in your night sleep.

• More time. There may come a time when living a fourth (up to a third) of our lives unaware will seem unacceptable. Would you ever opt-out of it given the choice? Instead today lucid dreaming is a complex opt-in. Need to choose to care about your sleep hygiene. Write down your dreams. Practice awakening.

The problem with the dream industry

Despite recent press coverage and copious stream of results in the last five years, the the dream industry suffers a positioning problem.

It’s too woo-woo for the down-to-earth crowds and too down-to-earth for the woo-woo crowds.

Some angry redditors on r/AstralProjection have beef with Raduga. “Don’t bother with him, he’s just a materialist, he reduces all out-of-body experience to lucid dreams”. It must feel sour to hear you weren’t abducted by aliens. You just ended up casually exploring Mars in your lucid leisurely sleep. I don’t know about you, but I’d choose the latter every day. Still impressive!

For many other skeptics, dream science seem like wasted human potential. Therapeutic effects and protocols are still undocumented. Progress is scarce. It’s been years since a material breakthrough.

But what if we were on the verge of opening up the porous boundaries of the oneiric world?

What if what was once a subjective experience, was now available for rigorous controlled interference? What would you do with such advanced technology in your lifetime? Would you trust it? Or would you stir away from it, afraid to offer your fresh mind to the advertisement-driven capitalist complex. What if people would never want to leave their bed again, enchanted by imaginary riches?

We are such stuff as dreams are made on

If the prospect of shared dream simulation is now a step closer, it immediately makes me wonder: doesn’t that weight up on the probability that our shard reality is itself in a dream of some kind by a sufficiently advanced civilisation?

“Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say: "Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise”. Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today. (Alan Watts, emphasis mine)

This classic passage conceives life as you are living it as a continuous antinomic approximation of creative joy and surprise. An equilibrium of liberating, rational comfort and achievable happiness mixed with just the right amount of challenge to keep us busy. Surprise and novelty are key ingredients for dopamine release. Variable rewards keep us engaged and motivated. Nobody wants a life too easy!

We always choose our adventures.

Dream well,

David

🧠 Will we hit the marginal returns of intelligence?

Anthropic is among the most interesting companies in the world. Currently, I’d struggle to name someone else more relevant, more ambitious, or with a more impressive track record. If Anthropic is the one company you should be watching in right now, then this is the one post you should be reading this week to imagine our future.

“Machines of Loving Grace” is an exercise of rigorous optimistic reasoning by its CEO Dario Amodei. It’s well-balanced prose about How AI Could Transform the World for the Better. It’s main quality is clarity. Good execution can only follow limpid thinking.

The questions Dario is answering are pragmatic. From which fields is the acceleration most likely to come from? For which discoveries, the returns to intelligence are higher?

He delves into biology, neuroscience and economics to show us what we could expect five years after “Powerful AI” is reached. Dario offers an optimistic account that is not overly unrealistic. A good starting point for dreamers and doomers alike.

💸 An Esoteric Crypto Investment Memo

BitTensor is a decentralised network that coordinates incentives to build open-source machine-intelligence across a series of task-specific subnets (see a list on TaoPill).

BitTensor ($TAO) is borne out of over-regulation of intelligence. At scale, BitTensor has the potential to become the most liquid AI asset in the world, the highest-paying “employer” of AI talent in the world, the largest computing cluster in the world, and - eventually - the most powerful intelligence in the world. (Investment Memo by EV3, Aug 2024).

Every day, it distributes around $ 3 million (at current prices) to developers and operators as a reward solving specific tasks. Think protein folding simulations, or deepfake detection. Its mechanism is simple: a class of nodes, called validators, query and check the miners’ output against a work product definition set out by a subnet owner, who has “staked” (immobilised) substantial financial resources in pursuit of a specific subnet goal.

If it sounds vague, it’s because it’s meant to be. It's designed to be as general as possible. It acts as a meta layer to coordinate incentives. If in the world of human intelligence, we have capital, labour and regulations to coordinate large-scale collective action, here they have re-invented and codified the game.

It’s currently commanding a circulating $ 3.4 billion valuation ($ 10 bn fully-diluted). About a fourth of the last reported Anthropic funding round valuation (~ $ 40 bn). We believe it has ample room to grow. Staking yields between 10 - 15% APR (declining).

You may ask: where do its cash flows come from? They don’t. It’s more like a platform capturing the value orchestrated across buyers and sellers. It’s a marketplace for intelligence. It’s a captive ecosystem that makes possible for a. subnet owners to solve hard AI problems, for b. tech-savvy AI miners to compete for the solution rewards. In the middle sit validators who extract value from both sides, making the exchange trustless and uncensorable.

You could think it as a response to OpenAI and Anthropic from the unbound crypto crowds. It’s a far west that eschews politically correct regulations.

It’s an effort to radically democratise machine intelligence by pooling resources together very tightly. Its strength is allocating resources internally with the most stringent market mechanisms.

It’s difficult to imagine any single entity competing with that level of internal efficiency. Networks are the future of large-scale cooperation.

Will the seven levels of management corporation become a thing of the past before the end of the XXI century?

Until next week,

David

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With unparalleled intelligence and computing available at our fingertips, there seem to be an obvious avenue for new natural science. Just collect more granular data, feed it to the machine along with some interesting macroscopic variable you can observe, wait and let the codebreaking beast do its thing.

Whether it’s by mapping the genome, the proteome, or the brain’s neuronal wirings (the connectome), biologists are pursuing large data collection in an effort to pattern-match at scale. As more data is gathered and classified, AI can help discover exotic regularities over large those large complex networks. Every interaction, co-occurrence, or interference that is statistically significant would be tracked down.

Is this really all there is to it? What about our slow, explainable, story-based, very human hypotheses? Will they become a thing of the past? Or will our expressive means evolve with our understanding?

🍄 The mushroom that could control a robot

The March of the Mushroom Robots (Nautilus). Machines have always been designed with inspiration from the living kingdom. This time researchers are taking it one step further by growing mycelium into the electronics of a robot.

Turns out living beings are excellent sensors. While our conscious systems elaborate information at a very slow pace, our peripheric sensory systems process raw data very efficiently. What if we could plug this rich input stream into a robot’s brain?

Enter the field of biohybrid robotics. Plants and animal cells may be hard to work with for now, but fungal mycelia is highly sensitive to light and chemicals. It’s been described as a single, long, wiry nose.

In August, researchers from Cornell and Florence Universities published promising experimental results (Science Robotic). Their prototype has an electrical interface that interprets the mycelia’s activity and translates it into signals to move the robot parts.

When the mycelia detects UV light, it reacts. Then, the robot picks up the surge of electrical activity in the mycelium and starts moving.

Wouldn’t you say it’s now the mushroom that controls the robot? What if it could start learning from the outcomes of the integrated system, made of the environment plus the robot’s program? What if it adapted, modulating its responses to command its robotic extension?

🧠 What’s inside the brain of a fruit fly?

