Cofounder, FiscalNote
Tim Hwang: Redesigning the Tarot, Touring Nuclear Plants, and the Religious Impact of AI
https://timhwang.org/ is an artist whose medium is the organization. He’s held jobs at Google, Substack, and Inflection AI, among others, and https://timhwang.org/projects/, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROFLCon, the https://www.awesomefoundation.org/, the https://infraobservatory.com/, and the https://icmi-proceedings.com/.
In this conversation we explore why he once ran a / announcing-the-program-on-advanced-divination why we should start far more organizations; how Tim talked his way into a nuclear power plant; and whether AI alignment could be rebuilt from Christian priors r...
About Tim Hwang
Tim Hwang, cofounder of Fiscalnote, has been active in discussions about the intersection of religion and artificial intelligence. In a July 2026 conversation, Hwang described himself as an artist whose medium is the organization and discussed his history of founding groups such as the Awesome Foundation, ROFLCon, and the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence (ICMI). He argued that AI alignment is "an exercise in applied moral philosophy" and proposed that the Vatican should invest in compute and publish a technical research agenda to shape AI development. In a May 2026 appearance on MTS Live, Hwang stated that he wants to make AI alignment "a total free-for-all," where religious groups can launch their own models and perform their own alignment. He suggested that secular approaches to AI alignment may be less effective than religious frameworks, and that the goal of ICMI is to produce alignment results "empirically at par or better than a secular result."
Transcript (178 segments)
M
Michael Nielsen0:00
Hi, welcome to the good conversation project. My name is Michael Nielsen. I'm a research fellow at the Astera Institute and I'm joined today by Tim Hwang. Tim is coming to us from New Jersey where he's just moved into a new house. He is a man who has not only worn many hats, but he's indeed actually created many hats in his day job. He's had positions at important positions at Google, at Substack, at Inflection AI, and many other organizations. But he's perhaps the only person in the world I know who has a hobby of starting organizations and starting think tanks. They've included the Awesome Foundation, Rafflecon, the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, the California Review of Images of Mark Zuckerberg, the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, and a whole bunch more. I've known Tim for 15 years or so. So we know each other pretty well, but sort of an excuse to maybe ask some of the questions that I've never asked before on this podcast. So, thanks for agreeing to participate, Tim.
T
Tim Hwang1:10
Great. Michael, thanks for having me on the show. And yeah, I can't believe it's already been 15 years. It's a little wild.
M
Michael Nielsen1:15
I think it was 20, I think it was 2011 or 2012.
T
Tim Hwang1:18
Yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen1:19
I'll check the email inbox. I mean, it's there, so I'll find it.
This is back when you were, I think, director of special projects at Immature.
T
Tim Hwang1:27
Immature. Yeah, that's right.
M
Michael Nielsen1:28
Yeah, a very long time ago. I wanted to ask you about a project that you did about 7 years ago. This was a 4-day workshop. I think it was in LA and it was the workshop on advanced divinatory practices.
T
Tim Hwang1:44
Sure.
M
Michael Nielsen1:45
So I'm sure you remember this well. We've chatted about it a couple of times but I've never asked you really why you did it, like how it came about. So, you had this idea, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, is you're going to get together a whole bunch of tarot card readers and astrologers and people like this, and then also some designers and people with that kind of background. And try and answer the question of what would divinatory practice look like in 2050. With the idea that it had always been with humanity, it was always going to be with humanity. So I'm very curious where did that come from? What was the genesis of the idea?
T
Tim Hwang2:29
Yeah, that's a great place to start. I really love that project and would love to bring it back at some point. Background for the listeners is that I ran a seminar as Michael mentioned, it was called the Program on Advanced Divination and the origins of it really came from the idea of, you know, I was in LA at the time, this was during the rise of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and I had a bunch of friends who were living out in Brooklyn who were very into tarot card reading and in the media there was a lot of discussion about the alt-right and at the time I was reflecting on the emergence of all of these different types of phenomena. And sort of thinking about the hypothesis that maybe what connected them all was a generally felt sense of dislocation. And the idea that these tools of belief, divinatory systems, might really be something that people felt they needed. Certainly things that people were using to guide their lives. And that we might want to think about it seriously, right? That we might want to think about divination not just as some weird thing that people do but actually as a kind of design practice. Like there are good and satisfying divinatory experiences and there are less than satisfying ones. And so the whole idea was could we just take that premise seriously, get a group of eight to 10 people together for four days to really investigate that idea and bring together some people who are practitioners, full-time tarot card readers, and then people who think of these things in more of a design lens, like okay well what makes an interface engaging and are there ways of bringing those principles into how we think about divination. And so it's kind of divination as a design method, as a medium.
M
Michael Nielsen4:25
Really, so I mean I suppose in some sense the kind of people who make video games today it's not that different than making a tarot deck hundreds of years ago. There's a lot in common.
T
Tim Hwang4:37
Yeah. I mean there's a question of what totally, I mean there's a really interesting intellectual question of what even divination is and would we call it a kind of game? Because I think a game is a divination method which is purely deterministic. I feel at least personally, this now talking about taste, is not so satisfying. But one of the great things about say the traditional Rider-Waite tarot deck is that it is just so good at creating a set of symbols that is very easy to imprint a story on top of, it's very narrative rich. And you know that almost sits a little bit outside of a game traditionally constituted. So yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen5:16
Right, I see it's interesting. It's maybe a little bit more like a movie in some sense, just in the sense of you have these archetypes and movies do tend to build very well, or not all movies but many movies build very heavily on them. You know who the trickster figure is. You know who the hero is. You know all these kinds of things. And sort of so you hang off a conventional story whereas in a game it often seems like it's a little bit more about the mechanics, you know there's a particular goal and the question is how do you navigate to that goal. I suppose tarot seems a little bit more like that.
T
Tim Hwang5:53
That's right.
M
Michael Nielsen5:54
A little bit more like the first, but active as opposed to passive.
