🚨 There is a newer version of this article here, on my wiki.
How to read it? Feel free to treat it like a Q&A page. All chapters make sense on their own so feel free to jump around.
Hello
My name is Paweł. I try to distill the most impactful knowledge over a long time. I also design products, wrote AI Revolution 101 and have a background in art. I am scheming how to improve epistemics and collective coordination using technology. I don’t normal write. But I care about being simple and precise.
Approach
Weird writing and non-linguistic brain
By origin, my mind is not very linguistic. For example, when I think, I rarely experience myself talking in my head. It’s more like sparkling-jumps between different thoughts. A long time ago I have been diagnosed as being on the verge of dyslexia. I believe dyslexia is not a hindrance but a different brain wiring. Dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big-picture connections at the expense of weaknesses in processing speed and parsing fine details from Dyslexic Advantage.
I see the strengths of my mind in the same way. I think I have high skills at gist detection, evaluating uncertain knowledge with analogies from different disciplines, having “aha” moments on how to more efficiently reinterpret things.
All that is to say, linguistically things may feel off. There may be lots of grammatical mistakes. English is not my native language and sometimes I break it intentionally. That is when grammar rules are blocking my precision, a proper weighing of arguments, or when grammar makes expressing ideas longer or less direct. Please bare with me through this non-standard narration.
Short, but rendering through a human
I deeply care to distill knowledge into a form that is as short as possible. I want to max out on the words per meaning ratio. But at the same time, you are human and you render things through human experiences. So I will be also injecting my weird, personal, subjective experiences and relations to things.
Centipede approach
I want to be like a centipede with one long leg. Which is to say I see a large potential in going broad but developing expertise in one area.
Why generalist?
This may be especially productive in a time of specialization. Holden Karnofsky describes a hypothesis that ideas naturally get harder to find over time (see Where’s today’s Beethoven? and chapters on: “The innovation as mining hypothesis” and “Data on innovation stagnation”). That’s why there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the overlaps between different areas.
Perhaps if one goes broadly, thinks precisely, and tries to out-maneuver cognitive biases there is a chance of stumbling upon view quakes. I believe one can deduct quite a lot from own experience. What may be more important are not fancy tools but brevity to question things from the ground up. Back in the day, realizing that Geocentrism wasn’t true didn’t really require any equipment. One could deduct it with only their senses. I have a sense there may be a lot more view quakes around us.
But learning can be also a form of procrastination. I think in order to find impact it makes sense to develop expertise in one or two narrower fields and then try to find some overlaps.
So what is your one long leg?
I try to understand the algorithms and distortions of the human brain.
And what are your other ninety-nine legs?
Okay, there is a lot and it is helpful for me to track them so I created this page:
Unique areas
Values living
Doing good
I feel the most meaning and fulfillment when I feel I am in the process, however wiggly, of doing good, going after the most positive impact on the world. I don’t know why, but I then imagine myself as this huge handsome tree and the sun is shining on leaves, making thousands of green glowy fires. I did some testing and this appeared to be my top intrinsic value. I also wonder if love may be one of the most important forces in the universe, more on this soon.
I think one of the most impactful actions for me now is to learn and improve my thinking. Straight the best way to improve thinking is to write and keep creating this thinking-helping machine.
Being brave
I may suck at it, k? But this is my value and I admire people who bravely reveal themselves in the world.
Values thinking
Overcoming bias
One of the main efforts of my learning is to overcome all the cognitive biases we are subjected to. I am sure I suffer from many, especially from the mother of all biases my-side bias and her children confirmation bias, hindsight bias, expert trap, typical mind fallacy, creator’s bias. So pleasssse send feedback. What truths about myself people are trying to avoid telling me?
Being precise and accurately uncertain
I will prioritize precision over persuasion. I think the form and the flow of writing is important but should never compromise the precision of arguments. I aim to include epistemic status in my writing and state my certainty with confidence tags.
Least amount of words possible
“I am sorry that I didn’t have time to write a shorter letter” – Pascal. I try to distill knowledge into as few words as possible. I think this is one of the most important and neglected ideas about knowledge. The shorter the more valuable the message is (while simultaneously preserving its depth and quality).
Long-term
New knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when you compare medieval to contemporary findings in medicine, ethics, physics. It is also a curse because we have a newness bias. I try to resist the new and select the knowledge that has a long expiry date.
Through a peasant's reasoning
This is a Polish expression meaning to communicate without jargon, in the simplest possible terms. Knowledge is often a signaling tool – a vehicle for climbing a homo sapiens hierarchy ladder. "I am capable of using complex vocabulary", "I belong to this type of people", "I am smart". I feel this force is largely active in our culture and in my hunter-gatherer's brain. I try to recognize it and cut it out. What out of my thinking is there because it’s good to think this way? How to say it simpler? What is the dumbest and most revealing question here? On this website, I attempt to take complex ideas and transform them into the most simple form. My north star is what Richard Feynman lived by "If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough".