Zugunruhe | Nathan's Notes
Appreciation
9
Importance
7
Date Added
3.2.26
TLDR
Knowing a lot of things deeply across domains is what produces insight and great work. Most people are “philosopher's coat racks,” hoarding mental models they never wear, and AI exaggerates this exact failure mode by collapsing the thousands of micro-decisions that build real judgment. What matters isn't agency (which is underspecified and can be directed at nothing) but ideology: a worldview deep enough to be load-bearing, built from having genuinely cared about many things over a long time.
2 Cents
Surely one of the best essays I’ve ever read. Read it!!!
Tags
One can’t fake nor cram the base. It has to come from having genuinely cared about a lot of things over a long time. Some of the best pretraining is just experiencing things without overthinking them, being shaped by something before deciding what it’s for.
The discussion of agency being “underspecified” and the wrong focus reminded me loosely of Sam Kriss’s piece on Roy Lee :
Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be.