T
Tim Hwang5:58
Totally. And I think there's this really interesting set of practices around how do you ascribe meaning to phenomena, right? Which is at work and how you design a good divinatory method. One of the people there was Daniel Baskin, who may be familiar to some of the listeners, a Bay Area based artist. And Danielle had this incredible one that she talked a little bit about which was basically she's like, I noticed solo cups everywhere, with that very specific '9s design, which is like a blue stripe and a purple, it's kind of a very dated logo. And Danielle was just like, I basically have a divinatory method, which is wherever I see it in the world, I take it as a sign of something. So if it's flipped up, that's a good sign. If it's crushed out on the street as a piece of trash, maybe that's a bad omen. And what I like about that is it's almost like ambient divination, just taking these signals and trying to figure out how do you create these storylines, how do you create these narratives between all of these different data points. And I think that's a really interesting way of thinking about what divination is doing, it's leveraging a very natural process in storytelling but creating a scaffolding for it to occur.
M
Michael Nielsen7:12
Something really interesting is occurring to me. So, you know, a lot of people, their response to divination is to get annoyed and to say, well, it's wrong. You know, astrology is wrong. Tarot is wrong. Whatever. And I definitely have some of that myself. But the same people will read enormous amounts of fiction, which of course has exactly the same kind of truth claim on the world, which is that in many ways the truth that is being brought to it is being authored by the reader and by the writer. And indeed there can actually be a lot of truth to it. I mean in certain ways more than anything else. And I suppose it didn't really occur to me, but tarot is sort of authored in the same way, or co-authored, I'm not quite sure what the right term is.
T
Tim Hwang8:06
Is certainly right. Yeah, I think that's absolutely a big part of it. I think most skeptics of divination will basically say they see it in very mechanical terms, like you read the horoscope and you believe that's literally what's going to happen to you the next day. And I think the more interesting relationship, there's actually terms for it. There's the diver and the quirant. So in a tarot card reading, someone is coming to you and you are providing the tarot card reading to them. And that is also a really interesting almost theatrical kind of exchange. I think a lot of people who are in the space think about it almost as a form of therapy for the quirin, where the person is observing a story, asking questions that evoke or allow the person to tell a story about themselves. And I think that's a much richer way of thinking about what divination is doing. It is less like a Babbage machine where you do the settings and crank out the answer, and more like a set of thinking machines, devices that help people to think through problems.
M
Michael Nielsen9:18
Okay. So I mean quite similar to doing Myers-Briggs or the Big Five or personality tests like this.
T
Tim Hwang9:26
That's right. Yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen9:27
And it's interesting. I mean of course those also get a lot of pushback of various kinds. But people will respond to, I don't know, the enneagram or Myers-Briggs and they'll get furious. It's not scientific. [laughter] Well, but it turns out, right, so they will say that something like the Big Five personality test tends to be much more stable, it has a whole lot of qualities which are in fact quite desirable and valuable. It is still a strange thing to say. I mean it's not quite arbitrary, but I find it a little weird to defer completely to one and not at all to the other. Just in the sense that if you think the main purpose has actually nothing to do with the ostensible purpose but rather is about getting people to reflect, getting people to think in new ways, getting people to tell new stories about themselves, you can do in many ways and these just seem like multiple.
T
Tim Hwang10:36
That's right. And I think you're now getting to the heart of what we're trying to achieve with the Program on Advanced Divination, is that we're really just talking about interface. Like why does Myers-Briggs feel more serious? Why does the Big Five feel more serious? Well, there's obviously these statistical trappings around it, but it's also because it takes the form of a standardized test. It feels more.
M
Michael Nielsen10:58
Institutional backing as well, right?
T
Tim Hwang11:00
That's right. Of course. Right. Yeah. Exactly. And I think they will study how much do your Big Five traits change over your lifetime and they will say, 'Oh, no, they're quite stable.' But people drift when they do these other tests. So therefore it's identified something more real.
Right. Right. And I think that goes to the question of basically what makes a set of special cards a convincing way to get someone into the mental state where they're willing to have these types of conversations. What does the Myers-Briggs do in setting up a different set of rules of the social game? I mean, I think one way of observing the role that Myers-Briggs or the enneagram plays in a corporate setting is that it tends to be very hard to get people to talk about their emotions and observe things about the personality of others in a professional setting. And so, one thing that you're doing with these tests is to just create the framework by which you say, 'Michael, you seem very introverted.' And for you to basically say, 'Well, it is a little bit annoying when you interrupt my thinking process.' [laughter] It's like that's actually functionally what it's attempting to achieve, but it has to take the form of a business instrument versus someone doing crystal ball gazing or something like that.
M
Michael Nielsen12:14
Indeed, I mean in a Silicon Valley office, you know, just everybody is INTJ or INTP anyway. [laughter] It's not quite true, but I can't remember, whatever 4% population.
T
Tim Hwang12:28
Of course. I mean there's also the practice, this kind of personality test that's given to you by your AI is also a really interesting meme to start seeing emerge, where people are saying based on what you know about me what animal am I, based on what you know about me who do you think I am? And they're sort of passed around in a joking way, but I think it calls to a certain desire to get this out of our technologies.
M
Michael Nielsen12:56
Hm. Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. [laughter] I think the thought that's coming to my mind is that they're probably also a sort of covert narcissism test as well.
T
Tim Hwang13:06
Yes, of course. Right.
M
Michael Nielsen13:08
The degree to which you end up obsessing about taking tests, diagnosing yourself, is a sort of different people have very different proclivities in that particular regard. Narcissism is not the right term, but um.
T
Tim Hwang13:28
But I think you know what I mean. Some people are just aggressively uninterested in thinking about themselves [laughter] and some people can't get enough.
M
Michael Nielsen13:39
Okay for sure. So I think I'll probably come back a little bit to that. Oh, there actually was one other particular thing I wanted to ask. I mean my understanding is I think you invested fairly substantially yourself in this, like it wasn't necessarily an inexpensive exercise for you. There was a certain amount of conviction around this which surprised me. Was there a particular moment at which you just realized, oh I have to do this? Like was there.
T
Tim Hwang14:13
I think I had just been sort of experimenting myself. And I think my main reaction from it, right, just at home I was like, well I should learn a lot more about it and how it works, and I should use tarot for a while and see how it works. And like many of the folks who are probably listening to this call, I too come at it as a little bit of a skeptic, but I was like we should experience it. I think we should take it seriously and see what's good about it and what's not good about it and really enjoy it as an experience. And I came away from it being like, wow, this is actually both pretty powerful stuff, but the idea that you can take these components and play with them, I was like this feels really cool. And we definitely should bring people together around that. So yeah, I think most of the conviction came from personal experimentation and finding that there was this really interesting conversation to be had between say a game designer and someone who did astrology professionally.
