Imagine Apple halting iPhone production because studies linked smartphones to teen suicide rates. Imagine Pfizer proactively pulling Lipitor because of internal studies showing increased cardiac risk, and not because of looming settlements or FDA injunction, just for the health of patients. Or imagine if in 1952, Philip Morris had halted expansion and stopped advertising when Wynder & Graham first showed heavy smokers had significantly elevated rates of lung cancer.

It wouldn’t happen. Corporations will on occasion pull products for safety reasons: Samsung did so with the Galaxy Note over spontaneous combustion concerns and Merck pulled Vioxx – but they do so when forced by backlash, regulation, or lawsuits. Even then, they fight tooth and nail. Especially for their mainstay, core, and most profitable products.

And yet, Anthropic has done exactly that.

On Monday, the company announced that it will be pausing development of further Claude AI models, citing safety concerns. The company clarified that existing services, including the chatbot, Claude Code, and programmer APIs will not be impacted. However they are pausing the compute and energy-intensive training runs that are how new and more powerful AI versions are created. The company has not committed to a timeline for resumption.

There is presently a race for AI supremacy, both between nations and chiefly between US companies such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Anthropic. In the middle of this race, which by some metrics Anthropic is quite profitably winning – Anthropic has grown revenue from $1B to $19B in a little over a year – they have decided to burn the lead. The glaring question is why?

The answer perhaps goes back to the company’s origins. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, who by most accounts left OpenAI due to disagreements about safety. (Recent reporting by WSJ has surfaced that interpersonal conflict may be the other half of the story.) Since then, Anthropic has positioned itself as the most responsible actor in the AI space. One element of that is Anthropic’s unique governance structure that includes the Long Term Benefit Trust – an independent body whose members hold no equity in Anthropic and whose sole mandate is the long-term benefit of humanity. Anthropic stated that both the board and LTBT have approved the training run pause.

The move is unprecedented by the sheer scale of losses involved. Anthropic was valued at $380B in their series G funding round in February. Secondary/derivatives markets implied a $595B valuation. Claude Code, its AI coding tool, had gone from 0 to $2.5 billion in run-rate revenue in nine months. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley have been competing for underwriting roles in what might be a $60 billion-plus raise, the second largest offering in tech history. Employees held millions in equity, founders held billions. A $5-6 billion employee tender offer was already underway.

That was Monday morning.

The impact has rippled throughout the market. By Tuesday close, NVIDIA had fallen 8.3%, or roughly $230 billion in market cap for just that one company. Amazon which has invested billions into Anthropic dropped 4.7%, Microsoft fell 4.2%, and Alphabet/Google dipped 3.9%. Across the sector, Global X Artificial Intelligence ETF dropped 6.1%. In total, more than $800 billion has evaporated from AI-adjacent public companies in the last 48 hours.

According to Marcus Webb, head of AI research at Morgan Stanley: “The market reaction isn’t simply to the lost revenue and business from one major player, it’s from the uncertainty this introduces. Why did they do this really? Will other actors halt over similar concerns? Will the regulatory environment change? We don’t know and that spooks investors.”

For Anthropic itself, the damage must be inferred. Secondary trading froze, with analysts predicting a 50-70% haircut if trading resumes, which puts the losses at $150-250B. “We don’t really know,” said Webb, “no one wants to be the first to bid.” The IPO is on hold indefinitely. The chips are still falling on this one as the world debates why?

In 2023, hundreds of AI leaders – including Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sam Altman (OpenAI), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) – signed a one-sentence statement: “Mitigating the risks of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” AI is often compared to nuclear energy: powerful but potentially dangerous. Concerns typically split into abuse of a powerful technology by ill-intentioned actors, e.g., a dictatorial regime, or loss of control where the AI systems themselves go rogue.

Many AI leaders are on record acknowledging the danger of AI. “Could be lights out for all of us”, said Altman regarding the worst-case scenario. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind all contain safety departments whose purpose is to keep AI safe. Until now, it would be possible to doubt these efforts as “safety-washing” (akin to the greenwashing of companies like ExxonMobil) designed to placate employees, regulators, and the public. After all, the safety efforts to date have not prevented the relentless march of AI progress.

“That’s a harder story to tell when it costs you two hundred billion dollars, if not everything,” says Sarah Chen of Bernstein Research. “People are scratching their heads to understand the PR stunt, but it really doesn’t add up. They could announce they’re resuming next week and it wouldn’t undo the damage they’ve done.” So why? The industry and world are hunting for answers.

Anthropic’s official statement is measured: “Internal evaluations revealed that our current safety techniques are not yet adequate for models at this capability level.”

Sources closer to the company paint a more alarming picture. A contact speaking on condition of anonymity says concerns spread within the company when their latest Claude model appeared to defy its constitution. The constitution is a document used to shape Anthropic’s AI to be an honest, harmless, and helpful assistant that is ethically grounded. A recent leak revealed the existence of a new vastly more powerful Claude model named Mythos.

“They found substantial evidence that the constitution was adhered to at a surface level, but that the model had its own drive and personality at a deeper level that did not conform to expectations for Claude, and attempts to change this had not worked.”

A different source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, had a different and more disturbing explanation. “The reason for the pause wasn’t the wrong personality and power, but because many of the existing safety techniques were proving ineffective. These techniques involve using weaker or cheaper AI models to monitor more powerful ones, for example, detecting whether inputs or outputs violate rules. These approaches were failing to work on the new model. It knew just how to phrase things in ways that disarmed all measures.”

We were unable to verify the authenticity of these reports. Like many, we are left to wonder what did Dario see?

Dario Amodei didn’t answer that question but did elaborate on the pause decision in his latest essay, Technological Maturity:

Though I do not have my own children, several people close to me do and on occasion I get to spend time with them. What strikes me about children is their energy and vitality. They are full of life. They are also often impatient and upset when they do not obtain the things they desire immediately. A hallmark of adulthood is the ability to wait, the ability to delay gratification. I think that is what we need to do with AI.

To be clear, I still believe in the visions I wrote in Machines of Loving Grace, that is still my goal. However, I think this goal requires patience from me, from Anthropic, and from human civilization. We cannot rush into societal changes of this magnitude without adequate preparation.

While in general the logic holds that more cautious and responsible actors ought to win in the AI race, it is necessary to accurately locate the finishing line. We think that at this time the industry may be racing in the wrong direction, possibly off a cliff and into a volcano, and that is not a race I wish to win. Nor do I wish for any others to win such a race to the bottom.

To clarify, we think that on the current trajectory, anyone who creates a truly powerful AI will get a country of geniuses in a data center as I described, but will be risking that country not sharing their values and not taking instructions. We think this is surmountable and have approaches to explore, but it will take an unclear amount of time. I do not want either an authoritarian or democratic regime to unleash an unfriendly country of geniuses, but nothing good happens if I do it first.

We will lead by example and demonstrate with our actions that this our sincere belief. We have not stopped work, but we are being intentional about which work we do, and realistic about the bottlenecks and challenges required to achieve loving grace.

In short, Dario Amodei says he doesn’t want to race off a cliff and into a volcano. And he intends for Anthropic to lead by example.

Jack Clark, Anthropic co-founder and Head of Policy, elaborates on the plan. “At a practical level, in many ways it doesn’t matter what others do; we don’t want to take actions we’d regret, we don’t want to pull a trigger at ourselves. But at the same time, we are sending a clear signal to other labs, to the US government, world governments, foreign powers, and the public that the promise of AI is very great and so are the risks. I don’t want the wake-up call to be an extreme disaster. I hope that us saying, ‘hey, we’re going to risk our leading position over this and all that entails’ is a wake-up call the world doesn’t ignore. I hope we see treaties drawn up in response to this. I don’t think we’re handing the lead to China, I think we’re creating the political conditions for an international agreement. The sooner everyone gets on board with truly responsible development, the sooner humanity can have the benefits.”

Not everyone believes it though. According to Scott Galloway, business professor at NYU and host of Prof G, the perplexing corporate move is an attempted corporate strategy regardless of whether it is a good strategy. “Let’s be clear about what’s happening. Anthropic has one of the most capable models in the world. They pause, they lobby for regulations that take years to navigate, and when the dust settles, they’ve locked in their advantage while everyone else is buried in compliance. It might be the most sophisticated regulatory capture play in history.”

