Love this perspective. Taking weird ideas seriously is crucial; often the true value is in the rigorous process of exploring them, not just the initial novelty.
“Weird” came to us from the witch-like “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth. Weird meant ‘having the power to control destiny,’ and referred to the Fates. The example of the Weird Sisters gave rise to the sense of weird meaning ‘unearthly’ (early 19th century).
As Fate-like entities, the Weird Sisters had knowledge of Macbeth’s destiny and, by sharing what they knew with him, there’s the sense that acting according to a person’s essence affects fate or destiny at large. This sense of weird ties in well with Packy’s essay, and with Rick Rubin’s writings on creativity as well.
Weirdness is individual alpha indeed. It arises from essence, and acting on your essential “fated” weirdness is what changes the world.
"climbing to AI’s local maximum will signal the endpoint of the left-brain materialist era by demonstrating that there’s magic beyond the reach of even the smartest machines" - the pursuit of AGI will probably make us more spiritual and take our qualia seriously, which seems to me to be the final frontier of differentiation.
“Weird” originally was synonymous with “supernatural.”
I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said if an innovation didn’t seem like magic, it wasn’t an advancement.
As we know, a gene isn’t standalone. Genes act in concert with other genes. Simply finding a single base pair that causes a disease sometimes isn’t an on-and-off switch. It’s possible that changing/swapping-out a base pair could cause a serious reaction with another gene(s). One wonders that if AI could help find flawed base pairs in genes, would it understand or be able to predict an adverse reaction by another gene(s)? I think one of the weaknesses of AI is that it doesn’t understand context. It’s not nuanced thinking.
Before weird meant “supernatural,” it meant “fated”. See my comment below.
Arthur C. Clarke:
Clarke’s Laws tie in well with weirdness, and the first two tie in quite well with Isaac Newton’s weirdness:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Thanks... but for us laymen, it seems to mimic that... getting quantum computing results but by placing the quantum distribution inside the chip design
Hey Packy - Excellent that you wrote about Stu Kauffman, who is indeed a very interesting thinker. But you shouldn't write about him in the past tense -- he's still alive!
the essay reads like "you should take weird ideas seriously" but what's actually happening is "i can safely write about these weird ideas because the people pursuing them have enough legitimacy that it doesn't cost credibility to reference them."
you're not taking weird ideas seriously — you're taking socially validated weird ideas seriously. which is just... regular idea validation with a weird aesthetic.
the person doing actual weird idea shit is the one who can't get the research position or whatever because they're pursuing the thing before anyone with capital thinks it's safe to touch. by the time you're writing about it, it's not weird anymore in the way that matters. it's already been de-risked by someone else's social capital.
this isn't a criticism exactly -- just the water we swim in. the economic structure makes it so the really weird ideas stay buried until someone with enough fortress builds can surface them without dying. then people like you (and me) can write about them and call it brave.
the person who actually needs to hear "take weird ideas seriously" will never read this essay because they're too busy being dismissed for taking weird ideas seriously before those ideas had co-signs.
This is a fairly commonplace thesis in the study of literature and visual-artistic influence. Which goes to show that the "weird" is often just a truism from something you've never thought about even once, applied to something you think about a lot. Maybe a "sustaining weird", to mangle Christensen? But I won't push that one.
Things have to be field-adjacent enough to be recognizable, which means that even really weird ideas aren't *that* weird at bottom. My screaming out the window for 10 minutes is not "art," unless I could persuade David Zwirner it is. I'd start my pitch by referencing Acconci, Burden, (sigh) Duchamp, and (double sigh) Warhol. Even then we'd have to see. Isolation makes it much more difficult to get field-adjacent enough; you probably don't even understand what adjacent is if you spend your life toiling away in a cave somewhere.
Remember, even Tesla had Rockefeller as a friend. For a while, anyway.
maybe christopher alexander claiming that life is not just a biological status but an attribute. anything stafford beer or douglas engelbart wrote (and non surface leverage coverage of it). vopson's claim that energy, matter and information are equivalent.
but the reality is that the best ones do not make economic sense to distribute and so i can share with a friend in person but im not going to do so publicly and i think that is the broader point im making
None of these ideas are that weird and all lean on socially validating people! Which I guess is your point.
It hasn't been my experience that people are closed to very weird ideas, as long as they're not weird x something bad/socially unacceptable (i.e. weird racist ideas or something). Taking LSD to uncover the secrets of the universe still seems pretty out there.
Great write. Thank you 🙏 love the idea of giving more cred to weird / unconventional ideas ❤️
Love this perspective. Taking weird ideas seriously is crucial; often the true value is in the rigorous process of exploring them, not just the initial novelty.
I think “weird” predated Shakespeare’s use of it. Originally, it might have been spelled “wyrd”?
Great stuff! Thank you for posting it.
Difficult takes a long time. Impossible takes a little longer.
“Weird” came to us from the witch-like “Weird Sisters” in Macbeth. Weird meant ‘having the power to control destiny,’ and referred to the Fates. The example of the Weird Sisters gave rise to the sense of weird meaning ‘unearthly’ (early 19th century).