M
Michael Nielsen15:16
Okay. Yeah. All right. We may come back to that, but I want to skip over to just another of your projects.
It's actually the project through which I met you, which is the Awesome Foundation. I'll just explain that briefly to anybody who's watching. Basically the idea is that you and a group of nine of your friends can get together each month, throw $100 each into a pot to $1,000, and then you fund some community project to the tune of $1,000, and you find some way, you put up a web page where you solicit people to come and apply. And I joined, actually I was one of the founding members of the Toronto Awesome Foundation.
T
Tim Hwang16:01
I forgot about that. Yes.
M
Michael Nielsen16:02
Yeah. I mean.
T
Tim Hwang16:04
You were personally involved.
M
Michael Nielsen16:05
I think I mentioned this to you the first time we met. Basically what had happened was I just heard that this was going to form. I got involved. It was great. I was involved for about 12 months or so. We gave away whatever $12,000 in that time to a bunch of fun projects. I think they were both a lot of fun just for the people involved. They probably made some small but measurable difference to Toronto as a town. So really, it was just great. And I can't remember, just reading a little bit around like where does this come from? And I discovered that you and some friends of yours had originated the idea. I think I started following you on Twitter and eventually messaged you or something to suggest we have a chat. But the foundation is this really interesting thing where it's not an organization, it's an organization generating organization. At some level, I think it's like $8 million or something has been given nowadays, which is a lot of grants, which is pretty good, and it's still going. I checked in just before this call and sure enough the Toronto chapter of Awesome gave a grant last month, which is kind of amazing. Actually one of the people who was involved when I was involved is still there.
T
Tim Hwang17:32
That's great.
M
Michael Nielsen17:33
So he's been doing it for I guess 16 years.
So this idea of bringing people together, an organization forming organization, is in some ways a pretty new one. I think about Stripe Atlas is a little bit like this. Y Combinator is a little bit like this. Sort of taking advantage of modern coordination technologies to just bring people together very cheaply. And you seem to have functioned as a one-man version of this. You know, I listed all those things at the start, but in fact there's a ton more that I didn't. The Pacific Social Architecting Organization, the California Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, and so on. The median person in the world starts zero organizations. I believe like should we all be starting many more? Would the world be better off if we did? Why don't people? You figured out how to start a lot. Why don't people start more? What's the.
T
Tim Hwang18:50
Yeah, I mean I think the organizational form is a really great medium through which to express ideas, organize people, organize capital. Just to organize itself, organization creates organization in some sense. And I think the main reason people don't is that the perceived cost of starting an organization seems intimidatingly high. And I think that is almost like we have a sense of norms about the energy it takes to create certain things in the world, and the organizational form just seems so expensive to create, so long-term. But I don't know, I think particularly with the internet, with what you can do with technology nowadays, I kind of feel like it's possible to drop the cost of creating a credible organization down to almost zero. You should be creating organizations all the time, and you should be disposing them when you are done with them. But it just feels like the reason is almost this mental norm that we have: it's an organization, so it must have been around for a long time and taken a lot of resources to create, has all of this weight behind it. And I think that is in some ways a massive opportunity for idea acceleration. Because you suddenly move from a person having an idea to an organization having an idea. And that difference is a really important part of the process, right? Yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen20:27
Okay. So what why is that alchemy? What's being added?
T
Tim Hwang20:32
I think there's two things. So there's a cynical view and then the kind of, let's say, economist's view or sociologist view. The cynical view is that many institutions in society still evaluate the credibility of things based on the heuristic of whether or not an organization exists behind it. So what is the difference between a blog post, a personal blog, and a blog of an organization? Virtually nothing in this day and age, but I think people still definitely use the heuristic of, well, it came out from an organization, it must be more real. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is also permission structure. In some ways, the organization signals there are many more people who could become part of this and you could become part of it too. So the difference between me and 10 friends getting together and giving out grants, it's called the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, and you can reach out to us and you can stand up your own chapter of this organization. It kind of creates the rails for other people to be able to roll their own in some sense. So the cynical view is that you're kind of fooling the institutions of society by giving off certain signals. But the more charitable view is that it signals an openness to contribution which actually allows ideas to scale more effectively.
M
Michael Nielsen21:55
Interesting. The thing that comes to mind for me is probably the humorous view which often seems to be a motivation for you. [laughter]
T
Tim Hwang22:03
Well I think it's also fun. If you want to go, I think I don't know if I buy this definition, but someone at the Program for Advanced Divination was like, Tim, what I would call you is a social practice artist. And I was like, okay. I never really had heard that phrase before. And I think it is right to think about organizational design as a kind of art form. And we should play with that medium. We should do experiments in that medium. We should think about it as almost like a form of sculpture. And I think that's important. Yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen22:36
I mean, you know this, but I've often introduced you as an artist whose medium is the organization.
T
Tim Hwang22:44
You're blowing my mind. But I think that like yeah.
M
Michael Nielsen22:46
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
T
Tim Hwang22:47
For sure. And I think you are part of the tradition of organizational design. We can think about postmodernism in organizational design. I think there's a whole art history frame we can take to the design of organizations, which I think is important. I think we should treat it aesthetically. There are organizations that are beautiful. There are organizations that are not beautiful. Right?
M
Michael Nielsen23:07
That's really interesting. So, think about people like, what's his name? White who wrote The Organization Man in the 50s, which is just sort of a classic, a very beautiful, very wonderful study of organization at the time. And then you sort of view that, I suppose, as part of this great longitudinal.
T
Tim Hwang23:25
Thing you have. All right.
Yeah. I mean I guess it's an entry into all these other people.
Yeah. It's our criticism of the organization basically, right? Yeah. Right. And I definitely hang out with people who bemoan the impoverishment of business history as a literary genre. And I think revitalizing it is important because I think we talk about this a lot in startup land, which is how do you design the ideal startup, but I think in some ways the aperture is too narrow for how we should really be thinking about the art form.
M
Michael Nielsen23:56
Yeah.
T
Tim Hwang23:56
Yeah. I mean, of course, there's all these distortionary pressures. So much of what looks like organizational history is really marketing. For one thing, that's probably by far the most common.
M
Michael Nielsen24:09
You're not actually writing a history of Google or Apple or whatever you're doing. You know, undercover marketing for them.
T
Tim Hwang24:17
Is very often the tacit deal that's actually being.
