To enter, write an original essay between 500 and 5,000 words that reviews, responds to, critiques, extends, or otherwise engages with the themes of Fundamental Uncertainty. Essays should reference the book by name and include a link to fundamentaluncertainty.com. Publish your essay somewhere public, like on Substack, LessWrong, Medium, or your personal blog. Comment on this blog post (either the version on uncertainupdates.com or lesswrong.com) before 11:59 pm, August 1st, anywhere on Earth, with a link to your post to enter. Limit one entry per person, no purchase necessary, void where prohibited.

I’ll read the essays and decide which ones I think are best, with winners to be announced on or about August 15th. While there’s no formal scoring rubric, I’ll be considering factors like clarity of writing, quality of thinking, originality, depth of engagement, and how much the essay made me think. Some examples of essays I’d be excited to see include:

• An ACX-style book review that distills the book’s main ideas for a wider audience.

• Applications of the book’s thesis to new domains (like the sections of Chapter 8 are).

• An exploration of related ideas and how they connect back to the book’s themes.

• A literature review that connects the ideas in the book with ideas from other sources.

• A critique that convinces me the book’s thesis or one of its central arguments is wrong.

I look forward to reading your submissions! Full contest rules follow.

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Fundamental Uncertainty Essay Contest — Official Rules

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Purchase of the book Fundamental Uncertainty in any format is not required to enter or win. A purchase will not improve your chances of winning. Full text of the book may be read online at https://fundamentaluncertainty.com/.

1. Sponsor

This contest (the “Contest”) is sponsored by Gordon Seidoh Worley (the “Sponsor”), an individual residing in San Francisco, California, USA. Contact: gworley3@gmail.com.

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The Contest is open to individuals who, as of the date of entry, are:

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The Contest begins on May 20, 2026 and ends at 11:59 pm on August 1, 2026, anywhere on Earth (the “Submission Deadline”). Entries received after the Submission Deadline will not be considered. Winners will be announced on or about August 15, 2026.

4. How to Enter

To enter, an entrant must:

1. Write an original essay responding to, reviewing, critiquing, extending, or otherwise engaging with the book Fundamental Uncertainty by Gordon Seidoh Worley. Essays may include book reviews, critiques, explorations of related ideas, deep dives into specific arguments in the book, or other responses related to the book.

2. Publish the essay on a publicly accessible web page (personal blog, Substack, LessWrong, Medium, or similar). The essay must remain publicly accessible in full (no part of the essay may be behind a paywall, login, or other access restriction) at the URL provided throughout the judging period.

3. Post a comment on the Contest announcement post (titled “Fundamental Uncertainty $2,000 Essay Contest”) at either uncertainupdates.com or lesswrong.com containing a link to the publicly hosted essay.

Word count: Essays must be between 500 and 5,000 words, excluding footnotes, citations, and bibliography.

Originality: Essays must be the entrant’s own original work created for this Contest. Essays previously published before the announcement of this Contest are not eligible. Posting the essay on the entrant’s own blog or similar platform as part of the submission process is permitted and expected.

Version judged: The version of the essay publicly available at the URL provided at the time of the Submission Deadline is the version that will be judged. Entrants should not substantively revise the essay after the Submission Deadline.

AI-assisted writing: Use of AI tools in the drafting, editing, or composition of entries is permitted without restriction. Disclosure of AI use is not required but is welcomed.

One entry per person. Co-authored entries are not accepted.

No entry fee. Submission is free.

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• Grand Prize (1): US$1,000

• Runners-Up (2): US$500 each

Total prize pool: US$2,000.

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The Sponsor will serve as the sole judge of the Contest. The Sponsor may consider factors including but not limited to: quality of thinking, originality, clarity of writing, depth of engagement with the book’s ideas, and whatever else the Sponsor finds compelling or interesting. Judging is at the Sponsor’s sole and absolute discretion. The Sponsor may, but is not required to, share additional guidance about what the Sponsor is looking for during the Contest Period; any such guidance is informational only and does not bind the Sponsor.

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The abbreviated thesis of developmental psychology is that, as we mature, we pass through various developmental stages. These might be moral, meaning-making, or ontological stages, but we typically think of them as distinct phases: a person exists at one stage and then enters another, never to return.

This isn’t quite right, though. Development is more often uneven. A person might be in, say, Kegan’s Stage 4 in their professional life, but struggle with Stage 2 concerns in their romantic life, or vice-versa. Base developmental theories don’t adequately explain why this is, but I have a theory!

First, let’s consider how people move through stages. It typically happens in what feel like quantized jumps. It might not happen in a single moment, but over a period of days, weeks, or months, it’ll become clear that a person has transitioned from one stage to the next. From the inside, transitioning to a new stage often feels like waking up from a dream or looking up to see there’s a wider world out there.

But the transition to the new stage is at first unstable. For example, when an adolescent transitions from Kegan Stage 2 to 3, they don’t immediately drop all their Stage 2 behaviors. They might keep playing with favorite childhood toys or continue to struggle with being part of a team because they remain too focused on short-term goals. It often takes several years to fully leave Stage 2 behaviors behind, and Stage 2 behavior can come back in times of stress or grief.

Something similar happens if/when adults make the transition from Stage 3 to 4 and from 4 to 5. In the 3 to 4 transition, one common pattern is for a person to transition to Stage 4 in their professional life, but remain in Stage 3 in their personal life. This is often the case for busy professionals, like doctors and lawyers who are brilliant at work but have messy personal lives. The opposite is also common, especially among women, where a person becomes an adept socialite in their personal life, but struggles to function at work. Either way, the result is people who seem uncannily capable in some ways and totally dysfunctional in others.

The existence of such people was originally treated as evidence against developmental models. After all, if people could be between stages, then maybe stages aren’t real. But modern theories recognize that stages are models over a high-dimensional space of behaviors, and progression through stages over those dimensions don’t happen in lockstep. This is, to a first approximation, Ken Wilber’s big idea, and he’s written several books exploring it.

But Wilber’s point is largely static. At any point in time, a person might be unevenly developed, but this doesn’t say much about how they either get into that state or get out of it. And development does often proceed in an uneven way, even in a single dimension, because the idea of a “dimension” along which behavior can develop is also a model.

At the base level, there just are behaviors and the processes that generate them. When they change, such as when transitioning between stages along some dimension of development, they don’t necessarily change all at once. What happens usually looks more like a few, mostly inconsequential changes happening first. Then, enough of these small changes build up to unlock some bigger change that has effects noticeable enough that we call it a stage change. Later, a trail of habits that haven’t been retrained get updated, and it can take years to change them all in light of a stage transition.

This pattern of development looks like having a leading and trailing edge of development. That is, there are always some behaviors which are operating from some furthest stage of development reached, there’s the main mass of the distribution somewhere behind it, and then there’s the long tail of the trailing edge.

The leading and trailing edge are where most of the action is. The leading edge is the place of growth into something more, like progressing from one stage to the next. The trailing edge is where maturation into what is already possible happens.

Growth at both the leading and trailing edge is needed to be psychologically healthy and avoid having a wide “spread” between developmental stages in different areas of life. Sadly, many people neglect one edge for the other, and it results in developmental stagnation and personal suffering.

Consider what happens if the leading edge is the only focus. A person will rush ahead as fast as they can to unlock insights and “level up”. They’ll feel like they’re unlocking the secrets of the universe, meanwhile, there’ll be a pile of unfolded laundry on their bed and a sink full of dirty dishes. They may in fact be having great realizations, but it’ll all be in their head, and fail to show up in how they actually live their life.

A focus on the trailing edge might seem better, but it lets a person get too comfortable. They’ll feel like they’ve done the work, eaten their shadow, and become whole, but if they stop there, they’ll be leaving out what they could become. They may be quite happy, but they’ll shrink away from doing the work to break away from their local maximum. More will be possible, but they won’t have tools to find their way to it.

Healthy development requires working with both edges. It requires insight and integration, growth and maturation. And if they do both, a person truly does look like they move through distinct developmental stages, because they keep pushing forward even as they’re cleaning up behind themselves.

As you’ll notice, this announcement comes with a new cover. The one I had been using was AI generated, and while nice, it didn’t quite fit the vibe the publisher and I wanted in print. I’m quite happy with how it came out, and I hope you’ll consider getting yourself a copy.

And if you prefer audiobooks, fret not, for the audiobook version is in production. Release date isn’t set yet but expect it to follow in the next few weeks.

Until then, if you see me around and you get a print copy, I’d be happy to sign yours. On that front, I’ll be at LessOnline the first weekend in June, and I hope to see some of you there. I’ll also have a few copies of the book to give away (just ask nicely).

I have a couple more projects cooking related to the book, so look for announcements about those between regular blog posts in the next few weeks.

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The core insights of Enneagram theory appear to me to be useful, but people have laden that core theory with epicycles. They’ve done it in an attempt to explain everything about personality, and I think this does a disservice to the strength of core Enneagram theory. But, I want to be fair. These epicycles are not completely useless. They often point to real patterns in the data, and it can sometimes be useful to identify these patterns to make sense of the core theory. The problems arise when those patterns are treated as causes, which leads to rationalization.