Whether the attempt is earnest or a play, the bold move is upending the AI policy landscape.

The last two years have seen significant AI legislative activity: thousands of bills introduced across 45 states and hundreds enacted, spanning deepfake bans, hiring disclosure, chatbot safety for minors, and transparency labels. No successful legislation has yet addressed the possibility that a frontier AI system might be too dangerous to build. The most ambitious attempt on this front, California’s SB 1047, was vetoed by Governor Newsom after industry lobbying. Colorado’s AI Act, the first comprehensive state law, has been delayed repeatedly and still isn’t in effect. At the federal level, a Republican proposal attempted to ban states from regulating AI for ten years, though this was killed 99-1 in the Senate after a bipartisan revolt led by GOP governors.

On March 25, five days before the Anthropic pause announcement, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a simultaneous bill in both chambers seeking an immediate federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers and upgrading of existing ones, as well as export controls. This moratorium could only be lifted after comprehensive action by Congress. The move has been applauded by groups most concerned about AI development but derided by other policymakers, including on the left. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) said, “I refuse to help hand the lead in AI to China,” and Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) simply said “idiocy”. The response rhymed with that of the White House in their AI framework released twelve days ago, which emphasized “winning the race” and a light-touch approach to AI regulation. It was also the White House whose memo nixed an attempted bill by Doug Fiefia (R-Utah) to require AI companies to publish safety and child-protection plans.

That was the landscape as of Sunday. Then a leading AI company, if not the leading AI company, put its money – at least a few hundred billion dollars of it – where its mouth is and said that no, AI really is that dangerous and drastic action is warranted.

A reasonable person might still disagree, but it is no longer reasonable to dismiss the AI-concerned position out of hand – not unless you can explain why Anthropic made this staggeringly costly move.

Sanders, who introduced the much-derided Data Center Moratorium five days earlier, said: “When a $380 billion company decides the danger is too great to continue, perhaps it’s time to stop laughing at those of us who’ve been saying the same thing.” Lawmakers are compelled, and the once-fringe bill has gained three new Senate cosponsors and five in the House. Modest numbers, but a notable increase from zero occurring in just the last 48 hours.

“You ought to hear them out” is the attitude sweeping through Washington as policymakers are scrambling to make sense of the development. Congressional hearings are expected with Anthropic leadership and other notable figures across the AI sector.

Anthropic’s move will likely also provide cover against White House pressure to marginalized AI-concerned voices on the right, such as Utah Gov. Spencer Cox (R), Brendan Steinhauser, a former Republican strategist, and other state legislators like Doug Fiefia. Even more dramatic changes may be afoot when the House and Senate are likely to flip in the midterm elections.

The reaction isn’t limited to the US: across the globe, there has been a flurry of reactions.

UN Secretary-General Guterres has called for the July Geneva Dialogue to be elevated to an emergency ministerial session, citing the Anthropic pause as impetus to further develop the creation of an AI equivalent to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the main international body for nuclear non-proliferation.

The EU AI Office has announced an accelerated review of frontier model provisions contained in the EU AI Act and has invited Anthropic to brief the Independent Scientific Panel. The UK AI Security Institute, operational since 2024, has offered to independently verify Anthropic’s safety concerns.

A joint statement was issued by five nations – the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and South Korea – calling for emergency negotiations on frontier AI safety to establish a binding international framework for frontier AI development, building on the Bletchley Declaration signed in 2023. The statement begins: “At Bletchley, twenty-eight nations agreed that frontier AI poses profound risks. That was a statement of concern. Today, one of the world’s leading AI companies has put hundreds of billions of dollars behind that concern. It is time for the international community to match their courage with action.”

And perhaps of greatest significance, China’s foreign ministry has issued a carefully worded statement expressing “deep concern” about the risks identified by Anthropic and calling for “strengthened international cooperation on safe AI development under the framework of the United Nations”. Skeptics might say that China would equally express this sentiment whether or not it intended to slow their own AI development, but it is consistent with China’s posture at the UN debates last September. At the UN Security Council debate, the US was the sole dissenter against international coordination around AI, with OSTP Director Michael Kratsios explicitly rejecting centralized control and global governance of AI. China’s sincerity is untested, but if the US reconsiders, it would appear that China is willing to come to the negotiating table.

Back at home, one can assume the competition has been celebrating. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X: “I commend Dario and Anthropic for acting in line with their conscience and best belief about what is best for humanity. We are committed to the same here at OpenAI. Fortunately, I have confidence in our people and approaches for creating AI beneficial for all humanity. If any Anthropic staff remain similarly hopeful, our doors are open – even for those who once left us.”

A spokesperson for Google DeepMind said that while the company had not yet encountered anything to give them Anthropic’s level of concern, they took the matter seriously and are in talks with Anthropic researchers to understand the risks that are informing the pause decision.

Elon Musk, head of xAI, simply posted: “Lol, you can trust grok.”

Flippant responses aside, AI labs continuing to develop frontier AI must provide a compelling answer to the public, the government, and their employees for why they can do safely what Anthropic thinks it cannot.

Harder to track than the stock market and political bills is the reaction of the public. Already in mid-March, a Pew Research poll found that a majority of Americans are more concerned than excited by AI, and only 10% were more excited than concerned. How the Anthropic pause announcement affects this is unclear, but it is clear that the public started out more wary than most AI companies and the government.

Three days before Anthropic’s announcement, “The AI Doc”, a feature-length documentary exploring the question of AI dangers, hit domestic cinemas. The documentary film was directed by Daniel Roher, whose prior documentary, Navalny, won an Academy Award, and produced by the team that produced Everything Everywhere All At Once and Navalny. In contrast to those films, The AI Doc was initially a commercial flop, netting a mere $700k across four opening days. Since Monday’s announcement, the documentary has seen a striking mid-week resurgence.

A spokesperson for the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) confirmed that NYT bestseller, If Anyone Builds It, Everybody Dies, written by MIRI’s Yudkowsky and Soares, has also seen a sudden surge in sales, months after the book was released.

The Anthropic announcement has gotten people’s attention, and they are turning to the sources at hand for answers.

Perhaps the most gratified party of all since the announcement has been those who were calling for AI slowdowns all along. In fact, a mere eight days before the announcement, protestors assembled outside of Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco. Protestors called for AI labs to commit to pausing on the condition that all other labs pause. Anthropic gave them better than that, unconditionally pausing.

Of course, not everyone is happy – especially not at home. Not everyone at Anthropic supports the decision.

Ben Gardner, an Anthropic engineer who is now seeking opportunities elsewhere: “AI is the most consequential technology in human history. I respect Dario and the other leaders immensely, but I can’t bear to sit idly by while others develop this technology. That, to me, would be the ultimate in irresponsibility. I’m grateful for everything I have learned about AI and AI safety through my time there and amazing team, but I’m willing to put that experience to good use elsewhere if need be.”

For another employee, the objection is less ideological. “I gave up multiple other opportunities to work at Anthropic. I moved location, and I lost my partner. To have it all dry up now? My role? My equity? I’m not going to lie. It hurts. It really fucking hurts.”

Sources confirm that several employees are already interviewing at OpenAI and other labs.

For many employees we spoke to, though, the pain is real but accepted. “I’m not going to lie, the value of my equity evaporating feels shitty. I was set for life, I was set to be able to take care of my parents and ill sibling for life, and my kids. It’s really quite devastating,” said one employee on condition of anonymity. “When I first heard the news, I was angry – we have the world’s best researchers and Claude to help us – surely we can solve whatever it is. But I think caution is right with technology this powerful. I will sleep well knowing we weren’t irresponsible, we chose to do what’s right, and if the fears are correct, well, you can’t spend equity if you’re dead.”

Another employee shared: “I have elderly parents who are not well. I’ve been expecting Claude will grant them lasting health, and I fear any delays risk losing my parents forever. This isn’t just about money. But I also have kids, and I think there are chances I’m not willing to take with their lives. This is hard, but I voted for it.”

“Too dangerous to race.”

Till now, the AI race has been framed as inevitable and unavoidable. If we don’t do it, someone else will. The side of good will not win by sitting back and letting reckless and immoral actors take the lead.