Neuronal wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain (Nature). Not unlike mapping the genome or the proteome, mapping the set of all neuronal connections (the connectome) in a brain is gargantuan task. It took over five years and hundreds of scientists expert annotations, even leveraging AI-augmented processes.

The research of the FlyWire consortium resulted in “a complete map of the female fruit fly brain” - the biggest and most detailed to date 140,000 neurons, which connect through 55 million synapses to permit vision, movement, and memory formation.

Scientists classified over 8.400 unique neuronal cell type, specified by their connectivity quality (“rich club, broadcaster or highly reciprocal”), or their superclasss role (afferent bringing information in, intrinsic elaborating information, or efferent bringing motor signals out).

Now, scientists can access not only wiring diagrams of individual neural circuits, or sinapse-level connectome, but also their aggregation, to map projections between brain regions. Such maps are called projectomes or mesoscale connectome. These structures are believed to be key for tracing complete pathways from sensory inputs to motor outputs.

It’s a brave new world for neuroscience.

💉The story your plasma proteins want to tell you

Ground Truths

What Can 11,000 Proteins In Our Blood Tell Us?

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2 years ago · 137 likes · 1 comment · Eric Topol

Longevity researchers have more data than ever to work with. Recent advances of proteomic mapping capabilities allow scientists to sample thousands of proteins from tiny blood samples. If you think it sounds just like what Theranos had promised its investors and feel skeptical, you’d be justified.

However, the number of protein target we can map and identify has been growing steadily. These results allow for better understanding of human aging process, identified many organ-specific decay paths (“organ clocks”) and how they may be favourably modulated.

This has the potential of using proteomic scores for assessing risk of various diseases. However, costs are still elevated. A high-throughput proteomic assessment ranges from $500 to $1000 per individual. The service is carried out by SomaLogic, which was acquired in Jan ‘24 by Standard BioTools (Nasdaq: ), previously known as Fluidigm Corp. in an all-shares merger. Each SomaLogic stockholder got 1.11 of the acquirer’s common stock for each of their shares.

The proteinomics race advances.

🧩 Industrial-scale mathematics

We're Entering Uncharted Territory for Math (The Atlantic). Award-winning mathematician Terence Tao has recently described GPT-o1 as a moderately “competent graduate student”. What did he mean?

Tao described a kind of AI-enabled, “industrial-scale mathematics” that has never been possible before: one in which AI, at least in the near future, is not a creative collaborator in its own right so much as a lubricant for mathematicians’ hypotheses and approaches.

Some years ago, AI surprised the mathematics community coming up with a faster algorithm for matrix multiplication (Quanta). DeepMind researchers formulated it as an adversarial puzzle and unleashed AlphaTensor at it. The Chess world-champion AI rediscovered mathematical techniques (Strassen’s algorithm, 1969) from first principles and further innovated on them.

What Tao highlights in his The Atlantic interview, though, is slightly different:

“The type of math that I’m most interested in is math that doesn’t really exist. The project that I launched just a few days ago is about an area of math called universal algebra, which is about whether certain mathematical statements or equations imply that other statements are true.”

He points out the challenges of collaboration in mathematical research. Every sufficiently advanced mathematics is an island of its own. Very few mathematicians can understand and proof-read a colleague’s work. It’s rare for projects to count more then five academics.

Universal algebra is a fascinating project, launched by Tao’s blog post (“A pilot project in universal algebra to explore new ways to collaborate and use machine assistance?”) at the end of August.

It studies the most possibly bland algebraic object: a magma, which is just a set A, with a binary operation described from AxA → A. No further constrains are imposed on the operation (such as inverses, identity, associativity, commutativity). Then it asks the question: which of all the axioms you can formulate with up to four operations are logically implied by another axiom?

There are 4694 equational laws involving at most four magma operations, hence 4694*(4694-1) ~ 22m implications that need to be proven (or disproven).

The project is now up and running on GitHub, with contributions of over 30 mathematicians. It employs transitive rewriting or Vampire an automatic theorem prover for first-order logic from University of Manchester.

As of yesterday, Oct 6th, it is 99.995% complete with only 1001 open implications to be proven or disproven.

Quite the result for little more than a month’s work!

🤝 Thought-partners needed

It takes two to think (Nature). Artisanal human-made science, meanwhile, is very much a conversation game.

Itai Yanai, biomedical scientist at NYU, writes a rather romantic piece defending the thesis that the best creative chats are the ones where you reason with just another person. Too many peers around the table and it becomes a brainstorm, or worse an exercise of groupthink.

It seems reasonable that good science needs intimacy. Vulnerability is key for new ideas. A “Yes, and” mentality is what opens the door of creativity and collaboration. But I disagree that only two can make for a good chat. The evidence presented does not seem conclusive of a categoric result. I believe it all boils down to trust and unique viewpoints. When you bring in new further contributions that are not just pro or against something but genuine, trusting, unique viewpoints, why would they limit the scope of your conversation?

I’ll leave you the article below so you can enjoy it, and judge for yourself.

👩‍🍳 The curse of the limelight

The curse of the Michelin star (Economist). On another planet, economists are researching the adverse effects of Michelin stars to NYC restaurants with linear regressions.

Are we better off the spotlight? Restaurants that are awarded the star are apparently more likely to fail. Being in the limelight seem to raise everyone's expectations. Employees, suppliers, customers and landlords all turn greedier. Expectations are the true happiness killers. After all, your happiness is only measured against your expectations’ baselines.

Daniel B. Sands from UCL “found that, of this promising group, establishments which went on to get a Michelin star were more likely to close down in the years that followed than those which did not. The relationship remained even when factors such as location, price and type of cuisine were taken into account. All told, 40% of restaurants awarded Michelin stars in 2005-14 had closed by the end of 2019.” (Strategic Management Journal, 6th August 2024). The study was limited to establishments in New York City. Could this be a specific feature of its market?

I have mixed feelings about this result. On the one hand, I like it. It seems to confirm a very narratologic truth: after every excessive success, comes ruin. Not very far off from some Eastern wisdom! It also echoes protestant ethics, which looks with suspicion at any man-awarded gratification. Don’t stop working, they’d say, salvation is only granted from above. Never think you’ve made it.

On the others, the methodology and the sample seems limited. What could the story of a few hundreds (276!) restaurants tell us? The findings are valuable yet anecdotical.

The author’s find that third-party evaluations are double-edged is commendable, yet what isn’t double-edged?

Mind celebrating your wins too soon,

David

♾️ When is one thing equal to some other thing?

When is one thing equal to some other things? Barry Mazur's 2007 article offers a compelling perspective on mathematicians' exploration of 'the awkwardness of equality.' It serves as a concise introduction to category theory—a complex and fascinating topic that has, curiously, gained traction in hipster artistic circles. Test yourself and see how far you can delve into it

I found a simple explanation of group theory (Quanta). This is a must read if you want to be my friend.

Understanding the precise language of symmetry is priceless. It’s not just a useful intellectual accomplishment. Personally, it’s one of my proudest (life) achievements. Give it a try!

