Hyperlegibility

Trading Secrets for Attention

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Hi friends 👋,

Happy Tuesday! Sometimes, you write an essay and need to come up with a title. Sometimes, you have a title and need to come up with an essay. This is the latter.

Let’s get to it.

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Hyperlegibility

When I was a kid, if I missed a UPenn basketball game one night, I’d have to wait until The Philadelphia Inquirer arrived the next morning, shake the dew off the bag, throw out the useless (non-Sports) sections, and search for the box score. Or watch Comcast SportsRise like a hawk to make sure I caught the 30 second Penn segment, whenever it came on.

Today, when Puja decides not to stay up until 3am to watch the F1 Chinese Grand Prix, she records the race to watch when the kids nap the next day. Do you know how hard it is for her to avoid spoilers? Simply unlocking her phone is a live action game of Battleship.

Information that was once hard to find is now hard to avoid.

This is, of course, what the internet does. And it gets better at it all the time. But something I’ve noticed is that we do it to ourselves, too.

Tyler Cowen says that he writes for the AIs now. That he writes in such a way and in such volume that the models of the future might know his mind as fully as is possible. Maybe, given the volume, the models will give his words more weight.

In a recent profile in The Economist's 1843 Magazine, Cowen describes the inputs that produce those AI-legible outputs:

Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or five books. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract by Martin Luther. Later, I sat next to him while he went through an economics paper. He read it at the speed of someone checking that the pages were correctly ordered.

Hyperlexic. I like that word. Hyperlexia is when a kid learns to read unusually early and surprisingly well. Cowen certainly knows this. He knows a lot. He’s repurposed the word to mean something like: extremely fast, prolific, and retentive reader; someone for whom reading is very easy.

If 'hyperlexic' describes extraordinary reading ability, then let me propose a complementary word for extraordinary readability: Hyperlegible.

Hyperlegibility defines our current era so comprehensively that I was shocked when I googled the term and found only references to fonts.

So pardon me, yoink, I’m taking this one. Hyperlegible^TM. You can use it, too.

Fifteen years ago, after reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Venkatesh Rao (VGR) wrote about A Big Little Idea Called Legibility. Before the book had become a cult classic in tech circles (VGR helped make that happen, with blog posts like this one… he made Scott’s work more legible), VGR explained its core concept: legibility.

James Scott via Venkatesh Rao

The picture above illustrates an attempt to make forests legible. Because wild forests like the one on the left were “illegible” to tax authorities, “scientific forestry” transformed them into “orderly strands of the highest-yielding varieties,” Rao writes. “The resulting catastrophes – better recognized these days as the problems of monoculture – were inevitable.”

This was the general thrust: over and over, the state tries to impose order (legibility) on chaos (illegibility), disaster ensues.

With that context, what’s fascinating about modern Hyperlegibility is that it is not the result of top-down action; we impose it on ourselves. Or Moloch does, at least.

Hyperlegibility emerges with game theoretical certainty from each of our desire to win whatever game it is you’re playing. Certainly, it’s a consequence of playing The Great Online Game. In order for the right people and projects to find you, you must make yourself legible to them. To stand out in a sea of people making themselves legible, you must make yourself Hyperlegible: so easy to read and understand you rise to the top.

Once you become aware of Hyperlegibility, you see it everywhere.

Remember when The New York Times psy-opped the Laptop Class into making Personal User Manuals? “I get a little grumpy if I hadn’t had my latte ;) Don’t Slack me after 9pm 😡 Honestly I’m incredibly insecure and I take that out on my subordinates 🤷” That’s Hyperlegibility.

When NBA teams “solve” basketball by jacking up a lot of threes, that’s Hyperlegibility.

When a venture capital firm blares its thesis to the world instead of farming it in secret, that’s Hyperlegibility.

When Aella tweets a Sankey Diagram for her birthday orgy (NSFW), that’s Hyperlegibility.

When a company shares its “ARR” numbers in real time instead of building in “Stealth,” that’s Hyperlegibility.

No judgment. When I write an essay and send it to you, that’s Hyperlegibility.

Hyperlegibility isn’t good or bad. It’s neither and both. But it certainly is. Information used to be the highest form of alpha. Now everyone bends over backwards to leak it.

