$ Essays
Older, longer-form writing on evolution, computation, culture, and the mind. Big-frame stuff, kept here rather than in the blog feed.
On the Evolution of Mental Models
Fitness landscapes as a universal pattern, from genes to galaxies
Computation in Nature
Evolution as computation, and why technology keeps copying biology
Our Collective Brain
Culture as humanity's nervous system
On Attention
The attention span as the selection pressure of the information age
Organization and the Brain
Democracy, neural networks, and organization as collective computing power
On Cities
Cities as living organisms -- growing, evolving, and dying
The Model
A short fiction: a language model chases the Aleph of human language