• Intended purpose of this document

◦ Join up recordings, essays, thoughts, quotes into a coherent and shareable body of
thought.
◦ Gather information on the driving questions of Outlier Theory
▪ Where can the concept apply?
• What are the existing outliers, is there shared structure among any of them, and is
it extensible to other areas?
▪ Where do outliers come from, what is their long-term fate, and how can we
find/detect them?
▪ How can we generally work with something defined by breaking expectations?
• Which expectations are solid?
◦ Completion status: Only considered complete if there are no loose ends, if the
information is presented in a logical order, and if the document is comprehensible
without knowledge of my writing idiosyncrasies.
◦ Notes on formatting
▪ Italics are used to emphasise within a body of text, while bold attracts attention to a
wider, general point. Green highlights signify sections I am happy about - they may
be expanded, but likely not removed or moved. Yellow highlights denote misplaced
thoughts (often requiring separate sections & headings). Orange highlights are
comments and TBDs. Text without highlights is implicitly incomplete.
◦ Plan of attack
▪ Review of previous essays & completed thoughts
▪ Outlier case studies, motivation for the theory
▪ Find other people studying aspects of the same problem
• Perhaps there exists scientific study of sequellitis
▪ More circumstances around outlier case studies
▪ Fix this mess of a document, it has become a dumping ground for random
observations. Deepen the bullet point structure, shuffle, and move the completely
unrelated stuff elsewhere.
• There is an underlying reason behind this: the outlier concept is very wide. The
driving questions are underdeveloped, I have almost no idea of the teams or
people behind these things. I seem to find it easier to care about the things
themselves. And there an outlier can be fit to almost anything that surprises me,
which overlaps a lot with what interests me, so basically everything fits here.
Now, what to do with that?
◦ The document is still a nice breeding ground to place everything that caught
my eye and see how it interacts. I might be the first person to connect L&O
with Durango (through treatment of issues in a world that has to deal with
them somehow, though that connection isn't in the text proper yet). Let's start
there.
▪ It's more helpful to focus on the document, not the theory. It's a collection
of a bunch of situations where existing tools to understand them have
failed, and connections I can draw between them. It sets up a standard for
inclusion (I cannot with good conscience include things I like but don't
understand or, in the end, couldn't be that passionate about).
• Basic idea
◦ A baseline is a generally accepted system of expectations from items belonging to a
given category (typically works of fiction).
◦ An outlier is then an item that belongs to the category, yet vastly outperforms the
baseline with regards to some useful measure, requiring a change in what we think is
reasonable to expect.
◦
 ◦ The thesis of Outlier Theory is twofold:
▪ 1) Innovation and greatness is discrete: hidden in individual works, not in styles and
traditions.
▪ 2) A great or innovative work (an outlier) appears thanks to circumstance, not
necessarily greatness or innovativeness of its creator.
◦ We can draw corresponding conclusions:
▪ In dealing with outliers once they are already out there (in study, review, post-
mortem), we must think in terms of circumstance, not craft, tradition, and skill.
▪ We must learn to spot an established baseline and actively look for ways out of it.
This is the only way to explore the full world of perspectives and possibilities.
▪ If in control of an outlier, study its origins and take care not to kill it when
expanding.
• Baseline
◦ The baseline is an established state of the art, best practices, a social network keeping
knowledge, etc.
▪ Baseline components
• Established state of the art
• Best practices
• A network on the creating side maintaining knowledge
• A similar network on the receiving side, writing reviews and actively discussing
some aspects of works belonging to the baseline
• Notably, the baseline can be broken from either side (though breaking creation
typically also breaks viewing). You encounter a couple works, get an idea for
how the underlying thing works, then something happens to break that narrative,
but that might not have been its intent at all, it might just be part of a different
creative baseline.
▪ A corrupted baseline is one where bad advice is kept alive in the social network
because the system has become disconnected from the origin of the ideas. It will tend
to appear where turnover is high, rules are opaque, and persuasion is normalised.