💻 What’s artificial learning about?

In Computer Science what comes to mind in this day and place is Generalised Unsupervised Learning. Here’s Ilya Sutskever in 2023 explaining some older OpenAI results from 2016.

This is not a state-of-art marketing presentation about LLMs. It’s rather a good (technical) ride to understand why OpenAI succeeded so far. Learn how its chief scientists were thinking about confusing foundational questions, what mental maps they found interesting to navigate the topic.

You’ll encounter topics such as distribution matching, algorithmic mutual information and Kolmogorov complexity. These are precise ways to formalise the notion of “shared structure” across two objects in informatics.

Ilya argues about how to ground theoretically the task of unsupervised learning, which lacked the same rigorous basis of supervised tasks, which can be viewed as convergent approximation problems. His viewpoint shifts the scene: unsupervised learning is a compression problem. This is the fundamental intuition behind LLMs (cf. LLMSs as blurry JPEG of the web). It’s worth to keep it in mind.

Here’s a (meta) example that can help us see what I mean by two “things” having the same structure. Think about prediction and compression. The two tasks share a common structure. Both have to capture patterns to reduce the amount of information needed to describe an (T+1) outcome. The outcome could be the decompressed item or the next entry of a time series. If a whole dynamic process can be compressed and explained in fewer simpler terms, then it can be predicted.

Stories, like equations, are compact explanatory devices. Their compression is their predictive power.

Talking about fundamental dualities…

🔥 The Unreasonable effectiveness of Physics

Read the The Unreasonable effectiveness of Physics (Nautilus). While it is well known that mathematics have allowed tremendous progress in the natural sciences, sometimes it goes the other way around.

The sort of math that emerges from studying reality is the sort our brains tend to like.

A recent paper by Daniele Molinini (UChicago, 2022) explores the converse of the classic question that Eugene Wigner asked in 1960: why is mathematics so effective explaining the natural world?

The sharpest knowledge-seekers out there test their pattern recognition skills continuously. It’s out there in the wild that new analogies, relationships, mappings, dualities emerge. Some of them stick around.

After all, there’s no true mathematics. Just mathematics that mathematicians like.

Once it is possible to translate any particular proof from one theory to another, then the analogy has ceased to be productive for this purpose; it would cease to be at all productive if at one point we had a meaningful and natural way of deriving both theories from a single one. … Gone is the analogy: gone are the two theories, their conflicts and their delicious reciprocal reflections, their furtive caresses, their inexplicable quarrels; alas, all is just one theory, whose majestic beauty can no longer excite us. Nothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships; nothing gives greater pleasure to the connoisseur, whether he participates in it, or even if he is an historian contemplating it retrospectively, accompanied, nevertheless, by a touch of melancholy. The pleasure comes from the illusion and the far from clear meaning; once the illusion is dissipated, and knowledge obtained, one becomes indifferent at the same time. … (A. Weil, De la métaphysique aux mathématiques, Science 60, p. 52–56, emphasis mine).

This passage from a letter of André Weil to his sister Simone is what made me fall in love with maths.

Hope you enjoy it,

David

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🦹‍♂️ How to access anyone’s browser without their consent

• Arc is the fiery new kid in the browsers’ block. A personal favourite, it enables you to fight back against the daunting, uncontrolled proliferation of tabs. Beyond its neat tab management, it offers user-defined customisations over the pages your frequently browse with a feature called Boosts. Want to change Facebook accent colour to pink? Easy. Live in a world where X is still called Twitter? You can, as it lets you inject custom CSS and JavaScript into any page. However, the vanity of Boosts backfired.

• The security researcher xyzeva has uncovered the worst possible vulnerability for a browser (CVE-2024-45489): remote code execution. That’s how it works. To enable syncing across devices, all your Boosts are saved on the Arc’s backend database. They are associated with a “CreatorID” unique to you. The browser chooses the boosts to apply via the “CreatorID” field. However, until 25/8 one could arbitrarily change the CreatorID  field to any user id!

• This way, if you were to find a way to easily get someone else’s user id, for example by their referral link, you could assign them your own “malicious Boost”. Such Boost could - for example - forge their bank page, steal their credentials’, or monitor their web activity.

• The company has since responded to the incident and awarded the researcher a bounty of $ 2000. Morality does not pay well. This bug was never exploited and no user was affected. Still, it’s a warning sign that when a challenger moves very fast, things could go terribly wrong… With great power come great responsibility!

🔬 How a Plant tells a Fungus “Go Kill Yourself”

Biological cross-talk: is RNA the lingua-franca of all living things or a poisoned pager? The fabric of the living is a stream of information exchanges. Some interactions occur over the long timespans of an organism’s behaviour, other can happen via direct molecular communication, even among evolutionarily distant species. Researchers have found that a plant and a fungus can exchange mutually-understandable RNA as a form of warfare, in a coevolutionary arms race between host and pathogen.

While organisms have evolved and diversified, their RNA-reading machinery has largely stayed the same. “RNA already has a meaning in every cell,” Buck said. “And it’s a pretty simple code.” So simple, in fact, that a recipient cell can open and interpret the message before realising it could be dangerous. (Quanta)

Foreign RNA instructions are executed on the host’s system, weakening their self-defence mechanisms. It’s a bit like `curl | bash` on Linux system: dangerous execution of foreign code that was designed for a very old architecture. Some system calls never change. Beware of opening that Excel macro from an unknown sender!

As an aside, I have never particularly fancied the software-hardware analogy in biology. I find it useful, but limiting. There’s a wealth of complexity in the dynamics of RNA. They need explore with better metaphors. It’s also epistemically dubious. It’s a by-product of the fact that what we can “explain, predict and control” best are computers. Not necessarily holding any explanatory power on the explanandum. The one with an hammer only sees nails.

Anyways, if you encounter someone working on different ways of understanding RNA rather then as a communication protocol, do let me know.

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🌍 Is Nigeria the world’s perfect midpoint?

• The Nigerian oil saga. A fascinating Financial Times documentary points out the difficulties that the new government is facing in Nigeria after it (partially) scrapped fuel subsidies. In 2022, subsidies amounted to almost 10 $ bn, or 2% of GDP. More than their health or education budgets. Fuel subsidies are deeply ingrained in Nigeria’s collective psyche. Cheap fuel exists to keep national hopes up. They are there to tell its people: we’re an oil country, we shall be rich.

• Imagine you are a young child. You have been told for a lifetime that although you are now poor, you are sitting on great riches because of your hidden genius. Your parents go to great lengths to keep up appearances. They praise you and fall into debt to fake your IQ test results and validate their narrative. How could they stop telling their lies without destroying you? How hard it is to acknowledge that without further nurturing (refineries) your raw talent is almost worthless?

• The country’s richest man Aliko Dangote is on its way to challenge these narratives. He’s building a new gargantuan refinery on the coast of the country to re-establish national fuel sovereignty. When fully operational, it will be the largest single-train refinery in the world.

