This Blog has Rebooted

And a book is coming soon

I’m bringing this blog back online, a few reasons.

Firstly, a number of readers have told me they really enjoyed the blog. Some asked me specifically to start blogging again. That tells me the blog is doing something helpful, at least for some people. I like to help!

Secondly, I can’t help myself. I had to stop writing online for a job I started in late 2022, and found that I missed writing much more than I’d anticipated.

Thirdly - and this is the most important - I have come to believe that this is my calling in life. My career, for a long time, felt like it just didn’t add up. But in the last few years, as I’ve gone deeper down a path of trying to understand the claims being made in various religious texts - and into the practice of faith - I’ve become interested in the hypothesis that perhaps telling this story is the reason I’m here. The only way to find out is to run an experiment. So I’m going to write a book.

I understand that once I start talking like this, I lose some people. It’s for precisely that reason that I feel compelled to reboot this blog. My goal is not to convert anyone. I don’t intend to tell anyone what to think or how they ought to think. I don’t want to judge anyone. I just want to share what I’ve learned - what that has helped me - in case it helps you too. I tell my kids, “I’m hoping you can learn as much from my mistakes as what I’m doing well - because I really don’t want you to suffer from the same mistakes I did.”

In the book, my goal is simply to tell the story of my life - to share the evidence of my experience. The story of anyone’s life, I believe, constitutes evidence about the relationships between what we believe, how we act, and what happens to us.

I have changed beliefs radically over the course of my adult life. The entire time, I’ve consistently tried to act in line with what I thought was true. Sometimes this worked out well for me. Other times, it was disastrous. All that changed was what I believed. The thing about me is that I can’t help but take beliefs seriously - to a point that others would consider pathological. It’s just how I’m wired. I didn’t learn how to relax until I came to believe it was important to relax. And then then I worked very hard at learning how to relax.

Given how often my beliefs caused problems for me, I had to keep changing my beliefs in order to continue functioning day to day. The idea of just letting go and going along with the crowd, or doing what worked day to day, I just couldn’t do until I believed, for reasons stemming from evidence, that this was the right way to act.

In the book, I want to share with readers the journey that resulted from this process. I want to share happened when I consistently tried to act in ways that I thought made sense given what I believed. I’m not going to argue for what I believe now - I’m going tell the story of the experiences that lead me to where I am.

We’re all on our own journey. I’ve seen how much I have benefited from listening to other people’s stories. I think my story may help people who are finding themselves on paths similar to mine.

The view from here - not so much where I’ve arrived, but how I’m traveling now - is a belief that there is a profound and true claim contained within most major wisdom traditions. I believe that this claim can be understood in mathematical and computational terms, and that it can be tested, experimentally, in your own life. In this blog, I’ll be writing material for a more advance audience, more interested in the technical details. My goal is not to convert you, to persuade you, or to tell to think in a specific way - it’s to accurately communicate what I believe has been communicated many times, in may different ways, by many different cultures.

Spirituality and Code

I think I can articulate the shared essence of all wisdom traditions in a new way. The message isn’t new, but the wire codec is. I’m going to talk about spirituality in terms of computing. I will discuss spirituality in the broadest sense - by looking at multiple wisdom traditions as repositories of valuable information about which psychological strategies are long term viable. My life really started to improve when I started considering the various wisdom traditions of the world as being repositories of evidence, and I worked to refactor that mental codebase into something I could safely and quickly iterate on. I figured that these traditions were evidence that lots of people from very different cultures seemed to think a certain strategy worked, for essentially the same reasons. I also figured that these reasons would make the most sense to me when I translated into computer code. So I looked for the similarities across traditions and then developed abstract enough base classes and interfaces that I could do things like, compare and contrast the Catholic and Calvinist understandings of the right way to be, moment to moment, with the perspective that I found Sadghuru articulating, until I could get at a shared essence.

If we take materialism seriously - and I do - then our bodies are robots controlled by our belief structures. This makes our belief structures computational systems, which can be understood, analyzed, and evolved using the same processes I’ve used to work at Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and one of the world’s biggest hedge funds.

I know code. Not just how to write it, and how to read it, but how to see through it and understand it enough to evolve it safely. My job has frequently required me to look at an important but messy codebase, and change it substantially to make it more usable and evolvable. I did this by developing new abstractions that made clear what was always there, just implicitly. I have always made this process work by continually searching for the underlying implicit structures, of which existing codebases were generally noisy reflections - and then finding ways to express the new in terms of the old, and vice versa.

I will be quoting from multiple sacred texts, alongside algorithms and operating systems texts and papers, to show that they share the same underlying forms. Complex belief structures - narratives about value and meaning and purpose - constitute algorithms for being in the world. Religions are psychological operating systems.

The search for the true underlying structure of reality is the spirit - i.e. the strategy, the intentional algorithm - which animates both science and religion. I think both pursuits can fall prey to a static dogmatism by mistaking the sign for the signified, and both pursuits benefit when their proponents stop imagining themselves to be fundamentally opposed.

