Style of post: Alexanderian meander (though with (at best) a tenth of the artistry and thoroughness/rigor). There's a Thing here and it has been tickling at my brain for ages and I have despaired of being able to clarify it all on my own, so I'm giving you my unclarified thoughts instead. More of an extended koan than a proper essay.

An acquaintance at EA Global suggested that I investigate anagram potential before settling on a possible name for my future child.

This was a cool idea, so I went online with my frontrunner to see what the possibilities were.

There were over 111,000 of them.

If I had made some modest change, say replacing "Elizabeth" with "Frederick" while leaving the other names alone, there would have been a comparable number of completely different ones.

There's something blank about infinity, or really large numbers like "one billion."

But the explosion of possibility somehow felt more viscerally real when it was like expanding one Workflowy node to see a hundred thousand possibilities, and expanding the next Workflowy node to see a hundred thousand different possibilities, and knowing that the next node would contain a hundred thousand new possibilities still.

Most people are familiar with the Youtube videos showing an infinite zoom into the Mandelbrot set, and how you keep finding complexity as you go deeper and deeper.

But it's interesting (and often underemphasized, in my opinion) that those videos show you the beauty and complexity of one single path, and if you were at any point to go left instead of right, or shift the trajectory of your zooming by some tiny amount in the hundredth decimal place, you would get another, extremely different path of equivalent complexity and beauty.

This is one of the talking points that has come up in my chocolate tastings. I sometimes like to mention that yeah, of course, there's fantastic, staggering, unmanageable complexity everywhere around us all the time, and of course we have to mute and muffle and abstract most of it away or we would be fully paralyzed and unable to comprehend anything or take any action whatsoever—

(Something something autism, something something processing disorders)

—but it's nice, when someone highlights a particular nook in the infinite fractal chaos as being pleasant and interesting and worth some extra lingering, to stop glossing over all the detail, or at least to gloss over it a little bit less. When I lead people through a chocolate tasting, most of what is special isn't the chocolate itself; it's that they're simply actually processing a bunch of sense data that, by default, would have been ignored, because it has to be ignored, because you have to ignore 99.999% of what you perceive to be functional at all.

An old puzzle used to be: if the universe is effectively infinite in extent, and per-unit-of-arc every star in the sky is approximately as bright as the sun, and there are stars in every direction ... why isn't the sky a uniform shining white?

There are several things wrong with the "if," but nevertheless it was useful for astronomers and physicists to notice that, if stars cluster, such that a galaxy might be hidden behind a single nearby star, and might itself obscure a supercluster yet further away, then we could indeed have infinite stars in every direction and still have most of the sky be black. A sort of inverted Cantor dust effect.

Speaking of fractals, I keep getting this image of something like an infinite anthill, and I don't have anything to draw with so I'll try words and maybe it'll work.

But like. Okay, so when I was born I (basically) went from a womb to a bedroom. And as I grew, the bubble of my awareness expanded to a house, and then to a whole property, and then to a neighborhood, and then to a school district, and then to a town.

And each of these were sort of expansions of the previous, like coming out of one chamber in an anthill into a larger chamber, and that larger chamber is just an anteroom to a yet larger chamber.

(Okay, fine, I'll find some paper or something.)
 

A couple of things about this (very basic) model leap out to me.

The first is an appreciation for just how many nooks there are. Like, every other kid in the Alamance/Burlington School System lived in a town that was full of neighborhoods that were full of houses that each had bedrooms.

Another is that the space has more dimensions than I was able to draw on the page. It's not merely a boring geographic claim—one could argue that the next bubble outside of "Alamance/Burlington School System" was not, in fact, just "North Carolina" or similar, but rather was something like "winter drumline" or "competitive Tae Kwon Do."

(And it just as easily might have been "debate club" or "Boy Scouts" or "competitive robotics" or "getting high off whippets" or "getting really into having sex" or any number of other things.)

As I leveled up out of a given bubble, in other words, the next bubble wasn't always of the same type. But each new bubble was itself an anthill-chamber with entrances back down to lots of other smaller bubbles, e.g. once I "left" my school system and entered the larger world of winter drumline, I encountered people who had themselves emerged into the winter drumline ecosystem from their own smaller school system bubbles. I could in theory have followed them back to their smaller bubbles, and we could have burrowed further and deeper until we were snuggled up in their own bedrooms, for instance.

There's something in this about how gases take up the volume of their container, and how humans can't seem to maintain a felt sense of abnormalcy for very long.

Some people stop climbing up out of bubbles at something like their father's small business, which they then prepare themselves to take over.

Other people keep on climbing until they have e.g. the presidency, or control over internationally notable crypto exchanges.

