Excited and currently non-nervous for EAG

I feel excited! I’m really happy that I get to see a good friend for lunch before it begins, and then head in with him. I actually currently don’t feel nervous (of course, experiences with e.g. JessCamp show me that I can become nervous. Longview work trial too! But, I think this is a great vibe of “everyone is friendly, there are clear things to be done (talks, 1:1s etc). And I’ve got meetings scheduled, and I’ve written about my imposter syndrome so that already feels better, etc.

What am I aiming to do at EAG?

Yeah, it feels true that I’m mostly excited just to break through my EA aversion. “I was scared of EAs until like 3 days ago when I wrote a blog post” vibes. Talking openly about imposter syndrome feels great, and it feels absurd that it ruled me in the backgroun for so long.

Also yeah, looks like there’ll be some great people to talk to. I definitely have the sense of like, “ahh I just don’t have the technical background to be as useful as I would like”. But also, really, I’m early career! Like, the ~3 years of being a data analyst don’t really count. So maybe if I roll those into one year, I have like 3 years of experience.

Because I’m meeting with a bunch of more senior ops people, and I have a sense that really, they’re not going to say “oh yeah I taught myself xyz and you have to read these books and study systems design”, they’re gonna have the story of “I worked at a place for multiple years and was consistently useful”. So I don’t actually know how much I’ll have to talk to them about. There’s also the thing of like, they can only talk about their non-tacit knowledge, really. So it’s tricky.

Talking to knowledge management people might be good. I should try and hunt some down. Like, what do true knowledge management people know, and do?

On returning to the real world

It feels nice, and somehow surprising, that I can go to London and it’s not a big deal. It felt exciting and novel to go there for the work trial, to wander around Shoreditch, to see the insane variety of food options, all the cool trendy people. Like, holy shit, this is such a different world. Very very cool that I can plug into such radically different worlds – a real priviledge. E.g., I can go to Life Itself and live in a gorgeous old… manse, I don’t know what you’d call that place. And old chateau? And the vibes are quiet, intentional, small-scale. A quaint little village, bars, people speaking French. Not even knowing where in France you are, not knowing a thing about the town. Bergerac.

On technological agency and John Vervaeke’s most fundamental way of knowing

There’s something adult about Vim, and Linux. It does feel like a different way of operating. Rather than being beholden to a Mommy who holds you hand (e.g. VS Code, Mac OS), you have much more agency. Admittedly yes, unless you’re a software engineer, and even then still, you’re going to be mostly running open source stuff that other people have made. But, idk… you get to choose to install it. It slots into your workflow, and it chosen out of other options, it is configured with a config file to your liking, it’s made by non-mainstream nerds who get the importance of niche software. It’s not made for the masses, with the sharp corners sanded down. There’s a learning curve, a sense of mastery, much more depth than would make sense if the thing was made for a mass audience in order to make a profit. Open source really is profound! The incentives are totally different – providing the most depth, optionality, extensibility, power, rather than a kind of race-to-the-bottom re: the most usability, the most normie-friendly, etc.

Rather than “this is how it is done, shape yourself to this environment (MacOS, Windows)”, it’s “shape your environment”. So there’s undeniably more setup cost, more tweaking and bugs and weird things, everything has a learning curve, there’s jargon and config files and etc, but it’s akin to how recently cleaning the (actually basically non-existent) dust from my Thinkpad’s CPU fan the other day gave me more of a sense of familiarity, of intimacy with the internal workings of the thing. Rather than being infantilised by this black box, treated like a kid who isn’t trusted, you do the setup and then when it’s working smoothly you are left with a pervasive sense of pride, micro-satisfaction with the continued operation of the thing. This feels similar to how learning to touch type maybe 9 years ago has given me pretty much daily micro-pride for 9+ years. Interacting with a computer now has a new “pride” affordance, a new way with which to generate a feeling of micro-pride, a little hit of “oh hell yeah, I learned this thing and it was worth it”.

I’m thinking of John Vervaeke here. Of his 4 ways of knowing, the most foundational/fundamental (according to him) is participatory knowing. This is the agent-arena coupling, the flow state dance of you and your environment. The skillful interaction with affordances in your environment. And this is how learning anything useful, be it Vim or better relational skills or whatever, surfaces new affordances in the environment. Meditation is an example too – “oh, here’s a negative thought spiral I just caught myself in, time to release the tension in my muscles, in my face, and let it go”. That’s a new affordance that you’ve uncovered, a more skillful way of interacting with the arena. The world that you’ve been thrown into, the “being-in-the-world” that you always are (to invoke Heidegger).