• Possible reasons for a corrupted baseline (inasmuch we don't accept it as the
default state)
◦ NoD
▪ The NoD essay argues that it is because of goal misalignment, which
would tie interestingly into the topic of AI.
• The problem with NoD is that it is the degradation of systems. People
stop following rules. So it is unsolvable by a reorganisation, since the
rules just get degraded again. Not even rules intended to prevent NoD
are invulnerable. Eventually, the near-miss documentation will end up
unread.
• So what do you do instead? You make people want to be safe. You
make it not a rule that will slowly drain away, but a part of their
identity, you make the gruelling and painful and seemingly-not-going-
anywhere experience (what Vsauce defined as "boring") of security
maintaining into an experience that is either enjoyable, or high-status,
or you otherwise incentivise it.
• You need to somehow rig the system so that the degradation leads to a
place other than bolting things together upside down.
• NoD cannot be fought with rules and standards, because they get
eroded. Instead, it is fought either by turnover (getting fresh people,
progressing one funeral (or firing) at a time) or by non-codified
expectations (reframing problems, honor)
 ◦ Vsauce1 suggests that the problem is individuals aren't built to
reason alone, but in groups (thus confirmation bias is just due
dilligence for your side in the debate).
◦ "Every popular mistaken belief creates a dead zone of ideas around it that are
relatively unexplored because they contradict it." (Paul Graham)
◦ Additionally, indie problems are more tractable because they are more niche.
◦ This creates low-hanging fruit, which can create an outlier with little cost in
resources.
◦ As we learn more about the world, there are ever more mysteries. Incentives
(such as economical ones) are often very focused (economies of scale), so a
single area becomes very developed while other approaches are neglected.
◦ The baseline has already established the qualitative structure and focuses on
quantitative details (craft over art). It may hide this through vague phrasing2
(the three-act structure "ends up happening as you write (even if you don't
intend to do so)" -> obvious question: why? how?)
▪ Lifehack and SMART goals: "all goals are analogous to getting fit, so we
just have to push through it".
▪ Three-act structure: All stories are basically the same, we just have to fit
within that structure and hide it well.
◦ The outlier then arrives out of left field: an entirely new situation where the
quantitative discussions are moot.
▪ A research-y or otherwise unpredictable goal, such as my study of
Castaway, doesn't have meaningful measurable subgoals that align well
with the goal.
▪ HTTYD: Hiccup has no overarching desire for most of the movie; he is
just being curious and doing damage control. That changes the pacing of
the movie drastically.
▪ We might even argue that the central problem of people (not characters!)
in Durango is precisely a lack of a clear goal and the existence of
numerous factions with poor coordination.
◦ Example baselines
▪ Movies
• The overreliance on formula as a consequence of the limited space
▪ Nonfiction writing
• Overdependence on hooks?
◦ I find that any marketing in a text taints it (which is why my writing is never
successful). Maybe the point is that I disagree with "don't tell the answer". I
find that even giving the answer straight away (as 3Blue1Brown at times
does) can work as a hook if the underlying point is interesting.
▪ Books
• The need to maintain tension at all costs, pitting the author against the reader
◦ A distrust (possibly valid, because of the expected audience) of the reader's
attention span
• Overuse of tropes to convey intended feelings without putting substance behind
them.
• Show, Don't Tell
◦ Some books try to be movies (NaNoWriMo)
◦ Telling is any part of a work that exists solely to communicate information
to the viewer, as opposed to carrying story (?). Its widespread definition,

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ArVh3Cj9rw
2 This is a good way to spot a baseline: it has to dodge the inconsistencies it stands on.
 however, is focused on the superficial: description versus action. Action can
still be telling.
