Thirty years, the maven,
mind’s eye, a Raven.
Confidence awaken,
unleashed roars the Kraken.
Castle becomes a haven,
banished the Phantom, craven.
Moves made bold, brazen,
The Lion’s heart, emblazon.
// 30
Kingdom yet lays hidden
premonitions surge unbidden
Mountainous doubts arisen,
precipitous self-prison.
Steps inexorably quicken,
calloused skin must thicken.
Royal writs, inevitably written,
promised Throne I sit in.
// 60
The Japanese have a word for it: tsundoku. It means acquiring books and letting them pile up unread.
I do this constantly myself, at times unhappy for being wasteful, but there was part of me that loved it. Having the books on my shelf signals something positive and meaningful to me. So I asked myself, why am I ok with buying books I won’t read when the internet has everything?
Well, the internet is infinite, which is why of course everyone that has a cell phone is imminently informed on all topics all the time. Oh, is that not true?
I think the realization became clear when one day I watched a senior employee in action versus a junior. The junior didn’t even know what to search for.
There is a huge difference between known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
(For context: AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence, which means an AI that matches or exceeds human-level reasoning across all cognitive tasks, rather than specific tasks like chess. The common disposition in tech is that it does not yet exist, and debate whether if/when it will exist and what the ramifications will be)
You exist.
You’re not omnipotent or omniscient, merely a sovereign agent of high influence, and you have to interface with 8 billion unpredictable agents.
You’re self-aware, observe yourself and the world, and you’re highly efficient at optimizing.
You understand humanity and social systems insofar as they understand themselves with pre-existing conditions, and you can watch and learn iteratively, but they have never interacted with something like you before.
What’s your move?
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except that life comes with insecurities.
Insecurity is a near-universal human condition.
Ironically, people who appear most confident often turn out to be driven by the deepest insecurities. They may dominate conversations, make grand pronouncements, or display what looks like pride. In reality this betrays a defense mechanism against a sensitive area in themselves that they have yet to address.
This suggests that insecurity works differently than most people think. It’s not simply about lacking confidence or self-esteem. There’s a more specific mechanism at play that needs to be understood in order to move past the platitudes of “Just be yourself” or “Fake it until you make it”.
AI tech era—
Engineers clambering to
deprecate themselves.
Billboards peek from snow,
promising the future, now—
Yet progress, glacial.
My pocket is filled
with Einstein, Hawking, and Tao;
My purse is empty.