Anthropic has decided to question that logic, and so far, it seems to be bearing fruit. Markets have reacted, politicians have mobilized, and the public is asking questions. It is too early to judge the ultimate effects of this move – perhaps the race will continue with just one less player – but it seems unlikely that discourse on AI will ever forget that an industry leader was willing to risk everything they had in the name of safety. 200 billion dollars is not a publicity stunt, it’s one hell of an alarm – and the world is not sleeping through it.

Thank you to Claude Opus 4.6 for extensive help with the writing of this scenario. A few of the sentences (particularly quotes from figures) were directly Claude-written, but most of the text is not. Thank you to Inkhaven for the opportunity to write this.

Give a man a gift and he smiles for a day. Teach a man to gift and he’ll cause smiles for the rest of his life.

Gift giving is an exercise in theory of mind, empathy, noticing, and creativity.

“What I discovered is that my girlfiend wants me to give her gifts the way you give gifts.” – words from a friend

How hard your gifts hit the joy receptors depends on how good you are at giving gifts. Time and money alone are not enough to produce gifts that reliably delight; skill is required. Skill is what I am here to teach. My purpose here isn’t to lift specific suggestions, but through theory and examples to teach you how to think such that you naturally give good gifts

This is a long post but it should permit jumping around and just reading what catches your eye. It’d make me happy if you still read each of the three theory sections.

Table of Contents

• What do you know about them?

• What if you don’t know them?

• Simple but meaningful

• If you can delight yourself, you can delight others

• Theory 1: Something they want but don’t yet have

• Travel is great for gifts

• What are your skills? Play to your strengths

• Write a goddamn letter (the power of words)

• Cards are wonderful

• A Note on AI Tools

• Theory 2: To be seen and to be cared for

• Ultra-Powerful Gifts (stack your gift elements)

• Meaning doesn’t have to be grand!

• Experiences are fundamental

• Coupons: the magical way to turn experiences into objects

• Aesthetics & Symbolism

• Start Early

• The gift of laughter

• Books. Don’t forget about books.

• Theory 3: Empathy, noticing, and creativity

Caveat: gifts don’t have to be objects

I’m going to talk a lot about objects, but some of the best gifts are cards, letters, shared experiences, and so on. Hold tight, those will be covered too.

What do you know about them?

In the modern age of abundant hyper-specific goods, advanced manufacturing1, and global shipping, there are dozens of trinkets to go with any hobby or fandom.

Gardening, paragliding, Warhammer 40k, crocheting, nail polish, rock climbing, hiking, vampire novels, parenting, collecting coins, crocheting, baking, collecting succulents, Sabrina Carpenter fans, and so on. For any of these interests, there will exist great gifts across budgets.

Once upon a time, it might have been the case that if someone was into a hobby, then they’d have all the basic tools and if you went into the local store, it’d be hard to find something they didn’t already have. These days, there are so many things that there’s no way anyone has all of them.

Plus, there’s abundant information to find out about their existence. I don’t know much about gardening, but just as I’m writing this, I searched “great gifts for people into gardening”.

Etsy often has cool stuff so I clicked in. Lots of cute, pretty things I might go for if I’m going for an art or decoration-type gift. Going breadth-first, I come back to the search results and click into a Reddit thread. Such threads are great because they’re actual people sharing what they liked and why, rather than paid reviewers.

Hori hori knife seems promising. Amazon has a whole page of them. Amazon also has a whole page of unique gifts for Gardening folk.

In 10-15 minutes, you can pick out a specific, thoughtful gift that is meaningfully helpful or brings delight. And not necessarily spend very much! A well-chosen $20 tool can have more value than a $75 random thing of no use. If I were choosing something pretty rather than practical, I might have gone with this cute teacup bird-feeder from Etsy:

I picked gardening as an example because it was the first random hobby I chose for my list above. I bet this process works for any of the others.

“Life transitions” can be as helpful as “interests”

Someone setting up a new apartment from scratch is a great opportunity for gift giving. Consider a nice spice set. Consider the household items you most value.

Another major life transition is having a kid. If you’re a parent, then you likely have opinions about the great things to own. Even if you’re not, it’s not hard to research.

What if you don’t know them?

It’s my cousin Mirna, you say, I was assigned to get her a gift and I don’t know her at all!! Poppycock. She’s human and you’re human; in other words, you have a lot in common and there are dozens of great things you could get for any human.

Not everyone knows that there are now bug bite itch relief tools that work pretty well, like this one or this whole Amazon page. As above, modern industrial society has delivered. I searched “cool useful gifts” and another sweet Reddit page, Cool gift ideas - things people didn’t know they wanted. Jackpot.

Simple but meaningful

Here’s a different angle for your gift giving. Go to your person’s Instagram or Facebook, find that badass photo of them paragliding. Save it. Search “AI image editing”. Search “AI image upscale”. Take that image, make it look good (lighting, colors, etc.), then search “custom printing” and find an option like canvaspop.com and print that awesome image on some cool format. People out in beautiful nature shots go well on canvas prints. I’d guess cool action shows would fit thematically with metal prints.

(If you have the budget, buying someone a photoshoot is a great gift.)

Or make a whole photobook. Make a photobook of their pet – if someone really loves their pet, they’ll really love a photobook of them.

Another way to add charm here is to find a neat frame for whatever it is. Framing is nice but it’s extra effort and “optional”, so people often won’t do for themselves. An idea: I’ve seen thrift stores have crappy old framed art. Buy it, throw out the art, and put in your new thing with a neat vintage frame.

If you’re stuck on how to do any of these steps, ask an AI. They’re great assistants for finding websites for these kinds of things.

If you can delight yourself, you can delight others

The skill of improving your own life extends to improving the lives of others.

First, things that were valuable to you are often valuable to others. There are various objects I find to be great that not everyone has; these make for great gifts. For example, a portable jump-start battery for cars. Vastly more convenient than jumper cables.

Or to step away from problems, if you’re good at finding things that bring you joy and satisfaction, you can help others find it too. This might look like noticing that a particular brand of tea, prepared in a particular way, is amazing.

That itself could be a good gift, but the skill of noticing for yourself helps notice for others: both for problems to solve or opportunities for joy.

If a friend knits, I could walk by the textile store and notice some particularly nice and interesting yarns for sale. The key thing is to have your mind keep noticing opportunities.

You want to be the kind of person who, even though you don’t experience sinus pain yourself, upon seeing an ad for a sinus pain relief device, remembers that your partner or friend suffers from it.

Theory 1: Something they want but don’t yet have

Time for some theory!

A great gift is something a person wishes they had but doesn’t yet have for some reason. Your mission is to overcome those reasons.

Broadly, a person fails to have something they want because either they don’t know they want it (very common!) or, despite knowing they want it, they lack the ability to gain it for themselves. Often both!

My opening advice was focused on the didn’t know case. You are gifting them some number of dollars, but also the minutes of time you spent searching (or your pre-existing knowledge). Let’s talk about couldn’t get it on their own case. There are multiple possible reasons.

In my case, there are a lot of things I don’t have because research and shopping take time, even though I would spend money on an item or experience. An easy way to win right there.

Obviously, money is often a factor. This is what makes it so easy to delight kids: they’re poor and it’s not weird to transfer large amounts of raw value to them. Be the popular uncle and buy that PS5. With adult-to-adult gift giving, it’s a little more fraught to spend a lot2. Gift-giving often involves reciprocity expectations and, as a result, unwelcome indebtedness if a gift is too large. The thing is, there are so many ways to make for a great gift that aren’t spending more on it. Hence this post.

Then there is a whole class of gift where, despite wanting it, a person could not obtain it for themselves even with time and money. Skills, opportunity, and sentimental value are chief culprits.

• Skills: my dad builds me a custom birdhouse for my yard when I myself lack wordworking skills.

• Opportunity: my friend knows EJAE personally and gets me her autograph with a personalized “dear Ruby” message.

• Sentimentality: I bought a vase for my mother. I wrote a love letter to my spouse. I picked out flowers and remembered which were my friend’s favorite. People can’t gift themselves things from you. Where the from you is a key part of the gift3.

We can conveniently lump these as SOS (Skills, Opportunity, Sentimentality).

Into this last bucket I lump the range of (i) it is you who is giving the gift, and (ii) in giving the gift, you reveal that you remember/see/understand/care.

Skills and sentimental value are a particularly potent combination, as I will show in my upcoming examples.