The most famous rationalizer among these epicycle theorists is Claudio Naranjo, who popularized the Enneagram in the 1970s and melded the original, more mystical formulation into a psychology theory. Alas, he didn’t stop at framing the Enneagram in psychological terms. He and his students layered on more and more theory until it was able to explain everything, and thereby predict nothing.

One of those layers of explanation is instinctual subtypes. The idea of subtypes predates Naranjo, but he expanded the theory to explain more. He saw each Enneagram type as split into three subtypes based on whether self-preservation, social, or sexual concerns dominated. Why these three? As best I can tell, they were picked because, on the one hand, Enneagram theorists love the number three, and on the other, these specific subtypes added enough complexity to explain away inconvenient wrong predictions the base theory can make when an individual doesn’t fit the pattern of their type closely.

Rather than admit the base theory describes a complex, multi-dimensional space where the types are attractor states and sometimes individual behavior will not be accurately predicted by those attractors, he instead attempted to “fix” the theory by adding more attractor states. In theory there’s nothing wrong with that, but he did it top down, adding theory to split up the types rather than building up from observations of where the attractors actually were. He tried to make reality fit the theory instead of vice-versa, and in doing so opened the door to adding ever more epicycles to make the theory fit observation.

Countertypes are one such epicycle. The countertype theory claims that some people behave exactly opposite to their type. So it lets someone type as, say, a 1, and if they behave opposite to what the theory predicts due to trauma, then the theory can say they’re expressing the countertype. Which, maybe? Trauma could change how each type’s essence and core wound affect behavior, but if we introduce countertypes, what does being of a particular type even mean? The addition of countertypes moves the theory down the path to unfalsifiability by wiping out most of the evidentiary power of observing someone’s behavior.

Another source of epicycles are type groups, the most popular of which are triadic groupings. These groupings aren’t without precedent. The core theory splits the types into three groups of three: head (5-6-7), heart (2-3-4), and gut (8-9-1). There’s some theorycraft behind why it does this, but for our purposes we can ignore it. What we can’t ignore is that it set the stage for people to create other triadic groupings.

The most popular of these are probably the Hornevian groups, named because they are based on the social stance theories of Karen Horney. They say that types 1, 2, and 6 are compliant, types 4, 5, and 9 are withdrawn, and 3, 7, and 8 are aggressive. And to this I say, fair enough, there is something of a pattern here, but it seems weak, since it depends a lot on how we interpret each of “compliant”, “withdrawn”, and “aggressive” and what behaviors we focus on when applying those labels. I can think of 1s and 2s I’d call aggressive, 4s and 9s that are compliant, and 3s and 8s that have become withdrawn. So if the Hornevian groups are picking up on a pattern, it’s not as strong as the triadic grouping might suggest.

Other triadic groupings have similar issues. There are harmonic groups, object relations triads, and more. All point to patterns that kinda sorta feel real, but also dissolve if pressed hard. I even managed to stumble on a novel one while learning about the Enneagram by asking “is there a pattern between Enneagram type and attachment theory?”. The answer is, a little, yes, we could say the 2-4-6 group tends towards anxious attachment because they want to seek connection with another’s authentic self, the 3-5-8 group tends towards avoidant attachment because they fear authentic connection, and the 1-7-9 group tends towards disorganized attachment because they don’t want to relate so much as use people to cope with the pain of their core wound, leading to a mixed, push-and-pull approach towards relationships. Sounds compelling and coherent on the surface, but it’s also a just-so story, and we can find any number of people who don’t fit this grouping.

I suspect what’s going on is that the space of personality is complex. There’s many dimensions, and you can always find a pattern no matter what grouping you create. There’s 280 possible triadic groupings, even more if we allow all possible groupings. This is like the way you can always fit a polynomial to any dataset: there’s a pattern there, sure, but it’s not necessarily meaningful. We see the same problem with Enneagram groupings.

At the extreme, the Enneagram risks becoming personality astrology, because it can have enough epicycles to explain all of human behavior, which is a problem, because a theory that explains everything can’t be proven wrong, and so it explains nothing. So if I’m so down on the Enneagram here, why do I think it’s useful and I’m excited about it?

Because not all of Enneagram theory is like this. I’ve found real value in reasoning about the core types and the wings. I’ve found it predictive of the behavior of others. And, like all good psychological theories, sometimes it fails, because humans are more complex than 9 or 27 types can capture. But the epicycles put the core theory’s value at risk by diluting its predictive power. Studying these epicycles can be useful to better understand the core theory, but only if held lightly. If taken too seriously, the epicycles turn the Enneagram into a theory of everything, and at that point it ceases to be useful.

What changed my mind and made it useful was, first, reading, Michael Valentine Smith’s series of posts on the Enneagram (1, 2, 3, 4), and, then, spending a year working with the Enneagram to slowly free myself from some of my habituated, maladaptive behaviors. I’m now fairly convinced the Enneagram is useful, but before I say why, let me say a little about what the Enneagram is.

The central thesis of Enneagram theory is that we have an “essence”, which is our natural way of relating to reality. Depending on who you ask, our essence forms before or shortly after we’re born, and it’s the seed from which our values grow. In this way, the word “essence” oversells what essence is, because it’s not actually something essential, but rather a contingent feature of our development. Perhaps a better term would be “original nature”, as in the way we naturally let ourselves be prior to any behavioral conditioning. Alas, “essence” is the jargon of the Enneagram, so I’ll stick with it.

After our essence forms, we’re almost immediately separated from it by suffering. Maybe it happens when we’re hungry and not immediately fed. Maybe it happens when we want snuggles and Mom and Dad are across the room. Or maybe it happens when we flail, scratch our own face, and can’t escape the pain. Whatever the case, we want to express our essence through our experience, that desire is stymied, and from such repeated denials we open what’s called our “core wound”—our deepest, most fundamental desire that can’t be completely fulfilled.

In time, we learn to live with our core wound by developing habitual behaviors to cope with it. These habits protect us from the wound, but also prevent us from accessing our essence. The personality we develop, which is just a pattern of habits, tries to take the place of essence, but it can never fill the same role. We are left to catch glimpses of joy when our essence shines through, but mostly live separated from it in the prison of habits we built to protect ourselves.

The Enneagram categorizes the bundle of essence, core wound, and personality habits into 9 main types. It then expands this type system from 9 to 27 by adding the concept of “wings”, and then to more by adding various epicycles. And epicycles is a good way to describe a lot of Enneagram theory, because a lot of it is post-hoc rationalization that makes no predictions and explains everything. Which poses the question: why do I think the Enneagram is useful?

First, some Enneagram theory pays rent. Just because there exist people who have used it as the basis for creating a personality theory of everything doesn’t mean the core theory is bunk. I think if we only go so far as to include the core types, wings, and the integration/disintegration lines, we get a relatively predictive theory given we have accurately determined a person’s type (which is its own difficult problem that’s outside the scope of this post). It does have gaps, hence the additional theory that’s been piled onto it, but those gaps are what we would expect of any valid psychological theory that works with patterns drawn from the highly-variable distribution of human behavior.

Second, it has value beyond prediction. The Enneagram provides a language for talking about the forces that generate habituated behavior. When I say my type is 4w5, that conveys information about how I make sense of my own life, and when I learn that a friend sees themselves as a 6w7 or a 1w9, I learn something about what it’s like to be them. This isn’t objective science, but rather a subjective system of categorizing experience and conveying that experience to others, and in this way serves both to help us better understand ourselves and to understand others by seeing how they are truly different.

Finally, on this point of categorizing experience, I see the Enneagram as a parallel to stage models in adult developmental psychology. Whereas Kegan’s or Cook-Grueter’s models aim to explain how our minds become capable of handling greater complexity of sense making, the Enneagram can be used to model how we can become free of our habits and live our lives joyfully. Or, to put a Buddhist framing on it, if developmental psychology is the vertical dimension that takes us towards awakening, the Enneagram is the horizontal dimension that leads to liberation.

And aiding in liberation from suffering is where I think most of the value of the Enneagram lies. Liberation is a complex process that requires first understanding why you do what you do. From that understanding, you can learn to untangle patterned behavior by addressing the causes of it at the source, then learning new, more adaptive patterns that support your essence rather than protect it. In this way, you can reconnect with the simple joy of being.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the Enneagram. As I explored previously, I think it has something important to teach us about liberation from suffering, and as I continue this exploration, I occasionally hit on ideas that seem worth sharing. Today’s is about how a person’s Enneagram type can inform what lineage of Buddhism they should practice in.

Now, sure, not everyone wants to practice Buddhism, so this idea is conditioned on the assumption that you do. And if you do, you’re faced with a choice of Buddhisms.

I know from the outside Buddhism looks like one thing, but really it’s a cluster of multiple traditions divided between various schools and lineages. Each has its own style of practice. Some styles fit some people better than others. The challenge is in knowing which style is going to be a fit for you.

For example, I found myself drawn to Zen. I also regularly meet people who bounced off Zen but found a home in Theravada or Vajrayana. Until recently, I didn’t really have a theory as to why, other than different people are different and need different things. But I’m starting to suspect that a large part of that difference can be explained by the Enneagram.