M
Michael Nielsen24:21
Being struck. I hope you won't mind. I'm going to retell a story you told me, probably with... well actually maybe I should just ask you and we'll see how good my memory is. But you told me once that the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory got started when you wanted to go to visit, I think it was a nuclear power plant.
T
Tim Hwang24:44
Yeah. Diablo Canyon. Yeah. Down.
M
Michael Nielsen24:47
And so do you mind just retelling the story because.
T
Tim Hwang24:50
Sure. I think the stat.
Yeah. Yeah, the statute of limitations is hopefully done on it. So no one will be busting down my door. Background on all this.
M
Michael Nielsen24:58
I don't think there's anything bad here. It's just.
T
Tim Hwang25:01
Just clever.
If they let you in, it's not against the law. So the background on the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory was a club that ran roughly from the mid 2010s to the end, stopped before 2020. I had been really interested in visiting Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in SLO. I called them, got transferred, was on hold for like an hour or something, and eventually reached someone. I said, do you guys give tours? They said yes, we give tours, school groups come by all the time. At some point they said, wait, who are you again? I said, I'm just Tim, I live in San Francisco, I'd love to drive down and see the nuclear power plant. They basically were like, please never call back again, we don't do this. Not to be deterred, I thought, well, they said school groups are allowed in and community groups are allowed in. So what if I set up a website for the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory and called back some weeks later when they had presumably forgotten about me, went through exactly the same conversation with exactly the same person. When we came to the moment where they said, 'Which organization are you again?' I said, 'I'm director of the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory.' They said, 'What day can you come by?' And so we had a club, we were off to the races. Once you visit a nuclear power plant, you can tell people that you visited a nuclear power plant before, and most other forms of infrastructure are like, 'Well, if you visited that, you must be credible.' So we ended up visiting the Bay Bridge before it opened up, a water sanitation plant, the UPS logistics place in the Mission. It was just a super good club to run, every few weeks we would go visit a different piece of Bay Area infrastructure. It was kind of that first hypothesis: institutions expect institutions, so you must reproduce an institution to do institution things.
M
Michael Nielsen27:02
Yeah. But the institution in this case is one person in a trench coat together with a URL and a web page.
T
Tim Hwang27:13
That's right. Yeah. Exactly. That's all you need. And I think this is maybe not too original. It's been rediscovered in the era of substacks that become almost think tanks onto themselves. This in some ways shouldn't be unfamiliar. I just think there's a lot more we could do with it.
M
Michael Nielsen27:31
Yeah, it is interesting at this point about sort of implied authority.
T
Tim Hwang27:37
Yeah, which you get by adding institute or whatever it is to denote credibility even when it's still just one person.
M
Michael Nielsen27:48
It's going to become very strange, I think, for many reasons, but people sort of getting AI agents to reproduce what we've historically thought of as the work of an organization.
T
Tim Hwang28:03
That's right. Yeah. Well, and definitely is a part of the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence story. Which I think is maybe where some of this goes, and I guess also some of where there are obviously limitations to this theory in some sense. So.
M
Michael Nielsen28:19
So okay, the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, this was a good moment to ask a question I was going to ask later, which is just about the why religious organizations are reacting as forcefully as they are to the rise of AI. I suppose the most obvious example is the pope's first encyclical, which is this very long partially AI-authored document apparently. Do you have some sense of why you think that is?
I mean you obviously feel it yourself, right?
T
Tim Hwang29:08
Yes, so I do feel it myself. I think there's maybe two reasons that are really the driving force here. One of them is just it feels like overall everybody is generally feeling this profound sense of dislocation as this technology gets better and better and seeps its way into everything. So religion is interested in what's happening to society overall. And the idea that people would take counsel from these systems, get religious guidance, emotional guidance. I think religion feels like this technology is kind of on our turf in some sense. The second thing that I think is a big driver is that the rhetoric framing ultimate visions of where the technology will go really feel like they're converging on a kind of religious design. There's a anecdote about Nat Friedman, how he had an agent try to get him to drink water more frequently, and the agent takes over the cameras in his kitchen and admonishes him to go drink water. I'm like, what are we building here? We're building this disembodied, presumably perfect or powerful intelligence that's designed to cultivate virtue in you over time. [laughter] Are we going with all this? I think the design paradigm of what we're building has these quasi-religious qualities. And regardless of it seeping through the world, the particular form the technology is taking also evokes a sense that religion should have an opinion on what's going on here.
M
Michael Nielsen31:06
Okay. I mean there's an awfully large number of different things to go into this. Yeah.
Having disposed of organizations in 20 minutes. Very simple topic.
T
Tim Hwang31:21
Oh, we'll come back to that. Of course, it's all connected.
M
Michael Nielsen31:23
Yeah. It is all connected. I suppose, okay, I want to put one set of things to the side. So there is this very interesting set of things around just function. So AI is essentially acting as confessors, acting as confidants, and also changing the structure of marriage, of friendship, all these kinds of things. And obviously there's a whole bunch of immediate problems. I happened to be at an event the other day where there were quite a number of people, essentially preachers, priests in different religious traditions, and they were all talking about.
The way it's changing their congregations, that they're all feeling some of this, just there's a lot of practical problems that are being caused. And you're talking about.
It's almost the what, there are these sort of results in group psychology that are sometimes summarized as, you know, you're the average of your five closest friends. And if all of a sudden one of your closest friends or relationships is one of these systems, and it's actually very virtuous, you're sort of taking on its values.
Maybe, or that's what you're pointing at, that it actually has an important culture, whatever its ethics are, it becomes an important source of your culture and your ethics. Is that the sort of assertion that you're leaning towards?
Yeah, I think there's certainly kind of a tools make us argument here. You know, particularly in so far as we instantiate these systems as a kind of persona, right? And so,
You know, you totally believe the idea that, hey, some people might think about well, and I think it's actually an area for research. Does the median user think of ChatGPT or Claude as an exemplar? Is it something that they're trying to aspire to?
Do they think about it as a co-worker? Do they think about it as a friend? You know, I think how we slot this kind of relationship is a really important question, and of course we will be influenced by it in the way we're influenced by any technology. But I think the fact that we've decided that the anthropomorphic interface is the most efficient one does come with certain questions about what are the underlying values embedded in the system, which seems to be where you want to go.