This is part of the reason why I’m really excited to continue learning new “propositional” knowledge, despite the tyranny.

John Vervaeke talks about how we live in the tyranny of the propositional. Basically, of the 4Ps of knowing, propositional is by far the one that we think about the most, that we equate with knowledge and learning. Propositional knowledge is learning of facts, of theory. E.g. “2+2 = 4”, or you know, the theory of quantum physics, etc. This stuff is great, but it’s easy to get very captured by it, to not learn the other 3, not intentionally anyway.

The other 3 are

  • procedural (skills, like riding a bike) (learning “how to”, rather than learning “that x is the case” (propositional)).
  • perspecitval (1st person experience, perspective-taking)
  • participatory (flow state, agent-arena coupling, affordances and skillful interaction as an embodied agent)

But anyway, my point is that these are all interrelated, and learning more propositional knowledge (e.g. learning about economics, or software engineering) allows you to take different perspectives, and to see different affordances in the environment. Idk this feels like a semi-incoherent ramble, I’ll stop there for now.

Complexity science and systems design

One thing I’m really excited to talk to people at EAG about is systems design. I’ve found a few people who mention it in their bios and booked meetings with them. I was a process improvement specialist at Alvea, and even though I was pretty good at it, I was essentially entirely fuelled by my own taste, attention to detail, desire to make things work well, etc. I’ve had a strong background sense that there must be proper bodies of knowledge that could help me upskill here. And now that there’s AI, it’s much easier to say “hey Gemini, make me a report on what internal ops is, what process improvement is, what bodies of knowledge might be useful”. Complexity science and systems engineering are both mentioned in Frans Osinga’s book on John Boyd re: the zeitgeist that he was immersed in. Complex adaptive systems, normal accident theory, network theory, emergent behaviour. Feels like there’s a bunch of great stuff here. Excited to talk about it!

Ahhhh I love having blasted through imposter syndrome and my “you have to use LinkedIn brain when choosing what parts of yourself to show in the EA space

Just got a message from an attendee about how they’ve also been on a healing journey, vipassana meditation etc. So cool!

A really nice thing about “prison mode”

A really nice thing about “prison mode” (that is, living at my mum’s in a small English village without a car or income) is that going to London (or you know, anywhere novel at all, lol) feels extra novel, but also, I feel like I have much more… compassion, or excitement, or warmth, for other people?

Like, living in a city, it’s easy to feel annoyed by people on the underground, or indifferent, but because I’ve been in “country bumpkin” mode for so long, I feel genuinely excited to see so many new people. I feel a lot more goodwill towards them. I wonder if this is a permanent change or just downstream of the novelty - I guess it’s probably the latter. But I have been meditating daily recently so I definitely imagine the grounding that comes from that could help too.

I really like my Sasha Chapin-inspired meditation technique

Sasha absolutely didn’t invent this technique, but. I re-read his post recently, the one called like “Should you meditate, and also what even is meditation”, and his core instruction is basically just “surrender, notice all the ways you’re resisting, resisting just being an animal, resisting the fear of death” etc. What that has been translating to for me is just noticing wherever I have muscle tension, often due to getting lost in thoughts and ending up with e.g. tension in my face, but also just residual habitual tension in my forearms, my neck etc, and letting it go.

I think over time this will deepen and more subtle and profound forms of tension and resistance will be spotted (he talks about how it’s only after many hours of squinting at yourself in this way will you start to notice deep habitual tension and resistance that at first will be invisible to you because it’s so habitual).

But what I like about it is that it’s actually just really nice to do, and very satisfying. There’s a feeling of unspooling, of releasing the hold. I have a friend who talked about a feeling of being an octopus with their suction cups stuck to glass, and meditation being the thing where you slowly peel your suction cups away from the glass.

I’ve lost the ability, but I used to be able to relax and let go to the point that my entire field of vision would go insane, it’d go all pixellated and grey/brown and low resolution and video-game-y. I think this was the “descending down the cortical hierarchy”, “climbing down the see lower level priors/representations” thing that Shamil Chandaria talks about in his talk that’s called like “Consciousness and non-dual awakening” or something like that. A friend unlocked this ability for me - he has a meditation practice where you do a dyad with someone and stare into their eyes for 1-4 hours whilst talking about the experience, attuning to each other, debugging the connection between the two of you, until you drop into a flow state “We Space” where (for me at least) vision does That Thing and it’s crazy. And since he hacked me brain into doing that, I could also get to that place through progressive relaxation meditation on my own, sometimes. Very cool, but also non-profound, just a cool altered state.