Currency, inflation, security, political stability, corruption, environment. Beyond fossil fuels, Nigeria’s story deserves more attention. Inflation reached a 24-years high of 31.7% in February 2024. Spatial inequality continues to be large, with the best-performing regions of Nigeria comparing favorably to upper middle-income countries, while the worst performing states fare below the average for low-income. Its population is projected to grow to 392 million in 2050, overcoming the entire EU within our lifetime.

Observing global dynamics, I have often felt like I was missing an equant. An ideal midpoint, a centre of mass approximation, a sample subset that could compresses some complexity of the world as a whole. Economies are drifting relative to each other at various speed. Each major power blocks bends and shifts political perspectives against the other. What would be good midpoint candidates?

Certainly Turkey which is geographically, culturally, and politically positioned as a bridge between Europe and Asia, and the Middle East. Then, Indonesia or Singapore, which have strong BRICS and US ties. Finally, even though Nigeria’s pro-capita GDP is far off the world’s median or mean, I have a hunch (to be explored or expounded in a further write-up) that its upper middle class offers a great approximation for many global dynamics. It’s also a fast-growing share of the world population, so the error rate is set to decrease.

More to come.

ps: on this note, if you happen to know of any project that requires an analyst to spend some time on in-depth coverage of Nigeria, i’d love to hear from you.

🌿 Adjacent ecosystems and regenerative growth

• Are.na is like a forest. It’s a wide network brimming with diversity. Rabbit holes abound. It has some of the early Tumblr vibes. This week, their editorial team has published a series in partnership with the verdant newsletter Dark Properties called Ecologies of Entanglement, exploring natural ecologies, networked technologies, and the people working across both. Think slime mold computing, regenerative kinship, or indigenous cybernetics.

• Terence Tao is advocating that young mathematicians aim just beyond their current range in their next pursuit. The mathematician advises to develop one’s talent by matching yourself against slightly challenging adversaries. Find the next adjacent challenge. Set your ambition to aim at just beyond what you find boring. Make it easy on yourself. Nurture achievable next steps. His old WordPress is rich of hidden treasures for mathematicians!

💸 Volatility is stability, ignorance is strength, hawks are doves

• Rate cuts. Central banking has always been an exercise of doublespeak. It’s the defining character of any central discretionary power. Powers bend languages to achieve their goals.

• If the economy is so strong, what justified the 50 bps cut? In Not Behind the Curve, RaboResearch’s report by Philip Marey, analysts by RaboBank pick up the Orwellian characters of the latest Fed press conference.

  Doctor: “We’ll give you extra strong medication.”

  Patient: “Is my condition that bad?”

  Doctor: “No, you’re healthy, but we’re committed to keep you healthy.

• Will inflation pick-up again on the expectations of a rapid easing cycles? Today it seems unlikely, as markets are pricing a rather slow decline. Overall, the Fed actions seem motivated more by unemployment data than inflation at the moment. Higher unemployment (4.4%, +0.2%) is expected by the last quarter of the year, stirring up some concern.

All in all, asymmetric opportunities abound in this new higher volatility regime. Volatility is good for insurgents and bad for incumbents, because the former only need to get lucky, once while the latter need to keep staying lucky.

Shoot your best shots, 🕊️

David

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It is games that give us something to do when there is nothing to do. We thus call games “pastimes” and regard them as trifling fillers of the interstices of our lives. But they are much more important than that. They are clues to the future. And their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation. (Bernard Suits)

Herodotus reports the legend that the Lydians in times of famine organised inventive public games every other day. They designed new games of dice and ball. Citizen would play all day to distract their minds from hunger. This way, they managed to fast every other day.

Games us let us trade time for attention. They kick the can down the road, delaying resolution.

Eventually, the situation got so bad, that Atys of Lydia decided to halve the population in two. Because of this, he sent away half of his people to start a colony off the coasts of Italy, led by his son Tyrrhenus.

A settlement is both the agreement intended to resolve a dispute and the establishment of a community in a place previously uninhabited. A mark in no man land. A new trade on the tape. What’s real and what’s virtual cross for an instant.

Malt Liquidity

Postmodern Society and Its Future

Liquidity: the friction between theory and reality…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Ven

“An ought becomes an is when there is a sufficient amount of speculation as to whether an outcome is or ought to happen.” Ven’s account of liquidity theory is a feverish ride. A 140-something chapters adventure of insomniac financial metaphysics. At times it can feel revolutionary, “the entire point of a centralised government apparatus is to short societal volatility”.

The main concern of the author is the growing prevalence virtual flow, leveraged algorithmic liquidity. Polluting noise on the markets. Like echoes bouncing around a cave’s walls, interfering constructively, they don’t carry any signal. Ven argues there is very little real flow left. Conviction in one local equity story (promise of a company future cash flows) has exited the markets. Global dispersion and correlation narratives have replaced it. It’s an everything-to-everything connection of psychotic sort.

Passive flows rebalancing across different mutually linked baskets. Drift across connected vessels, along a positively-skewed volatility smile. Numbers go up.

It’s a metaphysical tension built of self-referential hope. It’s the lieu of enchanted encounters. Facing what can’t be proved. We look up the clouds. We search for patterns in the pseudo-randomness.

Trying to explain the unprovable is precisely the reason why people get lost in fake models and prophets and signals that don't really explain why anything trades and get depressed. Trading is the postmodern religion. It can't be knowable, but it can make you money, because we bucket reality into time. (Postmodern Society and its Future).

I hear a echo of Camus' Diaries.

A quel moment la vie se change en destin ? A la mort ? mais c’est un destin pour les autres, pour l’histoire, pour sa famille. Par la conscience ? Mis c’est l’esprit qui se fait une image de la vie comme destin, qui introduit une cohérence là où il n’y en a pas. Dans les deux cas, il s’agit d’une illusion ? : il n’y a pas de destin ? (Carnets II, p. 57)

[…]

Until the next one,

David

• What do you want to grow into next? Bill Burnett reframes conventional career problems into an iterative design process. Research, prototype, iterate. He shifts the conversation from navigating towards a definite endpoint into way finding of an unknown treasure. Purpose-finding becomes a slow caribou hunt, where every trace, smell and story matters.

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Other times, you look back and can't account for all the days that have passed. It's already September. How fast the year flew! You wish you spent every single second more wisely. Hoping time went slower and you still had one more day before your deadlines.

Two things to notice here.

• The asymmetry of time. There seems to be a stark imbalance. How come that when we look forwards, time seems to expand, while when we look backwards it shrinks? Why at once we want it to move faster, and the other way around? Forward-looking time is perceived as abundant wait, backwards-looking time as scarce memory.

• The quality of attention. The second is that the way we process information, how we focus, makes all the difference in our inner perception of the flow of time. Somehow, the happiest moments seem to be those when we don't think about time altogether. No anxious wait, or pensive melancholy. No clocks, schedules or memories, just the present moment.

