Obligatory Meta-post
I'm writing because a modern blog is a tool of leverage.
Hello! Welcome to my Substack! I hope to be posting about cool ideas, ranging from technical STEM nerd stuff to life observations to fun writing in between. This specific post is more personal than a standard idea-based post. If you’re looking for technical ideas, I’d encourage you to read the next blog post.
I’ve begun to find it helpful to think in terms of leverage.1 For me, leverage means that a small input can lead to a larger output. It’s also a way to interpret my own actions in retrospect. For me, to get activation energy to do certain tasks, I think I have to feel I’m getting some leverage on the task in that particular moment.
This can pop up in slightly embarrassing ways. For example, I won’t buy plane tickets unless they’re in the exact window two months before where they are cheapest (but I will let other people do the work to buy them). Despite being in/around academic research for five years now, I just created a personal website because a friend of mine gave me access to a fancy AI agent. I went all winter with an ugly jacket, just to go shopping for a nice one right now, at the end of winter, while it is on sale. Again, to be clear, it’s the time and energy investment that I have an aversion to—the monetary incentives are of little consequence.
So when my friend told me about her April daily writing challenge, my first instinct was computing the ROI of such writing (e.g. “no one will care, no one will listen, you don’t have anything useful to say”). But the more I thought about it, blogging is an activity with some dimensions of leverage. The first facet is to support the idea of my own personal “LLM Knowledge Base,” popularized by Andrej Karpathy. The basic idea is as follows: have an AI agent constantly process all the text you create in your life. Then you can use natural language queries to find knowledge very quickly.2 The magic, in my opinion, is that then another agent can constantly search through this knowledge base 24/7—thinking and combining and recombining—to deliver you new connections and insights. By posting on Substack, my thoughts will feed into both my personal knowledge bases and others’ knowledge bases. Eventually, the agents will find my one good idea in the sea of my noisy thoughts. If you’ve ever tried to prune your own bad ideas, you know it can be very tricky—you are partial to your own ideas and hate to throw them away. Hence, this is a very high-leverage activity.
Furthermore, I feel I’ve been getting almost too many good, novel ideas. My initial instinct when having such an idea is to do academic research and try to write a paper. But this is a volume problem: research is a heavy commitment, and I am great at overcommitting myself. So this is a mechanism to release those ideas in a lower-effort way. For Andrej Karpathy, simply tweeting about these things is enough. For me, an essay on Substack is a sufficient way to delve deeper. Indeed, the leverage from just a post can be quite large.
A goal for the tone of this blog is that it isn’t too academic and formal. To dial it down a notch, I will share the story of making my account. I was going through the “getting started” flow, step-by-step, and the website asked me if I wanted to follow some people I may know. I clicked follow on a few people I recognized and then clicked “Follow All.” It turns out that this follows everyone they suggested for you to follow, which wasted a good amount of my time deleting them…if you ended up here, welcome, you survived the culling :)
Now that I’ve explained why I am writing this blog, I should tell you why you should read it. This is a twofer, and the next post explores one interesting idea: how the principle of leverage applies to modern coding practices.
The word first began to occupy my headspace due to my college roommate, who had at the time come back from a summer internship at a trading firm and wanted to communicate the low-risk, high-upside gambles one can take with options trading.