Napkin notes
A few weeks went by and I had no time to write or to calm down. This text is a unified version of all the small napkin notes I’ve put down.
Excitement
Students need to be excited, not fed with pessimistic conclusions. The future must be exciting, something to look toward, projects and ideas to dream about. Here in France, people talk about the end of resources, the end of life as we know it. But that is false, because it ignores the power of innovation, the things that can be created by excited groups of engineers, researchers, poets, and musicians. I think it’s a good thing to learn about consumption and the finite resources on Earth (it’s essential) but it’s the conclusion that I find stupid. We shouldn’t try to limit anything to anyone. It is possible to make global change through cultural shifts, and maybe humans will gradually start to limit their consumption. But this has a net negative effect on a population, because it brings down the amount of excitement. Strange things happen when people are bored and we souldn’t forget that... We, as a species, need to understand more, and to do that, we need energy.
Low IQ-species
We’ve been using fossil fuels as our main source of energy, which as we know has its environmental limits. We are basically heating the only place we live and slowly intoxicating living creatures. Not to cite the obvious, but we will run out of fossil fuel pretty soon. Think of it: a species on a planet that discovers combustion of matter under their feet, and starts to explode every drop of it until there is no more. That’s a low-level IQ species. We must learn how to create clean and abundant energy, otherwise we will either die from lack of resources or from internal fights.
Blackboards and chalks
I discovered the strange beauty of late evening discussions in front of a blackboard. There is something ancient about writing with white chalk on a dark surface. It feels like its written in our DNA. When the sun sets and my hands are covered in chalk, I feel alive. I have worked all week, all day, yet my energy grows instead of fading. The more I work, the less tired I become; it seems like understanding feeds energy. The more I understand, the more I want to know, and this desire replaces sleep.
Benefits of chaos
Then comes chaos. Life sometimes breaks you into pieces. You lose shape, you lose sense. There is a moment when everything collapses, when nothing fits anymore, and the only question left is whether you will stand up. Chaos does not destroy you completely, it gives you vision. Arthur Rimbaud went through hell, disrupted his senses to see clearly, to describe the world as it truly is. It may sound hectic, but it says something about us, humans. The truths about the world are hidden inside us. Our social strings act as weights; they keep us from understanding. I see us maintained on the ground by those strings.
Abstraction
Everything can be used to solve everything. You can abstract any problem using whatever language you choose. Numbers are one of them. But you can use shapes, symbols, or even gestures. The essence of understanding is in finding a path between different things, in realizing that universality exists in the bijection of any objects, any ideas, any entities.
Fed up by OS1
Sometimes I feel trapped in what I call the OS1 world. It feels like living in a system designed by someone else, a place where I cannot choose, cannot run, cannot think clearly. I hate being there. I hate being dependent, forced into low-agency choices. I hate how people talk about the world here. I cannot explain myself fully, and normal conversations cannot carry the weight of what I want to say. There is a critical amount of data that cannot be shared, a limit between what I think and what can be said. We need to increase the bandwith of human expression and we need to do it fast.