Insights by Danielle Fong

Reposted from Twitter/x, which has awful agent observability….

thinking of some of my bag of tricks to use in my “Feynman Method”:

• where is the entropy being created — drive that towards zero. everywhere there is entropy being created, e.g., “energy” diffusing across effective temperature differences as “heat”, it could be reversibly converted into work, useful “energy” via a 100% efficient, reversible “Carnot engine.”
• this is true up to a model that conserves something like “energy for any kind of diffusion and any kind of conserved “energy.” even psychological energy, LLM energy.
• what is the strongest scaling? T^4? exponential? how can you drive that to saturation.
• explore the tradeoffs from a new extremum with the new tools available in technology since people built or rebuilt the industry. what about with the physics that nature has given us. push all the way to the limit, first in theory, and then toward practice.
• what is the most severe problem?
• is there a way to invert it?
• if you relieve this problem, for what and who are you enabling the most. the max-flow min-cut theorem states that in a flow network, the maximum amount of flow passing from the source to the sink is equal to the total weight of the edges in a minimum cut. this is deeply true, not just about graphs in computer science, but about energy, about economies, about negotiating positions in games and business, and in the circulatory systems of life itself in all its forms, in anything that is conserved. it is a deeply spiritual, taoist, physical, visual, and mathematical lens to view the world, between the flow of conversed quantities, and the structure of chokepoints.
• in the case of business, for example, min-cut max-flow is related to the maximum power that can be brought into a location. it’s now manifesting as time-to-power at scale for hyperscalers. and we are happily serving it.
• in the case of Taoist energies, if you notice an excess of Yang, everyone is Yanging, the pivot point that has the maximum power is Yin energy. and vice verse. If everyone is showing off, be mysterious. If everyone is confident, raise a question. If people are lacking direction, pick a direction. If people are being mysterious, shine a light. If volatility is melting down, look for out-of the money optionality. If it looks like the end of the world, bet on the sun rising. If it feels like you can’t breathe, remind everyone, including yourself, to breathe.
• what are the natural scales in which to solve a problem, and which are the problems that people fail to solve systematically, because people cannot solve them, or shy away from solving them, at adequate scale?
• this strikes in both directions
• at indie or
  @lightcellenergy
  scale, or Wright Brothers scale, where really the limiting reagents are a combination of inventor time spent obsessed with a problem, which doesn’t scale well with organization size, and a combination of the necessary physical courage (either flying the thing or doing T > 2000+ C experiments in front of your face
• at
  @elonmusk
  or
  @sama
  scale, where they use the fact that nobody else actually marshals the resources in spaceflight, or AI, to solve the problems at natural scale (in size dimensions, or at vertical scale) like they do. So they have this neat trick that there’s decades of good ideas that are free alpha you can pick up, that are good ideas but required adequate scale in the effort to apply, and if you’re among the most ambitious person in the area you’ll probably want to go work for their efforts, or are at least are sorely tempted, because getting the resources to pursue it is such a severe requirement in such shortage that it’s among your best hopes. and nobody else dares compete with you on scale!
• think in public. if you’re doing something complex enough, it’s too challenging to rip you off completely. you’re better off drawing from an open door. the scientists at Bell Labs looked at the meta question of what distinguished their best researchers. they found that most predictive factor was that they all had lunch with Henry Nyquist. So, i’ve always tried to be Henry Nyquist, and what’s more, in a positive sum way, harnessed the output by investing in the output of particular fertile luncheons of the mind. There’s 1000x more good ideas that a single person can execute on directly. You can share a lot of what you’re doing safe in the knowledge that even if you give away as much as you can, the generator of knowledge and progress comes from my own heart, perspective, background, and obsession. it gives you the psychological safety to have the generosity of spirit to have a certain amount of magnanimity.
• and though i have not found the karmic calculus of the universe to be exactly same in dimension and particular, i have found that over the long haul, you get what you give, more often than not. and spiritual energy defies the conservation of energy in physical law, inside the vortex of the human heart. you can feel yourself generate positive energy as your heart pumps and you inhale and exchange. you can transform the negative to positive with attention. you can extend that field of awareness around the bubble over your self and extend it as you will to the farthest reaches. the ancients may have called this attention practice meditation, but it is also useful in a totally secular sense, to physicalize awareness into a “context window” a mind palace for your thoughts.
• if you extend your context into a well designed workshop, your physical awareness can bootstrap into the memory systems of your mind. this is how i “live in my workshop” as many great craftsmen and inventors of the past have utilized, and how those creators in possession of a workshop or studio are so much more creatively powerful relative to their financial Superiors — even when financially broke they are rich in tools, space, context window, and time available to obsess and expend on the problem. and they have less to lose, which might help with the physical courage part. this is enhanced if you are “neurodiverse” / ADHD for some stripes.
• nature gives you much: every common or uncommon atom, physical laws that act at a massive range of scales multiplied against time and space, far more than our computational analogs. what geometry does physical nature suggest?