In the recent stimulating paper "The Unbearable Slowness of Being", neuroscience researchers from the Biological Engineering division of CalTech assess human cognitive bandwidth. At what rate do humans process information?

Combining the available anecdotical evidence from professional typists, memory competitions and Rubik cube speed solving, they arrive at the conclusion humans operate at an information rate of at most 10 bits per second. This seems so low! At that speed, good luck for any brain-machine interface...

It is note-worthy that the information capacity of the brain is much larger. The "outer systems" are dealing with a rich continuous stream of perceptual (sounds, visuals, etc...) stimuli at several order of magnitudes higher rates. A single photoreceptor emits 270 bit/s and there are over 6 million of those in an eye. Our perceiving peripheral systems seem to equipped to manage Gb/s of data flows. Yet, our mind, our conscious "inner system" only process a meagre 10 bits/s. Our motor, cognitive or perception rates are capped at the firing speed of a single neuron!

Coming next…

• Intrinsic time flow is a fascinating research topic. A distinguished contribution in the field came from French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. He studied financial time-series with original new mathematics, that stemmed from realising their scale-invariant properties. The markets movements over one hour are affine to those over one week or one year. His (multi)fractal model of asset returns unlocks significant explanatory power, by making explicit the intuitive concepts of a slowing or accelerating time. The dynamic study of volatility is born.

• “Stop playing games!” - how many times have we complained to a friend or a partner, that we felt was acting from a fundamentally dishonest place? This classic from 1960s Californian psychiatrist Eric Berne belongs to a time when game theory as a mathematical discipline was relatively young. Its insights are deep. Berne’s understanding of our most mundane, everyday interactions is built around transactional game analysis. He offers a structural view to account of behavioural patterns, often unconscious, with a hidden payoff that keeps the drama going.

• Is reality so broken we are better off living in a videogame? The 2011 book by game-designer Jane McGonigal is a thought-provoking ride. Far from just being something to do when there is nothing to do, games have a wide cultural significance and power. Simulations engage the limits and possibilities of our imagination. By re-routing our attention and focus, games hack our sense of time… and may even help us transcend our hunger!

Did you know?

• Equities holdings (as a share of all financial assets) are at record highs across American households. This is surprising in a time of relatively higher interest rate (SOFR 5.35%). The risk premium rotation theory would advocate less appetite for riskier assets. Guess what: any theory that models human beings linearly as “pull this lever, get this action” is flawed.
  On a different note, this broader exposure may have repercussions: when markets perform well, households may feel wealthier, which can boost consumer spending. Conversely, a market persistent decline could dampen spending, in turn a accelerating a downturn.

• Last week was a blood bath in the S&P500. This felt as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Before the week began, commentators anticipated how poorly had markets performed on average during September in the last five years. Flows rushed out. Momentum strategies reversed. Until now, mid-caps with momentum had been one of the best performing “factors” year-to-date [ ]. To have a memorable deep dive into factor models from a practitioner’s point of view, I can’t recommend enough the recent Flirting with models interview of Giuseppe Paleologo.

• What else… The yield curve of the 2s - 10s uninverted. For the US Government, it is now cheaper to borrow for 2 years than for 10 years. Long-dated bonds are poised to do well in the short-term as the market prices in more rate cuts. The ECB is meeting on Thursday 12th in Frankfurt and it is expected to cut rates from 4.25% to 4%. The FED will follow suit the following week.

Like in all the best stories, it feels the wind is changing. We are sitting near a turning point. What’s coming next?

The Chinese have a great way to put it. We encounter brightness unexpectedly from the inconspicuous detail (yi wei she ming). The beginnings of good and bad fortune are tiny as a sprout, so people overlook them. Only the sage sees through them (Book of Huainanzi).

To really see the little things is to see the big things they betoken, and see them well before their development becomes obvious. Such seeing penetrates to the virtual depth of the world, perceiving incipient mutation, recognising opportunities to align and transform with the changes. (Barry Allan, Vanishing into Things, 2015)

Feeling the rhythm of the flow of time may offer us anticipatory insights. Have you ever felt that moment in a football match, when after a rather monotonous period, everything seems to unravel in a short time-span? Volatility spikes. It’s contagious. Suddenly, all the team believes a comeback is possible.

We feel the contraction and expansion of time at both the individual and collective levels. We hold our breaths together. Together, we wait and we rush.

Stay curious. Keep noticing!

David

The two goals were clearly in contrast. I struggled to find back a voice and set something out against the static canvas. Starting again is hard. It's much easier not to break an habit than to return to it. I have a feeling that all my efforts here are spent learning this one single lesson: how to get back up, face the white canvas, and pick up steam again.

Today, very conscious of this spread no noise principle, I have assembled what I believe are the most salient bits and pieces of the month. These reflections brought me value and insight, but they could be perfectly anachronistic today.

Why a curated retrospective of a month in the US financial markets, you may ask. Wall Street has mastered one thing: selling greed and fear. They are the human’s most powerful fantasies.  Markets are where stories meet action, shaped by our collective (buying) power. When narratives are traded, prophecies are realised.

What was the story arc of this month?

American writer Kurt Vonnegut had an original master's thesis idea. What if we could study how narratives oscillate from their beginning to the end across the "Good fortune v. Ill fortune axis"? The theme of thesis was simple: stories have a handful of shapes. He was ahead of his times. This was 1947. The UChicago committee rejected it unanimously: this is not anthropology.

Fast forward to 2016. Researchers from Universities of Vermont and Adelaide mapped out a large corpora of narratives onto six prevalent emotional arcs (The Atlantic). The inferences are made using natural language processing, singular value decomposition and clustering (Journal article). Their conclusions? The most popular stories follow one of six arcs: “rags to riches” (rise), “tragedy” (fall), “man in a hole” (fall-rise), “Icarus” (rise-fall), “Cinderella” (rise-fall-rise), or “Oedipus” (fall-rise-fall).

So, what was the story arc of this month?

Down, up, up. August started with fear. The contagious Japanese kind.

While everyone was watching the Olympics, for a day or two recession odds spiked. The offices were empty while implied volatility (^VIX) hit a fresh record. For a day, every Bloomberg commentator put their anxious hat on.

Then, it recovered. At first, decisively. Then, the pace slowed in the last third of the month. Sentiment shifted. Everyone forgot what happened. The traumatic week left few scars. Credit markets were healthy. There was no liquidity crunch. Some deleveraging ensued with cautious retracing and rebounds.

Observing what happened afterwards often may give us a false sense of comfort. Looking forward, the commentary seem to have returned to the usual discreet sense of subdued optimism. Sure, Buffet cut its Apple stake.

Some portfolio managers are building more defensive positioning. Many can finally pitch their clients rotation. I find the idea perverse. It is rooted in the biased view that “Everyone must have their time under the spotlight”. Mmm... Nope. Sure, in July, the Russell 2000 (US small-caps) had one of their best week in years against the S&P. Now, things look different. Why would they outperform?