◦ Discussions of style (say, adverb use) only matter inasmuch as you need to
trick the reader or make the experience more superficially pleasant. It is
relevant, but not core.3
◦ A more meaningful distinction is dynamic versus static4 works. Static works
are primarily composed of telling and have to be good by creating interesting
worlds. Dynamic works tell enough to set up the (generalised) characters and
then have them do things. In theory, telling is everything, because the story is
just information. So telling is distinguished from showing thus: Telling is
about things, showing is about events.
▪ Rules for writing
• There are no Mary Sue characters, only Mary Sue stories. Not everybody has to
be flawed (Think K or Melquíades). The fundamental rule is "don't write stories
that glorify a single character at the expense of all else", but the Mary Sue
formulation caused much collateral damage.
◦ Garbage culture?
• Outlier origins
◦ Breaking established "rules of play"
▪ Rules of play often focus on the outward symptoms of a problem. An outlier is in
accord with the spirit, but not the letter of the rule.
◦ The process often benefits from chance
▪ HTTYD, at least, seems to have been produced by the alignment of a million
chances and a million people not failing at their jobs.
▪ Outliers are tough to follow and not always do the creators realise what they just
made. Case in point: HTTYD 2, a return to formula.
• Scientific study of sequellitis?
▪ I'm not so sure of the circumstances related to Durango, What! Studio & Nexon
▪ OTT
◦ Exploring fringe groups at a cost of comfort, but benefit of novelty
▪ The startup business is based on outliers - finding ways in which the world is wrong
and earning money by exploiting it, hopefully producing a fix in the process. PG
essays.
◦ Astroseminář. Mystics and pseudoscientists tend to flock to underexplored subjects. See:
dreams, psychology, personality categories, etc. I'm not sure about the direction of the
causal relation between the mystic rush and the skeptic vacuum. (i.e., not sure if this is a
baseline or an outlier source)
• Outlier consequences
◦ Breaking established scale
◦ Reviews point out quality, but cannot pinpoint its exact source
▪ Double take, surprise, broken expectations
▪ Confronting an outlier produces mini-stories of its own.
• It can turn you off an entire genre/medium, or it can open your mind to a world
of perspectives.
• A physical reaction. Goosebumps or 20 pull-ups. Quite objective.
◦ New baseline establishment
▪ Because of the shakeup, there is more scrutiny and the whole OT structure becomes
more obvious:

3 Captain Obvious?
4 Epical vs. lyrical?
 • OHYOS spawned the term of "macondísmo" and a fear that it relied on a
telenovela-like structure and a barrage of shallow characters, and that its
structure could be abused to mass-produce cheap literature.
• Getting Over It might rely on an "addiction to failure" and abuse of human
stubborn curiosity.
• Outliers do not create Follow The Leader, they merely become the new leader.
But their novelty calls attention to the underlying problems.
◦ Cheap literature has been here before (Hollywood formula)
• Video games rely on addictions already
• Outlier case studies
◦ HTTYD
▪ Baseline: Hero's journey
• A rigid model with slots for characters, major events, and message
• Centered around a specific and persistent need or want
• Compounded by the need for marketing and thus specifying a genre and a niche,
as opposed to quality
▪ Instead
• The inciting incident opens a mystery, but no obvious long-term desire. It is also
internal - Hiccup's choice, not an event (like entering dragon training). The
moment has some aspects of an ending, making the whole film feel a bit third-
act-y (everything is a consequence of Hiccup freeing Toothless).
• The introduction is very effective, so the movie has a lot of room for a second
act, which doesn't need to artificially delay since it's fundamentally about
exploring something new - there is no mentor, no world to fit into.
▪ Sidenote?
• There's a similarity to some Lost episodes in the lack of distance between the
viewer and the main character. The Hero's journey often has good/evil,
known/unknown axes. This puts the story into a context, as Vonnegut explains,
where we can see good or bad things happening. But sometimes the writers go
full Pepe Silvia on you and just present a lot of things that happen without clear
good/bad weight and the characters actually doing their best to make sense of it.