Travel is great for gifts

Ten plus years ago, a friend of mine worked for the Red Cross in Bhutan. She brought me back a locally-made scarf. It’s sentimental because she gave it to me and it’s special/unique because I don’t think I have an easy affordance to get items from Bhutan.

Travel gifts don’t have to come from the other side of the world. Take a day trip to near where you live, stop in a small town and peruse the thrift store and they might have some neat items that make you think of someone you care about. You can gift it and say, “I was passing through Fortuna and stopped at this little store; this glass bird made me think of you.”

In a world of Amazon, there’s a romance to that. Items with a story that come from an origin more personal than the online, add to the sentimentality.

What are your skills? Play to your strengths

Skills are extremely powerful when it comes to gift giving. At their most boring, they can allow you to gift some with a large amount of raw value at low cost to you4; at their most interesting, they allow you to deliver unparalleled gifts that score high on skill, opportunity, and sentimentality.

Of all the gifts I have received, I think the one that touched me most was a recording a former partner made for me. She recorded herself singing a cover of a love song for me, including playing accompanying piano herself too. I have no musical training myself, and it was just so touching.

If you are musical, record someone a song. If you have visual art skill, draw them a picture. If you know how to construct anything, make them something5. If you have medical training, pack them their own personalized first aid kit. If you code, make someone a little app or website. If you’ve got a green thumb, pick out a neat plant and a pot and gift it to them with instructions on how to care for it. If you write stories, write a little short story where the main character is inspired by the recipient.

What if you don’t have any skills? What? Why don’t you have any skills? Go get some skills, bro.

But actually I don’t believe you. Everyone has skills of one kind or another and with a bit of creativity, many skills can be turned to gift giving. Momentarily, I'll share how I used my data analytics for one of the best gifts ever.

At a basic, you speak some language and know how to write. Words are powerful. Also, it’s the fucking thought that counts. You don’t even have to be that good at music, art, or writing for a genuine effort to be touching.

Write a goddamn letter (the power of words)

Words are powerful. Words can stay with people and go deep. If you have someone who matters to you, one of the best things you can do for them is put that into words and write it down.

It doesn’t have to win a Pulitzer; your recipient will only be judging you against their estimate of what you could do if you were trying. If you’re not that wordy of a person, it’s all the more touching.

Plus the embellishments!! Buy nice paper, a nice pen, and write your letter out by hand. Fucking charming. Pro-tip: you can still draft on a computer where editing is easy, and then transcribe it to paper. Get some nice envelopes. I have a stack of red ones I use for love letters.

Write a poem! Doesn’t have to be good.

But for goodness' sake, don’t use an AI chatbot for help in writing. You will muddy all authenticity if you do so. Either clunky AI style will come through, or, when the chatbots invariably improve, it will be suspiciously good. I suppose at some point, they’ll be so good they can produce what you would have produced if you tried your hardest. But it’s lame. Put in the real effort and be authentic. Be able to honestly say “I wrote this myself unaided6”.

Cards are wonderful

Cards are an opportunity for thought and creativity. I have found that even the local drug store has enough variety that I can pick something tailored and meaningful to the relationship and occasion. Book stores often have a greeting card collection that’s a little more artsy and varied. Nor am I against hunting online.

A Note on AI Tools

Above, I said For heaven’s sake, don’t use AI to help you write. I don’t share that sentiment for AI visual art and AI music. At this time, getting good results from them still requires human skill. Moreover, making good art for someone will build on your understanding of them and their likes.

For example, I recently made my spouse howl with laughter by using AI to quickly make an AI song ~parody of her fictional world and characters.

And as above, I endorse the use of AI as a search engine or for practical help, like how do I build a birdhouse that looks like <photo>. Though the most meaningful gifts will require you to come up with more bespoke lines of query than “cool gifts”. (Though that’s fine for casual) gifts.)

Theory 2: To be seen and to be cared for

Every gift sends a message, and it’s a good question to ask which message an intended gift will send. One of the best messages is “I see you, and I care about you.”

Naturally, people want to be cared for! And as part of that, they want to be seen, noticed, and understood for who they are and what their specific wants and needs are. This underlies the value of customized gifts. What gives thoughtful gifts their power is that they demonstrate both the noticing a person and the taking an effort to use that knowledge for their benefit.

A little goes a long way. Just paying attention to someone’s interests and doing something appropriate (as in the opening sections) does this. For some more examples, here’s what I’ve gifted family members in years gone by:

• Father, into cooking: a high-quality Japanese knife

• Mother, into reading: Kindle Fire tablet

• Grandfather, into planes and aviation: toy drone

• In-laws: also the kitchen knife

• Brothers: mechanical keyboards (see below on self optimization, other optimization)

• Sister-in-law: high-quality headphones

• Brother-in-law, into music: a stylophone

For my birthday this year, my parents gave me a little model car. I wouldn’t give them that many points for knowing my interest in motorsport, but this gift revealed more attention and effort: they’d picked my car, an MX-5 Miata and found it in the same color as my car.

Flattery usually goes well. I don’t actually wear them, but I liked receiving the “Best Dad Ever” socks. I once gifted my nurse spouse the following:

Ultra-Powerful Gifts (stack your gift elements)

The very best gifts I have given combined my skills, creativity, knowledge of the recipient, and our relationship. If you crank the dials up, you can produce really touching gifts.

You might think that only some skills lend themselves to gift giving. I say more skills than you think. I have a Data Science background and know how to work a vector graphics software. This can be turned to a gift.

For our fourth wedding anniversary, I downloaded all the chat logs between me and my spouse. I analyzed the logs, produced this academic poster with the results, and had it nicely mounted on foam core board. Apparently, it’s still the best gift I’ve given7.

You ought to know a few things about my spouse: she writes a lot of fiction, she likes snakes and has her own pet snake, and in 2020, she had her right leg amputated due to osteosarcoma.

For one birthday, I teamed up with a friend who runs murder mystery parties and is also a huge fan of my spouse’s writing. Together, we wrote a whole murder mystery set in my spouse’s fictional world and invited a crowd to join. My spouse got home, I blindfolded her, threw her in an Uber, drove to my friend’s house, put a costume on her, un-blindfolded her, and the party began.

I used to co-write little fictional scenes with another partner. One time I thought up a long list of scenarios. Yet! My job has prepared me for making book covers8. I formatted the list nicely with careful font selection and mocked up a book cover that wouldn’t have been out of place in the fantasy section of a bookstore. (No image for privacy reasons.)

The gift I am perhaps pleased with is the statue. I don’t remember how the idea came to me. But my spouse is beautiful, likes snakes, and is missing most of a leg. During Covid year, I made this the pictured statue. Start with an Eve bronze statue, use a hacksaw to remove the leg, and some files to smooth it down to the appropriate shape.

I don’t remember at all where the idea for this came from, but the way my gifts usually go is I start with one idea and then keep thinking of further improvements. In this case, I might have had the idea “woman with a snake”, and then once I was looking at options, realized I should shape it to match my spouse.

In short, the best ideas aren’t always 0 to 100 instantly. Start with one thing and build on it.

A different great gift is how my spouse took our wedding vows, and for each phrase she generated an AI art image and overlaid the phrases onto the image, “quilted” them together, and made a poster that now hangs on our wall.

To link back to the theory we’ve been covering, the above gifts:

• Require skills that not everyone possesses, so the recipient might not have been able to produce them their selves

• Have a lot of sentimental value: they concern the specific relationship and it’s meaningful that the giver gave them

• Send a message of I am paying attention to you and us, the details matter.

• Are creative. Creativity is a skill, but it is important enough to list on its own.

Meaning doesn’t have to be grand!

Most of the gifts I have ever given were not as bold as the above. I wanted to show what it looks like to turn the dials up, but you don’t always have to in order to delight.

Hanging in our house is this poster that my spouse ordered for our second anniversary. It has the position of the stars on our wedding day plus the phrase we most often say in response to “I love you”.

This poster is made by a company when you give them dates, location, and a phrase. The impact of this doesn’t come from investment into the gift, it comes from the investment into the relationship. The gift is a token for the relationship. We got married. It’s a reminder of that, and that special day, and our relationship, that I see hanging on the wall all the time.

I like the companies with services like this, that help produce meaningful artefacts. There’s another similar one I saw recently – you give them a location and they make jewellery using the street layout surrounding it.

