Digifesto

Tag: writing

July 6, 2026

maybe writing a book about epistemology

I have been reading and writing for a long time. Every once in a while I have thought, “I should write a book”. I starting thinking about the scope of the book, get overwhelmed, realize that I don’t have the time, and give up.

Not too long ago, some PhD students I know suggested that I should write a book, which is very encouraging — somebody might actually read the book!

I thought about it again recently and settled on some fundamentals:

  • I will write multiple books, and two books I’ve tried to write before (about ethics and metaphysics) are going to come later, after the first book.
  • I am nowhere near where I want to be to write a book about politics and economics; that’s my next research agenda with the computational economics and multi-agent systems tools.
  • What I have written about quite a bit already is epistemology and scientific method. That’s a real passion of mine, and it’s one where I feel my views have solidified.
  • This is probably also a topic where I’ve got a somewhat original and deep perspective, given my interdisciplinary romping, relative to what others have done.
  • Because this isn’t what I’m interested in researching next, and because it’s a topic that I think everybody should know about, I’m free to write this as a (aspirationally) popular book, trying to walk the reader persuasively through interesting arguments and history, rather than trying to establish my expertise among a crowded field of other experts.
  • Since this problem is never going away, and indeed only gets more confusing with, e.g., AI and other technical infrastructure, I’m not in a rush to finish it.
  • This is a good setup for my future research, since in many ways it’s a public-facing account of why my (now much more narrow and difficult to get into) research makes sense to do.

So, there we go!

A few surprising things about getting started. First, GenAI tools are useful, or at least seem useful, when outlining a book. Rather than force somebody else to listen to me rattle off ideas for what to include, I can rattle off my ideas to a CLI tool, and it slots those ideas into the outline and draft materials for me. Cool!

Second, I feel, philosophically, in good shape. There are good reasons for believing in things, good tests for things. There’s no need to be ‘post-truth’ about anything. The anti-science side of the science wars, and various skeptical positions along the way, have robustly lost their argument and I can explain why. Critical counter-epistemologies can be incorporated back into a robust constructivist epistemology without sacrificing objectivity. I’m bullish about objective human knowledge and its continued accumulation.

Third, it’s very comforting looking at historical epistemology, because it never changes. I’m going to start with Socrates. But there’s also a surprising amount of material to add based on developments in the last 20 years, and a lot of this has to do with technology and statistical methods. I think what might be useful is explicitly connecting the problem of epistemology to the mathematizations of knowledge that are at the heart of knowledge infrastructure. This is useful to do, but not located in any discipline that I know of.

Fourth, I think this work can be helpful as “AI for science” as well as “AI-powered misinformation” take off. A lot of the book will be about technology and institutions and their recursive impact on knowledge. The book will have implications for how to navigate the world that could otherwise be confusing for the next generation of people who have to live in it. I have my children in mind when I work on this — I want to be able to efficiently convey a lot of stuff I’ve learned to them. That’s motivating.

Fifth, I’m actually qualified to write this book. My official degrees are related to this field. I’m working on adjacent areas. No imposter syndrome!

Now, it’s only been a few days and the book outline already spans 2500 years of history and a bunch of fields of study. It is quite probably “too ambitous” and maybe it will never get written or read. But… the project feels compelling, and it’s a fine “first book” attempt.

So, onward!

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July 4, 2026

some philosophical progress, and next steps

I had a wonderful time at FAccT 2026 in Montreal. I was at the first FAT* in 2018 and thought it was doing something important — creating an intellectual space for serious thinking about powerful socio-technical systems in a way that’s consistent with computational thinking. Prior to that conference, I didn’t know where to publish work along those lines. This year was my third time publishing at it, second time presenting. This year, I presented a paper that was all about causal modeling in service of privacy-by-design, which brings closure on a long engagement with trying to mathematize social norms. I’m satisfied by how we did this, and the approach is very extensible. I intend to build on it in various ways for the rest of my career.

At one moment of the conference, in one of the socials, there was a bit of a philosophical exchange. I discovered that I am not the only person in the world that subscribes to both enactivist and transcendental pragmatist principles, and in fact these approaches seemed to be an increasingly good fit for the direction of the field, though I did hear Agre and postmodernism mentioned a few times.