Many classics5 have characters that try to analyse their story - not genre
savviness, just reflection.
◦ TBD: Try watching a random animated movie & see the structure there. (I
picked Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs because it has a vaguey similar
character premise to HTTYD)
◦ (this is basically ratfic without an antagonist (or a driving conflict))
◦ TBD: Even more generally, I should watch more formulaic movies to get a
better grip on the baseline. Danny Deckchair is an option for sure.
◦ Works of great volume, emergent atmosphere, and no clear upshot6
▪ Baseline: Themes
• Often, in book analysis, one searches for the central theme of the work, from
which the entire book then follows.
▪ Instead: World, atmosphere
• A movie can end with you crossing the street, but in real life, you must go home.7
• Much of these works is extremely tangential8 and there is a lot of "filler". The
works are typically connected to something "real" - Americana, Márquez's life,
5 Jenom z maturitní četby: Cizinec hledá byt, Alexandrijský kvartet, Vypravěč, Kolíbka, Stepní vlk, Tristram
Shandy (pokud uznáme, že se tam vůbec něco děje), Na Větrné Hůrce (tam je to zamotané ještě do vrstev
vyprávění), Milovaná (to je spíš character drama prostě)
6 This goes contrary to the "no groups" rule. That signifies unfinishedness.
7 Source unknown and unfindable.
8 Said about Twin Peaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDjYpUYt9MI
 existing mythology. Thus, they reflect the real world, as opposed to being riddles
with a solution9. Maybe there is something to be said about Agatha Christie here
(GAD versus The Hollow & co.).
• Sidenote: Rational fiction aims to resolve the same problem (twisting the story
to fit a predetermined endpoint), but in a different way. It wants to give more
autonomy to the characters, but then gets stuck in creating a good story out of it.
Failing to drop the central conflict, it merely invents balanced situations of
rational conflict, which are inherently unstable. 1/0 comes to mind as a much
more stable way to give autonomy to characters, and it achieves it by total
honesty (to the point of lacking a fourth wall). It's analogous to realism versus
magical realism.
▪ Examples
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
◦ Massive book by volume of plot
◦ Takes you out of the moment, intended to work as a whole
◦ Packed with ministories (nights of intolerance and dill pickles, Krakow
hospital, the wise Catalonian, et al.) Concentrated Borges, basically.
• Other classics
◦ The Tin Drum (Germany)
◦ Midnight's Children (India)
◦ However, at that point, we might consider it its own baseline. At times, these
works can get rambling.
◦ TBD: Create a timeline of magical realism
• Twin Peaks
◦ Durango: Wild Lands, the game
▪ Baseline: MMOs designed for whales, pandering to (empowering) the player
▪ Instead: An MMO hooking people on a sense of community10 and on lore that the
game takes seriously.
▪ It was a world where people were not pitted against each other, but pushed to
cooperate against environmental threats or to build places.
▪ Managed to build an appreciating fanbase despite a bungled execution (country
availability issues, poor PvP)
◦ Durango: Wild Lands, the story/setting
▪ Used an existing baseline in an unexpected context: Isekai
• This genre is the same hero-empowering, world-toppling cliché as the Hero's
journey, but here it is made mundane, a part of the worldbuilding. Durango is
about finding memos about the lore, not yourself
◦ This is enhanced by what the designers chose to focus on: Environment
design through art girders (founding principles).
• It explores a world that deals with problems analogical to those of MMOs -
hunting leads to warfare much like games with primarily combat-based
mechanics inevitably have warring clans.
• It sets up a highly dynamic, chaotic world, where long-term infrastructure is next
to impossible because of constant Warps, so it feels like the place doesn't have
much history and is closer to wild lands. This creates a feeling that anything is
possible within the world, as opposed to our world where institutions and
centuries-old traditions often block change.
