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I didn’t get the job! Something like 2 hours after writing that post, the decision finally came through. And it actually felt really freeing!!

There may be a bit of a mourning period to come. But the reasons they gave for choosing the other candidate were completely valid, and fit my prediction. I thought that, despite being in the final 2 out of >100 people who applied, there was a 70% chance I wouldn’t get it, because I was the wild-card applicant. If the other person had more direct experience in the role, that’d be hard to say no to. Whereas I was coming at the role from a different angle, and did a pitch to them as my final act during the in-person work trial about what I wanted to do, and how it differed from the role as advertised. In the end, they wanted someone who could do the role as advertised, which makes total sense!

So now I actually feel pretty great. I’m finally completely free to move on, I have a list of other things to apply to, it’s a Friday, this website is working and my writing ThinkPad is very fun. Onwards!

It’s funny, having this stealth blog, there’s a feeling of having many many things to write about, but knowing that it can’t all be done at once. I also have a sense that I’m essentially writing to recruiters at the minute, lol. As I’ll be linking this website on my CV, so they may be the only people who find this (apart from a few friends), as I don’t really tweet these days.

I’m really lucky to have my friends

I’m in a group with 2 friends who are both EA/rationalist-adjacent, both have been life coaches in the past. One is in Bali, one is in the UK. We send voice notes every day, and it’s so lovely. It’s really great that any of us can drop a voice note about what we’re up to, or something we’re struggling with, and get reflections and feel seen, etc. It’s lovely! I’m very lucky to live in an age where you can communicate over the internet, voice notes are a thing, there is a community of kind people who you can be friends with (EA, rationalists, post-rationalists). It feels very modern and cool. In my microsolidarity crew (we have fortnightly meetings), I often have the sense that we’re really on the cutting edge of some great stuff. Relationality, emotional work, etc. Showing up for each other well.

I have this sense with effective altruism and tpot too. Like, we’re really right at the forefront of what is going on in the world. This meta-modern soup, this crazy interconnected web of things like Buddhism, community, philosophy, AI, ethics, technology, all the stuff Vervaeke weaves together, the meta-crisis… it’s hard to summarise, but I do have a sense of this being a really interested and novel crucible.

I’ve been reading the Frans Osinga book about John Boyd, and chapters 3 and 4 are all about the zeitgeist that Boyd did his work in (the 1960s to the 1990s), and all the fascinating new discoveries and fields that he closely followed and folded into his work. He was credited as bringing “the new Physics, complexity science, and chaos theory” to the military. I feel early on my journey, but I can imagine a similar thing happening, if we survive AI. It feels like there are really interesting cutting edge things happening at the moment and we’re swimming in it on twitter. Michael Levin’s stuff, Shamil Chandaria’s stuff… maybe we’ll solve enlightenment soon. And intelligence, and ageing. It’s a wild time.

It’s very easy to feel overwhelmed and behind, but I think really the aim is just to keep playing, keep showing up and interacting, enjoy your little bubble of cosmic foam. I really love it here.