And both of these bubbles (eventually) feel right and natural and normal, for the people in them. We acclimate. We adjust. It starts to feel ordinary, even if (at first) there's a large dose of "I never thought I'd be here!"

Part of this is down to something like "no matter what the surrounding visual imagery, you're always looking out at a sphere of Stuff around you." Like, the world that we're capable of carrying, inside our heads, is always just this spherical terrarium? And it's not that much different to adjust to a spherical terrarium made of low-earth orbit than it is to adjust to one made of the insides of a sweatshop?

From the perspective of a human brain, they're both within the same order of magnitude of pixels and complexity. Ditto something like "no matter whether you're a fry cook or Elon Musk, you have twenty-four hours in your day and you're going to spend a lot of them eating, breathing, sleeping, pooping, talking, and doing things with your hands."

(There's also something anthropic here, in that we're not going to carve out very many cave-bubbles that are inhospitable to humans; humans are ~100% of the time going to find themselves in human-sustaining bubbles by an obvious set of filtering and selection effects.)

But I am reminded of a time when my father applied for an environmental engineering job, despite having zero experience and not having the relevant specialty subskills (he was an engineer, but not an environmental engineer). His interviewer asked "so, what makes you think you can do this job, then?" and my father's reply was "what makes you think I can't?"

(He got the job and performed adequately for many years.)

I am similarly reminded of my grandfather's curious aphorism, that it's every bit as hard to compete at the bottom as at the top.

(I think this isn't quite true, but that it's trying to say something like the competition itself is just as stressful and difficult, even if you're fighting over pennies rather than empires. Like, work is still work, and cutthroat antagonists are still cutthroat antagonists, etc.)

All of which is to say: I think the experience of playing in a vast and complicated bubble is not 10x different than the experience of playing in a small and trivial one. I think that bubbles which are by any measure 1000x more meaningful or impactful or leverage-y are only maybe 2x or 3x or mmmaaaaaybe like 6x more complicated and fast-paced and skill-intensive, and often not even that. I've seen people with incredible perceptivity and dexterity and sensitivity and cleverness honing and applying outrageous levels of skill to, like, making cool videos about vaulting over trash cans, or streamlining the process of expanding their Minecraft world-model, and I've seen people who were demonstrably less-capable-agents doing passably well at moving around hundreds of millions of dollars.

I don't know what to do about any of that. There's a standard EA-bot answer that goes something like "oh! Right! Since there are bubbles that are a billion times more important, your job is to climb up to the biggest bubble you're capable of meaningfully controlling or impacting, and then Steer Toward The Glorious Future!"

But that seems ... askew, somehow? Like a misunderstanding of the question, as if someone said "wait, what's going on with this weird rock" and somebody else was like "oh, if we light it on fire we can get to the moon!"

Something's up, here, in other words, and while we could leap forward to various applications with partial and imperfect understanding, I much more want to figure out, like, a sensible model of The Thing That's Going On. To be able, if my child asks me "Dad, what's the world like? How does it work?" to include some coherent story of this fractal anthill thing in my explanation.

Like, this is what's going on when people send other people off to university, right?

(Right?)

Like, they're saying "get out of this bubble, get to a bigger hub, if you hang out in the 'university' bubble for a while you will see a lot of ways to climb out of it into even bigger bubbles—or at the very least, if you decide that a small bubble really is the right home for you, being in the ... antechamber? ... of a university will let you peer into a much larger assortment of small bubbles than the ones you can see from inside this small bubble, such that you'll be able to make a choice that's better suited to your goals and preferences."

(I apologize for the fragmented nature of this essay, but there are only a few more non-sequiturs left.)

People seem (to me) to have something like a parabolic arc, when it comes to how-big-of-a-bubble-they-want-to-be-in. They start out in tiny nooks, as children; they move out into the world as teens and young adults, and at some point people peak in their struggle-to-reach-a-higher-bubble. They get to some large-enough-for-their-ambitions antechamber, and they look around, and then they choose (or carve out) a smaller nook off that antechamber for themselves. They found a company, maybe, or establish a career in academia, or develop a brand. They start a family, and tuck that family away in some off-the-radar town in Northern California. Maybe they keep tabs on the larger bubble, or maybe they never actually drop back down, but they do stop climbing, most of them.

(Us?)

They find a nook that matches their comfort zone, or they adjust their comfort zone to match the nook they find themselves in.

Which means something, I think, when it comes to "what advice do I want to give to a clever high schooler?"