My intuition was that August was an important turning-point. A test, if you will. If the S&P500 would close green in August (+2.3 %) , it would sail relatively smoothly until the end of the year with similar profit. The large-cap market demonstrated resiliency to some strong stressors. Nvidia earnings last Wednesday were a turning point. They were good, the last quarter revenue hit $30bn (+122% YoY). Yet, they underperformed the maximalists' hopes and the share price took a hit.

The AI market is growing fast, but how big of a monopoly can it accrue in the GPUs chip designer? To justify its valuation, it would need to command a market share similar to Apple's in the consumer electronics market. For how long will its chips be superior in the matrix multiplication essential for AI?

Next, there are the mid September Fed's meeting and the US elections in November coming up next. Their outcomes are more predictable. Fed is hinting at the cus: 25 bps, 50bps twice less likely. A reluctance to cut rates can be felt across the last Fed actions. After all, the faster they cut the faster they’d loose leverage.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the Maelstrom, the most acute observers talked about the new breeds of correlation trades popular on Wall Street that got hit that August day: the dispersion trades. That's when you trade index volatility against single stocks volatility. The index is usually less volatile then its single names. The index can be calm in aggregate, while its constituents swing up and down.

For a while in June we had some of the lowest S&P 500 volatility. It had been pushed to artificial lows. There was a race to the bottom to sell index volatility.

This is also political. As Morgan Staley noted once "there is a bountiful opportunity to pick the winners, avoid the losers and create a portfolio that meaningfully beats the benchmark if the dispersion of the constituent stocks is high". Dispersion means there’s more alpha to be captured by active managers. Hence, fees.

After we understand dispersion, we really need to understand skew. The key question here is asking what's more in demand in the option markets? Capturing the unexpected upside, or protecting portfolios from unforeseen downsides?

Tail risks. Tail opportunities. Everyone is beginning to realise how fat is the tail...How common are the (very) uncommons on aggregate. In this regime, asymmetric odds abound.

Yet, core macro questions remain. Where is the US dollar weakness going to land as we ease into elections? Will we see a turnaround? How many rate cuts can we expect until the end of the year? In January, the main street analysts were pricing in over six rate cuts. Now 1 - 3 seem more probable.

The broader long-term questions are relative to the job market. Not a surprise that the markets are jumpy around unemployment data releases. Both long-term investors and short-term traders watch this carefully. The larger underlying story is fairly simple.

How will the massive AI productivity gains impact consumers' discretionary spending? The US is a consumption-based economy. Households incomes depend on labour conditions. Higher indiscriminate productivity entails less workers are needed to achieve the same output. With so many "artificial interns" available at near no cost, why would companies still train and hire the same amount of new graduates? From the pandemics onwards, there's an evident slow down in job postings. Some of this has nothing to do with AI, as we can see even Construction roles have been hit. Yet, software Engineers seem to be hit the most.

What’s the best non-exotic bet anyone could have made?

Right on the aftermath of the Biden-Trump debate, it was clear Biden was not going to make it. He came out devastated from the encounter. There was no way the Democratic Party establishment would have went all the way to the elections backing a candidate that was running with less than 20% odds! A change of jockey was in the cards.

A dollar placed on Kamala back then would have turned into 50 $ at today's Polymarket rates. That's 50x in two months, an astonishing annualised return.

Obviously, this was highly profitable because there was a large chunk of US population, that was willingly ignoring this probability. Biden supporters. Media establishments. For a good while in July, they were loudly in denial and kept pushing the narrative that Joe Biden would not step down.

As a rule of thumb, bet against the loudest and most irrational mob. Usually, in the long run, it turns out alright.

Outside Questions

• Longevity: Why We Die? Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist Venki Ramakrishnan delves into the question of aging from first-principles. It’s a must read book of 2024. On YouTube, you can find his Harvard Science Book Talks and Research Lectures.

• History: How did we progress? Calculating Empires. A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500. It is a large-scale research visualisation exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power.

• Biology. “There are certain species in every ecosystem that play a very specific and important role: dying, inexplicably”. The proverbial canaries in the coal mine. They pick up subtle cues from the ecosystem as a whole.

  Reminders for Humans

  Indicator Species

  Reminders for Humans is a monthly series that explores a natural phenomena, and how I’m applying its wisdom to my own human life. I’m a scientist, and also a gushy poet who loves metaphors. Expect both…

  Read more

  2 years ago · 136 likes · Sarah Quirk

• Conversations. Emergent behaviour happens when “there’s no point in looking under the hood”. To assess the mathematical proof of Fermat Last Theorem, you’d waste your time studying the psychology of Andrew Wiles or how its brain works. Breaking down the magic of good conversations is similarly pointless. They just happen to carry emergent properties.

starting from nix

good conversations have emergent properties

Conversations have emergent properties: products co-created by two people. Distinctive behaviors, shared taxonomies, even entire secret worlds…

Read more

2 years ago · 164 likes · 9 comments · Nix 🕊

Have a great start of September.

Talk soon 🎈

David

As we hurtle through the digital age, leaving behind terabytes of data rather than stone monuments, the nature of legacy is shifting beneath our feet. Our descendants may have unprecedented footage of our lives, yet paradoxically, we may be more forgettable than ever.

Distal Thinking

Nobody will come looking for us in history books. For a while, we will stay within our descendants hearts. Then, we will become files and folders in someone else’s archive: words, photos and videos. Never will our descendants have more footage to choose from, if they wished to reconnect with our way of living. Eventually, the backups will be lost, overwritten, flushed out.

Maybe we’ll become an immutable entry in some unusable blockchain. At some point, no one will even know where and how to look for us. Our memory will vanish.

When even the last of our footprints on these shores will be erased, what will we have left this world?

In Pompei, the same smothering ashes that erased a city overnight preserved it from the slow erosion of time.

Order, chaos
then order again.
Such is the way
of the great
untangling.

Entropy spreads inexorable, yet fleeting emergent phenomena are dancing and recombining on its surface. One day we’ll harmonise back into the whole and its rhythmic flow between order and chaos.

Emperors built monuments, yet legacy feels uncontrollable. We can build something that can physically withhold a few centuries. But do we have any clue on what will be meaningful in 2124? Will the frame of reference of our values still make sense?

Will there be still someone defending the liberal world order from its detractors?

After all, our democracy feels ever so fragile. It’s always at odds with concentrated power. Individual liberties are under continued stress and assault. Who has never thought looking at their neighbours: they should do better? Perspectives are as volatile as ever. Cultural memes drift fast, like a memecoin’s valuation rollercoaster. We don’t read books. We consume shorts we forget the next second. It’s the coming of entropy. It’s the coming of anarchy.

“Century-long projects, please abstain from inquiry”

Greatness cannot be planned. Time will wash away all our traces on the shore, but good and bad ideas alike can hibernate for centuries. They can trade form, entangle with each other, impact the most unexpected life arcs.

There is some relief in knowing that legacy is largely a job beyond our paycheque. In most cases, we are better off asking ourselves whether the attention we give to our reputation, or public influence is serving efficiently our present happiness or making us - all in all - rather miserable.