◦ Frontier (as mentioned in Interstate 60)

9 It was said at the Art History course that art is defined precisely by there being no key to its interpretation.
10 Ending party:
https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/2eueya/has_any_cancelled_mmo_ever_made_an_event_out_of/
 • Again, in the last transmission1112, we see that the world is ending, and the
players are addressed in plural13.
◦ Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy
▪ Baseline: Busywork-based games
▪ Instead: A game where progress happens in the skill of the player. Additional
innovation is the way in which the difficulty auto-adjusts as you fall back down the
mountain.
• General principle here: Rage games & super difficult mods aren't considered a
worthy avenue because they demand too much investment on the player. This
problem can be solved, but is generally overlooked compared to problems in
AAA games, which are far less approachable but more mainstream.
◦ La Pedrera
▪ Baseline: Purely functional, minimalist buildings
▪ Instead: Additional value is imparted through organic shapes and the cost is offset
by the improvement this allows for.
◦ Minecraft
◦ Perhaps some of Castaway recordings may be useful here, but not now, as I have no idea
what Castaway is.
• Notable exceptions
◦ Webcomics appear to be a fairly functioning medium. Since anyone can publish one on
no budget, people constantly throw random stuff on the net. It's an open system and
roughly a success story - there are few standards. Some objective-ish measurement
exists in terms of art quality, writing, etc., and I don't know how valid it is, but it seems
not to do too much harm.
▪ As a result, these are examples that could be outliers within the more general indie
creative world:
• 1/0
• Time, OTC, OTT
◦ OTT is the synthesis of why the internet is fundamentally a good thing.
• Gunnerkrigg Court (this is just copied over)
◦ Versatility in styles (great efficiency of depiction and variety) AND in topics
(what is being depicted)
◦ Well-researched references to everything as if Tom Sidell lived in Macondo
or something.
◦ It's somewhat hidden by the outlier effort (scale!) put into it as well.
▪ The webcomic itself also appears non-gimmicky, and in many ways its
structure is similar to other webcomics, it just has a vastly different scale.
◦ While this example is higher up in some measures, they follow rather
straightforwardly from effort and personality of its creator. There is nothing
inexplicable at play, at least not in the sense we care about here.
• Jason Shiga
▪ Both art-heavy (GC) and message-heavy (1/0, JS) works are present
▪ I'm not that familiar with the webcomic world. Maybe Tailsteak reviews and
whoever it was that did the "judging a book by its cover" thing would offer a better
idea of the baseline and where it comes from. It's true that webcomics aren't overall
too respected and there is a lot of mediocre stuff, so it could be just market forces at
play?
• The role of evolution

11 I'm sure there's something more to find here

12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFH13pLwkUo
13 Sidenote: This way of thinking, noticing individual aspects of an archetype and thinking about how they might be
handled differently (and why they weren't), is very much inspired by Astroseminář.
 ◦ Two faces
▪ Brilliant solutions that are out of the box of traditional thinking (as Instead)
▪ Messy, interconnected system that is next to impossible to fix. (as Baseline)
• B-movies
◦ Common usage: "low-budget, usually badly produced movie"
◦ More useful: Movie without expectations. Movies that resign on having a broad
overreaching point and instead just fuck around. This might mean that not even the
creators are sure where the movie will go or what it means.
◦ Case study: Journey to the Center of the Earth
▪ No antagonist, no moral, just luck and an adventure.
• The upshot
◦ Restructuring note: Much of this should be moved elsewhere (collectors of outliers
should go to outlier reactions), but a clear "these actions were taken inspired by Outlier
Theory" section should remain.
◦ I'm creating the Klaus search engine so that I can find interesting ideas online. I again
found that this idea is based on surprisingly little data and few examples. I have trouble
finding good content. My bookmarks are a to-do list, and quite few of the items are to-
read items. Many are to-read-up, which is distinct from to-read (say, read up on VR), to-
write (often on TV Tropes), to-check-eventually (WIP of others, Miegakure, Sapiens) or
to-backup (Durango, Castaway, Likwid).
