nonfiction
-
Essay
Software engineering does so little epistemic work that it hardly earns the name “engineering.” The field has never learned to distinguish provenance — where an artifact came from — from warrant — why anyone is entitled to rely on it. Authorship, a passing test suite, and a completed review are routinely mistaken for the second when they are only ever the first; libraries are the rare exception, where warrant is actually constructed and amortized across users who never read the source. LLM-generated code inherits neither comforting story, and the discomfort that provokes is not a new problem but the oldest one in the profession, finally felt without the anaesthetic that provenance usually supplies.
-
Essay
Curricula in mathematics and the sciences optimize for procedural fluency — the half of what they teach that decays once the student stops being a student. What survives twenty years on is conceptual residue, generated only as an accidental byproduct of the curriculum’s intended work. The asymmetry compounds across generations of teachers and produces a population unable to do the work that civic life requires of it.
-
Essay
As we approach AGI, the increase in the ability of Artificial Intelligence models to infer a robust specification from a sparse prompt will lead to a devastating trend of homogeneity. We argue that this is the primary concern regarding the interaction of AI and human intelligence, rather than blanket claims that “AI reduces human cognitive ability.”
-
Essay
A compendium of years of informal, empirical experiments aimed at extending the efficacy of Anki beyond rote memorization to more intricate levels of learning.
-
Essay
Notes from Underground is widely admired as a cornerstone of literature, culture, and philosophy. This paper develops the argument that the primary philosophical undercurrent is a rejection of logic and science as end-alls in modern life, traced through comparison with the more explicitly articulated works of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries and successors: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Shestov, Ellul, Sartre, Camus, Husserl, and Arendt.