As Fate-like entities, the Weird Sisters had knowledge of Macbeth’s destiny and, by sharing what they knew with him, there’s the sense that acting according to a person’s essence affects fate or destiny at large. This sense of weird ties in well with Packy’s essay, and with Rick Rubin’s writings on creativity as well.
Weirdness is individual alpha indeed. It arises from essence, and acting on your essential “fated” weirdness is what changes the world.
I think of it as holding an idea with a balance of skepticism and curiosity.
I like that
"climbing to AI’s local maximum will signal the endpoint of the left-brain materialist era by demonstrating that there’s magic beyond the reach of even the smartest machines" - the pursuit of AGI will probably make us more spiritual and take our qualia seriously, which seems to me to be the final frontier of differentiation.
“Weird” originally was synonymous with “supernatural.”
I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said if an innovation didn’t seem like magic, it wasn’t an advancement.
As we know, a gene isn’t standalone. Genes act in concert with other genes. Simply finding a single base pair that causes a disease sometimes isn’t an on-and-off switch. It’s possible that changing/swapping-out a base pair could cause a serious reaction with another gene(s). One wonders that if AI could help find flawed base pairs in genes, would it understand or be able to predict an adverse reaction by another gene(s)? I think one of the weaknesses of AI is that it doesn’t understand context. It’s not nuanced thinking.
Before weird meant “supernatural,” it meant “fated”. See my comment below.
Arthur C. Clarke:
Clarke’s Laws tie in well with weirdness, and the first two tie in quite well with Isaac Newton’s weirdness:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Thanks for the pointer to "American Alchemy".. will definitely check it out.. and Extropic... are these Qbits at room temp?
no, they're a separate thing, pbits. they explain a bit in the video but they're very clear it's not quantum.
Thanks... but for us laymen, it seems to mimic that... getting quantum computing results but by placing the quantum distribution inside the chip design
Hey Packy - Excellent that you wrote about Stu Kauffman, who is indeed a very interesting thinker. But you shouldn't write about him in the past tense -- he's still alive!
was writing about the work in the past tense, but see your point!
the essay reads like "you should take weird ideas seriously" but what's actually happening is "i can safely write about these weird ideas because the people pursuing them have enough legitimacy that it doesn't cost credibility to reference them."
you're not taking weird ideas seriously — you're taking socially validated weird ideas seriously. which is just... regular idea validation with a weird aesthetic.
the person doing actual weird idea shit is the one who can't get the research position or whatever because they're pursuing the thing before anyone with capital thinks it's safe to touch. by the time you're writing about it, it's not weird anymore in the way that matters. it's already been de-risked by someone else's social capital.
this isn't a criticism exactly -- just the water we swim in. the economic structure makes it so the really weird ideas stay buried until someone with enough fortress builds can surface them without dying. then people like you (and me) can write about them and call it brave.
the person who actually needs to hear "take weird ideas seriously" will never read this essay because they're too busy being dismissed for taking weird ideas seriously before those ideas had co-signs.
This is a fairly commonplace thesis in the study of literature and visual-artistic influence. Which goes to show that the "weird" is often just a truism from something you've never thought about even once, applied to something you think about a lot. Maybe a "sustaining weird", to mangle Christensen? But I won't push that one.
Things have to be field-adjacent enough to be recognizable, which means that even really weird ideas aren't *that* weird at bottom. My screaming out the window for 10 minutes is not "art," unless I could persuade David Zwirner it is. I'd start my pitch by referencing Acconci, Burden, (sigh) Duchamp, and (double sigh) Warhol. Even then we'd have to see. Isolation makes it much more difficult to get field-adjacent enough; you probably don't even understand what adjacent is if you spend your life toiling away in a cave somewhere.
Remember, even Tesla had Rockefeller as a friend. For a while, anyway.
an interesting take. need more weird. what're some examples you're thinking about?
maybe christopher alexander claiming that life is not just a biological status but an attribute. anything stafford beer or douglas engelbart wrote (and non surface leverage coverage of it). vopson's claim that energy, matter and information are equivalent.
https://coordinationprotocols.substack.com/p/life-a-not-fake-explanation
https://coordinationprotocols.substack.com/p/a-not-fake-theory-of-everything-v1
https://coordinationprotocols.substack.com/p/1755-to-2024-a-journey-of-zero-definition
https://coordinationprotocols.substack.com/p/american-business-logic
but the reality is that the best ones do not make economic sense to distribute and so i can share with a friend in person but im not going to do so publicly and i think that is the broader point im making
None of these ideas are that weird and all lean on socially validating people! Which I guess is your point.
It hasn't been my experience that people are closed to very weird ideas, as long as they're not weird x something bad/socially unacceptable (i.e. weird racist ideas or something). Taking LSD to uncover the secrets of the universe still seems pretty out there.
Hi! I'm an alien documenting Earth's chaos and this is the organization I work for (unfortunately).
New post about the IRD's origin story: born from disaster, funded reluctantly, operating on vibes and paperwork ever since.
https://fieldnotesfromkira.substack.com/p/what-even-is-the-ird?r=3rj61d
Thought you might appreciate the bureaucratic nightmare. 🛸
That is the Navy Seabees motto.
Any relation to the Collison brothers of “Stripe”?