We may name a bench, a book, a building or a scholarship; but in the end, aren’t we maybe better surrendering to the unexpected character of our legacy?

Maybe. Though, if we still wanted to reason about factors impacting our legacy, how would one think about it?

Some factors will be rather extrinsic, outside of our control. Others intrinsic qualities of our ideas. Most of them are fully relational, depending on a the whole sum of interactions.

As finance geeks, we can reflect back that this question is not very far off from asking What is a good investment? What will have value in the next decade?

The 12 Factors Impacting Legacies

1. Zeitgeist and historical context: The spirit of the times plays a crucial role in shaping legacy. Ideas, actions, or innovations that resonate with or challenge the prevailing zeitgeist are more likely to leave a lasting impact. Conversely, contributions that are out of sync with their historical moment may be overlooked or undervalued initially, only to be rediscovered later—or perhaps never fully appreciated.

2. Power structures and gatekeepers: The creation and propagation of legacy often depend on existing power structures. Those in positions of influence—be they academic institutions, media outlets, or political entities—can amplify or suppress potential legacies. This dynamic can lead to the perpetuation of certain narratives while marginalising others.

3. Cultural values and shifts: What a society values changes over time. Legacies that align with enduring human values (like compassion or justice; gloria is the righteous fame of the righteous) may have more staying power, but even these are subject to reinterpretation through different cultural lenses.

4. Reproducibility and scalability: Ideas, inventions, or methods that can be easily reproduced, taught, or scaled up are more likely to create enduring legacies. This is particularly true in fields like science, technology, and education. Think printing press.

5. Narrative and myth-making: The stories we tell about individuals and their contributions play a significant role in legacy formation. A compelling narrative can elevate a minor contribution to legendary status, while a lack of storytelling can obscure even significant achievements. What’s the antagonist? What are the intention and obstacle?

6. Adaptability and reinterpretation: Legacies that can be reinterpreted or applied to new contexts have a better chance of enduring. Abstract qualities lend themselves well to new challenges across cultural lenses. This adaptability allows the core idea or contribution to remain relevant across changing times.

   

7. Documentation and preservation: The survival of physical or digital records plays a crucial role in legacy preservation. Cultures with strong traditions of documentation may produce more lasting legacies simply because the information persists.

8. Collective vs. individual legacy: While we often focus on individual legacies, many of the most profound impacts on society come from collective efforts. The tension between recognising individual contributions and acknowledging collective achievements affects how legacies are formed and perceived. What is the collective you most belong to? A family, a company, an institution, a city, a country?

9. Global vs. local impact: The scope of influence can affect the nature of a legacy. Some legacies are profound but localized, while others achieve global recognition but may have less deep impact in any one place. Culture is becoming global, yet some problems are radically local. Not everything needs to be bland and maximally adaptable.

10. Timing and serendipity: Sometimes, the right idea at the right time can create an outsized legacy, while brilliant contributions may be overlooked due to poor timing or lack of recognition.

11. Resistance and controversy: Paradoxically, attempts to stifle or discredit ideas can sometimes reinforce their legacy by drawing attention to them or casting their proponents as martyrs or visionaries.

12. Interconnectedness and network effects: Legacies don't exist in isolation. They're often part of a web of influences, building upon or reacting to other ideas and legacies. This interconnectedness can either reinforce a legacy or dilute its perceived originality.

All in all, time will tell. What did I miss? How do you approach questions around your legacy? Do let me know in a comment or private message.

Stay well.

D.

Admiration can be a terrifying force. It makes you freeze. For a moment, you feel your work is meaningless. If your project is already out there, why keep writing?

The first knee-jerk reaction gives way to a deeper realisation.. You can stand on their shoulders, reference their work and continue with your quest. If another fellow intelligent human being has pursued a similar path and achieved success, it means you are on the right track. Later validation is still validation. Yet, in a world where competitive dynamics are everywhere, it comes veiled with a nagging message. Maybe you're late to the party, and you're certainly less original than you thought you were!

Today, I felt like this encountering Fernam Street, the work of former intelligence analyst Shane Parrish. This popular newsletter aims precisely at mastering what others have already figured out. The blog is named after Berkshire Hathaway's HQ address, and you can find a lot of popular Buffett & Munger’s tropes in it.

What’s funny is that I discovered it completely by chance, while I was doing some very open-ended market research with an AI. You could say it was ChatGPT that recommended it to me!

This are some of my highlights from Fernam Street.

• The Map is not the Territory. Understanding the difference between perception and reality can be incredibly tricky. Orienting around your mind is a complex task. You may need many different maps.

The image is borrowed from influential semiologist and mathematician Alfred Korzybski. Here, you can find his original paper on “Non-Aristotelean systems and their necessity for mathematics and physics” (from his book Science and Sanity, 1933). It’s a highly technical read, but worth skimming through.

It is the perfect introduction to the Mental Models program, a curated list of thinking tools, which by analogy can be used to make sense of complex phenomena.

• Mental Models. Shane’s catalogue of over 94 mental models is invaluable. He makes the very smart choice of organising them by discipline: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Microeconomics, War and Strategy, Human Psychology.

  In comparison, my program of organising mental models (“stories”) by dimensionality (Story with N characters…) is an order of magnitude more complex.

Reading through the list I realised that only the ones that are borrowed from Physics (thermodynamics, inertia, velocity, leverage…) have a clear sense of dimensionality. The other are mostly “multi-dimensional”, or as dimensional as you like them to be.

A catalogue of analogies to think about how we think can take us very far; but how can we integrate it better with the way we make decision? What are the natural case studies for a applying such a long list of modelling tools?

• Complex Adaptive System Introduction. On an additional note, his introduction to complex systems is also very well-written. A good introduction if your new to the topic. Enjoy!

  

Hope this finds you well and you’re having a great summer. Talk soon,

David

Most events spring from causes equally small: we are unacquainted with them because most historians have been themselves ignorant of them, or have not had eyes capable of perceiving them. It is true, that, in this respect, the mind may repair their omissions; for the knowledge of certain principles easily compensates the lack of knowledge of certain facts. (Helvetius, Essay III, Ch. 1)

Understanding a dynamic means grasping its transient characters, oddities, exceptions. Mastering it means knowing its feedback loops. Every dynamical system—biological or social—obeys homeostasis, reacting against one-dimensional change.

"If I double the efforts, I will double results." Linear relationships feel controllable, explainable—colonel's fantasies to impress generals. But generals know the enemy may react unpredictably or deceive. Systems have no mechanical levers, no buttons to push.

Linear correlations rarely explain "why," but equivariance is invaluable—an active bridge between stories. Change one thing, and the result changes predictably, even in across non-Euclidean domains. Input and outputs often have different symmetries. They may act more like an elastic rubber band. The energy stays constant, but everything else doesn’t.