So, happily, I’m feeling settled in what have been my two greatest intellectual preoccupations: the question of what is true, and the question of what is right or good. Provisionally — and I suppose this sort of thing is always provisional — I feel well educated on these matters, and have tested several theories, and been wrong enough times, to have a rough idea of the right methods for approaching these problems. I’ve made a good deal of progress by accepting, with some humility, that there is maybe not so much room for innovation in these areas as one might have hoped in earlier years. The conclusions (so far) of the process of inquiry are mundane, not spectacular or ‘radical’. However, it is comforting to have greater confidence in common sense than I once did.

To try to put it briefly, I think the following is the case. We are individually and collectively alive, and this is a condition for our knowledge and relationships with others. Knowledge, and cognition more generally, is a process of adaptation whereby a living system responds to change and maintains viability over time, as it is structurally coupled with their environment. An individual’s mental habits are those that survive experience and inquiry and, above all, maintain the life of the individual. The ‘contents’ of the mental states of the individual are those representations, coupled bodily with the environment, which capture useful sensorimotor regularities of their local world. In this sense, knowledge is embodied, personal, and particular, at the individual, ‘ontogenic’ level. (This is all ‘enactivism’ in a nutshell; it is also ‘pragmatism’ in Peirce’s sense; and something borrowed from traditional philosophy of mind.)

However, no individual exists alone. We are born with chromosomes from two parents. We are raised, live, and die in society. The collective social organism is also alive, and must maintain its viability over time. The development of language, institutions, communication systems — including the legal system, property laws, and markets — are a kind of ‘cognition’ at the collective, or ‘phylogenic” level. It is at this level ‘objectivity’ is constructed; knowledge can be ‘transcendent’ of individual bodies because its meaning comes from its use in social forms. As a specific accomplishment of certain kinds of social systems, we get general representations of the world that are reliably ‘true’. And, as a specific accomplishment of certain other kinds of social systems, we can get representations of social behavior that are reliably ‘good’ or ‘right’, mainly because they interactively maintain the viability of the collective, and the individual, dependent on it, within it. Considering society decomposed into separate mutually supportive but distinctly personal spheres of activity, we get Contextual Integrity, and the implied norms of personal information flow. Considering society in its broadest sense, we get Dewey’s notions of social democracy, and ultimately Habermasian notions of legal legitimacy.

Thus construed, we have lots of room to improve ourselves in both knowledge and wisdom. This is primarily achieved by the improvement of institutions and social forms, as these are the harnesses which distinctly embodied agents create objective representations. Computational social science remains a worthy pursuit as a means to these ends. The ultimate end is survival and flourishing of humanity — one’s descendants, one’s society, one’s ecosystem — which is an intrinsic motivation which grounds the whole process transcendentally.

I’m grateful to Christoph Salge for working with me on a paper about enactivism and the legal responsibility of AI systems, which has refined and improved my confidence in these points.

The above is, I suppose, all well and good, but it’s incomplete in at least two respects, which I find bothersome. These two issues are at the heart of many of today’s deepest political conflicts, and I suppose they reflect inherent instabilities in the characterization of truth and goodness described above.

The first is the problem of tribes, or nations. Individuals can to some extent choose which collectives they are loyal to, and social collectives come into conflict. Universalist ethics are a longstanding ideal, but frequently come into conflict with particularist loyalties to tribe, race, state, etc. Some amount of loyalty to family seems essential for viability and is broadly good. When tribal conflict leads to war or subjugation, that is often not good. There is both cooperation and defection by tribes; tribal boundaries are unstable; tribes have their own local knowledge and customs and these can be in conflict with universals. A great deal has been written about this in various fields and I’m finding it so intractable that it has become tedious.

The second is the problem, or solution, of wealth. I’ll admit that I wish I had much more to say about this than I currently do. For one, while I believe I have a pretty good idea of what truth and ethics are, I do not have a similarly grounded concept of what wealth is. And yet, the distribution of wealth is the single greatest political and moral concern of our society, besides, maybe, the relations between tribes. Wealth cannot be the same thing as truth, and it cannot be the same thing as ethics — the tension between the three is obvious; and yet it seems connected to both in intrinsic ways. Some amount of wealth is necessary for the survival and flourishing of the individual and the collective. Wealth is sensitive to institutions — property and liability regimes, markets, and so on — but what makes these institutions proper or desirable? The assumptions of the prevailing theory often seem weak on inspection.

This latter issue is the subject of economics, but I have not yet been able to find economic theory that is on enactivist or systems-theoretic grounding. I have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t exist yet in a convincing or generalizable way, and it’s a problem my work is pointing at. A big methodological gap is in computational methods that are a good fit for the problem. This is what I’m most interested in advancing in the short term.