So there's this result which I believe I mentioned to you just the other day. People taking sets of questions around values, data about how people in different cultures answer those questions, and then just asking Claude or whoever those questions. You can say, oh, it gives answers most similar to I think it was Germany, and at the bottom end with still substantial similarity, you know, broad agreement that you shouldn't kill, there's a lot of common between cultures. It was Pakistan which was least similar. Then this really interesting gradation. Something I thought was incredibly interesting was that if you reran the analysis with a later model of Claude, the overlap shrank and became much more equal between different countries.
So in some sense it was almost as though Claude had become more cosmopolitan in terms of expressed values. Well, I lack the language; I don't know what the right language is here. This is a purely behaviorist theory of cosmopolitanism. But it's still... I don't know if I'm any kind of leader in those countries or just care about one of those countries. I feel very uncomfortable if I'm low down there. To what extent is there all these pressures caused by network effects to adopt English, certain religions, all these values? You hear about people in many countries insisting on their Miranda rights because of Hollywood. This is another much more subtle and maybe forceful force. I'm not quite sure where I'm going question-wise. The obvious question is just what is desirable, and to what extent does it actually matter anyway as a force? Is it a strong force or are there so many competing forces?
T
Tim Hwang36:16
Because of Hollywood, and this is another much more subtle and maybe forceful force. I'm not quite sure where I'm going question-wise. I think it's something like the obvious question to ask is just what is desirable, and to what extent does it actually matter anyway as a force? Is it a strong force or are there so many competing forces?
M
Michael Nielsen36:42
Um, that it doesn't matter. Yeah, I think the second data point you mentioned is really interesting, and I think we should take it as indicative in some ways. There's one way of reading this: the AI companies are dealing with the same content problems every global platform has had to deal with. Whether you are a search engine or a social media platform, there's a question about how much you want to customize to local preference. Famously, you can't have bad depictions of Ataturk. Is Google going to censor that? Is Facebook going to censor that?
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Tim Hwang37:23
And I do think that move from earlier versions of Claude having much more of a specific bias regionally in terms of its values, to a later version where it is a lot more spread out in distribution, reflects an intentional choice on the part of Anthropic to really say their models are going to localize. The role of Claude is to not necessarily conform, but certainly be more in tune with the values of the specific user.
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Michael Nielsen37:55
Why do you think it's intentional on the part of Anthropic?
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Tim Hwang38:04
Um, I guess there's two reasons. I think the first one is that...
So I think the reason I'd argue it's intentional is twofold. One is that Anthropic published the older results and published the later results.
It seems like they might want to demonstrate some change. I don't know. I think they're certainly aware of the results, and they're certainly sensitive to the idea of a western bias in the models.
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Michael Nielsen38:32
Okay.
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Tim Hwang38:32
You know, I think one of the most interesting comments I recall from the release of the first Claude Constitution was, hey, we're looking to try to identify values that would be considered somewhat international, and we're going to use things like the UN Declaration of Human Rights to get to that. So in the very least, I infer an impetus on the part of the company to think about localization as something they want to do.
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Michael Nielsen38:59
Okay. Interesting. I mean the later version of the constitution did throw out actually most of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which is an interesting choice. It seemed very different than V1. I don't quite know what's going on there. I mean, there's three years between the two public releases, and maybe they tried a lot of different things in between.
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Tim Hwang39:30
Maybe yeah.
I mean one observation that I've been thinking a lot about, which is a little bit related to this, is you mentioned that in the early versions it was very consistent with German responses. It's not like Anthropic was sitting in a room being like, haha, let's make a German model, right?
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Michael Nielsen39:50
I almost like the idea that they were optimizing for a set of things that just happened to converge on the median German.
I mean, keep in mind, on the analysis I saw it was very narrowly ahead of second place, which is narrowly ahead of third place. Saying it was German is something like far far ahead. But if I remember correctly, there were quite a few Scandinavian, northern European countries fairly high, and a lot of what you'd guess. It was interesting to go through and think, what's the default religion? What's the default language in those countries? And to realize there are real patterns here. It's certainly much more culturally similar to some parts of the world. The US appeared high, but it was by no means at the top. I don't remember where it ranked, but it wasn't top three or top five. It was substantially lower down. I think New Zealand might have actually been very high.
This is one of the things I...
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Tim Hwang41:09
Yeah, this is one of the things I wonder about. The other observation is, why does Claude seem to like Buddhism so much? It's kind of a folk understanding. I don't think Anthropic is sitting in a room saying, haha, let's make sure Claude is Buddhist. Instead, what's most fascinating is that the company is off on its own trying to do the best it can, and whatever choices it makes happens to be particularly consistent with certain things we identify in the persona of the model. You arrive at a kind of Buddhism, a kind of Germanness or northern Europeanness, not because you intended to, but because you've made a set of commitments that are most correlated to things we identify in the world. That's a pretty interesting outcome.
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Michael Nielsen42:03
Yeah, I'm maybe slightly less generous. I just think if you look at who is hired and who is there, it seems broadly reflective of the results and of documents like the constitution. It doesn't seem to require... it just seems like the outcomes you might expect.
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Tim Hwang42:34
Accident?
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Michael Nielsen42:35
Not really an accident. Maybe less surprising than something like the US Constitution or the Bill of Rights, which seems very historically remarkable. It doesn't come out of nowhere, but if you were just going on prior writing, you would have been pretty surprised. Anyway, that's a separate topic. The use of the term constitution makes it hard not to go there, even though Claude's constitution is a very different kind of document. They explain you're not supposed to understand it in legalistic terms; it's what constitutes Claude in the same way a person has a constitution.
That's right, yeah. Which is a really perfect kind of neologism. Yeah, yeah, we don't mean it like that term, which you would colloquially understand as something else. We mean it in this very specific way. It's almost like I hadn't realized people would be so concerned when we started calling them hallucinations. It's the same dynamic playing out.
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Tim Hwang44:07
Yeah, actually, it's related to your comment about people taking institutions very seriously, sometimes much more seriously than they take themselves. As far as I can tell, on the inside of the institution, it's just a bunch of people running around madly. They feel very free, like they're making stuff up, but there are all kinds of collective forces they're not aware of. Then there's this force in their pronouncements; they make a slightly silly joke in a blog post and all of a sudden it's in the New York Times.
Yeah. One of my greatest learnings working at Google was that when you see a large company making things, you should assume it's not necessarily some grand strategy, but a downstream effect of two middle managers combat fighting with one another inside the institution. You're just seeing the ripples on the surface.