Recall that Enneagram types are grounded in what we might call the core wound or trauma a person carries—the thing they most deeply want in the world because they feel it’s what they need to make themselves whole. All of these wounds are some version of “not enough”, but the specific manifestation of not-enoughness is what makes the types different. I summarize the wounds for each type as:

1. I’m not right enough

2. I’m not lovable enough

3. I’m not valuable enough

4. I’m not authentic enough

5. I’m not capable enough

6. I’m not safe enough

7. I’m not free enough

8. I’m not protected enough

9. I’m not important enough

The type of wound a person has matters a lot to practice because it determines much about what’s separating them from awakening. For example, as a 4, what was preventing me from resolving the Great Matter was an inability to accept that I might not be special, since if I’m not special, I might be like everyone else, and if I’m like everyone else, I’m not authentic. In contrast, a 2 has to accept they’re lovable, a 6 that they’re safe, a 9 that they’re important, and so on.

My theory is that some Buddhist traditions do a better job of meeting some of these wounds than others. On this theory, it’s not mere coincidence that I came to Zen practice, and specifically Soto Zen; it’s that Soto Zen is set up in a way that handles the needs of 4s better than other forms of Buddhism do, and that’s why I felt at home there. This isn’t to say that Soto Zen is only a place for 4s, only that it has features that make it disproportionately adapted to their spiritual needs.

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So which schools and lineages are best for which types? Here’s my current thinking, with the caveats that I’m not a scholar of religion and I’m writing from inside Zen, meaning I know the landscape better closer to home and less well farther out:

1. Theravada. 1s want to get things right, and Theravada gives them a clear, systematic path with explicit moral precepts and well-defined stages to work through. What they find, though, if they carry the practice far enough, is that they were right enough all along.

2. Christianity? Buddhism isn’t great at working with 2s. What they need is a practice centered in unconditional love, and what Buddhism has to offer is too impersonal, or if it is personal, as from a teacher, then too risky. But you know what religion is great at providing unconditional love? Christianity. I’m sure Christian mystics have paths to awakening, there’s a long tradition of Christian meditation, I just don’t know much about any of it. There’s probably other options, too, and maybe even some within Buddhism I’m just not aware of.

3. Theravada. Theravada works for 3s, too. They want to achieve, to succeed, and to accomplish. Theravada offers all that through explicit stages, maps, and attainments, and in the end they get to attain something they already had to begin with.

4. Soto Zen. Soto Zen says you’re already awakened, you just don’t realize it, and through practice you can have that realization. This directly meets the 4’s sense that something essential is missing, and the thing that was missing was zazen.

5. Theravada. Theravada also works for 5s, but again for different reasons. More than other living traditions, Theravada has a strong scholastic side in the Abhidhamma, and this gives 5s a pathway to convincing themselves of the value of the more embodied practices that will ultimately be necessary.

6. Vajrayana or Pure Land. The 6 needs someone to take refuge in. Vajrayana is built around devotional practices to teachers, ancestors, and deities that fill this need. Pure Land works similarly, though in a more impersonal way, that eventually leads the 6 to see they didn’t need a protector, but to see they were safe from the beginning.

7. Eclecticism. Nailing down 7s to a single thing is basically impossible. They’re unlikely to be happy in one place. Tantric practices will be appealing to them, as will practices from Dzogchen and Zen that point directly to awakening. But realistically they’re going to mix practices from various traditions, and many will struggle to settle down until they’re already far along the path.

8. Rinzai Zen. Unlike Soto Zen, which heavily emphasizes meeting the moment in stillness, Rinzai asks students to meet the moment in action. Rinzai teachers are notorious for doing wild things to help their students wake up, from shouting and hitting to asking them to answer impossible questions. 8s meet these moments, find themselves exposed, survive, and then discover that, in the end, everything is okay.
   (There’s also some interesting Enneagram theory-craft about how 4s and 8s are “the same” except that 4s turn inward and 8s turn outward, so it makes some sense they’d be on opposite sides of a pair of closely related lineages.)

9. Monasticism. Rather than best fitting a specific lineage, 9s are well adapted to monastic practice. Their desire to merge is acknowledged and contained by the monastic structure, and any lineage that offers that will serve them well. Even in lay practice, they’ll do well in more traditional groups that create the same kind of formal container that monastic practice provides. This structure can be found in many traditions, but, in the West, Zen is probably the most accessible and reliable option for getting what they need.

I’m sure more matchings work, and I know plenty of people practicing in lineages outside this mapping. In fact, I know plenty of 6s in Zen, which is surprising, because the 6 reaction to zazen is almost always the same: panic. And yet, sometimes, they stay. I’m sure you can find people of every Enneagram type in every lineage, as the teacher, student, and specific context matter far more than the general pattern of practice in a lineage. But, if you’re currently looking to take up a Buddhist practice and having a hard time finding your fit, I think it’s worth looking to your Enneagram type for guidance.

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• 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

• Getting Things Done

• How to Win Friends and Influence People

• I’m Ok, You’re Ok

What these books have in common, aside from being self-help, is that they’re attempts to help people make the transition from the pre-rational, pre-systematic thought most of us have entering adulthood to the rational, systematic, modern, and self-authoring thought of Kegan Stage 4.

This process is often plagued with difficulty, as Kegan himself explores in In Over Our Heads, and is especially difficult for people who master Stage 4 thinking in one area of their lives but struggle with it in others. Folks like doctors, lawyers, scientists, and engineers are masters of Stage 4 thinking by the time they graduate from college, but usually only within their domain of study. They can easily spend decades with their personal and social thinking trailing in Stage 2 or 3, and suffer all the more for it because they know more would be possible if they could just figure out how things work.

Thus, I was pleased to recently come across a copy of The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. Originally published as a series of three articles by W. J. King in Mechanical Engineering magazine in 1944, the book I found was a second edition with revisions and additions by James G. Skakoon. And although the original advice is now several decades old, it still reads well for professionals learning to operate at Stage 4 in their work lives.

The book is relatively short at just 60 pages, but in that space its direct, to-the-point style does a good job of explaining what should be obvious. Some of its advice includes such nuggets as:

• Confirm your instructions and the other person’s commitments in writing.

• Return your messages.

• Whatever your supervisor wants done deserves top priority.

• Meetings should be neither too large nor too small.

• Cultivate the habit of making brisk, clean-cut decisions.

• Regard your personal integrity as one of your most important assets.

• Beware of what you commit to writing and who will read it.

It ends with a brief discussion of how to analyze yourself, as a system, just like an engineer would analyze their work. It encourages readers to find their strengths and learn to exploit them, and also to notice that one’s passions and desires may not always lead to the happiest and best life.

I get the impression this book is a popular graduation gift. Maybe I would have seen a copy earlier if, despite the various job titles I’ve held, I’d been an engineer instead of a programmer. But I wish I had, both for myself and for the engineers I’ve managed who, despite years of experience, held themselves back by not applying the same systematic approach to themselves that they applied to their work, for it was only learning to treat myself as a system that began to learn how to take control of my own life.

That said, like most books in this genre, I’m sure it’s lost on the people who need to read it when they first do. The lessons one must learn to make the Stage 4 transition are complex, have to be lived, and can’t be picked up in an afternoon from a book, but the books do help! They plant the seeds of ideas in the minds of their readers, and as best I can tell, The Unwritten Laws of Engineering is as good at sowing as any book in the genre.

I know some of you read the draft version I posted on LessWrong as I wrote it. If you did, thank you, because your comments and feedback were critical in making the final version what it is (some of you even made it into the acknowledgments!). There are lots of changes since the draft, so if you read it before and thought “ehh, maybe there’s something here, but I don’t buy it”, I highly recommend reading it again.

If you’re not familiar with the book, here’s its thesis:

1. Our knowledge of the truth is fundamentally uncertain because of epistemic circularity caused by the Problem of the Criterion.

2. We manage fundamental uncertainty by making pragmatic assumptions that lead us to believe in the truth of claims that help us achieve our goals.

3. Consequently, the truth that can be known is not independent of us, but rather dependent on that for which we care.

4. That truth is fundamentally uncertain and grounded in care has far-reaching implications for many of the world’s hardest-to-solve problems.

The book argues for and develops these points in greater detail. It’s written for a general STEM audience, but I think it will be mostly of interest to rationalist and rationalist-adjacent readers. I especially hope folks working on AI and AI safety read the book, since I wrote it to document all the things I had to learn about epistemology to pursue my own previous AI safety research program.

I’ll have more book-related news in the next few weeks, as I’m planning an essay contest, and I’m actively working on getting the print and ebook versions together, with an audiobook to follow. For now, you can read it either in your browser or as markdown, and if you’d like other formats, please let me know in the comments.

I finished the second editing, and I’m now into copy editing. That’s also almost done, with just the last two chapters to go. Which means that, sometime in the next month, the book will finally, after a bit over 4 years, be complete!

I’ve decided to go the independent publishing route. The book market has changed a lot, even just since I started writing, and my book is at high risk of being too niche to support a run with a big, commercial publisher. Thankfully, in that same time, independent publishing has lost a lot of its stink as the book market has transformed away from mass distribution, so it’s no longer a low-status move to go independent. Thus, I’ll be retaining the copyright, publishing the book free online for anyone to read, and also have print and audiobook versions for those who would like that available for sale with most major book retailers.

