My name is Paweł Sysiak, Pav for short. I am scheming how to improve epistemics and collective coordination using technology. I do UI / UX design, wrote AI Revolution 101 and have a background in art. Here are the values and directions I care about.
Overcoming bias
One of the main efforts of my learning is to figure out how to minimize Cognitive Biases. I am sure I suffer from many, especially from the mother of all biases My-side bias and her children Confirmation bias Hindsight bias Expert trap 🎨 Typical mind fallacy Creator’s bias 🎨. So pleassssse help and send Anonymous feedback. What truths about myself people are trying to avoid telling me?
Being accurately uncertain
I will prioritize precision over persuasion. I think the form and the flow of writing is important but it should never compromise the precision of arguments. I aim to include Epistemic status in my writing and include my confidence tags
Short
“I am sorry that I didn’t have time to write a shorter letter” – Pascal. I try to distill knowledge into as few words as possible. I think this is one of the most important and neglected ideas about knowledge. The shorter the more valuable the message is (while simultaneously preserving its depth and quality).
Through a peasant's reasoning
This is a Polish expression meaning to communicate in the simplest possible terms. Knowledge is often a signaling tool – a vehicle for climbing a homo sapiens hierarchy ladder. "I am capable of using complex vocabulary", "I belong to this type of people", "I am smart". I feel this force is largely active in our culture and in my hunter-gatherer's brain. I try to recognize it and not engage in it. What parts of my thinking are there because it’s good to think this way? How to say things simpler? What is the dumbest and most revealing question here? On this website, I try to follow Richard Feynman method
"If you can't explain it simply you don't understand it well enough".
I don’t normal write
Stylistically things may feel off. English is not my native language. On top of that I am also softly dyslexic. I believe it’s a feature not a bug (as dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big picture connections at the expense of processing speed and parsing fine details)
Also, I believe an important function of creation is figuring out better interfaces of knowledge. Tinkering on this comes to me naturally and language is a system I am trying to improve. That said, I try to do it only when grammar rules are blocking precision, a proper weighing of arguments; or makes expressing ideas less-straight-forward, not direct or too long.
Long-term
New knowledge is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing when you compare medieval to contemporary findings in medicine, ethics, physics. It is also a curse because we have a Recency bias . I try to resist the new and select the knowledge that has a long expiry date.
Max good
I feel the most meaning when I am in the process, however wiggly, of attempting to create the most positive impact. This seems may be my top intrinsic value according to this test.
All the directions!
How to survive being interested in almost anything? It’s tough to have generalist interests, but being a generalist could prove increasingly valuable in an era of specialization. Holden Karnofsky describes a hypothesis that ideas naturally get harder to find over time (see Where’s today’s Beethoven? and chapters on: “The innovation as mining hypothesis” and “Data on innovation stagnation”). That’s why there may be a lot of low-hanging fruit where areas overlap.
I recognize, however, the value of developing an area of expertise. Upon reflection, I've discovered that I naturally trail towards understanding distortions and algorithms of human mind, specifically Cognitive Biases, and secondarily Mental Models.
I find it’s productive for me to map all my major area of interests see it on this page:
Unique areas