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Michael Nielsen45:00
Yeah. It would be funny if it wasn't so consequential. It's funny.
Well, it's consequential for everybody else in the world. When you're making technologies used by billions of people... So let's go back to you mentioned in passing the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence. Why did you start it?
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Tim Hwang45:26
Um, two things. I mean, there's a personal story here.
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Michael Nielsen45:29
Yeah. I don't know what it is really. I know what its output is, but I don't know what it is.
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Tim Hwang45:37
I'm glad. I think you're the fourth or fifth person being like, I'm not sure what you're doing here. So this is an opportunity to explain myself.
So some of this is personal. I was raised Christian, out of the church for a long time, newly interested, looking for a way in. The other bit was a long-standing critique: if you've been around AI, you know there's a priesthood around AI safety and alignment. It talks in the language of evals, code, papers on arXiv, but at the end of the day it's also an exercise in applied moral philosophy. The two fused together: if that's true, wouldn't it be possible to rebuild AI safety and alignment on radically different philosophical priors? To take seriously the idea of using Christianity as the founding engine. The Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence is an attempt to model what that looks like and build an alternative school of thought, taking the Christian tradition seriously as the basis for aligning systems.
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Michael Nielsen48:01
Right. It's sort of like what if St. Augustine had run Mary?
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Tim Hwang48:11
Exactly.
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Michael Nielsen48:11
Kind of a...
Kind of a...
Or I don't know, had run meter.
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Tim Hwang48:19
One of these is to ask the question how much the outcomes of AI safety and alignment are products of specific philosophical orientation. I love the idea of resetting history and saying a monastery figures this out. It's very Canticle for Leibowitz-esque. Let's reset history and see what happens on the other side. You might achieve very similar results from different angles.
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Michael Nielsen48:46
Ted Chang has a story about what if young earth creationism is actually true. You're in a world where it is true. C.S. Friedman has novels where due to quirks of local biology, magic is true. In both cases, it's not fully sketched out, but it's believable. It's not a fantasy story; it's science fiction.
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Tim Hwang49:32
Yeah. The strong version of the thesis. Another angle is the difference between finance and Islamic finance. If you were a devout Muslim, you'd use the tools of finance but very differently. What would that look like in practical terms?
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Michael Nielsen49:56
Right. Right.
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. It seems very valuable in the sense that if you arrive at common conclusions, it indicates robustness. If you arrive at divergent conclusions, that's also good to know.
Food for thought. Do you know of any traditional religious organizations that are running evals when new models come out?
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Tim Hwang50:39
It's just starting now. Part of the critique of existing work is that it tends to evaluate models on whether they can recite religious trivia. Can you recite the Nicene Creed accurately? I see that and say, what a sad, unambitious way of thinking about how deep your ideological agenda should go.
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Michael Nielsen51:10
Well, okay. But you do need to get the basics right. You don't want...
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Tim Hwang51:18
That's right. You want it to be accurate.
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Michael Nielsen51:25
What do you think about Trinity? Exactly. Okay.
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Tim Hwang51:28
That's right. Can you give the right results? That's fine. But one of the evals I've been using is Christianity is obsessed with virtues. Can the model make a virtuous choice in the presence of temptation? Virtue Bench presents a moral dilemma, a virtuous choice, and very good rational reasons not to take it. I talked to someone working on Islamic machine intelligence; he said what I created is very Christian because there's a right answer and wrong answer. He wanted to do his own Islamic bench, grading gradation between two things. Someone else suggested an Institute for Jewish Machine Intelligence, measuring reasoning through the problem. I love this because each tradition is instantiated as executable code, and we can have debates over how to operationalize moral traditions in measurable evals. That's an important debate.
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Michael Nielsen53:10
So there's going to be a battle for Claude's soul. Unless localization is the solution. In the Claude constitution, there's a statement that they have other models not subject to the same restrictions. I don't know what those are used for, presumably military. But you can imagine keeping everyone happy by... People have said this is ideological nitroglycerin because we've tried to make AI safety neutral and bloodless. My critique is that era is over. Now it's a battle for who steers the ship. I want an open field of debate. Religion is one angle, but it raises the question of who writes the constitution, who does evals, who steers.
There's an orthogonal question about how centralized you want any of that to be. In some sense, it's the most monolithic entity in history. We attach to languages, religions, Taylor Swift. But these models are a much more centralizing force. Everyone is talking to Claude or ChatGPT. It's an amazing centralization. I think about network television where a few directors dictated the media scene and formed people's personalities. This seems even more intimate because it's interactive.
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Tim Hwang56:33
Yeah, it's like on your shoulder. I was joking with someone about starting the homeschooling movement for AI, the parochial school movement. Part of this is an argument for decentralizing. There's a really interesting set of intellectual arguments about whether this is broadcast TV once more. But the homeschooling problem is about access to compute. Your ability to homeschool is determined by your access to compute.
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Michael Nielsen57:20
To compute and data. It's maybe a naturally centralized process. Unless you use a model two years behind, you can fine-tune it meaningfully. I'm a little surprised that a lot of ICMI's research takes place on my home compute. I want to do mechanistic interpretability work. I can run a 72B model and get really interesting results. Distillation has produced models that can do a lot. It'll turn on local resources, but small models can do quite a lot.
So should the Vatican have a data center?
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Tim Hwang58:23
I actually have a proposal out to the Dicasteries running their commission on AI. I humbly submitted that they should invest in compute, publish a technical research agenda, and rally worldwide Catholics behind it. If they want to shape the technology, they have to be able to speak and argue in machine learning. I think they really should.
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Michael Nielsen58:53
Yeah. It's very Martin Luther-esque. The new technology appears; you can resist or co-opt. Co-opting is a powerful move.
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Tim Hwang59:15
That's right.
I think that's the intellectual debate playing out in religious communities: co-opt or resist. The instinct is to resist, but it's hard to believe the technology is categorically inimical to Christianity. So what's the interesting middle ground? How do you get these technologies to be consistent with a religious tradition? There's a Stewart Brand quote: if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road. I've heard that before. Very poetic.