Very excited to get the final version of the book into everyone’s hands, and then to get onto my next big project. Expect a full announcement on it soon, but to tease you now, it’s a conference, it’s about epistemics, and vibes, and it’ll be happening a little later this year. More details soon!

I’m a week in now, resting and recovering, but I sadly had to admit that I wasn’t going to hit my new, lowered target of just one blog post a month while I finish the book. Then it hit me, I could use Claude to do some research into concussions and write something short about that!

So I asked Claude to do some research into concussion recovery. Specifically, whether there’s anything useful I can do beyond the standard advice of “rest”. I already sleep and meditate, and I’ve been hearing more about psychedelics as treatments for brain injuries, so I had Claude to do a deep literature review on all three as concussion interventions. We focused on psilocybin because it’s the psychedelic with the most research about concussions available. The full report is here. Here’s what came out of it.

The three interventions are complementary, not redundant. All three reduce brain inflammation after injury, but through different biological mechanisms. Hitting the same problem from three independent angles is a well-established principle in pharmacology, and it tends to work better than hitting it from one angle three times as hard.

Each one is best at a different thing. Sleep drives the brain’s waste clearance system. During sleep the spaces between brain cells expand by about 60%, allowing fluid to flush out damaged proteins and metabolic debris, and nothing else does this. Psilocybin provides the most potent signal for growing new neural connections, with a single dose producing structural changes lasting over a month in mice. Meditation offers the best-evidenced stress and immune regulation, creating the upstream conditions that let the other repair processes work.

Psilocybin works around a problem the other two can’t. After brain injury, inflammation hijacks the raw materials your brain uses to make serotonin and diverts them toward toxic byproducts instead. This depletes serotonin while simultaneously causing further damage. Because psilocybin is chemically similar to serotonin, it can activate serotonin receptors directly, bypassing the broken supply chain entirely. No endogenous process can do this.

But the evidence is profoundly asymmetric. Sleep has robust clinical data and an irreplaceable biological role. Meditation has one concussion-specific meta-analysis showing moderate benefit and near-zero risk. And psilocybin has zero completed human trials in brain injury populations, with the strongest direct evidence being a single rat study.

So the actionable takeaways are, sadly, anticlimactic. Prioritize sleep above everything, and not just “sleep more” but actively protect it, because the injury itself disrupts the very sleep needed for repair. Meditate if you already do and consider starting if you don’t. And probably don’t take psilocybin for a concussion yet, because the biology is exciting but there’s no human data and there’re unknowns around safety in an injured brain.

The full research report with citations is here.

The first makes the claim that minimum viable AGI is already here. The second is my take on what to do about it.

I can’t understate how important it is to understand what’s going on right now with AI and the immediacy of the need for action.

That said, there’s only so much I can do about it, so I also have updates on the book.

Book Updates

I reached an important milestone yesterday: I finished revisions on Chapter 7, which is the last of the core chapters of the book. All that’s left is to do a revision pass on Chapters 8 and 9, which are “what’s next” chapters after having concluded the core arguments.

I have no idea how long they will take to revise. I hope not long, but they do contain a lot of words.

I really want to get the revisions finished and the book actively moving towards print publication soon, so I’m going to be taking a little break from blogging. Not entirely, but I’m going to switch to posting semi-monthly instead of weekly until I get all the revisions done.

Historically, I always write more than whatever target I set for myself, so I’ll probably write more. I just have to remember that the less I write here, the more progress I make on the book, and the sooner the book is done, the sooner I can focus on blog posts instead of book revisions.

I practice Zen in the lineage of Charlotte Joko Beck. Her teaching style was, for its time, radically non-traditional. In an era when talking too much about your inner thoughts and feelings was discouraged by first-generation Japanese-American Zen teachers, she believed Western students needed to practice a Zen that leaned on familiar psychological concepts to make sense. One of those concepts is what she called the “core belief”.

The core belief is a deeply held, usually unconscious belief about ourselves. It almost always feels like some flavor of “not enough”. It forms early, operates automatically, and powers the reactive, habitual, and often maladaptive patterns of behavior that make up most of what we call our personality.

The cruel trick of the core belief is that it reinforces itself. It tries to protect you from noticing anything that might confirm it, and by doing so actually generates more evidence in favor of it. For example, if you believe you’re unlovable, you might push people away so they can’t prove you aren’t worthy of love, or you might stay so anxiously close to them that no one has a chance to notice how they really feel about you. It’s a psychological trap that heaps suffering upon more suffering, and almost all of us have been ensnared in it since before we can remember.

Joko doesn’t advocate for getting rid of the core belief. In fact, she argues that would be impossible. Instead, it’s about becoming intimate with it, noticing it when it shows up, and learning to face reality rather than hiding from it. The more you do that, the less power the core belief has to control your life, and the more you are free of the suffering it causes.

But describing the core belief as a feeling of “not enough” is rather vague. You can sit for years, intellectually knowing you have a core belief, and never catch a glimpse of what your core belief really is. It’s possible to have so many layers of psychological barriers in place that you never allow yourself to see it.

In the Ordinary Mind Zen School that Joko founded, we practice getting past these barriers by paying attention to sensations in the body. Much like in Gendlin’s Focusing, we try to notice the physical sensations that arise when we react out of anger, fear, or desire. We become familiar with those physical feelings, then, let our minds name them. Sometimes the names we give provide surprising insights. Other times, nothing comes, and more noticing is needed. Over time, with the help of a skilled teacher, one can learn to work with their core belief and tease apart how it limits life.

Now, it’s pretty normal in Zen to do things like this from scratch with a minimum of conceptual frameworks. And I generally endorse this approach, but sometimes it’s helpful to get hints. Based on my understanding of the Enneagram, gleaned from Michael Valentine Smith’s series of posts on it last year (1, 2, 3, 4), I think its nine types provide a map to common patterns of core beliefs, and may help a person better practice with their core belief when noticing alone leaves them stuck.

The Enneagram is a Map of Suffering

Over the years, I’ve occasionally taken Enneagram tests, and every time I found the results unhelpful. I’d get categorized as some type, be offered some explanation of what it means, and while it seemed like it might be true, it all fell flat for me. Am I a 9? A 3? a 1? Who knows! The outcome seemed to change based on my mood. I had little reason to think that the Enneagram was useful.

Michael helped me see value in the Enneagram by reframing it, not as a personality classification system, but as a map to how and why we suffer.

In his framework, each person has what he calls “Essence”, which is something like your true nature, the awareness and aliveness you had before reactive personality took over. Essence naturally expresses certain qualities, like love, clarity, peace, power, and freedom. But when Essence gets overwhelmed in early life, it creates a mechanical personality to stand between itself and the world. That personality tries to mimic Essence’s qualities, but it can only produce toxic imitations, and those imitations create self-reinforcing downward spirals.

He tongue-in-cheek summarizes the Enneagram as asking: “In which of these nine ways are you most screwed up?”

Reading his posts, I couldn’t help but notice that Michael’s “downward spiral” was not too different from how Joko describes the workings of the core belief. In fact, I think they’re pointing at the same mechanism, but are coming at it from different angles.

The Enneagram says personality tries to replace an essential quality, and fails because the replacement is mechanical. Joko says that the core belief generates reactive patterns that try to protect us from acknowledging it. Both say that these behaviors create lock-in, double down on what’s not working, and create a self-reinforcing loop of suffering.

What’s neat about the Enneagram is that, unlike Joko’s intimately individual approach, it gives you a map to the essential qualities your personality is trying to mimic. If the parallel between the Enneagram and Joko’s teachings holds, then each Enneagram type corresponds to a class of core beliefs. I might phrase those as:

• Type 1: “I’m not good/right enough”

• Type 2: “I’m not lovable enough as I am”

• Type 3: “I’m not valuable enough without proof”

• Type 4: “My inherent worth is missing or damaged”

• Type 5: I’m not equipped enough to handle the world directly”

• Type 6: “Nothing is reliable enough to trust”

• Type 7: “What’s here isn’t enough”

• Type 8: “I’m not solid/real enough”

• Type 9: “Things aren’t okay enough to fully engage with”

Of interest to me is that this mapping can give greater specificity to Zen practice. It can be hard to simply sit with not-enoughness. You have only a vague idea what you’re looking for, and people are different enough that the way one person talks about their feeling of not enough may sound totally foreign to you. The Enneagram helps explain this, because different people really do have different styles of core belief that feel quite different from the inside.

That said, I see some danger in the Enneagram. It’s a system for putting names on things, and Zen is ultimately about seeing through how our mental constructs imprison us. The self is not a fixed thing. Our stories about ourselves are just more thoughts about whatever is really going on. The Enneagram risks becoming a new way of formulating a self to latch on to rather than a way to become free of it.

To be fair, Michael himself warns about exactly this in his series. People who get into the Enneagram often start trying to explain everything in terms of it, and then start contorting their behavior to fit their type. He recommends holding your type “extremely lightly” and measuring its value by a single criterion: does viewing yourself this way make your life more wholesome?

That’s a good test, and it’s the same test I think Joko would apply. Is your practice making you more open, more responsive, more alive to what’s actually happening? Or is it giving you a more sophisticated story about yourself? The Enneagram is useful exactly insofar as it helps you see through personality. It’s harmful exactly insofar as it helps you solidify it. If you find yourself using your type to explain your behavior rather than to notice and release it, set the Enneagram down.