References

Maturana, H. (1988) Ontology of Observing: The Biological Foundations of Self-Consciousness and of The Physical Domain of Existence. https://reflexus.org/wp-content/uploads/oo3.pdf

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October 3, 2024

I miss writing

I miss writing.

For most of my formative years, writing was an important activity in my life. I would try to articulate what I cared about, the questions I had, what I was excited for. Often this was done as an intellectual pursuit, something para-academic, a search for answers beyond any curriculum, and without a clear goal in mind.

I wrote both in private and “in public”. Privately, in paper journals and letters to friends, then emails. “In public”, on social media of various forms. LiveJournal was a fantastic host for pseudonymous writing, and writing together and intimately with others was a shared pastime. These were the ‘old internet’ days, when the web was imagined as a frontier and creative space.

The character of writing changed as the Web, and its users, matured. Facebook expanded from its original base of students to include, well, everybody. Twitter had its “Weird Twitter” moment, which then passed as it became an increasingly transactional platform. Every public on-line space became a LinkedIn.

Instagram is, for a writer, depressing. Extremely popular and influential, but with hardly any written ideas, by design. YouTube can accommodate writing, but only with the added production value of performance, recording, and so on. It’s a thicker medium that makes writing, per se, seem small, or shallow.

The Web made it clear that all text is also data. Writing is a human act, full of meaning, but digital text, the visible trace of that act, is numerical. Text that is published online is at best the body of a message with so much other metadata. The provenance is, when the system is working, explicit. The message is both intrinsically numerical — encoded in bits of information — and extrinsically numerical: its impact, reach, engagement, is scored; it is indexed and served as a result to queries based on its triangulated position in the vast space of all possible text.

Every day we are inundated with content, and within the silicon cage of our historical moment, people labor to produce new content, to elevate their place in the system of ranks and numbers. I remember, long ago, I would write for an imagined audience. Sometimes this audience was only myself. This was writing. I think writing is rarer now. Many people create content and the audience for that content is the system of ranks and numbers. I miss writing.

Generative Artificial Intelligence is another phase of this evolution. Text is encoded, intrinsically, into bits. Content is sorted, extrinsically, into tables of impact, engagement, conversion, relevance, and so on. But there had been a mystery, still, about the way words were put together, and what they meant when they came in this or that order.

That mystery has been solved, they say. See, my looking at all the text at once, each word or phrase can be seen as a vector in a high dimensional space, relative to all other texts. The meaning of the text is where it is in that space, as understood by a silent, mechanical observer of all texts available. Relative to a large language model, the language in one person’s mind is small, shallow.

Generative AI now excels at creating content. The silicon cage may soon start evicting its prisoners. Their labor isn’t needed any more. The numbers can take care of themselves.

I remember how to write. I now realize that what is special about writing is not that it produces text — this is now easily done by machines. It is that it is a human act that transforms the human as writer.

I wonder for how long humanity will remember how to read.

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October 24, 2014

writing about writing

Years ago on a now defunct Internet forum, somebody recommended that I read a book about the history of writing and its influence on culture.

I just spent ten minutes searching through my email archives trying to find the reference. I didn’t find it.

I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately. And I’ve been thinking about writing especially tonight, because I was reading this essay that is in a narrow sense about Emily Gould but in a broad sense is about writing.*

I used to find writing about writing insufferable because I thought it was lazy. Only writers with nothing to say about anything else write about writing.

I don’t disagree with that sentiment tonight. Instead I’ve succumbed to the idea that actually writing is a rather specialized activity that is perhaps special because it affords so much of an opportunity to scrutinize and rescrutinize in ways that everyday social interaction does not. By everyday social interaction, I mean specifically the conversations I have with people that are physically present. I am not referring to the social interactions that I conduct through writing with sometimes literally hundreds of people at a time, theoretically, but actually more on the order of I don’t know twenty, every day.

The whole idea that you are supposed to edit what you write before you send it presupposes a reflective editorial process where text, as a condensed signal, is the result of an optimization process over possible interpretations that happens before it is ever emitted. The conscious decision to not edit text as one writes it is difficult if not impossible for some people but for others more…natural. Why?

The fluidity with which writing can morph genres today–it’s gossip, it’s journalism, it’s literature, it’s self expression reflective of genuine character, it’s performance of an assumed character, it’s…–is I think something new.

* Since writing this blog post, I have concluded that this article is quite evil.

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