I think I want to say stuff like:

• Think about the expanse and potential of the bubble you're in before you really settle into exploring all its nooks and crannies and becoming comfortable inside of it. Decide whether you want to keep leveling up, because there is a tradeoff between climbing to the next level of chamber-size and developing expertise in your current chamber.
• Shoot for a nook that's higher than the nook you suspect you're ultimately comfortable with, because the bubbles get bigger as you climb, and if you stop in a comfortable spot, you'll have just arbitrarily ended up in one single random instance of a right-for-you sized nook. But if you go up one level higher than that, you will be able to access a bunch of that-sized nooks that all open up into the same antechamber, and choose from them, and thus your odds of something like satisfaction and success go way way up.
• Similarly, there's something that's not even quarter-baked about ... like ... if you ultimately want to Do Your Real Work in a nook of size N, and you pop up to a nook of size N+1 so that you can peer into all the N-sized nooks off that larger nook ... well, you're still limited to only the N-sized nooks that are off that larger nook. You can only fly to the cities that planes-from-that-airport reach. You might benefit from going yet higher, to N+2, to see which of the N+1 nooks off that antechamber looks the most promising, in terms of containing N-sized nooks that you're likely to want to settle into, but: from the N+2 vantage point, you probably can't clearly see into the N-sized nooks. Like, you can peer into the chambers one level below you, and peer out through the exit into the larger chamber above you, but you can't really see two levels further in either direction? ...idk.
• Don't let the vast majesty of larger nooks intimidate or demoralize you? They're probably full of monkeys of roughly the same caliber as the monkeys you're already used to?
• Something something, all the actual joy and light and satisfaction actually comes from (relatively) smaller nooks, as far as I can tell? Like, there's this thing where, you want to pop up into a big antechamber that's got a ton of cool offshoots, and then drop into one of those cool offshoots where you can actually focus and stuff. There's tremendous value in having your next-largest-nook be a good one, that lets you pop out of your cave and rub shoulders with lots of other cool people and check in on lots of other cool projects and happenings, but you probably don't want to do Your Main Thing in the airport lounge? You want to do your main thing in a building that's convenient to the airport lounge, so that you're only one jump up and one jump back down away from other cool things that are happening. You don't want to be in the lounge itself; it's loud and chaotic and there are a million things tugging at your attention and you can't really get your feet under you and besides, most of the people in the lounge are going somewhere else so they don't have the requisite stick-around properties to help you build things, for the most part. But you also don't want to be way way way down, two or three levels below where the cool people are, because then it's very hard to stay in touch and it's very hard to get your message out and be seen and stuff.
  
  (There's something here about grapevines and go-betweens usually just crossing from one level to another, not crossing multiple level boundaries at a time. Like, if you impress somebody, they'll maybe go out into the next antechamber up and big you/your project up to people, but they won't likely go two levels up.)

I haven't managed to tie together the stuff at the beginning, about rich complexity, with the stuff at the end, about humans and social spheres. But I put them both in this essay because I think there is a connection. There's some insight lurking that I haven't quite had yet, about the insane complexity and detail that is everywhere bundled up into quanta that are themselves bundled up into bunches that are themselves bundled up into larger bunches, something about how you can drill down from any nook, even something like "the presidency of the United States," and it doesn't take long at all to get all the way down to a very quiet tributary of Not Much Going On.

("Not Much Going On" is a misnomer, of course. But like, relative to the standards of the presidential nook.)

There's something important, in my mind, about the fact that, when I go from an international gathering of EAs and longtermists back to my home in California, it feels like I am descending, and like the walls are getting closer (luckily, in a cozy way rather than a claustrophobic one).

When I leave my home in California (which is itself still fairly plugged in to Big Important Stuff via the internet and my social ties), and go home to North Carolina to visit my parents, it feels like I am descending further still.

I can descend all the way back to the literal room that I lived in, as a three-year-old child; the room that was once not only the center of my worldview, but also the majority of it. The room that contained Most Of What Mattered.

And some people live there. When I speak to people in my hometown (such as those who Never Escaped), it's interesting to see how they have filled their bubbles (which are so much smaller) to approximately the same extent, and with approximately the same level of apparent satisfaction, as my friends concerned with the literal actual lightcone.

(There's a filtering/self-assortment effect there, obviously, but also "but.")

In conclusion: I'm miles away from a conclusion here. I'd like your help. My main sense is that there's something about this nested nook concept that is important, that is a useful abstraction, that will clarify a lot of confusions and help capture most of the important/relevant complexity while simplifying a lot of things.

(It feels, in my head, something like the distinction between arithmetic and algebra, or between doing a recursive function and finding a straightforward equation that just takes in n and gives you the answer without having to go through every step between 0 and n.)

Curious to find out if anyone else feels the same, and curious to find out if anyone else has the ingredients of epiphany.