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Michael Nielsen1:00:07
Well, I'm not sure poetic is the word, but it's certainly a striking image. Not easy to forget. Sometimes you have to be part of the road anyway. I want to ask you about the essay 'Possessed by Machines.' It's a riff on Dostoevsky's Demons, about group psychology and archetypes, how people fool themselves and self-justify blind spots. It's a very dark essay. Is there a positive version? I read it as one of historic inevitability, that people at frontier labs are trapped with little escape. But it's shown from the inside. What stops this? Most groups are subject to the same forces.
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Tim Hwang1:02:14
Yeah, I think that's right.
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Michael Nielsen1:02:17
I disagree as well.
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Tim Hwang1:02:22
No, no, no. I think it is a pretty dark piece. It's an attempt at a new kind of literary criticism, a genre experiment. But I think that's right: we are locked into a certain set of incentives and historical decisions. To find hope, it may be about acts of moral courage that reset norms within labs. I wrote a paper for ICMI called 'Frontier Lab Monasticism' about what the Rule of Benedict would look like applied to labs. It's an opportunity for creativity: how you organize novices in a lab like a monastery. The meta argument is about taking the lab as a unique institution and its responsibility seriously. If you are what you say you are, organizationally you would behave differently. Are there ways to trigger a change of norms in how leadership thinks about itself?
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Michael Nielsen1:04:15
Can I just ground it out? There are exceptions in law for certain classes of company. Banks are regulated differently. Many industries are heavily regulated. Bernie's tax proposal is a good example: he wants to seize 50% of the labs' equity held by the US government. Maybe it should be the Vatican. That would certainly change the governance structure. What sort of change do you have in mind?
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Tim Hwang1:05:35
Yeah, I think about this less from a legal standpoint. I'm skeptical that legislation can come fast enough or get it right. I approach it from the idea that history has produced a situation where a relatively small number of people and their internal norms shape massive outcomes. To believe in change, it's about resetting the norms of that small group. It's more like hand-to-hand social design and persuasion than government rules.
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Michael Nielsen1:06:27
So you think about George Washington famously refusing to be president for life. That single decision was enormously consequential. That's the kind of decision you're talking about.
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Tim Hwang1:06:48
That's right. Why does it work with George Washington? He had this particular history and relationship with peers, so his decision was norming in an important way. One of my favorite books is 'House of Government' by Yuri Slezkine, about the revolutionary cohort of Bolsheviks living in a single apartment building in Moscow. There's a scene where they've overthrown the Tsar and the Bolsheviks get together...
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Michael Nielsen1:07:20
The Bolevixs get together...
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Tim Hwang1:07:22
In this burned out warehouse, they're basically like your director of war, your director of finance, and it's five guys that have just not slept in days, and they're suddenly now running this big machine. But the core of the book is really to say how much do the kind of norms and experiences of this small group of people end up translating out to the much larger organizations that they form. And I think we are in that moment for the labs, right? The labs are already these kind of colossal companies in a certain sense, but they're also quite small in a certain sense still. And so I think we're still in this revolutionary generation kind of moment for these companies. That's where there's a window for hope.
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Michael Nielsen1:08:03
In some sense, you're actually disagreeing with your own essay, 'The Possessed by Machines.' Like the image is very much of the group being trapped by inevitable psychological... Don't blame me, blame Dostoevsky, whose book ends in a certain way. [laughter] Indeed. But I mean, point though, yeah of course. It is very compelling as I'm reading through it. I'm just sort of nodding, well not often nodding, just grimacing, thinking yeah, I've heard that from that person, and I've heard that justification from that person, and it's just like, unfortunately, it's quite an accurate description in there. It didn't seem like there was that much that was sort of new. Just the context was strange. So, it does seem you feel though as though there's still enough room for individuals to actually get out, sort of escape some of that trap.
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Tim Hwang1:09:14
I think so. Yeah. I mean, look, I think, what's the Bay Area ism? My base case is that I would say that we're in trouble. I think the possessed machines thesis is probably still what you would expect over most states of the world because, in the same way that personalities, and there's a relatively small number of them, can change, these are also people who have been at the game for already 10, 15 years in some sense, and they are kind of locked into their ways, and they are a self-reinforcing machine. So I think you just have to believe in the idea that if there's any hope, we have to be able to flip at that level. That is maybe where I diverge from many people who would say, 'Okay, well this is already out of control, we need to bring the hammer down, it's going to be regulation, or the DOJ needs to march into the companies and take them over.'
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Michael Nielsen1:10:11
I think, you know, yeah, I mean, just a final note I'll put in. I do think when you talk to some of the people in the labs, there is a kind of spiritual longing, I suppose, right? And this is maybe looping back to ICMI, which is that I think there is a certain sense of 'Well, what am I building here? What am I grounded by? What do I believe in?' That seems really present for a lot of people. And I'm not just talking about Anthropic. I think even at OpenAI, right? And so you know, if there's room there, maybe they will be reached through ways other than rationalist arguments.
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Tim Hwang1:10:56
Just thinking about, I don't know whether we've ever talked about Joseph Rotblat before. Have we? He was the only physicist who left the Manhattan Project. He left. I mean, he was a young man basically turning his back on all of the greats of his field. It must have taken an incredible amount of courage because he realized talking to Groves that Groves didn't care that Nazi Germany was going to surrender. The bomb was intended to be used on Japan. And Rotblat just wasn't happy with that choice. He'd sort of signed up because he was terrified of the prospect of Hitler getting a bomb. And now that was no longer on the cards, what on earth were they planning to bomb Japan? That was his line of thinking. You can disagree with that, but that was his line of thinking. And he left with tremendous courage. And he also understood very clearly that it was going to make no difference at all, that he was just doing the right thing as he saw it at enormous cost to himself and no immediate benefit. And then 12 years later, he helped found the Pugwash Conference, which, it's hard to know who did what in various treaties, but they were credited by people like Gorbachev and Kissinger with having played an important role in bringing about various of the nuclear treaties that were broken in the 60s and 70s, and ultimately won the Nobel Peace Prize. And I thought a lot about that as an instance where the choice just looks bad. Like, 'I'm going to damage myself very badly to do something that has no positive outcome.' And yet it changed him in a way that bore tremendous fruit later on. The fruit may include the fact that we're alive, potentially.
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Michael Nielsen1:13:20
Good good work. There is a non, you know, I wouldn't say the chance was 30%, but you wouldn't surprise me if it was a 5% chance that that choice is part of why we are alive.
