Mathematical Intuition
Voronoi Regions
Watch nearest-neighbor territories emerge from a field of points.
Interactive explainerThe Same Matrix, Five Ways
Read one grid as a relation, transformation, covariance, transition, or bilinear form.
Interactive explainerThe Jacobian Matrix
See the derivative of a vector-valued function as its best local linear map.
AI Math
Query, Key, Value
The three roles every token plays inside attention.
Interactive explainerSoftmax, Felt
See how a list of scores becomes a probability distribution.
Toy modelTrace a Next-Token Prediction
Work through a small QKV model by hand, one decision at a time.
Interactive explainerLatent Dirichlet Allocation over Word Space
See how documents become mixtures of topics and topics become distributions over words.
AI Use
AI Judgment & Governance
A Theory of Appropriateness
How good judgment fits a situation, and why general rules are not enough.
Interactive explainerThe Quilt, Not the Telescope
AI safety understood as social tailoring, not just technical foresight.
Interactive explainerA Pragmatic View of AI Personhood
Personhood considered as a governance instrument rather than a metaphysical prize.
Meta-Systematicity
Multi-Systematicity & Meta-Systematicity
How to coordinate distinct systems through translation, coupling, and reflexivity without making one system sovereign.
Interactive explainerHow much rationality?
When calculation is enough, and when judgment must take over.
Interactive explainerConceptuality as Compressed Possibility
How concepts compress possible interactions—and become rigid when they stop responding to feedback.
Interactive explainerStructural Coupling
How distinct systems become mutually adapted without becoming one system or sharing a single explanatory model.
Interactive explainerContemporary Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT)
How activity systems construct different objects, coordinate across boundaries, and reorganize through contradiction and collective learning.
Meaning, Agency & Transformation
Where Does Meaning Live?
How ecological, embodied, social, cybernetic, and cultural-historical traditions locate meaning in interaction.
Interactive explainerEnactive Neo-pragmatism
Meaning, knowing, and selves arise from embodied interaction, with no final vocabulary.
Interactive explainerSelf and Subculture Co-Formation
How persons and shared social worlds acquire form together through ritual and recurrent embodied action.
Interactive atlasThe Work of Hans Joas
A book-by-book atlas tracing creative action into values, sacredness, institutions, and universalism.
Interactive explainerThe Creativity of Action
How ends and intentions emerge within action rather than being fully determined beforehand.
Interactive comparisonHall × Joas
Two theories of agency: recovering overlooked freedom, and action that constitutes its own ends.
Interactive comparisonWhere Does the Ought Come From?
How normativity can arise without an ahistorical moral order.
Interactive explainerYidam Practice as Reconstruction of Agency
Tibetan yidam practice read through Joas’s theory of creative action.
Interactive explainerRecognitions of Transformation
The five phases and their cycles of nourishing, restraining, overwhelming, and undermining.
Traditions, Practices & Institutions
The Esalen Extended Universe
Follow the people, practices, and institutions around a cultural crossroads.
Interactive explainerEthnomethodology
The everyday work people do to make the social world intelligible.
Interactive explainerPolycentric Subsidiarism
Why each problem should be governed at the lowest scale that can handle it.
Strategy primerBoydian Strategy
An introduction to the tradition of maneuver strategy.
Interactive atlasFacies · The Reading Face
An anatomical atlas of facial morphology and the vocabulary used to describe it.