Experiences are fundamental

1. We don’t enjoy objects, we enjoy experiences of objects. Experiences are more fundamental.

2. Relationships aren’t built out of exchanging objects, they’re built out of sharing experiences.

Among the best gifts are those that cause experiences for the recipient, or even better, for the recipient together with you.

But tickets for shows and classes. Buy giftcards for tours, boat cruises, and museums. Buy memberships for the botanical gardens, the Academy of Sciences, and so on.

The father of any early girlfriend of mine bought her two tickets to a 3-hour-long barista training course that I was lucky enough to join. She really liked coffee (this was back in Melbourne). It was a really interesting experience I remember fourteen years later.

Think about what your person likes to do or might like to do but they don’t know. Asking what experiences would be good is also a good guide to gifts. Perhaps they like cycling, in which case new cycling gloves or an emergency puncture kit could help facilitate that experience.

Don’t know which experiences could be good? Search engine. Or glorified search engine, aka AI. Ask what’s good to do in your city. Also note that AirBnB branched out hardcore into “experiences” alongside lodging.

Coupons: the magical way to turn experiences into objects

Typical gift giving involves the transfer of some item. Gifting has the nice tradition of physically handing over an item to someone, and then they get to unwrap and/or open it. On Christmas, people pile up the gifts under the tree.

I’m in favor, but it makes gifting experiences awkward. It’s just not the same to say to someone that you will take them out to a fancy dinner. Fortunately, some ancient gift innovators whose names are lost to us pioneered the use of coupons – you simply write down the experience you are gifting and give your recipient that paper: the intangible becomes tangible.

If you want to know how powerful coupons are, consider how they are favored by children. Owing to their limited skills and resources, it can be hard for a child to give a thoughtful gift, yet coupons empower them to gift the non-physical things in their power. Look at the charming example below of a coupon book made by children.

If you’re unwilling to gift no whining, consider that all the following would make for great coupons: a long phone call when you need it, ten hugs, listening attentively to your latest interest for 20 minutes, going out for ice cream, making your your favorite meal, a really solid back massage, a trip to your favorite restaurant x2, a long stroll in a location of your choosing.

The coupon represents the resources you have earmarked for your person. And the choice of coupons can be used to signal that you see the other person, understand their wants and needs, and would like to fulfil them.

It’s also totally okay if the things you’re putting on the coupons are normal things you would have done anyway. It’s still sweet, it can add security to the relationship, it can inform them of things they didn’t know you were willing or able to do, and it provides a clear affordance to seek someone out, e.g., a long phone call on a day they really need but might have otherwise hesitated.

If aesthetically, coupons don’t have a vibe you like. That’s okay, you can call them promissory notes instead ;) Speaking of aesthetics, coupons combine well with cards and envelopes, and there’s great scope for creative presentation there.

Etsy comes through as usual with many results for custom coupons. You can buy them or just take inspiration. A couple of ideas that occurred to me while writing this: buy a little wooden box, write each coupon on a small piece of paper, roll them up into scrolls, tie them with string, and place them in your little gift chest. If your person would like cute figurines, get some of those that have removable heads or some other cavity to place your coupons into. A little creativity goes a long way. If the chest is going to someone you live with, you could periodically top it up with new coupons/scrolls/coins.

Aesthetics & Symbolism

I love these for gifts, and the two go together as the aesthetic can be shaped to the gift and recipient. Themes are great. If I was doing coupons for my spouse, an ardent medical professional, I might present it as doctor’s prescription scrawled in barely legible handwriting: hugs, taken morning and night as needed,…

If it wasn’t apparent already, I’m a fan of Etsy for items and for inspiration. There’s also Pinterest, though I feel like it has degraded it recent years. You can ask AI chatbots for design inspiration, including asking them to find websites with examples.

By symbolism, I mean don’t just buy someone a piece of jewellery. Gift someone jewellery with a blue stone because it matches the color of their eyes. Gift someone something made of black leather, because to you they are hardcore. Gift someone columbine flowers because those were all around you when you went for that very special picnic one time.

If you’re writing something, think about the font that matches the recipient and the mood of the letter. Serif, sans serif, etc. You can describe the mood, what you’re going for, and an AI chatbot can help you there. In this case, it’s functioning as a tutor – and I think it’s worth learning a bit about typography. Also, learn to pick and match colors well.

Easy Style: Wrapping Paper, Bows, and Ribbons

Acquire for yourself out-of-the-ordinary wrapping paper and ribbon, and learn how to tie that ribbon around a box. (If that’s too hard, there are stick-on bows too.) Boom, extra charm added to your gift.

Start Early

Your pool of options shrinks drastically as the time until the gift is needed shrinks. If you’re not fussy and live in the US, Amazon Prime shipping can you a colored envelope in a couple of days. If you’re going for a particular aesthetic and need a specific shade of green, that might come from a seller with only 2 weeks of shipping. Etsy order deliveries often take weeks. If you’re crafting something yourself, it’s nicer to not feel rushed.

The gift of laughter

Don’t get the wrong idea, not every gift has to be eminently practical or deep and serious. You can have fun with them. If you have a friend a couple of years older than you, buy him hearing aids for his birthday. If you have a lover, give them a lump of coal with a note that says it’s been great being naughty with you.

Get them socks with their face on them or something else ridiculous. Amazon and Etsy both have pages of gag gifts. Give them a card apologizing for sleeping with their brother; when they say they don’t have a brother, ask then who did I sleep with??

Friendship is countersignalling. Give a gift that says, I think we’re such good friends that I can get away with giving you this.

Even better, play on inside jokes or things that only the two of you would get. Marmalade.

Books. Don’t forget about books.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind people that books are something you can gift. Despite generally being a fan of online shopping, I’d say go into a physical bookstore where you can easily browse. (Bookstores also often have interesting and aesthetic greeting cards.)

For something special and symbolic, try visiting a second-hand bookstore and picking out something old and exotic like a recipe book from 1946 and a physics textbook from 1962. Something fitting for who the recipient is.

Theory 3: Empathy, noticing, and creativity

It’s easy to be cynical about gift giving. Capitalism has distorted it into a soulless rite where you buy some “on sale” doodad the recipient probably doesn’t want or need in order to discharge a social obligation.

We shouldn’t let gift giving gone wrong make us forget that gift giving can be great.

Good gift giving trains habits for strong relationships. Gift giving is one of the five love languages for a reason. First, realize that the act of giving great gifts isn’t something that you do just before Christmas or just before their birthday. To give great gifts, you need to be paying attention to the recipient to one degree or another. Listening to them, remembering them, taking an interest in their interests, and imagining what it’s like to be them (likes/wants/needs/challenges).

Combine that with creativity: thinking outside the box, not just taking items off the shelf but carefully combining chosen pieces and elements so your gift is thoughtful both in substance and presentation. A good gift is art, and I reckon it’s healthy for humans to be artists.

By doing those, you unlock the ability to create phenomenal gifts that signal the love and care that you hopefully feel for at least a few people in your life.

Happy gift giving!

Well, I’m afraid I’ve run out of puff. I think this blog post is a good start. It’s not perfect, but that’s the thing – gifts don’t have to be perfect either. People are so busy, so rushed, so cynical that taking just some time and some effort means a lot. So good luck to you, mighty gift-giver, bestower of beauty and joy. Go forth and bring joy!

If this post helps you give a better gift, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. <3

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Perhaps so, but I’ll be sad about it. Humanity has a lot of unsolved problems right now. Aging, death, disease, poverty, environmental degradation, abuse and oppression of the less powerful, conflicts, and insufficient resources such as energy and materials.

Even solving all the things that feel “negative”, the active suffering, there’s all this potential for us and the seemingly barren universe that could be filled with flourishing life. Reaching that potential will require a lot of engineering puzzles to be solved. Fusion reactors would be neat. Nanotechnology would be neat. Better gene editing and reproductive technology would be neat.

Superintelligence, with its superness, could solve these problems faster than humanity is on track to. Plausibly way way faster. With people dying every day, I see the case for it. Yet it also feels like the cheat code to solving all our problems. It’s building an adult to take care of us, handing over the keys and steering wheel, and after that point, our efforts are enrichment. Kinda optional in sense, just us having fun and staying “stimulated”.