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Finding My Type

After reading Michael’s series, I got interested in what type I might be, since if my theory was right, it will help me in my Zen practice. When I’ve taken Enneagram tests, I’d variously score as a 3, a 5, a 7, or a 9. And if I’m honest with myself, I see something of myself in all the types. Hard to do much with that!

But as Michael argues, the tests are just looking at surface-level traits and don’t do a very good job of detecting Enneagram type. What you actually have to do is figure out which type helps you unwind the reactive downward spiral. As I think of it, you need to ask yourself: which type’s need, if it were fully met, would make you truly and deeply happy, and not because your need was incidentally met, but because your need was met fundamentally?

This is easier explained with an example. As I said, I often test as various types. Sometimes I test as a 3, meaning I need to prove I can achieve greatness. Other times I test as a 5, meaning I need to show off how much I know. But notice how I phrased those. I didn’t say I desire achievement or knowledge, I said I need to prove/show off. And you know what type needs to demonstrate personal specialness? That’s right: type 4.

As I think of it to myself, I’m happiest when my inner nobility is allowed to shine. Everything else is incidental. I’m smart enough that I can let my nobility shine by showing what I know. I’m capable enough that I can let it shine through achievement. In fact, I can make any of the types fit so long as it’s a means to showing off my specialness. I feel like this explains a lot about me.

What’s interesting from a Zen perspective is how a type 4 core belief maps to the central misperception that practice addresses. The 4’s spiral is powered by a search for inherent worth that was never missing. That’s basically what “seeing your true nature” is all about in Zen: recognizing that what you’ve been searching for was here all along. All you have to do is stop searching, and you’ll find yourself!

Now of course, following Michael’s advice, I hold this all lightly. Maybe I’m wrong about being a 4. Maybe someday I’ll find it makes sense to think of myself as another type. The point is not to be identified with a type, it’s to use the type to make sense of myself and point the way to actions I might take that would make my life better.

And the same is true if you want to try using the Enneagram. I suggest reading Michael’s series, and if you’re interested in learning more about Joko’s idea of the core belief, I suggest picking up her most recently published book, Ordinary Wonder.

What’s the Great Matter? It’s the question you can’t answer. It’s the fear you feel when you contemplate your own death. It’s the void lurking at the center of your existence, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t see into it. You’ve lived with it for as long as you can remember, fighting against its friction with your every action. It can’t be pointed at directly, but you know it’s there because it’s in the place you can’t look.

That’s all rather mysterious, and thankfully some people have managed to grapple with the Great Matter enough to say a little more. They often talk about non-dual experience, of crossing the divide between the relative and the absolute. They say things like there’s no separate self and that all is impermanent. And if they’ve read the right websites, they might even describe the Great Matter as the contradiction inherent in the intuitive self-model, and say that to resolve the Great Matter is to have the insights that transition you into a persistent, non-symbolic experience of existence (PNSE).

Or, in short, to resolve the Great Matter is to become enlightened.

But the longer it’s been since the Great Matter was resolved, the less I like the word “enlightened”. I did a whole video essay about it, but in short, the main problem is that “enlightenment” implies a permanent state of attainment and carries misguided cultural connotations. Other words like “awakened” drop some of that cultural baggage, but unfortunately keep the attainment framing.

And you might be saying to yourself, why would an attainment framing be bad? Clearly something has been attained! But, the only thing attained is a resolution of the Great Matter itself, which is the act of having an insight and having that insight spread deeply through your entire being, nothing more. The rest has to come later. All that resolving the Great Matter does is remove the obstacle that was blocking the way on the path to freedom from suffering.

And if you want to be free of suffering, you have to put in the work. First, you have to put in the work to resolve the Great Matter, which often involves untraining many of your maladaptive habits. It requires grappling with your addictions, your traumas, your hangups, and your insecurities. And then, after the Great Matter is resolved, you have to continue that work, but now on a deeper, more subtle level than was possible before. It does feel easier, because you no longer have to deal with both the habituated mind and the Great Matter, but that feeling itself can become a trap that will ensnare you if you aren’t careful.

Now, some people who resolve the Great Matter do so while living in a monastery or hermitage, or move to one after such resolving. In such a place, one has the opportunity to minimize decision making and planning. And when there’s no decisions to make, there’s no need to model the self, and so the constructed self-model can be let go and forgotten, replaced by a mind that only concerns itself with this moment. That can be nice, especially if done for a limited time to strengthen one’s practice, but it comes at the cost of helping the world.

To help the world, you have to live in it, and that means constructing a self-model to make the predictions necessary to plan and take actions. The best one who has resolved the Great Matter can do, if they are committed to benefitting all beings, is to find a way to live holding that self-model lightly. To see, in each moment, that the self and the not-self views are equally real, for both are needed to tackle the great many challenges facing our world.

I’ve left out many details you’d probably like to know. That’s because I write this post with some hesitation. Although this is not the first time I’ve publicly admitted to being “enlightened”, it is the least obscure and most easily found. But I decided to take the risk, because I feel that it’s been long enough that I can speak confidently of my own experiences, however they are labeled, and because by speaking about those experiences, I may be able to help others.

When I had not yet resolved the Great Matter, I was very confused about it. Some people wrote some straightforward things that were confusing. Other people wrote confusing things that were straightforward. I needed all the help I could get from others pointing the way for me. Now it’s my turn to help others by pointing. This is one attempt, and I hope it proves useful.

But I think the word has legs. I just have to figure out what it actually means!

On the surface, it’s obvious. It’s the combination of “vibes” and “epistemics”, so more or less naming the core idea of the post/meta-rationalist project. But again, what does it actually mean? It’s easy to point at a large body of work and say “I don’t know, whatever the thing going on over there is”, but much harder to say what the thing actually is.

So to start, let’s talk about epistemics. What is it? I see people using the word two ways. One is to mean the way we know things in general. The other is to mean the way we know things via episteme, that is knowledge that’s reasoned from evidence, as opposed to doxa and techne and many other ways of knowing (if those Greek words mean nothing to you, I highly recommend reading the post at the link before continuing). Unfortunately, some people equivocate between epistemics-as-knowing and epistemics-as-knowing-via-episteme to give the impression that episteme is the only good way to know anything. That, to me, is a problem.

I think it’s a problem because such equivocation discounts valuable sources of knowledge that aren’t easily made legible. Now, to be fair, there’s some reason to do this, because the pre-rationalist epistemic stance says legibility doesn’t matter and logic is just a means to justify one’s preferred ends. The rationalist stance is largely that everything that can be made legible should be, and that which cannot be made legible needs to be treated with great caution because that’s how we slip back into pre-rationality. So I understand the desire to equate epistemics with episteme (and, etymologically, the English language tries very hard to do this), but I also find it frustrating because it encourages excessive devaluing of other ways of knowing, especially metis, techne, and other forms of knowledge that are less legible.

That’s where the vibes come in. They can rescue us from an excessive focus on episteme and temper the excesses of legibility. But what are vibes and how can they help?

Vibes are the embodiment of what we care about. The stoner, for example, has stoner vibes because they care about chilling and feeling good. The Christian has Christian vibes because they want to do what Jesus would do. And the rationalist has rationalist vibes because they care about knowing the truth with high predictive accuracy. For any vibe, there is always something the person expressing it cares about deeply that causes them to have that vibe.

This matters in epistemics because knowing is contingent on care. I make this argument in detail in Fundamental Uncertainty (currently in revision ahead of publication), but the short version is that we have a mental model of the world, truth is the degree to which our mental model is accurate, we want an accurate mental model because it’s useful, and usefulness is a function of what we care about, thus truth is grounded by and contingent on care. And since vibes are the embodiment of care, vibes have an influence on the act of knowing, hence, vibestemics.

(If this argument seems handwavy to you, it is. You’ll have to read the book to get the full argument because it takes about 10k words in the middle of it to lay it all out. If you want to read the first draft for that argument, it’s in Chapter 5, 6, and 7 which start here. Alternatively, although I think “Something to Protect“ does a poor job of emphasizing the epistemic relevance of care in favor of explaining a particular way of caring, I read it as ultimately claiming something similar.)

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Okay, but that’s the theoretical argument for what vibestemics is. What does it mean in practice? Let’s dive into that question by first considering a few examples of different epistemic vibes.

Woo: The epistemic vibe of woo is that whatever’s intuitive is true. Woo is grounded in gnosis and largely eschews doxastic logic and careful epistemic reasoning. That said, it’s not completely devoid of epistemics. It’s definitionally true that whatever you experience is your experience. Unfortunately, that’s roughly where woo stops making sense. It interprets everything through a highly personal lens, so even when it leads to making accurate predictions, those predictions are hard to verify by anyone other than the person who made them, and woo-stemics easily falls prey to classic heuristic and bias mistakes. This severely restricts its usefulness unless you have reason to fully trust yourself (and you shouldn’t when it comes to making predictions).

Religion: The vibe of religion is that God or some other supernatural force knows what’s true. Knowledge of what God knows may require gnosis, or it may be revealed through mundane observations of miraculous events. Although not true of every religion, religious epistemics can be a friend of logic, and many religions demand internal logical consistency based on the assumptions they make. Sometimes these theological arguments manage to produce accurate world models, but often they have to be rationalized because the interpretation of the supernatural is fraught and we mere mortals may misunderstand God.