• biological nature has often solved its problems bottom up using geometry to solve flow problems. all natural systems must flow energy, material input and product output, and waste (among other conservations, like cells and immune systems). it always solves problems by folding new dimensions into the system, either in the physical layout of arteries, veins, cell or cellulose walls stacked folded capillaries, or extended all the way between the folded proteins necessary to structure themselves at low energy per base pair, the physical antenna to couple to the visible light (eV per mole), the chemical energy required to store the energy in ATP at high availability (0.3 eVs per mole), and the low physical energy (micro eVs per mole) required to transport circulation through a living body. by which means has nature discovered to arbitrage entropy through her natural time scale, and energy natural scales? true universal thermal equilibrium is a dead universe, and we are in a live one — how has nature bridged between dynamic quasi-equilibria, in life and nature’s other storms.
• how can I apply these ideas given the toolkit human hands over mastered? what new tools and possibilities have I, permutationally, hyperdimensionally expanded at the frontier of the possible, now that i have, with the benefit of human technological civilization, unlocked the machining and patterning of metals, of semiconductors, of ceramic? invented macroscopic rotating machinery — assembled machines that work at far greater temperatures and in shapes that, biology could not perfuses as a living object, and those could not optimize in her billions of years? in which ways am I, the human investor, have, in some dimensions, more to be grateful for, in the creative tools i have at my disposal, and my few years at a pivotal time in history, than nature has, for her planet full of live and her billions of years of evolution. if i make them count!!
• most of the hyperdimensional orange is peel
• as an example: they highest temp heat exchangers have been metal because they need to tolerate tension under high temperature — well, what if you can extract energy at high temperature for ultrahigh carnot efficiency, ultrahigh power density like
  @lightcellenergy
  , at minimal pressure over ambient? then you can use an oxide ceramic, which unlike steel won’t further oxidize. but now you have something that’s much stronger in compression, and you have to design something that will balance and distribute all tensions with compressions. ok, how does nature solve problems like this — with an extra dimension of curvature, as meta materials and cellular geometry.
• most of a hyperdimensional market arbitrage, which could be literally any trade between any set of parties with any set of comparative advantage or difference in their value of the object, is untapped. the efficient market hypothesis is a lazy lie. it is only directionally true if you ignore the expansion of the frontier of the possible.
• there are weirdly only a small high school’s worth of people that you find out are behind new things in the domains that you know about. maybe like 500 people or something. your job is to surround yourself with, and be one of those people. live in the future, and build what’s missing. it’s a literal scene. golden age that you get once in a while. don’t forget it.
• find a way to work like hell, over the long haul. it helps to be obsessed. that’s why you gotta work on what you’re obsessed with.
• let the work pull you, as much as you can rather than push. that makes sure you have the right energy and direction.
• nevertheless, some things just work nonlinearly better annealed or forged under high temperature and pressure, cyclically.
• if you’re trying to make a large difference as a small player out of a system, look for the resonances. what is conserved, or what can be. what are the capacitances, inductances (like pendulum swings, resisting the force but displaced in time), what are the dissipations or resistances. many things in economies, or ecosystems, or other dynamic systems, can be modeled to first order as simple RLC circuits, and it’s a powerful model even designing systems to put things on or off resonance, stack them, or add dissipation or detuning. this goes across all systems, even psychological systems!
• what haven’t been explored because people haven’t been brave enough? clever enough? haven’t had access to a tool you do? look especially hard under that rock!
• try to prove, by counterexample, what a physical or computational limit is, for the performance of an idea. now, depending on how hard or soft the limit is, can you flip it, and prove by construction, a physical example that reaches or approaches this limit? how far can you get? come at it from every angle. how close did anybody come, in some dimension, from every field of technology. what can you apply from those fields of technology to your idea, in a different combination than they did.
• there are most geniuses dead than alive. you must learn from their lives and efforts. befriend them. don’t just stand on their shoulders. learn from their methods. ask the questions that they did. ask the questions that they would if they were sitting on your shoulders. use what they would use, if they had the benefit of all the inventions since they past. they should be some of your closest friends, even if they’re dead. they can live through your mind, hands, and heart.
• think from the perspective of an electron. get really familiar with what makes electrons happy. that is everything from atomic happy electron theory (we love a full shell) to inference, which gives you everything from inferometry and subwavelength electron lithography to the formation of bandgaps itself.
• if you know how waves work in D dimensions in one material at time/space scale, you can map it to any other scale.
• the first order response to a problem, as in the first order change of something measurable (eg a force) in response to an input, is always missing something in nature. even though it’s usually what pundits and statisticians point out. why? it’s literally impossible to make the system do anything other than exponential growth (explosion) exponential decay, or stasis! mathematically. but as soon as you get to second other systems, like simple harmonic oscillators, like RLC circuits, like atoms, you can admit not just cyclic solutions, like simple Sine waves, but literally any superposition of them! so nature often stacks couplings in resonances between systems that have toy models that share them! and this presents why physics give so many useful toy models that are simple harmonic oscillators working well in one domain or another, and also why doing this, a highly trained part of the physics toolkit, has has such good yield in so many fields. not that it’s perfect! this also explains for so many things, like business cycles, or emotions, have cycles. cybernetics. and why so many things respond to being driven at a resonant frequency.