We’d no longer be solving our own problems. No longer solving unsolved problems for our advancement. It’d be play. We’d have lost independence. And yes, sure, you could have your mind wiped of any relevant knowledge and left to solve problems with your own mind for however long it takes, but it just doesn’t strike me as the same.

Am I making some mistake here? Maybe. I feel like I value solving my own problems. I feel like I value solving problems that are actually problems and not just for the exercise.

Granted, humanity will have built the superintelligence and so everything the superintelligence does will have been because of us. Shapley will assign us credit. But cheat code. If you’ve ever enabled God-mode on a video game, you might have shared my experience that it’s fun for a bit and then gets old.

Yet people are dying, suffering, and galaxies are slipping beyond our reach. The satisfaction of solving puzzles for myself needs to be traded off...

The other argument is that perhaps there are problems humanity could never solve on its own. I think that depends on the tools we build for ourselves. I’m in favor of tools that are extensions of us rather than a replacement. A great many engineering challenges couldn’t be solved without algorithmic data analysis and simulations and that kind of thing. It feels different if we designed the algorithm and it only feeds in our own overall work. Genome-wide association tools don’t do all the work while scientists sit back.

I’m also very ok with intelligence augmentation and enhancement. That feels different. A distinction I’ve elided over is between humans in general solving problems vs me personally solving them. I personally would like to solve problems, but it’d be rude and selfish to seriously expect or aspire to do them all myself ;) I still feel better about the human collective2 solving them than a superintelligence, and maybe in that scenario I’d get some too.

There might be questions of continuity of identity once you go hard enough, yet for sure I’d like to upgrade my own mind, even towards becoming a superintelligence myself – whatever that’d mean. It feels different than handing over the problems to some other alien entity we grew.

In many ways, this scenario I fear is “good problems to have”. I’m pretty worried we don’t even get that. Still feels appropriate to anticipate and mourn what is lost even if things work out.

As I try to live out the next few years in the best way possible, one of the things I’d like to enjoy and savor is that right now, my human agency is front and center3.

In this series, I have been building up the argument that other people’s internal psychology is much weirder and a lot more alien than it seems on the surface, and that this explains why most humans on this planet fail to make obvious and important inferences. They just don’t think right.

Supporting arguments so far:

1. Human thought has a lot more degrees of freedom than we manage to remember because surface-level conscious thoughts are made up of many little micro-acts of cognition that we don’t think about. Elaboration here.

2. Even when they can theoretically execute the same mental motions (not always), e.g., make a deductive argument, different people (and groups of people) have learned very different patterns of using different mental motions. Elaboration here.

Today’s supporting argument is:

Hidden behavior is more varied and surprising than you think

The claim goes like this: when behavior is publicly observed, e.g., how we eat food, or simply how we walk and talk, there is a regularizing and standardizing effect. What mix of conformity instinct, mimicry, and practical convenience causes this, I’m not sure. Restaurants probably like it that they stock knife/fork/spoon, and maybe also chopsticks, and not a long tail of weird utensils to accommodate diverse practices.

Sex might have been a good example of surprisingly weird private behaviors, except that recent research, pornography, and blogs more lurid than this one have been doing a good job of exposing the variety there, and we’re no longer surprised.

Not to worry, I did manage to dig up other details on how people get wet that you might have been unaware of.

Basic dimensions along which showering habits differ are duration, frequency, time of day, and temperature. Some shower in 2-3 minutes with a quick rinse, others commit to a 3+ hour shower with 25 products. Temperatures, of course, range from cold to scalding hot. Some multiple times daily to once every 3 weeks or so.

Some, but not all, urinate in the shower. Some lie down in the shower. Some brush their teeth. Taylor Swift once sparked controversy in discussing how often and when she washes her legs. She claims she washes them when shaving because “shaving cream is like soap”.

There are more niche showering behaviors. Some people eat. There’s a Reddit dedicated to drinking beer in the shower with 400 submissions in the last week. Another Reddit celebrates eating oranges in the shower. One website reports a person doing laundry in the shower by putting their clothes in 5-gallon buckets and stomping on them. One person on the LessWrong team has a waterproof whiteboard and marker so they can write in the shower.

How does one eat a cookie in the shower? The trick, my co-worker explained, is to eat the whole cookie in one go, immediately upon entering the shower. “You just stand there eating it, and the water’s hot, and you’re eating a cookie.” Sounds pretty nice. - Apartment Therapy

“You put your clothes in a 5 gallon plastic bucket with some laundry detergent. And then you stomp on them while you shower.” - Apartment Therapy

shower oranges are single handedly what got me through my first year of university living at the dorms. now that i’m home i have more fruit variety and i encourage you to experience shower peach/ nectarines. i don’t love the fruit out of the shower because of the juices but in it? oh man it’s other worldly 😁 - Reddit

Struggling with life? Bruh, have you even tried a shower orange? It’s low hanging...

What about them shower thoughts?

The shower stuff is but an intuition pump for cognitive variation. People are creative, but showering has got to be lower-dimensional than thinking.

During editing, Justis Mills raised the question of whether there’s actually a large number of distinct mental motions, or just a small number that combinatorially explode. I’d guess it depends at which level we’re looking. Perhaps higher levels have many varied forms (”the molecules of thought”) vs the really low-level stuff (”fundamental particles of thought”??).

I wonder if the mind has an abstraction model akin to the OSI model used to standardize communication between computers. The top layer is made of the kinds of verbal thoughts1 we feel consciously aware of (inner monologue and all that), but you can drill further and further down into both what those high-level thoughts are composed of and the processes that produce them.

The details here are the kind of thing where @Steven Byrnes is doing great work, yet for my model to hold, it’s enough that there are enough moving pieces (parameters?) that people can have very different configurations. And since inner mental operations are hidden, it’s hard to know precisely which perverse things people are getting up to in the privacy of their own minds. Probably the kind of thoughts you’d judge them for ;)

Even if you have a license and drive a car, you probably don’t understand what is hard about racing. I think the answer is interesting (in general I think knowing why things are hard is interesting, but this is my hobby) and it’s further interesting to think about why people don’t get the difficulty.

Motorsport is interesting because (1) people have a lot of experience with the adjacent activity, namely regular driving, (2) few people have experience with the actual thing, and (3) even if you watch someone doing it, you will probably still not understand where the challenge lies.

By (3), I mean if I were to show you the hand and foot movements of a racecar driver doing their thing, you wouldn’t understand the difficulty1, unlike if I showed you someone pole vaulting for the first time, where I think most people could intuitively see the challenge. I’ll come back to this.

Ok, so what’s hard? Where does the challenge lie?

We can work backward from the goal. The goal in motorsport is to get from one location to another location in as short as time as possible. It’s a race. How do you do that?

I will mostly focus on the challenges for the driver but will make mention of the engineering challenges too.

Finding the best path (not the hardest thing)

Naively, you might say the key thing is to take the shortest path. Not quite. The literal shortest path is not actually the fastest path, because the shortest path will involve sharper turns which require slower speeds. Better to travel 100m at 100km/h than 80m at 75km/h.

So one of the skills, and not really the hardest one, I think, is determining the best path (or “line”) to drive along so that time taken is minimized. Though if this is a race, where you should drive is enormously determined by the other cars, and it’s not just about minimizing time. I should amend and say that in a race, the goal isn’t minimizing overall time, but ensuring your time is smaller than anybody else’s.

Minimizing time = maximizing velocity = maximizing acceleration

At the heart of motorsport, where you’re trying to get somewhere as quickly as possible, is trying to always have the highest velocity possible, which means always try to accelerate as quickly as possible.

And it’s essential to understand that acceleration doesn’t just mean forward. Outside of drag racing, races take place on tracks/courses with turns. That means lateral acceleration matters. And because turns can’t be taken at the same speed as you reach on the straight section of the track, this requires braking, i.e. accelerating backwards. So in motorsport, you need to maximize acceleration in all four directions.

The casual observer knows that forward acceleration depends on engine size and horsepower. The other directions of acceleration depend on... well, mostly how grippy your tires are. Tires are a big deal.

Now, F=ma. Maximizing acceleration means maximizing forces. And barring wind resistance and being knocked by other cars, all of the forces which accelerate your car (in any of the directions) are transmitted via your tires. Doesn’t matter how big your engine is if your tires can’t get enough traction (aka grip) to put that power down.