Science: Science as actually practiced by scientists involves empirically testing beliefs and updating them based on evidence. The vibe is pragmatic—build hypotheses, test them, see what happens, and revise accordingly. The only problem is that science requires the ability to replicate observations to determine if they’re true, and that’s where it hits its limits. When events can’t be observed or can’t be replicated, science is forced to say “don’t know”. Thus, science is fine as far as it goes, but its vibe forces it to leave large swaths of the world unmodeled.

Rationality: The vibe of rationality is to be obsessed with verifying that one really knows the truth. This has driven rationalists to adopt methods like Bayesian reasoning to make ever more accurate predictions. Alas, much as is the case for science, rationality struggles to deal with beliefs where predictions are hard to check. It also tends to smuggle in positivist beliefs for historical reasons, and these frequently result in an excess concern for belief consistency at the cost of belief completeness.

Post-rationality: The post-rationality vibe is that rationality is great but completeness matters more than consistency. Thus it attempts to integrate other ways of knowing when episteme reaches its limits. Unfortunately, how to do this well is more art than science, and there’s a real risk of getting things so wrong that a post-rationalist wraps back around into pre-rationality. Arguably this is what happened to the first post-rationalists (the postmodernists), and it continues to be a threat today.

What I hope you pick up from these examples is that different epistemic vibes are optimizing for different things and making different tradeoffs. Although it may seem strange, especially if you’re a rationalist, that someone could have a good reason to ignore predictive accuracy in favor of intuition or dogma, for those with woo and religious vibes that choice is locally adaptive for them. They similarly look back at you and think you are deeply confused about what matters, and this is a place where arguments about who’s right will fail, because they’re ultimately arguments about what each person values.

All that said, it’s clear that some vibes are more epistemically adaptive than others. Accurate world models convey real benefits, so adopting a vibe that leads you to develop better world models is usually a good move. This, incidentally, is what I would argue is the pragmatic case for post-rationality over rationality: it’s rationality plus you can break out of the rationalist ontology when it’s adaptive to do so (though admittedly at the risk of it becoming rationality minus the guardrails that were keeping you sane).

And this ability to shift between vibes is why I think having a word like “vibestemics” is valuable. When we can only speak of epistemics, we risk losing sight of the larger goal of living what we value. We can become narrowly focused on a single value like accurate model prediction, Goodhart on it, and forget to actually win. We can forget that knowledge and truth exist to serve us and our needs, not the other way around. Vibestemics invites us to know more and better than we can with episteme alone, if only we have the courage to let our grip on a single vibe go.

Chapter 7, as you may recall if you read the first draft, is both the “cybernetics chapter” and the “tie everything together” chapter. Originally it was largely based on the two posts where I first worked out these ideas, but as I’ve been revising, I discovered that it contained both a lot of extraneous material and didn’t have quite the right focus for where it sits in the book. These were both problems I knew about when I wrote the first draft, and now in the revisions I have to solve them.

As a result, it’s been a slog to find the right way to present these ideas. I’ve tried maybe 5 different approaches. It takes time to develop them out enough to see if they work. I’m hopeful that the 6th approach will be the final one, but it’s not done yet, so no promises.

Medium

Hey, did you know I used to run a blog on Medium called Map and Territory? It originally started as a group blog for some folks in the LessWrong 1.0 diaspora, but the group aspect quickly collapsed after LessWrong 2.0 launched, so then it was just me. (All my posts from it are now mirrored on LessWrong since I trust it more than Medium in the long run.)

Anyway, every few months somebody, usually this guy, references my most popular post from the Map and Territory days. It’s titled “Doxa, Episteme, and Gnosis”, and it still gets about 100 new reads a week all these years later. I’ve tried a couple times to write new versions of it, but they never do as well.

The “Many Ways of Knowing” post from two weeks ago was the most recent evolution of this post, though this time excerpted from the book. I like it, and I think it fits well in the book, but it still doesn’t quite capture the magic of the original.

The original succeeds in part, I think, because I was naive. I presented a simple—and in fact over-simplified—model of knowledge. It’s accessible in a way that later revisions aren’t because it’s “worse”, and I suspect it’s helped by putting three Greek words in the title, which I am pretty sure helps with SEO from students trying to find out what these words mean.

Anyway, this is all to say I got some more posts lined up, and hopefully I’ll at some point be naive enough to write another banger.

Back in October I shared how I write code with Claude. A month later, how I write blog posts (though ironically not this one). But I wrote those before Opus 4.5 came out, and boy has that model changed things.

Opus 4.5 is much better than what came before in several ways. It can think longer without getting lost. It’s much better able to follow instructions (e.g. putting things in CLAUDE.md now gets respected more than 90% of the time). And as a result, I can trust it to operate on its own for much longer.

I’m no longer really pair programming with Claude. I’m now more like a code reviewer for its work. The shift has been more subtle than that statement might imply, though. The reality is that Claude still isn’t great at making technical decisions. It’s still worse than random chance at picking the solutions I want it to pick. And so I still have to work with it quite closely to get it to do what I want.

But the big change has been that before I would have the terminal open, claude in one split in tmux, nvim in another, and we’d iterate in a tight loop, with claude serving as something like very advanced autocomplete. Now, I use Claude in the desktop app, get it to concurrently work on multiple branches using worktrees, and I have given it instructions on how to manage my Graphite stacks so that even for complex, multi-PR workflows I usually can just interact through chat rather than having to open up the console and do things myself.

Some tooling was needed to make this work. I had to update CLAUDE.md and write some skills so that Claude could better do what I wanted without intervention. I also had to start using worktrees, and then in the main repo directory I just check stuff out to test it (the local dev environment is a singleton) and do occasional manual operations I can’t hand to Claude (like running terraform apply, since I can’t trust it not to randomly destroy infrastructure on accident).

Still, this is not quite the workflow I want. Worktrees are annoying to use. I’d prefer to run Claude in cloud sandboxes. But the offering from Anthropic here is rather limited in how it can interact with git, and as a result not useful for me because it can’t use Graphite effectively. Graphite has their own background agents, but they’re still in beta and not yet reliable enough to use (plus they still have restrictions, like one chat per branch, rather than being able to have a chat that manages an entire stack).

But as I hope this makes clear, I now use Claude Code in a more hands-off way. My interactions with the code are less “sit in an editor with Claude and work in a tight, pair-programming-like loop”, and more “hand tasks to Claude, go do other things, then come back and review its work via diffs”. I expect this trend to continue, and I also hope to see new tooling that makes this workflow easier later in the year.

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That’s coding, but what about writing?

Well, Claude still isn’t fantastic here. It’s gotten much better at mimicking my style, but what it produces still has slop in its bones. It’s also gotten better at thinking things through on its own, but I still have to work to focus it and keep it on task. It will miss things, same as a human would, that I want it to look at.

For example, I was editing a paragraph recently. I made a change to some wording that I was worried might convey the right sense but be technically wrong. I handed it to Claude. Its response was along the lines of “yes, this looks great, you made this much more readable”. But when I pressed it on my factual concerns, it noticed and agreed there was a problem more strongly than I did! These kinds of oversights mean I can’t trust Claude to help me write words the same way I trust it to help me write code.

So I’m still doing something that looks much more like pairing with an editor when I write with Claude. This is good news in some sense, because it means I’m still needed to think in order to produce good writing, but bad news if you were hoping to automate more thinking with Claude.

This past week there came news of some novel mathematical breakthroughs using LLMs. The technology is clearly making progress towards critical thinking in a wider set of domains. And yet, writing remains a nebulous enough task that doing it well continues to evade Claude and the other models. That’s not to say they aren’t getting better at producing higher quality slop, but they still aren’t really up to completing a task like finishing revisions on my book the way I would want them done for me.

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Where does this leave me feeling about LLMs right now?

We made a lot of progress on utility in the last 12 months. Last January I was still copy-pasting code into Claude to get its help and using Copilot for autocomplete. It was almost useless for writing tasks at that point, and I often found myself wasting time chatting with it trying to get things done when it would have been faster to sit and think and do it myself. That’s just no longer true.

As always, though, I don’t know where we are on the S-curve. In some ways it feels like progress has slowed down, but in others it feels like it’s sped up. The models aren’t getting smarter faster in the same way they were in 2024, but they’re becoming more useful for a wider set of tasks at a rapid rate. Even if we don’t get LLMs that exceed what, say, a human ranked in the 70th percentile on a task could do, that’s already good enough to continue to transform work.

2026 is going to be an interesting year.

What does it mean to say “I know”?

This might seem like a strange question to ask since knowing is such a fundamental and intuitive activity. It’s hard to imagine being a person and not knowing things. In fact, the only time in our lives when we aren’t swimming in a sea of knowledge is when we’re newborns, and we quickly wade in by learning the voice, face, and touch of our caregivers. Within days we’re able to tell them apart from strangers, and our long relationship with knowledge begins. So if we want to understand what it means to “know”, we’re going to have to spend some time exploring how we use this almost invisible word.

When we say to each other that we “know” something, we generally mean that we’re able to recall an idea, hold it in our mind, reason about it, and say things based on understanding it. Consider these examples of things I claim to know:

• I know my friend Eric.