• if there’s something standing between you and a solution to a long standing problem it’s probably embarrassment. there’s glory in cringing through it. pick up the phone. write the email. make the video. write the application. fill out the contact us form. give the talk. get on the plane. slide in the DMs. the universe is literally waiting for your courage.
• that’s why it keeps trying to teach you the same lesson until you pass the class
• a lot of this is in Thinking in Systems. Read thinking in Systems.
• a lot of this is in Taoist, Buddhist, even early Christian thought. Wisdom will make more sense as you get older.
• try to keep up with the prodigies. they’re coming up from behind. you don’t want to be “i’m losing my edge” “the kids from London are coming up from behind.”
• music is memory, food is memory, smell is memory, moving (on foot) is memory, smell is memory, dance is memory. if you’re having trouble thinking, go for a walk. get moving. get dancing. at least stretch. put cues in your environment. it’s good for a 10x context window, seriously.
• “perspective is worth 80 IQ” — Alan Kay
• if you can’t solve a problem, what truths grow outward from it. embrace those. for me, that includes being a girl (transition, move tho SF, duh), being essentially unemployable (be an entrepreneur) or having liquid molten (yet transparent) sodium chloride coating our entire combustion system (make a continuous surface to a reservoir and ensure that NaCl is molten and thus transparent. now the problem is a solution, not only is the sodium transparent and wicks itself by capillary action, but it moderates the temperature gradients of sapphire and alumina ceramic by itself being a vapor chamber, clamped to the vapor temperature of the NaCl). also that only curved surfaces will print and sinter successfully — ok — make all forms out of compounding curved surfaces! etc.
• one of the reasons is that invention is at the intersection of art and technology is that art is at the intersection of creation and imagination, and imagination is amplified by perception. and which the artist uses every tool at their disposal to amplify their powers of perception, and of creation, the technologist has the power to create their own tools to amplify their perception and powers of creation, using science and engineering, and aided by the art of invention and the unlocked imagination. it’s a self-reinforcing loop! this explains why single genius and scenius can plow decades, even centuries after of other civilizations if they get the self-reinforcing reaction together, like light from an enhanced flame.
• there’s always another move. think!
• if you can’t think, play around. walk. look from another perspective. let your feet think. let your hands thing. lift heavy rock. make your muscles think. post. let your exobrain think.
• honor thy mistake as intention.
• invent a smarter brick, then invent a better meta brick (like an arch), then invent a way to compound an arch, before you build a cathedral.
• leave yourself a juicy, simple task to get started with in the morning.
• if you haven’t, open a file.
• you can always have second breakfast.
• a latte is breakfast
• there’s free alpha in shilling good stuff that you know about, especially from friends.
• if you’re suffering, you probably aren’t even at 40% of what you could try yet. have you tried really focusing for three more hours? have you tried long walking about it? have you tried calling up or cold emailing the world experts? have you tried begging? have you tried paying them money? have to tried promising shilling for them? probably not!!
• be deeply comfortable with unresolved mysteries, questions, and problems, but never forget about them. remember the state of knowledge around them, and keep it in your back pocket. remember why and where you learned something. then, if something comes along, and sheds light on an old question or unresolved mystery, you put it together, and then people say “you’re a genius” or possibly, a prophet. But you just are ahead of the average — you’re just relatively in the future relative to people referented to the past.
• remember where and why you know something. that way you have more robust networks of knowledge, and can put new stuff together more easily, deriving from a deeper web of what you know, and if you get a big update on what you know or believe, you can update the entire network. this lets you be right an annoyingly large fraction of the time, not just because you’re right on the object level more often, but because you’re more often right about how right about you are. this lets your esteem and exobrain (what you tell other people in your company in your network) be much smarter and more useful.
  @paulg
  refers to this kind of thing as a “Morris Method” after Robert Morris, who is often right about how right he is, although I am sure I am on another side of the tradeoff between that and speculating!
• the value of most of your work can be multiplied by positing about it. it costs close to nothing to have a high signal channel amongst the noise — the noise you add is below the background and improves the SNR, and the algorithm sadly is routing it anyway. So just post a lot. It’s the one thing you can control, and it’s a lot better than the media posting the same version of an article 1000 times and then ditching and burying you when that’s out of fashion. (ask me how i know). Become your own platform. Be ungovernable.
• nobody will be more resentful of your success than people who think “that should have been me.” learn to read resentment from others as envy, and learn to read your own envy as a mistake.
• remember that no matter how much money others have, no one as as much currency locally as the one who is aware and courageous enough to be truly present with a problem, and has enough command of themselves, their creative powers, and the resources they can draw own to make steps toward a real solution happen. never doubt that a good idea presented clearly and the will, effort and resource and convening power to make something happen, can. the world is a lot more malleable than you think. over time, the universe will shape itself around the vision that you induct into the realm of the possible. the will to power is real; it is the force from within emerging from all life

maybe i’ll share more ideas as they come to me.
it’s about cultivating special interests and their many touchpoints to everything you see. it’s from developing a useful bag of tricks.

share more ideas yourself from your super secret special bag of tools in the replies below! 🥰

this Feynman method is for the people!