Linearities are rarely accurate predictors, but often the cheapest. They're local approximations, holding true when our efforts are an infinitesimal of the system. Collective forces never behave linearly. Everything swings, dances, reverts to how it was. The least you can do is imagine tides. Periodic models. The world, in all its complexity, refuses to be confined to straight lines.

David

fridays are for science. if clouds feel vertigo, then they must enjoy surfing into the rippling and ever-expanding surface of human knowledge 🌊 here a few recommendations:

• How Is Science Even Possible? (The Joy of Why, a Quanta podcast).

How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process.

• Deriving Convolution from First Principles (Medium). Convolutional neural networks were a big deal in image processing. They can be derived from very simple ideas of translational symmetries. Micheal Bronstein explains them fairly clearly from signal processing primitives. Good read if you’re in good terms with matrixes.

Don’t: argue with anyone who only thinks in linear terms, it’s easier to bend a metal rod than a metal mind.

Do: hit that Like button, do your own research, explore faraway narratives and forward this to a family member, friend or colleague who might benefit from the read!

So, I asked ChatGPT what could I talk about. The monster suggested a heavy dose of boring, or at least peacefully mainstream topics: Ai Weiwei and Banksy, Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Greta Thunberg and Black Lives Matter.

So I challenged the AI: “don't be banal. don't go for the most publicly relevant and common names. many of those suggestions are too mainstream to be interesting to the well informed public. use your best judgement to scout for quirks, oddities, uncommon features”.

wednesday whatnots are the new creative nosedives of do clouds feel vertigo: we leave the abstract stratosphere to plunge into the shared cultural now 🔥

Suddenly, the names became more interesting. They felt original and special. Their oddity was just the right kind. They were rebels. Their work’s strength was being interdisciplinary. It was the work of artists, architects and writer who drew from physics, biology or computer engineering. Just my kind of rabbit holes.

We begin our plunge from the ideas’ stratosphere very fast: questioning the relationship with established truths.

Tavares Strachan

"My work questions the nature of our relationship to the truth. It is really hard to be human without having a relationship to storytelling. Storytelling has been central to every significant movement spanning the history of art. Culture is formed as a result of storytelling, which encompasses all the things we try to hold onto and share with the next generation. So, what happens when historical narratives are false? What do we do with that?" — Tavares Stratchan

The Bahamian artist Strachan deals in his work with cultural invisibility, community, and the histories of underrepresented peoples. His collages show fragmented identities and looming threats. In December, he recasted Leonardo’s Last Supper at the Royal Academy (Guardian) to send a message about colonial storytelling. His seat? Judas. His 2022 collection “The Awakening” is a testament to rewrite racial narratives.

Today in London there’s his new solo exhibition “There Is Light Somewhere,” which will be available from 18 June to 1 September 2024 at the Hayward Gallery. It’s described as a playful ride to rediscover hidden cultures and stories. Enjoy!

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If you want to see more of this writing happening, come say hi and suggest someone you would like to feature next.

👾 unexplored connections

Meanwhile…

• The Disruption Nexus (Aeon). The cultural cycle is the midst of its own disruption nexus. “Polycrisis. Metacrisis. Omnicrisis. Permacrisis. Call it as you like” - political philosopher Roman Krznaric author of forthcoming History for Tomorrow doesn’t believe we need new definitions. In his article and latest book, he decides to retrace the history and significance of a well-travelled concept: crisis.

None of the ideas feel new, but his overview is broad and knowledgeable. The aim? To explore what might bring about a “surge of political will, that elusive ingredient of change”… The picture he draws is linear:

1. There’s the Crisis. A political, economic, technological or ecological rupture, which destabilises the system.

2. Ideas. Crises makes new ideas relevant. Narrative inform worldviews, which reshape policies.

3. Movements. Ideas inspire movements. Activism challenges the power holders. Movements in turn amplify the crisis.

In today’s world, the interplay of “political movements” sounds retrò. Like something that belongs to the menu of a XX century French café, to be enjoyed with a deep red wine. Political conflict now does not belong to traditional civil and urban political actors and Western elected liberal governments. It’s OnlyFans models selling their nudes and Solopreneurs selling their playbooks; and hordes of Twitter (X) trolls fighting against the Threads’ bots.

The cultural space is saturated with noise. Fragmentation has become ineludible. Side question: what do both sides snack on planning the next social upheaval?

Oddly enough, there’s someone who seems to be wondering about these same topics at the same time: it is billionaire hedge-funder Ray Dalio.

• In The Coming of Great Conflict (TIME) or Pick A Side And Fight For It, Keep Your Head Down, Or Flee, he wonders where are we on the cycle of internal disorders. What captures the attention of his long read is not the credit cycle (5.33% EFFR), technological advances (AI), or the external conflicts (Ukraine). All of the stories that are absorbing daily the attention of Bloomberg commentators are out of the picture. The conflict he picks to candidly explore is radically different: it’s a US civil war.

I won’t deny it. I felt some uneasiness reading that Dalio believes we are sitting at the brink of a civil war and people may be forced to make a choice between fight or fly. It’s like storm clouds are building over the highway of the liberal democracies’ future.

It seems to me that if Biden wins, it is likely that Trump and those on the hard right who he represents won't accept the leadership of Biden and the Democratic Party, and that if Trump wins, those on the hard left won't accept Trump's leadership and tactics. What happens next depends on the strength of the legal system, with those on each side seemingly more willing to fight its judgments than abide by them if they don’t get what they want. For these reasons, it seems to me that there is a higher than 50 percent chance that democracy as we know it won't run smoothly through the election and beyond, […]

The prediction seems bold. The model yet is forceful and simple. Along the two-sided distrust, there are inadequate financial conditions, debt and a toxic mix of large income, wealth, and values gaps within the system. All it takes is a single external shock and we might experience some scary edges of civil unrest. What’s the next Capitol Hill or Stop The Count going to be like? What will be the magnitude and frequency of such episodes?

I agree that this is the biggest currently underestimated risk to US equities. Markets today are calm and exuberant. The S&P 500 seems like a never ending, self-fulfilling prophecy of good vibes for investors. US country risk is not far from historical lows, for good reasons: productivity is the highest and yet growing (AI!)

This is why it is our job to question with Dalio and any serious investor: what might instead go wrong? In the next thirty years, can we imagine the US Federal unity threatened (peacefully or otherwise)? Just a hint of such a possibility would spread panic waves across the pond. Watch out for the internal order-chaos balance.

In my view, Brexit represented the latest and greatest civil disruption to a political project. In our last decade, we haven’t seen any other internal reconfiguration. We rebounded okay. After all, many would point out that rewriting inter-governmental agreements after a referendum cannot be compared to civil unrest. Yet, I feel the magnitude of change it brought about is similar. It was a narrow vote that hijacked the trajectory of a nation state and the civil liberties of millions…

What other futures may hold in store for us a fat can of baked beans?

D.

Don’t: stress out and become overly concerned. Do: hit the Like button, do your own research, explore faraway narratives and forward this to a family member, friend or colleague who might benefit from the read!

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