I’m Kifah, and I’m researching/building complex systems and Tools for Thought.

Map of complex systems

Mathematician Richard Hamming used to ask scientists in other fields "What are the most important problems in your field?"— partly so he could troll them by asking "Why aren't you working on them?", and partly because getting asked this question is really useful for focusing people's attention on what matters. *

• Our society’s problems are interconnected, systemic, and often require coordinated sense-making and action (i.e, too large for a single person to solve).

We need better tools for sense-making and multi-scale perception (among other things!).

Big Picture Questions I think about

• What is the 21st century equivalent to punctuation? 🔗

  • beforepunctuationwasinventeditwashardtoread. Yet today we take capitalized letters, spaces, and punctuation symbols for granted. Surely there’s more we can do

• How can we perceive the damage we’re causing more tangibly?

  • Many of the “improvements” or “solutions” we’ve implemented ends up having disastrous 1st/2nd/nth-order effects.
    • Just a few examples:
      • Lead in paint/fuels, asbestos (carcinogen), plastics → microplastics, endocrine disruptors, pollution; massive CO2 production → temp increase → coral die-off; pesticides and fertilizer runoff decimating aquatic life, etc
    • How can we think about them better?

• What (stateless?) alternatives do we have to capitalism that aren’t socialism or communism?

  • Context:

    • It is hard to run a financial system based on infinite growth on a planet with finite resources.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A41z7UD3NsU

    • Communism and socialism either don’t truly work or get outcompeted/sabotaged by capitalist counterparts.

    • How can we achieve a flourishing steady-state society?

• Can we shift from destructive, centralized, relatively fragile monoculture agriculture, to permaculture and other systems-based techniques ?

  • Some problems with agriculture:
    • Topsoil depletion, compaction

• What do we need to create general-purpose multi-scale modeling?

  • How can you simultaneously see effects at the microscopic and macroscopic level?

    https://twitter.com/yoshikischmitz/status/1286801612053213184

• What do memetic immune systems look like?

  • How can we facilitate [[Hegelian dialectic]]? How can we make it easy to judge information on the internet according to our own metrics/epistemic theories of truth

• How can we make it easier for people to disagree usefully?

  https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1039420186586038273?s=20

  • One of the central tenets of science is falsifiability— making hypotheses and providing possible ways to falsify them, whereupon we update our beliefs.
    • How can we do the same thing online, where disagreement can be rife with fallacies and incredibly polarizing?

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Recent Work

Writing

The Social Information Platform Of the Future: GPT-3, The Next Wikipedia, Stepping Outside Filter Bubbles, and Unprecedented Learning

Notes on Collective Intelligence from Reinventing Discovery

Musical.ly's Alex Zhu on Igniting Viral Growth and Building a User Community

Jordan Peterson's Advice on Entrepreneurship, Selling, and Personal Success 🧙🏻‍♂️