I’m curious about grandiose ideas filled with wonder and a hope of magic. I’m curious about what they are about and how they are made, but I’m most curious about who makes them.
For it is one thing to understand what goes into the spark of an idea, but it is another learn about the mind behind it. The latter determines if the former was a miracle, a strike of chance, or one of many ideas to come.
Fluff aside, here is a list of topics that I am intimately curious about, and some questions/notes that I hope will frame why I am curious about them.
Stories: what makes a good story? Ideal length, speed, exaggeration, tone, etc? What is the value of a good story? Links with leadership?
Education: is our current system failing just because I don’t like it? How do I determine who deserves higher quality education? Is forced education a good or bad thing? Early STEM education? This one has too many questions.
Synthetic Bio: cells editing cells.
Computational Bio: ??? This one just sounds important
AI: i like what open AI is doing. I want to do it. AGI when?
Large Language Models: similar to the above. It’s crazy that most of the world doesn’t know that this exists yet.
Web3: So much noise, need to find signal. i like bureaucratic and government applications. Is it better to place your trust in computers or humans? I like the hardness argument.
Dreams: a whole new reality where time is slower. How does this affect the real world? Can we add multiplayer? Can we force lucid dreaming? Ties to longevity?
AR/VR: soo many things. Should we replicate the real world? Teleportation? Ready Player One? Emerge goes brrrrr.
Electromagnetics: I took a course for this in university and feel like I didn’t really internalize the lessons here. I still don’t know how cell signals work. Or brushless motors. Or pretty much anything else.
Space: I’ve been quite involved with the metaverse recently, however I believe that it is more “exploring inwards” than “exploring outwards”. It feels like the universe has so much to offer, and we have succumbed to creating our own. I also wonder what the limits of our universe are? Will it indefinitely end?
Longevity: I’ve recently met some very interesting people who are willing to do anything and everything to live long. I have found myself to be convicted in the idea of ammortality, and thus want to see what this involves.
Distributed Computing: More of an abstraction from web3 or blockchain, I want to look into great distributed computing systems and how they are model their incentives.
Zero Knowledge Proofs: Obviously a very important concept in cryptography. I also think I would enjoy it because it reminds me of my favourite university course to date
Design: I want to be able to convey the dreams I have for the world. Especially animation. Animation is the epitome of exact storytelling. The skill is worth cultivating because it acts as a high throughput method of moving thoughts externally.
Decision Theory: I’ve loosely heard of Bayesian decision theory and think that it would be interesting to explore different models of how to make decisions well.
Physics: relativity, quantum computing, I want to understand how the building blocks of our universe were optimized.
Human-Computer Interfaces: what is the ideal way to interact with the digital world? Should it be as low friction as possible? What am I willing to sacrifice for that? Speed or power? Am I ready to succumb to AGI? Especially interested in Brain Computer Interfaces.