◦ I base content websites on only these (to my recollection) (this now seems outdated and
unrelated):
▪ Tailsteak
▪ Garlikov
▪ Paul Graham
▪ Vsauce
▪ WBW
▪ Jacob Geller (whose "Bad Graphics" video is cook/chef theory applied to video
game graphics)
▪ A few other edutainment YT channels (CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Sideways (HTTYD
opening video))
▪ Trouble is that much wisdom is found in non-dedicated sites, like xkcd Time. Search
must also try to class reasonably chosen parts of the text.
◦ Other people in the outlier business:
▪ Jacob Geller or Old Vsauce are all about outliers, weird things
• JG seems to feel the same draw towads things that just don't belong in this world.
He is far more art-focused, though.14
▪ WBW in its travel posts is about odd things in odd places
▪ George Carlin calls out the Baseline as bullshit
• Being aware of outliers, of different ways to do stuff, helps you recognise
bullshit. Case in point: "Storytelling in general is actually the art of choosing
what to withhold. When rewriting, decide which answers you want to reserve
until the end."1516 I might have believed it, but not after reading OHYOS or 1/0.
Withholding is a marketing tool.
▪ Paul Graham (primarily startups, but the theme is prevalent in his writing)
▪ Perhaps Tailsteak plays a role?
▪ I am not the only one to have this reaction. For example:
https://autotranslucence.wordpress.com/2018/03/30/becoming-a-magician/ uses very
14 Uh, what? What else is this about?
15 https://www.julian.com/guide/write/rewriting
16 Note to self: This guy is in a class similar to Lifehack (though less absolutely irredeemable). He is fine with
quoting famous people left and right to lend a sense of authority, writes with a measurative (new word!) tendency -
"dopamine hits", and is okay with tricking people.
 similarly exaggerated language ("magician") to describe an outlier, but in a person,
rather than a thing, and thus a more skill-based and therefore tangible approach.
• Avenues for expansion (probably a pointless section now)
◦ Highlighted text. What else?
◦ Maybe read up on architecture of ordinary buildings.
◦ Read up on clichés and history of literature and reactions.
◦ Most important is the study of the circumstances that led to the case studies mentioned.
• Science
◦ The scientific study of psychology, behaviour, and other black boxes (such as NoD) is
hampered by p-values. They create an arbitrary threshold for "positive result" and divert
our attention to what is easy to document, not representative of real life.
• Some specks of hope
◦ The aforementioned webcomic world filled with indies and mostly only advertising each
other
◦ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-
the-internet/519795/ points to podcasts as possibly valuable content
◦ Nebula?
◦ Wikipedia
• Archive of unrelated or not-yet-placed thoughts
◦ Outliers will be my fists and fangs. I will go through the world, lonely as Aureliano the
last. Guided by the attempts of my predecessors, I will check every memory and rebuild
the universe from scratch. I will start with Klaus and see what else can be gathered, but
it cannot be the ultimate cure. I will keep searching for the nonexistent, but when
needed, I will produce it on my own. I will study dreams, the scientific method, fiction,
philosophy, all to get rid of this layer of bullshit and recreate the universe.
◦ Outliers are a trope. Remedios the Beauty, Jugo's mustache, the hidden world of the
Hero's journey. Something that forces you to rethink your life. Maigret is based around
people under pressure and the ways they react to it. Maybe there's something about that
in Cliff Rhodes and the journey to the center of the Earth.
◦ I am an outsider in murder mystery circles, for I reject the mystery. This obviously has a
poor effect.
▪ I try to see the potential of things. To look beneath necessary technical drawbacks
and unimportant bad decisions to the distilled piece of the puzzle. This is both
enlarging of your worldview - far more works get to give you some part of
themselves - and making it much more confused.