• I know how to tie my shoes.

• I know how to speak English.

• I know that Paris is the capital of France.

• I know what it’s like to ride a rollercoaster.

• I know that if I eat too much food I’ll get a stomach ache.

Although all of these sentences begin “I know,” the knowledge expressed in each is not the same. Knowing that Paris is the capital of France is knowing a propositional fact. When I say that I know my friend Eric, though, I’m not claiming to state a proposition, but rather that I can recognize him by sight and sound and am familiar with his patterns of behavior. There’s also no propositional fact about what it’s like to experience the thrill of riding a roller coaster: it’s a lived experience that simply is. Rather than using “know” to mean many things, perhaps it would be useful to have different words for these different forms of knowledge.

The ancient Greeks did exactly that. They used multiple words to break down knowing into several categories, including:

• episteme: things you know because you reasoned them from evidence, like knowing that water boils at 100 degrees celsius because you boiled a pot of water using a thermometer to see when it started to boil

• doxa: things you know because others told you, like knowing what happened at a party you didn’t attend because your friend tells you

• mathema: things you know because you were educated in them, like knowing how to spell words because you were taught them in school

• gnosis: things you know through direct experience, like how it feels to jump in a lake

• metis: practical wisdom, usually collectively constructed from many people’s experiences, and shared with others, often starting at a young age, like how you know to look both ways before crossing the street

• techne: procedural knowledge that comes from doing, like the “muscle memory” of how to ride a bicycle

These categories aren’t perfectly distinct, though, because the same information can be known multiple ways. For example, Ada recently saw Ed wearing a traffic cone on his head. Later, she told Grace about it. As a result, Ada had gnosis of Ed’s appearance, while Grace had doxa of it. And because nothing is ever simple, Grace also eventually saw Ed wearing the traffic cone on his head and gained gnosis of her own in addition to her pre-existing doxa.

Does this mean Grace now knows more than Ada does? Maybe, if the combination of gnosis and doxa provides a deeper understanding than gnosis alone can. Or maybe gnosis trumps doxa and the value of doxastic knowledge is lost once gnosis is gained. Whatever the answer, that we can ask this question at all shows that the lines between different kinds of knowledge aren’t always clear. Perhaps that’s why English and many other languages have collapsed these distinctions into a single word for knowing.

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Yet, sometimes we need to make distinctions between different ways of knowing, as political science professor James C. Scott does in his book Seeing Like a State. In it, he examines how modern and historical governments have differed in their treatment of knowledge. He then goes on to explore how those differences have had significant impacts on people’s lives.

Prior to the modern era, states placed a high value on metis. They frequently saw themselves as the defenders of tradition, often to the point of killing those who dared to challenge the established order. Modern states, in contrast, often throw tradition out in favor of rational, scientifically-grounded episteme. By prioritizing episteme over metis, modern states have created a bounty of benefits for the people living in them, including more reliable food supplies, better medicine, and increased access to what were previously luxury goods. But, as Scott explains, these benefits aren’t guaranteed, and sometimes overturning tradition leads to disastrously worse outcomes.

In the middle half of the 20th century, there were numerous attempts to modernize agriculture. Many of them ended in failure. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, Russia, China, and other communist countries saw catastrophic famines resulting from forced collectivization, unrealistic production targets, and bad agricultural science. On this last point, it was the misguided theories of Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko that magnified what might have been survivable food shortages into widespread, mass starvation.

Lysenko trusted his own episteme over everything else. He claimed that his methods were more rigorous than established science, rejected the accumulated practical knowledge of farmers, and dismissed all critics as ideologically impure. He treated his own reasoning as the only valid path to truth. When communist leaders implemented his ideas alongside their political programs, the resulting crop failures led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

Over-reliance on episteme was not a problem unique to communist countries, though. In the United States, the Dust Bowl and associated food scarcity of the 1930s was the direct result of careless industrialization of farms in the 1920s. Early agricultural science thought it could achieve higher crop yields simply by working the land harder, and for about a decade this was true. Using mechanized plows and harvesting equipment, farmers converted a hundred million acres of Great Plains prairie from low productivity cattle pasture to bountiful fields of wheat and corn.

Scientific farming was a boon to the people of the United States, right up until drought hit in the 1930s. The intensive agriculture of the previous decade had damaged the natural ability of the land to protect itself, and overworked fields crumbled to dust as they baked under cloudless skies. The situation only began to turn around when rain finally returned in 1939, but it took decades for the land to fully recover, and even longer for farmers and scientists to develop and widely adopt sustainable farming practices that work in the Great Plains.

Do we know better now? We like to think so. Certainly we’re less naive because we tell each other about the failures of the past (metis) and learn about them in school (mathema). Politicians no longer propose that we solve all our problems with science, and we know that episteme doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth. Yet even as we’ve learned from our mistakes, we risk overcorrecting and forgetting the power of episteme. In fact, many would say we still don’t value episteme highly enough and too often ignore scientific results that offer us clear ways to improve the world.

But it’s not that we need to spend more effort finding the right balance between different forms of knowledge. Rather, we need to integrate all our knowledge together, whatever the source. When we privilege one way of knowing over another, we risk incomplete understanding that leaves out things we could have known. We must instead strive to update our beliefs in proportion to all the evidence we have available, and by so doing build the most accurate models of the world that we can.

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So I was naturally excited when Apple TV teased a new Fraggle series and delivered it to us in early 2022.

Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed by what we got. I’ve made it through every episode of Back to the Rock, but it was a painful exercise in patience. After watching the Christmas special they released this year, I’m starting to get a sense for what feels so wrong about the new series to me. I’ll see if I can work it out below, but apologies in advance if this descends into ranting about how Apple TV is ruining my childhood.

NB: Obviously, there will be spoilers, though I’d be surprised if anyone cared. Also, I’m going to assume a fair degree of familiarity with the source material for the rest of this post. Sorry if that means it doesn’t make much sense to you, but if that’s the case then you probably didn’t care that much about what happens to Fraggle Rock anyway.

Setting

Back to the Rock (BttR hereafter) is nominally set in the same universe as the original series and is a continuation of it. The reality is more complicated.

There is some continuity with the events of the original series, and those events are occasionally referenced. We also have a bunch of changes that break continuity, which is terrible and confusing. Thus, BttR is neither a reboot nor a sequel, but something far worse: it’s fan fiction.

For example, Sprocket is somehow both the same character as before and not, so he chases Gobo but also knows him and seems to remember having lived with Doc in the workshop, which means he should already be friends with Gobo. Similarly, Junior Gorg is both back to having an interest in catching Fraggles, but also is now much friendlier to Fraggles, and quickly switches to being friends with them instead of needing multiple seasons of stories to change his heart. Every character, even minor ones, has problems like this.

The timeline is also unclear. In some sense, the show takes place approximately 30 years after the end of the original series, reflecting the real-world timeline. But also somehow Sprocket is still alive, as are the individual Fraggles from the original series, and none of them have really aged (though maybe this is fine for Fraggles since we have little information on exactly how long they live).

Now to be fair not all the changes are actual consistency issues. The caves in the Rock look different and have a different layout connecting them. This is fine because the original series already established that sometimes the caves in the Rock move and change on their own. The Gorg’s castle looks different, which is a little more concerning because the Gorgs are established to live for thousands of years and are resistant to change, but perhaps we can give them the benefit of the doubt here given how the original series ends.

There are also some general changes to the show’s color palette and the characters’ designs, but they reflect general trends with the Muppets and are not specific to Fraggles or BttR, so I’ll ignore them here.

Characters

I could probably ignore the setting and continuity issues if those were BttR‘s only problems. Alas, the changes to how the characters are written is where things really go off the rails.

Let’s take the example of Gobo. His defining characteristic in the original series is bravery. He often ends up as the main character because he’s the only one courageous enough to take on some responsibility. Of course, he also suffers the follies of excess bravery, which makes for interesting stories, but the Fraggles depend on him to be the humble hero.

In BttR, he’s still sometimes put into this role, but I get the sense that the writers want us to feel bad about it. His dialogue is a bit different. The fear and uncertainty and awkwardness is turned up. He’s more brash chungus than brave hero. He’s often not allowed to solve his own problems. He doesn’t rely on his friends so much as get saved by luck channeled through them.

Or take Cotterpin. She was originally a fish-out-of-water Doozer who ends up apprenticed to the Architect and is in line to replace him. We can reason that since BttR is 30 years since the original series she’d be further progressed in her career, and she is, but in ways that don’t feel like real development. She’s often presented as being the only Doozer with any real smarts. The Architect is still her boss, but now no longer a source of wisdom to learn from. He’s almost always played as an old fool who is somehow still in charge.

But this doesn’t seem right given what we know of Doozer society. It’s very competence focused. If the Architect can’t do the job, I’d expect him to give it up to Cotterpin when that became clear. Instead, he’s just an empty boss character who wields nominal power that Cotterpin gets to react against. She gets to be a girlboss with no actual purpose to it. In the end, we never feel like Cotterpin is actually competent, just the least dumb of the now much dumber Doozers. I’d much rather have seen a BttR where Cotterpin is now the Architect and must deal with the responsibility and accountability that comes with leadership.