Through a combination of humanity getting ever-better at reading anything and humans becoming ever-more willing to make themselves legible, information is easier to find and understand than it’s ever been.

When I say we’re getting better at reading anything, what I mean is that we have both all of humanity’s accumulated information and modern tools by which to discover and decipher new information at our fingertips.

Let me give you an example.

I was reading Dominion the other day, the book by Tom Holland on the spread of Christianity, and found this paragraph particularly striking:

For almost two and a half millennia, one of the inscriptions commissioned by Darius to justify his rule of the world—written in three distinct languages, and featuring a particularly imperious portrait of the king himself—had been preserved on the side of a mountain by the name of Bisitun. Carved into a cliff some two hundred feet above the road that led from the Iranian plateau to Iraq, its survival had been ensured by its sheer accessibility. The chance to risk life and limb in the cause of deciphering ancient scripts, however, was one that the odd adventurer might positively relish. One such was Henry Rawlinson, a British officer on secondment from India to the Persian court. He first scouted out Bisitun in 1835, scaling the cliff as best as he was able, and recording as much of the inscription as he could make out. Then, eight years later, he returned to the site properly equipped with planks and ropes. Balanced precariously on a ladder, he was able to complete his transcription. ‘The interest of the occupation,’ he later recalled, ‘entirely did away with any sense of danger.’ By 1845 Rawlinson had completed a full translation of the section written in Persian, and sent it for publication in London. The Great King Spoke once more.

That’s a long block quote, probably too long for an essay this length. But sacrificing flow, adding a little friction and heaviness, is the best I can do to give you a sense for the lengths people once went to to get information, to make the world more legible.

Rawlinson spent a decade – not the whole decade, but still – in pursuit of information that you can now, thanks to his efforts, Google. In fact, I forgot the names of both Rawlinson and Bitisun, so a traditional in-book search came up fruitless. In the past, I would have spent, what, half an hour combing the book, or given up. Now…

Easy as.

And let’s say Rawlinson had never scaled Bitisun, that Darius’ words were still undiscovered. How would we get them today? A climb so treacherous as to “do away with any sense of danger”? No of course not. We would send up the drones, equipped with high resolution cameras and maybe some LiDAR, and use photogrammetry and machine learning to stitch the pictures together and make sense of their contents.

What once took a decade might take a week, and the results are searchable in a second.

There used to be this bit on the podcast Reply All where the show’s producer Alex Blumberg would bring a tweet he didn’t understand and co-hosts Alex Goldman and PJ Vogt would try to explain it to him. By the end, they’d try to get to three “Yeses” – meaning that all three understood the tweet.

Now, you just hit the little Grok button.

It costs like $100 to read your whole genome. Our telescopes can see 13 billion years into the past. Luke Farritor pulled an ancient library from the ashes of a volcano. Elad Gil is funding efforts to translate “the top 1,000 off-copyright books into all commonly spoken languages,” generate audio versions, and host language models that allow you to talk to and ask questions of each.

Alexandria AI

Henry Rawlinson smiles. Or weeps. I don’t know. It must all seem so easy and weightless to him.

The point, I hope, is clear. We are getting better at reading the world, just as a book that is entirely illegible to a two-year-old becomes entirely legible to a ten-year-old through improved skill.

The second reason for Hyperlegibility is the more fascinating one: we are tripping over ourselves to make ourselves easier to read.

Think Personal User Manuals. Think Tyler Cowen writing for the AIs. Think me, writing this.

We are game theoretically driven to share more and more of our best ideas, the ones that we might have once exploited in silence.

Here’s an example I like that hits close to home.

Imagine you’re a small emerging early stage venture capital fund. You’ve noticed something about the market that no one else has. Say you believe that quantum computing is closer than anyone else believes. You’ve identified a handful of promising companies that you want to back.

What do you do? Do you keep it secret or tell the world?

Well, what do you need to do in order to successfully invest against your thesis?

First, you’ll need to raise money from LPs. To do that, you’ll need to spell out as clearly as possible why you believe quantum computing is more investable than everyone else does and which types of companies you think are most investable. Maybe you have a network already, and you can do all of this behind the scenes. Maybe you don’t, and you need to yell your thesis from the rooftops: blog posts, podcast appearances, conference panels, whatever. One thing a differentiated view can get you is attention. So you trade a secret for the chance at money.

Assuming you raise, you’ll need to stand out to the companies you want to invest in. This is not the public markets; you can’t just invest in whatever you choose. They need to choose you, too. Maybe in the early days, you can know everyone – go to the conferences, meet them one-on-one, impress them with your insights and with the fact that you believe harder than anyone else does. Does that scale? Do your early investments pay off quickly enough to build a reputation in the community before other investors come in? How do you stand out?

Say you convince companies to let you invest early, you need to help them continue to raise money from downstream capital. Which means part of your job is to make quantum legible to the very firms who might one day compete with you. Sure, while your category is small, unproven, weird, and risky, they might let you win at the early stage. But eventually, they won’t. Either way, the proximate issue is getting your companies funded so your investments don’t go to zero before your ideas have had time to play out.

In all three pieces of your job, you are incentivized in the short-term to make yourself and your ideas Hyperlegible so LPs, founders, and downstream capital can find you. And without the short-term, there is no long-term.

Now imagine this dynamic playing out everywhere.

My friend Tina He wrote an excellent essay last week, Jevons Paradox: a personal perspective. She noticed that instead of letting us work less, AI actually incentivizes working more. The more you can do in each minute, the higher the opportunity cost from not doing anything. The problem is, even if everyone agrees that’s not what we want, who blinks?

If you work less, someone else will happily take your slice of the pie. She calls it a Malthusian Trap; it’s like Scott Alexander’s Moloch or a Red Queen’s Race: "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Same same here, with Hyperlegibility. You could opt out, stop publishing, encrypt yourself. Someone else will happily fill the vacuum.

Attention is the scarce resource. Information you can get.

Information, long alpha, becomes beta.

There’s a version of this essay that bemoans the fact that information is no longer precious.

That would feel good, to mourn Friday nights at Blockbuster, metaphorically speaking, but it wouldn’t be particularly useful.

The question to ask is: assuming Hyperlegibility, what do I do?

This is a question that I’ll probably explore over a bunch of essays, and without having the word, already have. There’s the question of what to do as an emerging manager given the conundrum I laid out above. There’s something about the growing relative importance of relationships, of “having a guy,” of agency and the ability to get things done. There is a reason that all of these ideas have become more popular recently (hint: it’s Hyperlegibility). There’s certainly something on the value of Vertical Integration, of how you chain things together to create new forms of value. The ideas in Most Human Wins are enhanced by thinking about Hyperlegibility. And I am quite certain that the more Hyperlegible most things become, the more people will crave mysteries and The Return of Magic.

But for now, I’ll leave you with this: Hyperlegibility is our reality. There’s no going back.

There is a generation of people living among us who don’t feel the same nostalgia for newspapers and “not knowing the answer to something immediately” that I do, because they never had those experiences in the first place. And they’re a preview of what happens when you take all of human knowledge as a commoditized input.

I’ve been talking to more college students recently, and despite rumors of their demise, the kids are very alright. Maybe every generation thinks this, but I’ve walked away from a few recent conversations thinking, “If I were competing with these people I would be COOKED.” They’ve somehow read as much as I have but have the faster brains of youth. It’s a scary combination.

The other day, I asked one of them, Malhar Manek, why so many of his peers seemed so scarily advanced. His answer was that they grew up on the internet, with access to all of the information imaginable. Not just the fire hose, but the blogs and newsletters and podcasts and YouTube videos that helped make sense of the stream. So it was easy for a relatively curious kid to figure out what to read to set a baseline, and then, baseline established while the brain is still fresh and curious, to jump off of that base of knowledge to ask their own questions. To help answer them, they have all of the internet’s information, AI, and even one-DM-away access to experts.

I’d never thought of it that way, because I didn’t live it. But by making the world Hyperlegible, we helped create a generation of Hyperlegibility-Native Hyperlexics who take as an input the information we worked to turn into an output. And thus civilization evolves and compounds.

A priori, I would have guessed that giving everyone access to the same information would lead to a convergence of goals. That doesn’t seem to be happening. One of the people I spoke with wants to start a vertically integrated healthcare company, another wants to write a Great Book, and what I’ve heard very consistently from smart college kids is that their smartest friends are all working on biotech, specifically neuro, specifically brain-computer interfaces.

Which is to say, if you think the world is Hyperlegible now, just wait.

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Thanks for reading,

Packy