◦ Sidenote on the mechanism of science
▪ Science is the process of verification of hypotheses. A grand hypothesis is called a
theory. While theoretically our senses could fool us, science is the reduction of things
we cannot see to things we can. A major problem is that science doesn't tell you how
to pick your hypotheses. So we use two main techniques: pattern-matching and
extrapolation. The first is the applied side, the second is maths.
▪ (space for googology (which is an outlier from MATHS) and my own Tegmark)
◦ Wikipedia outliers?
▪ odd uses of obscure concepts outside of their original context
◦ A related idea: Apply this to a community. "Weird's another place" ("Ne, Darrene. Všude
jinde je [život] divný.") You get odd places with conventionally poor quality of life, but
a culture. Midsomer (if one takes to WMGs), Night Vale, Twin Peaks, the island of Lost,
perhaps even Durango. I Choose To Stay among the heathens ("it looks like you might
be one of us").
◦ Possibly relevant background philosophical insight: When we learn something, there
sometimes comes a moment where we hold the whole thing in our heads. WBW calls it
the tree trunk. And we think that things can be ultimately broken down. That the
 universe, deep down, is describable. And we design curricula as such, and we build sites
like Wikipedia, where it seems that we could capture the whole truth in a system of some
sort, that in order to find something new you need to pursue a PhD. But consider Turing
machines: The simplest structures capable of holding the whole world. They can be
described in a paragraph-ish of somewhat dull text. Then, consider the somewhat dull
metric of the number of steps - how long the machine can keep itself busy. Now, can we
somehow understand the "whole world", the entire universe of possible programs? If the
universe is indeed describable, then through some system we could build the tree trunk
of knowledge here, and find the Busy Beaver. Yet this eludes us even when we restrict
our universe to the shortest ideas of all - BB(5) is still unknown1718. We find that the
world contains too much, more than we can handle, and the curriculum and Wikipedia
and common knowledge, all of that covers only the general use cases and heuristics and
in the end we still don't know diddly, nd we never will. Work on the Busy Beavers is the
purest confrontation with the wild lands, not with the individual portions of the wild that
we manage to tame or recreate within, and it's kicking our asses.
▪ In light of this, Ray Kurzweil's claims that the brain can be deduced from the genetic
code, and it has just a couple of megabytes, so it should be doable, reveal themselves
to be stunningly lacking in perspective, but of course Kurzweil isn't really the point
here.
▪ There is the minor complicating factor of the (4n + 4)2n machines that exist for n
states, a number so unreasonably vast that one could make the opposite point about
the sea of useless machines with only a couple interesting ones through. But there is
a point there as well: 5 states ~ 46 bits, 6 states ~ 58 bits. If we trust xkcd what if19, a
bit corresponds to about a bit of English text. You only cross old tweet length
somewhere around 12 to 13 states, beyond any possible hope of full mapping. Now,
is this at all comparable? Not really, since we convey vastly different kinds of
information - either very specific instructions for a specific abstract machine, or
general and not necessarily coherent observations (and/or demands, chants,
comments, etc.) about a world full of context. But in some sense the idea stands. The
Turing machine builds on itself to create complexity and has the benefit of stability
and well-definedness. The English text exists in context and has the benefit of being
able to just refer to things, to just point out existing order. The phenomena here are
different, but both mediums are permissive in their own ways. In both we can sense
that a lot will be rubbish, but heuristics for filtering have to get more and more clever
as we get to the smart stuff, because it starts to diverge a lot. Thus, BB candidates are
separate theorems, and sentences will require different kinds of people to unpack
properly.
▪ Next day thoughts: Since our language does things other than specify Turing
machines, or even processes in general, the direct cvonnection has little value.
However, it provides a rough benchmark for how ideas can be fairly simple to access
(not necessarily building onto other stuff, but going in a new direction). This doesn't
preclude the necessity of PhD-level study to navigate the possibility space, but it
strips away the notion that we have the whole territory mapped and all we can do is
build further on.
