Alex K. Chen | Notion

the attention residual ("interestingness") = what remains valuable after competence and intelligence become too cheap to meter. High in Varley’s “dark information”.

near-complete backup of crsociety.org: https://crsociety2-archive.pages.dev/forum/3-forums/ | lots of longevity content: forum.longevitybase.org

Once upon a time, I was the Quora celebrity that all the Quora employees knew. Adam d’Angelo said “I’m important for Quora”. AI causes global weirdening - maybe some interface with AI may make Quora rescueable again. Even as Quora declines, my questions on Quora finally keep getting better! https://www.quora.com/profile/Alex-K-Chen

I love generalizations, open-ended reinforcement learning, and network science.

spectral theory: https://chatgpt.com/share/6a22e548-0d64-83ea-b98d-548aca4d00c6

I have a high level of betweenness-centrality/breadth. I sometimes generate useful amounts of entropy (way easier when I’m broadly/sparsely distributed). On occasional bursts (roughly timed 5 years apart each), I can trigger exponential growth trajectories in multiple people (eg someone once told someone else “go meet me and something interesting will happen”). I can occasionally be highly entertaining. I like ontologically open-ended pre-disciplinary areas of study (esp “cybershamanism”/cyborgism.wiki). Higher in sensitivity than specificity.

One of my main interests is preventing brainwave drowsiness/resetting brainwaves to “focus” mode when I can (sometimes a special kind of confidence is enough). [though the easiest solution is still ending your long break from stimulants (mb nebivolol paired with high-dose concerta)]

Retaining plasticity for multiple “cycles” is what I live for. (you may screw up one cycle and may need to wait 4 years for the next “cycle”). People often alternate between overestimating and underestimating me.

I lean into the “strength of WEAK TIES” - it is a uniquely serendipity-maximizing (if illegible!) strategy. I aim into the feeling of not being boring, even if my strategies sometimes seem to produce some bursts of interestingness punctuated by long periods that seem stagnant.

I am interested in neuromodulation (including way less limited TMS/tFUS), out-of-distribution generalization, polychromic objectives**,** alternative computing architectures, and making fat tailed distributions more Cauchy. I like highly expressive geometric language.

I try to aim at a certain kind of non-degenerate flow state. It is hard to describe what it is, but my patience for video games and many kinds of degeneracy are lower than before, as I have faith that “constant KENSTANLEY-ESQUE novelty-seeking” is enough for something!

I may be more prepared than most for global weirdening due to near-term AI progress- which will highlight the contrast from distal/sparse components of the graph!! (AI progress also makes a mess out of people’s strongly held beliefs!!)

Sparsity and Purity/Noise are two concepts I’ve taking interest in as recurring relevances!