Why Me?

The reason I think I can talk to people who reject all of spirituality as ‘woo’ is that I was one of them, very much so, for almost a decade. Like most people with college degrees who work with numbers for a living, I figured the entire domain of faith was off limits to me. At school and then at work, I had to be able to make and test hypotheses, gather evidence, and consistently exercise skepticism when there wasn’t evidence present. I learned these ways of thinking, I learned to love them and to trust them deeply. I learned, like many, to be deeply suspicious of anything that violated this pattern: come with evidence, or go away. Give me the source code, or go away. Make a prediction, or shut up.

I no longer think the use of these mathematical and evidentiary practices precludes spirituality. Consistently finding myself in positions - at multiple companies in very different industries - where my job was to evolve a structure meant to keep a computational system alive and steer it towards specific futures - required me to develop certain ways of thinking. These same ways of thinking went to work on my own psychology, because I saw how my own thinking patterns had the same faults as the codebases I was working on. I now think a commitment to evidence-based thinking can amplify spirituality. Spirituality is simply a refactoring - i.e., a re-definition - of your sense of identity and your relationship to your operating environment.

How I got here from there is the story I’ll tell in the book.

Far from obliterating the capacity for intelligent people to take spirituality seriously, I think our scientific and mathematical advances have given us the capacity for a much higher resolution form of devotion to, and trust in, the single source, the one root process of which all of us are merely child processes - in a way very much like an operating system has a root process which creates child processes.

I need your Help

I can’t do this alone. It’s a wildly ambitious project. I am going to try to convince skeptical, disagreeable people to take seriously ideas which they think have long been discredited and remain the domain of credulous fools. I’m going to argue that the people who did bad things in the name of faith and religion were going against the ideals, once they’re properly constituted - in the same way that calling yourself a scientist, even using numbers and wearing a lab coat and writing papers and talking about evidence - doesn’t make you a scientist.

There are emotional landmines all over the place, easily triggered by using the wrong words. I know my chances of succeeding in this project aren’t particularly great. But I can’t help myself - I have to try. I know I won’t regret trying, because I think I can pull it off. If I try and fail, well, I can at least let go of the idea that maybe I could have done it. And I’ll learn and evolve in the process - which I’ve come to see as a helpful invariant: I can learn from anything as long as i’m willing to embrace failure.

My capacity to evolve as a being is constrained by my willingness to ‘die’ - i.e. to realize and accept that I was very wrong in my beliefs, and to change them. Belief structures which are unwilling to die - e.g. to encounter concrete evidence of their own radical insufficiency - can’t undergo the necessary selective pressure to allow them to evolve.

But, all things being equal, of course I’d rather do it well.

For that to happen, I have to be both deeply competent and deeply charitable. I have to sometimes express ideas which are partially formed, and have you - my esteemed readers - poke holes in them and thus help me evolve them. I have to share interpretations that I’ve put a lot of time and energy into, watch them broken, and then pick them up and try again. I have to fail, publicly and in possibly embarrassing ways, and then keep trying. That’s the only way to do this.

I’ll definitely need you, my esteemed, valued, critical-thinking and immune-to-flattery readers to tell me if I’m not being charitable to people I disagree with. The whole project hinges, ultimately, on begin able to generate trust that I really am seeking the truth. I can only pull this off if I can consistently demonstrate that this search really did lead me where it lead me. I’ll only be persuasive if I can make it clear that rather than constituting a rejection of the evidence - a belief that i’m part of larger and wiser whole which guides and loves me is a better fit for the evidence than the idea that I’m a cosmic accident, meaning is an illusion, and hope an inferior strategy to dispassionately weighing the evidence and plugging it into a utility function to evaluate multiple hypothetical courses of action.

I think my ability to reach people is going to be primarily constrained by my ability to be charitable in disagreement, patient and understanding when - of course - they mock me and say i’m stupid and crazy. Because of course that’s what i’m getting myself into. But I think it’s worth it: I have seen how much these concepts have helped me in my own life, and I think there are many people out there who, like Fox Mulder, want to believe - and what they lack is not just evidence, but the hypothesis, expressed in their native language, of numbers and algorithms.

I think the hypothesis has been stated numerous ways: in the Tao, the Vedas, the Prophets, the Gospel - and my only job is to restate the same hypothesis in computational terms. The evidence is just the lived experiences of people operating under the hypothesis, as compared with the lived experiences of people who are rejecting the hypothesis. The experiment is choosing to trust in the Truth - and thus trying to control only ourselves - rather than trying to control the world.

So that’s my goal. That’s why I left a great job at a hedge fund when the economy isn’t great, at the start of a new war. I can’t continue to ignore the thought that maybe I could do this if I tried. It increasingly seems to me that the time is now. I think more people are open to this than ever before, but I don’t see anyone leading this charge.

So I will try.

If you’re interested in the project, please let me know if you’re along for the ride. I’ll take all the help I can get. I know I need it.