▪ Additional thoughts: This may have bitten Chris Crawford20. Many programs
concern themselves with easy-to-format-and-understand data (such as text, images,
boolean setup), while he tried to apply a similar standard to processes, but then the
anticipation of what they might do (since you deal with living things) became

17 http://turbotm.de/~heiner/BB/mabu90.html
18 https://www.academia.edu/16369928/A_New_Millenium_Attack_on_the_Busy_Beaver_Problem
19 https://what-if.xkcd.com/34/
20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBmuy0N15vQ
 overwhelming, hence going over budget and massive feature cuts. You cannot take
on the entirety of the wild lands at once at a useful scale and expect to win! You can
try, and use it for inspiration, or truth, or something, but in the end the wild lands
must be navigated, not just charted in their entirety! You must discriminate!
• This points to a frame issue. Literature cannot be considered just words on a
page. Yes, that is its physical nature (usually), but it is not a useful framework, as
GPT-3 demonstrates. Instead, we can generally separate two issues for a work of
fiction - frontend and backend. The backend is the story or the point in the
abstract, the way one might learn it for maturita, or a 2D bunch of notes. The
frontend is the presentation, which makes the backend accessible in a more
traditional format. In some cases, this distinction is broken, and the style cannot
be divorced from the substance. But alas, we have to simplify, and we have to
disregard.
◦ What this means is that, at least when writing/outlining, one does not
generally produce text! One produces ideas and outlines and backend stuff
and concepts for the frontend (perhaps the frontend is better thought of as the
coasting/implementation part of creation, with its idea hidden in the
backend), and only in the later stages does any text get made at all!
◦ What does this story format look like? Hard to tell in general, but often, you
might find that in order to work, it needs some kind of symmetry, of
structure. In other words, as with Turing machines, most arbitrary stories (for
some value of that) will be useless or degenerate cases.
• tiling? We're getting distracted.
◦ A different concept that might also be called an outlier in ordinary speech: a wildcard is
a person or group that has evolved separately from the mainstream.
▪ Examples
• LessWrong
• Chris Crawford
• Maybe even Páleš
• People possessed of some radical notions21, people with intense focus on
something most overlook22
◦ Malcolm Steadman, existentialism and injustice
◦ Roman Opalka, the passage of time, mortality and infinity
◦ John McAfee, paranoia, wilderness, the physical aspect of the human body
◦ Larry Walters & Terry Davis, the power of amateurs
◦ Strange, yet inspiring lives
▪ They tend to be tactless and often wrong. The sense of danger here is real and bad
stuff does happen. But... something might come up along the way.
• LessWrong has ways to make Bayes' theorem intuitive
• Chris Crawford has civilisation collapse and public speaking and dreams and art
in pornography.
◦ He also illustrates the wildcard concept rather neatly by being a prime target
for cancel culture. His views are mostly progressive, but at times show a
huge disconnect from the current time and issues (as demonstrated in his "test
comment" about racism, among other things), and so he even gets canceled
from minor places (like the discussion board). But since his primary means of
communication is a self-hosted website & a YouTube channel (and not, say,
Twitter or a major news publisher), it is next to impossible to actually cancel
him!

21 Inception quote
22 This also seems dubious & might overlap with wildcards.
 ▪ He also points out a simple solution for the polarised state of the world:
divorce! Split USA in two! It's ludicurous on its face, but maybe the
problem is not in the bubbles, but rather in the internet (& nebulous
philosophical dilemmas) forcing them to collide, rather than exist in
independence and peace. Thus, we don't have that many wildcards
because we are too connected.
▪ In order to take on a wildcard without getting sucked into the darkness, you must:
• Already be subject matter acquainted
• Only consider the place to be an idea generator (i.e. grain of salt)
• Be patient and understanding (not to flip out at the first troubling claim)
• Be kind, so that the bad does not rub off on you.