8: metastability

Author

Gavin Leech
July 08, 2025

Week 7 of freedom. Been doing all manner of costly things, from quitting caffeine to spending a sleepless night in a cave to red-eye flights to reading Hegel and Heidegger.

  • My life is oddly complicated still. London to Bristol to Prague to Tachov to Annapolis to Tallinn to Oxford.

  • I taught at EXP Camp. It was for adults rather than the usual teens, and by gum we pushed them. I can’t say much but some of my tasks there:

    • On demand, I wrote a new class about LLM narratives in about 10 hours

    • Read Solaris for work

    • Made a hat out of birch bark and an eye mask

    • Lifted a grand piano (with 4 others)

    • Practiced self-analysis with a good friend

    • Created a pile of 600 terrible books

    • Made some extremely inept pelmeny for 10 people

    • Wrote 2 new dramatic characters in 15 mins

    • Wrote 20 pithy descriptions of attendees in 35 minutes

    • Messed with garden hose connectors

    • Walked 7 miles, ate wild blueberries

    • Fucked up my ankle on a flat surface the night before another 7 mile hike

    • Lifted 200kg of costumes and food uphill

    • Improv role as a proto-Slavic shaman praying to ancestors and reading the signs. Got lost, led 7 people through a field of nettles, made a small fire, wailed in character

    • Ate borscht in the dark alone at a table in the woods

    • Transported 23 replica Nagants and 20 wool greatcoats in pitch black forest

    • Improv role leading people through pitch black forest. Crouched in the dark with my Nagant listening to the wind in the trees.

    • Lay in a cave for 6 hours awaiting the sunrise

    • Argued that the Unabomber was actually wrong even in his critique

    • Pushed a 200kg wooden wagon about 2km along a rough forest path. Rode back with it on a trailer, blasting the new Slipknot album.

    • Ate communist peanut cheetos (Křupky)

    • Perform self-analysis to an audience of 20.

    • Make a meme about Michel Foucault

    • Sing Decemberists, Richard Dawson, and Sweeney's Men to my friends

    • Long baggy conversation about utopia

    • Forage some firewood

    • Go hard leading a round of shanties and noises for 2 hours round a campfire. Add a bunch of verses to old songs. Sing "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" despite not knowing Japanese

    • Roused people from their beds at 2am, in costume as an undertaker, 10 times

    • Shovelled about 50kg of rotting food into bin bags

    • Chased aggressively by maybugs

    • Lifted about 500kg into a van including two fridges and a grand piano

    • Ran to a transatlantic flight 

  • Went to a seminar at St John’s to group-read people like Shelley, Knuth, and Heidegger. It was great, a total departure from my normal intellectual practice, but I felt out of place. It took me a couple days to work out why. But there’s a lot of weird cool things about it:

    • There are ~no departments. Every professor is in principle supposed to be able to teach the entire curriculum. e.g. Homeric Greek, Renaissance French, Hegel, Euclid, special relativity

    • Every student must attend the school choir

    • Grades aren't sent out; you have to go in person to the office and ask for them. No essay grades, just a whole-semester Excellence number. No explicit goodharting possible.

    • I've never before felt that uni is a floating world, ukiyo

    • It was pleasant to find somewhere that I am the AI booster.

  • Then I stood in the rain listening to a choir of 20,000 Estonians (2% of the country!).

  • Really actually going to make a finetune of R1 on my corpus next.

Writing

A very anticlerical month.

the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.

Books

Playlists

Words

  • to terraform (VC v.): to create funding and a market regardless of the industry you are dropped in. As the god of businessmen.

  • incorporeal hereditament. Stuff like titles, exclusive rights, pensions, annuities. But also rent-controlled leases in NY.

  • personalty (n.): portable personal property

  • to stanfordize (academic v.): to balkanize a department along ideological lines as a last-resort end to bickering.

  • coirreligionist (n.): I made this one up.

  • The Standard Dozen (olympiad n.): the inequalities most commonly deployed in competition maths

  • to dumbass (olympiad v.): a very general technique for solving (toy) mathematical problems, which boils down to homogenizing, multiplying everything out, then applying Schur or AM-GM

  • The actual word of the month is atelic good.