And then we have the new characters. I’m just gonna pick on the most poorly written one, Pogey. Pogey is something like a token diversity character. I think they’re supposed to have autism and ADHD or be otherwise neurodivergent, they come out as non-binary in one episode and then this fact is never referenced again, and they also get increasingly inserted into stories for no purpose other than being there. Pogey is also annoying—not just to me but to the Fraggles—and we see the other Fraggles taking pains to tolerate them.

I think there’s a version of Pogey that could have been good. Maybe we could have had a version that just has autism or ADHD or is non-binary. Great! Then we get to see stories about how sensory issues or trouble focusing or being outside the gender binary affects their life. But instead I get the feeling that someone in the writers’ room really wanted to make a character that demonstrates intersectionality and intersected everything they could into a single character, ruining what makes Fraggles Fraggles in the process.

See, the thing about Fraggles is they all have a thing. Gobo is the brave Fraggle; Red is the competitive one; Wembley is indecisive, and so on. The intersectionality happens on the group level, because individual Fraggles aren’t, in some important sense, whole people. Instead, the wholeness comes from their interactions. Boober, for example, is not so much a full character as he is the archetype of anxiety and fear, and he serves the same role in Fraggle society that anxiety serves in our own minds. Yes, he is presented as a full character, but it’s clear that he, and all the other Fraggles, would live a kind of half life if left on their own. They only get to be whole by being part of a whole. That’s their beauty.

But the writers of the new series destroy this by misunderstanding what Fraggles are. They try to write them like they’d write humans instead. The result is, to me, disappointing.

Songs

Most of the new songs suck. This is not worth getting much into, but they mostly suck because their lyrics need to reflect how the characters are written (already discussed) and what the characters are doing (we’ll get to that next). Also, I think too many of the new songs aim to sound contemporary rather than fitting the folksy, out-of-time style common in the original series. Luckily for me, the new writers seem to be adding fewer songs as the show goes on, so maybe this problem will go away on its own.

Plot

Given how the characters are written, it’s not surprising that the episode plots in BttR also have issues.

In the original series, an episode generally has a plot built around some kind of universally applicable lesson, like about sharing or apologizing or dealing with difficulty. Some of these were quite intense, like in one early episode where Red and Boober almost die in a rock slide and grapple with the potential of their own death before they are saved. The stated goals of the original series were to promote world peace and to teach kids from any nation or culture about empathy, interconnectedness, and tolerance. In BttR, this seems to be forgotten.

The episodes in the new series are generally part of larger story arcs. The individual episodes and the arcs have lessons to teach, which is fine and good for this kind of show. Unfortunately, usually those lessons are progressive or otherwise politically leftist. I’m sure I will take some flak for this because in the episodes the lessons are presented as if they are universal, and in some sense they are, but the details make it clear that the writers have a political agenda that is not just empathy, tolerance, and peace, but empathy, tolerance, and peace on their terms and their terms alone.

Consider the main arc of Season 1. The Doozers discover a new building material that lets them be more productive, but it turns out to pollute the water supply. This destroys Craggle Lagoon, displacing the Craggles who must come live as refugees with the Fraggles. The pollution also harms the Merggles downstream. Resolving the issue requires everyone to work together and convince the Gorgs to destroy their fountain so water can flow fast enough to clear the pollution. Meanwhile, in the “Outer Space” segments, the new Doc is a PhD student researching how to remove microplastics from the ocean.

Now, none of this is objectionable on its face. The original series was always about interconnection, and “pollution is bad” isn’t a partisan position. But notice the specific shape of the story: industrial productivity causes environmental harm, which creates displaced populations, which requires collective sacrifice from those with more resources (the Gorgs and their fountain). The Doc segments make the real-world referent explicit. It’s not teaching kids that actions have consequences or that we depend on each other—lessons that would resonate across political lines. It’s teaching a particular story about how environmental problems arise and how they must be solved, one that maps cleanly onto progressive climate politics. The universality has been lost.

There’s a world where this story was written differently. If the writers had Abundance politics, rather than the Gorgs sacrificing their fountain, they enlist the Doozers to help them find a technical solution that makes everyone better off. Or maybe there’s a conservative version where everyone RETVRNs to the way things were before the Doozers started building with their new materials. There’s any number of ways to tell the story differently, and those differences would mostly reveal different political biases.

There’s also a world where BttR tells a story about pollution and interconnection that’s more abstract. Most likely this wouldn’t be a long, multi-episode arc, which is perhaps why those were rare in the original series. Instead we’d have something like a one to two episode arc about Doozers polluting the water and then finding some clever compromise solution to deal with it. It doesn’t push the same kind of political message, which I think the writers likely explicitly wanted to do, but it does better serve the original spirit of what the Fraggles are.

Conclusion

I really wanted to like BttR. I’ll honestly probably keep watching whatever new Fraggle Rock content Apple produces even if I don’t like it. But I wanted to write this anyway because I wanted to at least lament what we lost.

Fraggle Rock was, like many of Jim Henson’s projects, meant to be for everyone, no matter their birthplace, language, or culture. The show was even localized, and if you look you can find alternative versions of Doc and Sprocket, just like you can find alternative versions of Big Bird on Sesame Street. What I love about it is that it’s a show that’s ultimately trying to teach compassion, and that’s something I think we desperately need more of in the world.

Unfortunately, BttR turns Fraggle Rock into yet another front in the political battle over everything. It’s now a Blue Tribe show for Blue Tribe kids, because don’t you know we can tolerate anyone except the Red Tribe, exactly what Fraggle Rock was meant to work against. I’m saddened that we got BttR instead of something that honors and extends Fraggle Rock’s legacy.

Luckily I, and you, can keep watching the original series whenever we want.

But it was also a good year. I curated my mom’s art. I built an AI oracle. I wrote 37 blog posts, gained 500 MMR in DoTA2, lost 10 pounds, volunteered at 2 conferences, and revised 5 book chapters to make them much, much better. And none of that is to mention all the quality time I got to spend with friends and family and all the cool places I got to visit.

Year boundaries are a good time for setting goals. Here are mine for 2026:

• finish revisions on Fundamental Uncertainty and get it into print

• run a conference at Lighthaven (details still in the works, more to come)

• continue to do whatever I usefully can to prevent existential catastrophes

• live my life well and love all the people in it

Although I have plenty of reason to worry for the future, I’m generally hopeful, and I look forward to seeing how things unfold in the year to come!

We had to let Sammie go last Wednesday.

The lump first appeared on her nose sometime in the Summer of 2024. It was small. You could miss it if you didn’t know her face.

The vet did a biopsy. Melanoma. We were told the median survival time was 6 months.

Over the next 18, we did everything we could to make her life comfortable. When the tumor grew too large, we’d have it debulked. When she couldn’t clean herself anymore, we brushed her and gave her baths. In the end, we had to hand feed her when the tumor, now inoperable, got in the way of eating on her own.

But we couldn’t feed her enough that way, and she was losing weight. The tumor was getting larger and soon would spread into her bones. Although she was always happy to cuddle, in the last week she spent most of her hours curled up in a heated bed, tolerating a pain she had no way to avoid.

She couldn’t use words to tell us her wishes. We had to guess. But if I were her, I’d want to be spared the pain and indignity that so often comes at the end. So we made the decision to let her go.

We made some art with her. We said our good-byes. And then, on a sunny afternoon, the vet let her slip off, sitting in my lap, purring to the last.

I adopted Sammie with my first wife, Sarah.

Sammie came to us from the SPCA. She picked us out. She jumped on Sarah and began snuggling immediately. I filled out the paperwork while she sat on Sarah’s shoulder.

Sammie was born on Halloween, so her full name is Samhain. But, as a joke, since many people mispronounce Samhain as /sam-hane/, we shortened it to Sammie.

As cat dynamics shifted in the house and Sammie grew from kitten to young cat, I became her favorite. I’d come home from work and she’d snuggle with me as I played on the computer or watched baseball. Many nights we’d fall asleep together on the couch with the TV still on.

After Sarah and I split, I moved to California, and Sammie came with me. The vet gave her Valium to fly. It made her extremely cute, extremely floppy, and extremely cuddly.

Sammie and I made a new life in Berkeley. We developed a routine. I’d wake up early and come home late from work. She’d climb in and snuggle with me in bed. If I played video games, she’d curl up on the computer, enjoying its warmth. If people came over, she’d wander out and demand their attention. I tried to take her outside a few times to enjoy the weather, but she wasn’t having it, so an indoor cat she stayed.

We moved several times to different houses with different people. Sammie loved everyone she met. And then she met Joy. The first night Joy slept over, Sammie snuggled her all night. Sammie was sure that Joy should be my wife.

In her last two years, Sammie got to know the fog of San Francisco after we moved to a house atop Twin Peaks. She looked forward to the afternoons when the clouds parted, the sun streamed in, and she could stretch out and bask in its warm, amber glow.

Now she’s cold. Very cold.

Like me and my wife, Sammie was signed up for cryonics. This is her new forever home:

I don’t know if we’ll ever get to see Sammie again. Maybe one day we’ll have the technology to bring her back. Or maybe we won’t. It’s something I can’t now know.

But she’s got a chance, which is more than most get. I’m glad she was able to take it.