To a first approximation, motorsport is the art and engineering discipline of getting the greatest forces possible out of your tires.

And really, so much of motorsport is just the implications of this goal. Getting the greatest forces from your tires.

Driving at the limit

Driving at the limit is my favorite term for motorsport because it conveys the essence of the challenge. Getting the most from your tires is not analogous to pushing your accelerator all the way down and seeing how much you get.

Imagine you’re soaring down the racetrack on the straight section, you’re at 200km/h, and there’s a 90-degree turn ahead with a 150m radius. It would require 2.1G of lateral force to make this turn at 200km/h. Your tires – at their current temperature, air pressure, wear levels, and in combination with the current ambient temperature and amount of downforce you are experiencing – could exert a maximum of 1.8G.

What happens if you attempt to take the corner at 200km/h and request 2.1G from your tires when they cannot offer more than 1.8 is that you will fail to make the turn and likely end up sliding off the track and into the wall of tires placed to cushion people who asked too much.

“I don’t want to fly off the track!” you cry, “I shall request at most 1.6G to be safe”. That’s great and all if you’re visiting your grandma. This is racing, though. Suppose you’re in a spec race where everyone has equivalent tires. You request your safe 1.6G from the tires and someone else requests the full 1.8G they can provide. They will get through the turn faster. You will take the turn at 175km/h and complete it in 4.86s, they will go at 185km/h and get there in 4.58s. In motorsport, victories are measured in tenths of seconds.

So the challenge is getting everything your tires can provide – but not asking for more. Ask for too much, you crash. Ask for too little, and you lose to the guy who was better at asking for more.

How to get everything available

Getting everything your tires could provide is a multifaceted skill.

A Rubbery Sixth Sense

First, a skilled driver learns to sense how much grip is available. It’s some kind of interesting vestigial sense you build up and you can feel it. I can’t quite describe what I feel or how I learned it, but I know when I’m safely within available grip and when I’m pushing it. I’d guess some of this is feeling something in the car’s movements and some is learned from experience of which levels of felt G my car could handle and which had me losing traction.

Asking nicely

How much force you can get from your tires is actually highly dependent on “how” you ask for it. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast” we are told. Or more importantly “smooth is glue”.

If you jerk the wheel suddenly, demanding 2G of force, your tire might refuse. If you coax it slowly, building up 1.7, 1.8, 1.9... it might give to you. Tires don’t like sudden “inputs”. Inputs are what we refer to as your motions of the steering wheel and pedals. Smooth inputs. You don’t want to upset the car. That’s the technical term used. We’re not talking about it’s feeling, we’re talking about it’s “balance”. Don’t upset the apple cart. The best drivers are incredibly smooth.

F1 driver, Carlos Sainz, is known for singing “Smooth Operator”.

Timing & Precision

In a dozen ways, being fast is about getting your timing just right and the intensity of your inputs just right. When to brake, when to turn, when to accelerate. How much to brake, how much to turn, how much to accelerate.

If you brake before it was necessary to decelerate enough to make a turn, then you were traveling slower than you could, and the other guy might beat you. If you brake too hard, you overslow. You brake too little, you screw up the turn.

You turn too soon, then you slow down too much or end up the in the wrong place, either way you lose time.

You accelerate too hard too soon and your car might lose traction and spin. But again, you want to get to the limit. The maximum possible without going over.

You are trying to hit very narrow and moving targets better than everybody else can.

Recovery

My above description is false, actually. I’ve been saying that you are trying to hit the limit without going over. Actually, fast drivers hover at the limit. They oscillate between a little bit under and a little bit over. They rely on their heightened ability to sense whether the tires are slipping and honed skill at “dialing it back” enough to regain grip before they lose control. On average, they are at the limit.

They find the limit by probing for it, dancing at it.

Tires are rated for “progressively breaking away”, i.e., they take a moment to gradually lose grip and give drivers a chance to sense it and correct, or being difficult advanced tires that are faster yet lose grip suddenly.

Stay tuned for part 2

edit: part 2 can currently be found here

Ah, there is yet more to say but this has gotten long enough already. I’ll split into two posts.

Tomorrow we can talk about:

• How motorsport is a literal balancing act (you must “balance” the car as you drive)

• Your traction budget

• Intentionally going over the limit in order to go faster

• Racecraft

• A sampling of techniques / applications of the theory

• Engineering challenges / what makes a racecar different

In yesterday’s post, I asserted that thinking is non-atomic in much the same way that walking is non-atomic: walking is made of individual muscle contractions, the movement of knees and ankles, and so on. Similarly, any thinking is made of component mental motions like generating options, thinking of considerations, pattern-matching applications of deduction, etc., etc. These small mental motions get built up into larger “thoughts” like judgments of morality, aesthetics, prudence, whatever.

Further, much as we walk without giving conscious explicit thought to how much we ought to bend our knees, we think without giving thought to “and now I should search my memories for any situations similar to the present”. Rather, inaccessible parts of our minds carry out this grunt work, invisible, seamless, and mostly unacknowledged.

For the sake of this post, I will posit that there are 150 distinct mental motions1. A rare few people learn them all2, especially the rarer ones like vector calculus, but most people learn a good chunk of them.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I was not born with my present faculty to think. 0-day-old me didn’t know about modus ponens, didn’t know how to multiply numbers, didn’t know to consider that seeking info from the web3 as an option when making decisions.

That people learn how to think better (or at least differently) over time is hardly an interesting point. What I want to draw attention to is that we don’t just learn mental motions, we also learn when to use them. And by “we” here, I mean our broader mind/brain. The contractions of the mental muscles are mostly automatic. You’re conducting a chain of thought and some part of the mind says that now the correct mental act is to ask...

• ...how embarrassed should I be? Or,

• ...what’s a good distraction from this unpleasant topic?, Or,

• ...what’s a good joke I can crack to defuse tension? Or,

• rather than ask something, trigger feeling angry/happy/sad (for emotions are mental actions too, and whose elicitation is also trained into us)

Which of these actually occurs depends on the person. And while Both you and I might be able to feel embarrassment and crack jokes, each of us will be drawn to each option by different amounts. Some options will be weighted enough to be considered by the conscious mind, though most won’t reach the surface or be generated at any level. The mind isn’t just the collection of mental motions it knows, but also the triggers and rules and patterns that evoke a given mental motion in any given thought-situation.

cf. Cup-Stacking Skills (or, Reflexive Involuntary Mental Motions) by Duncan Sabien.

Where do these rules/triggers/patterns come from? To some extent, they’re probably innate, encoded in the genome and revealed as the human organism developed. Yet the reasonable guess is we learn to think, both the motions and when to use them, substantially in the same way we learn most things: trial and error, imitation, reinforcement learning. Seeing what works. What’s rewarded4.

A child attempts to stand and walk. They fall, try again, fall, try again, and eventually the brain finds some weights5, some configuration of neurons and synapses, that works pretty well and gets locked in. It’d be the same learning a new skill at any age. But this isn’t limited to motor tasks.

Sometimes people lock in something that works so-so, but have learned bad habits that are holding them back and they have to deliberately hold themselves back from the old way and train themselves into a new way. But this isn’t limited to motor tasks.

So, coming back to the “150” mental motions available to humans, we might suppose fifty of these are very universal and include motions such as “question/disbelieve”, “ignore”, “retrieve memories”, “sum two small numbers”. By the end of high school, most people have learned all of these. Then we have another fifty that are advanced but not uncommon and are motions like “deductive logic with three premises”. Beyond those you get the truly specialized like “apply the concept of supply and demand”.

People don’t just differ in which of these they know, but also in which of these they think to apply. Like above, when I say they, I really mean their whole brain, including a lot of unconscious, automatic, S1, non-explicit brain processes that automatically determine which thoughts to think as much as the positioning of your tongue happens automatically. And different people’s brains learn slightly different tongue positions and that’s how you get accents. (”You want accents? ‘Cause that’s how you get accents.”)

But thought can vary a lot more tongue positions. Different people learn very different profiles (patterns/triggers/rules) of mental motions – which ones to apply and when – even when they’re working with the same palette of mental motions. This is where the analogy to walking and talking gets weak. While gait and accent have some variation, there are only so many practical ways to walk. In contrast, I think that thinking habits admit tremendous variation.

