Explores the latent space. Worked in venture capital, built startups, built products at startups, built products at large companies, advised companies, and occasionally advised a government or two. The sum of those parts has given some interesting notions about ways to push the frontier of our knowledge forward.
And that’s what I write about, as an “idea hedonist”. You should subscribe to read about innovation and progress, technology, business, science and complex systems.
Why Strange Loop Canon
In a complex world we're forced to understand things piecemeal, caressing the elephant's trunk and tail and hoping to understand its full majesty. That's the goal here too.
Why Strange Loop? Because as Hofstadter said:
when I say "strange loop", I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by "strange loop" is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in an hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle
Why Canon?
The concept of canon is very broad; in a general sense it refers to being a group (noun) of official, authentic or approved rules or laws … or similarly, one or a body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic in a field of study
Where to start
I publish about an article a week. Meanwhile, ten of my favourites below:
Building God - A deeper essay on AI development and what we can expect!
What can LLMs never do? - Are we somehow less interesting than we used to be?
Rest - An analysis of the extremely underrated importance of sabbaticals!
Seeing Like a Network - Dark forest theory, or why the culture is so polarised: explaining vibecession
On Medici and Thiel - Why we need to radically scale genius grants!
Isolated narratives of progress - How analyses focusing on growth malaise often miss the point when it comes to technological progress
Why do big businesses seemingly suck at innovation? - why large companies are affected by the need for legibility and try in vain to wrestle complexity
The New Space Race - An analysis of why it took us so long to restart the space race with SpaceX
Understanding wage stagnation - Why are the wages so damn low?
Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses - Examining the social networks essential to innovation
Should You Go To College - The varying strategies and benefits of college
About me
I am, therefore I think. But since arguments from authority still work, I'm an engineer and an economist, ran a hedge fund, worked in 4 continents, was a venture capitalist and now building AI platforms that don’t suck.
But that's background, and maybe past is prologue. Life is filled with unwritten essays. About theories that never get to see the light of day, about insights that remain in a sock drawer, about relationship amongst ideas that remain unquestioned. This blog started as an attempt to create a philosophy I could live by, but that quickly got away from me, as strange loops are wont to do.
And I’m on @krishnanrohit. Feel free to say hello!