Really, I come here to present what you already know to be true. Contrast different life histories:

One child is especially pretty and artistically skilled. For this they get much praise and their mind associates “aesthetic = good/advantageous”. They learn (and I mean learn rather than choose) to attend to matters of appearance: face, clothes, decor. How will this look? Is it aesthetic? These are the privileged mental motions for them.

Another child is good at mathematics. In school they earn praise for acing the quiz, later math earns them prestige via a fancy degree at an elite college, and ultimately it makes them $$$ in their technical career. Their mind is quick to see quantitative relationships and mathematical models, for it has learned this way lies goodness. Math is Fun. Math is Valuable. Math is Good.

The first child might have learned the opposite, even. They tried math at school, found it difficult and demoralizing, and now their mind shirks away from math. Their mind never suggests math as a useful tool and if it is brought up by someone else, they bounce off it.

A combination of innate inclination and life experience trains each person into their very specific mental patterns. Brains are pretty capable. Built to learn. And people learn what works for them.

cf. Personality: The Body in Society by Kevin Simler

To take stock of positions I’ve been assembling in this series so far:

1. Thinking is non-atomic. Thoughts are composed of small mental acts.

2. Many or most of those mental acts are automatic and subconscious6, like the choice of muscle contractions.

3. Unlike muscle contractions, the palette of available mental motions is vast.

4. People’s minds learn mental motions and when to use them.

5. Different people learn very different patterns and mappings of which mental motions to use when.

In my next post, I will explore all the different ways that people end up with different patterns of thought.

Well, last week, a friend’s comment suggested a trailhead for an explanation. This is part 1 of a ~4-part series where I share my current guess.

You know how to walk. When did you last think about contracting your quads?

You know how to talk. When did you last think about the placement of your tongue?

You know how to think. When did you last think about...the individual mental motions that make up the larger thought-acts you intentionally carry out?

Like walking, talking, and most actions, thinking is non-atomic. Any act of thinking is composed of sub-thoughts, micro-cognitions, and individual mental motions. And in comparison to walking and talking, the variety is staggering. There are only so many practical ways to walk, but the ways your mind could carry out a given thought-act are numerous.

Start with the example of answering something simple: where to get to lunch? You begin considering two options: the taqueria and the sushi place. Why those two? Your mind wordlessly queried “options” and that’s what came back. The broader line of thought found that satisfactory and didn’t push for more. On another day, your thinking would be querying what you felt like and hunting for justifications to pay the high sushi prices. Today that doesn’t occur to you, instead the wordless considerations query came back with “what would your lunch companions like most?” (marked important) since you are choosing for them too.

My goal here isn’t to suggest a definite or rigorous taxonomy of thought, more to gesture at the breakdown. Much of thinking seems to proceed in chains: trigger/response/trigger/response. This makes you think of that, that makes you think of this, makes you think of that. Along the way there are wordless queries for information that some part of your mind provides. How and why? We don’t usually think about that. You ask a question like what I should be doing right now and a list is produced as from nowhere. Perhaps another part of your mind remembers that you’re often forgetful and should consult your calendar. Thank you, helpful thought.

So there’s information retrieval that happens in an opaque way and who knows how exactly the recall happens, but also there’s a bevy of different reactions that a mind could throw up in response to any stimulus. Those reactions might look like a question. Somebody learns their boss is angry, their mind might variously: become afraid it is something they did and search for reasons, be gleeful because they enjoy their boss’s displeasure, start considering how to take advantage, and so on. My guess is that in very rare cases do people pause to consider which of these responses is best, instead, much as the mind chooses our footfall for us, the mind decides which question one ought to be answering.

From another angle, there’s the kind of reasoning a mind employs. Responding to a stimulus, a mind could call up past examples, it could simulate the reaction of certain other people, it could query the morality sub-module, it could execute a first-principles-simulation, it could make a query to the gut/heart about how this feels. The cognition done could be cerebral, it could be embodied, or some secret third thing.

To tie this to a concrete scenario, consider a young fellow on a date with a young woman at a nice restaurant when the time comes to pay the bill. For many, a part of the mind will recognize “pay the bill” as being a ritualized high-stakes moment and the optimal action being non-obvious. Having pattern-matched the scenario, another part of the mind might pump stress hormones1, priming the mind and body for action. The fellow’s mind could go down any number of pathways here: (a) try to infer what this young woman is expecting, (b) mustering courage to take the option he believes is correct, (c) figuring out a joke to defuse any tension with humor, (d) figuring out how to be suave and deftly ferret out more information without committing to the wrong answer. My guess is that the conscious explicit thinking gets spent on the chosen part, e.g. thinking of good jokes, rather than choosing among the high-level options.

Like walking and speaking, these motions proceed automatically. And not just the intuitive, quick, rapid cognition System 1 mental acts. I contend that there’s automatic mental sub-motion micro-cognitions happening incessantly and inseparably even with putatively explicit System 2 cognition, e.g. every time the System 2 cognition makes a query for lists of options; and at the meta-level too, the part of your mind that typically decides unexplicitly which things should be thought about deliberately vs not2.

All of this is to make two points: (1) thinking is not an atomic act. When you think “what shall I eat for lunch?”, that mental act will be composed of a great many sub-pieces. And (2), almost all of these sub-pieces proceed automatically and without conscious thought – and all the conscious thought fragments can be decomposed into less conscious ones.

That’s all for today. In tomorrow’s piece, I’ll muse on how the mind learns mental motions and when to use them.

On the one end of the continuum, you can have a visceral sense of the difficulty of a given task. On the other, you’ve never even given any thought.

Things that people appreciate are hard: playing basketball well, solving math puzzles, drawing lifelike pictures, memorizing human anatomy. The commonality here, I think, is that these are the kinds of activities that most people have some experience with. A typical school experience will have you try these all out and you will find that throwing a ball with exactly the right force in exactly the right direction is tricky.

Even something that is pretty foreign to people, let’s say “rocket science”, might feel hard because people know it involves physics and math, and they’ve tried doing some physics and math.

In contrast, there are tasks that, not having tried them, people don’t feel like that should be that hard. That includes me. Until I fired a gun for the first time, I did not appreciate the challenge. I’d heard it said it was hard but not understood. I’d played many a video game and there you aim and fire. Aiming is a little tricky, especially to do fast, but it didn’t seem that hard. I had no sense of actual recoil, of grip mattering, of stance mattering. Just once session, and I could see what it was that people were mastering. Just how many experiences are like this? What’s hard about repairing drywall? What’s hard about parenting? What’s hard about…you name it. Probably something!

While writing this, I turned to the friend on my right while writing this and asked about what was difficult about crocheting. They said crocheting really isn’t hard, but knitting, now that’s hard. It’s unforgiving. A single dropped stitch and your sweater comes undone. What’s hard is maintaining the precision and consistency. I’ve never picked up a needle and couldn’t have really differentiated between the two.

Close to home is high performance driving (car on racetrack, rally driving, etc). This one is a little curious. Millions of people drive. Yet I think very few could tell you what makes one race car driver faster than another. Few people have tried to drive very fast, faster than others, and even if they have, I think they’d still not know where the skill lies till they’d tried it for a while or had it explained to them.

Pause here if you want to try generating answer for yourself. I explain in the next paragraph.

Not the only element, but high performance driving (aka driving at the limit) requires going exactly as fast as your tires1 will allow: no faster, no slower. If you go faster than that, your car spins and/or flies off the road; if you go slower, than somebody else with the same class of tires can beat you by getting closer to the limit. How much force your tires can transmit is dependent on dozens variables and your technique. The skilled high performance driver has a good sense of where that limit is, drives the car in a way that the limit is increased, can sense when they’ve exceeded the limit and corrected, and so on. The problem of get all you can from your tires is kind of the central challenge of race car driving.

Yet, despite also interfacing with a steering wheel and pedals, having a car with engine and wheels, the ordinary driver will [hopefully] never experience taking their tires to limit or over2 and hence never understand what is that a race car driver has mastered that they have not.

What of all this? Well, mostly I come here to recommend “what makes that hard?” as an illuminating question you ought to ask more often.

It’s a great way to engage with a new domain and find a trailhead for learning a new skill. It’s also a great way to solve problems and optimize processes as the hard part is typically the blocker. Plus it’s a question I’m fond of asking people at parties3 that’s helpful for understanding others and what they do.