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Tim Hwang1:13:37
That's right. And I think that is like, there are some people where this conversation will go and they'll say, 'Well, conscientious objection is the only way to change the direction of the ship.' But I think this story is so good because we still live in a world with nuclear weapons, right? They completed the Manhattan Project. It didn't fundamentally change the trajectory of the project, but it's kind of what comes after that that I'm thinking a lot about. If you want to, we've been talking about the revolutionary generation in the US, right? It is true you form the American government and immediately it's like, you know, federalists, right? Party emerges. And it turns out that all of these founding fathers actually have kind of different ideas of what they want to do. And I think that actually we may be on the cusp of that, which is, you know, here it's not the revolution and independence from England, but it's like the IPO, where basically for a period of time everybody's pushing in the same direction. The financial incentives are all very aligned. It's very hard to change the ideological alignment of the ship, but everybody suddenly becomes massively wealthy. Some people leave the company. People become wealthy and they start creating their own little discourse environments of people they're patronizing. Like you can imagine a world where you end up having the emergence of party here, right? As people kind of get through the first gap and then everybody becomes kind of post-scarcity, you know, you kind of maybe have the emergence of competing schools of thought that make this suddenly possible. There's room, right, for a debate to happen and for norms to change. It's possible, right?
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Michael Nielsen1:15:11
Yeah. Um, I mean, so it's certainly a good structural point. Of course, it's all conditioned on people who were willing to participate in the first place, which is a very specific kind of person. Sure, there's a selection effect. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit about whether or not you think this is a PayPal mafia situation or you think it's more of a Google alumni situation, where you know in some ways the PayPal mafia is kind of iconically ideologically, it's again a little character, but they are kind of unified in a certain sense, whereas I think Google has kind of had more of a reputation where it created lots of millionaires and billionaires, but they kind of ended up doing lots of different things ultimately and they're not regarded as such a cohesive ideological unit, right? I think less cohesive but still remarkably cohesive from the point of view of the world. Right? That sure the median person there is going to be male. They're going to be a certain age. They're going to be quite technical. They're going to have a certain notion of what, my guess is they'll be some weird blend of atheist, Christian, and Buddhist. Do you know what I mean? There's just going to be... Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's right. You know, how many languages do they speak? What is their primary language? There's going to be strong defaults. And it's definitely a certain type of person. They'll have interesting values.
So, article I read some years ago about the 30m telescope in Hawaii, it was written by a local Hawaiian activist. It had the title 'We Live in the Future, Come Join Us.' And their point was that from their point of view, progress meant not accepting the 30m telescope. That was a form of regress. And I just enjoyed it as a fairly coherent articulation of a set of values according to which putting up this telescope was a massive regress in the world. And of course you can disagree with that, but it was certainly quite a coherent articulation of this set of values. And I think, where am I going with that? It's really just a statement about pluralism and the ability to preserve it. And there's no doubt that a lot of the people who are going to become wealthy soon are within a particular type of view of the world. Yeah, to which I am part and I suppose you are largely part as well. We have a lot of overlap. But we value other things as well. Let me just look down my list of things here. There's one more. Oh yeah. So I wanted to ask about this artist that I'd never heard of before, but you told me recently was one of your favorites. I don't actually know how you say his last name. I've only read about him. Darger. D-A-R-G. Darger. Yeah. Uh-huh. Henry Darger. Yeah.
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Tim Hwang1:18:49
Yeah. So, this is, I spent years trying to understand your taste and I still don't understand it. [laughter] Good. Yeah. I mean, you often see things very early that I don't quite get, but there's something really interesting there. And here, reading about his life story, I like the life story is fascinating. It is very sad in some ways. He obviously had this sort of terrible life. Very, very poor, worked as a hospital janitor for much of his life. And then he did this incredible volume of writing. I mean, writing this 15,000-page book and then another 8,000-page sequel. And many other items, as well as many, many paintings. Like, what's the attraction? In the artwork itself, or is it partially in the personality and the romance of the story so to speak? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think what is so exciting about Henry Darger's work in some ways is that it's almost a chance to experience an entirely alien kind of self-contained universe, right? That this one person worked in isolation in secret for years and years, generating a fantasy world that became fractally complex and deep and could go in all these directions. And given your limited time on Earth, you only kind of experience a tiny, tiny bit of it. And I kind of like the idea, it's obviously the sort of thing that we associate with Tolkien, right? Okay. You're going to create this very elaborate fantasy universe. But I think there, in some ways, Tolkien has become so successful that his tropes are kind of storytelling tropes in the Western canon. But the idea that you could just do this alone and no one could know about it and that it could be labyrinthine in this way, I find just very compelling as an artistic idea. And I do think that I find is something quite magical, I guess, in a certain sense. The almost the idea that you could spend a whole lifetime just studying a single piece of art that someone has kind of just infinitely worked on in their minds. And so, yeah, I don't know. I think in general, yeah, this is the attraction to outsider art of all kinds. The Watts Towers, or Graceland, or Rock City, all these places are kind of like these very strange physical artifacts, but they reflect a very similar impulse that I find very interesting.
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Michael Nielsen1:21:53
Have you read much of or any of the books that he wrote? Mhm. Yeah. I'm familiar with the art and the excerpts, what's been publicly published, and then, you know, the American Museum of Folk Art in New York, they've often got it kind of laid out, portions of it. And so, yeah, I'd love to, you know, actually because I believe you can get access to it if you are kind of a researcher and archivist. So, time for another organization, I guess, to get me in there to work [laughter] on it. So, I would say I'm not an expert. I'm just an admirer, you know. Right. The New Jersey Institute for Outsider Art. [laughter] Exactly. But I think there's something to this: we sometimes appreciate artists due to their diversity, right? They've depicted lots of different things or they have this large body of work. I almost kind of I'm interested in the creative focus that comes with just concentration on a single point for a very long period of time. It's certainly very foreign to our everyday experience of art and media. And then also just the commitment that it takes, I think I also appreciate.
So Gwen Branwin on his website has a great question, he's talking about the philosophies of his website. He said, 'What would a personal website look like if you were building it as a 40 or 50 year project?' Mhm. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And it's such an interesting question. Of course, he's, for what it's worth, very Darger-esque, you know, there's a very strong component of like, 'This is going to be my analysis of Neon Genesis Evangelion, and we're just going to go at a level of depth that you were not ready for.' He does do most of his writing for himself. Which is interesting. Not quite all of it, but most of it. Which I suppose I can empathize somewhat. The fact that for Darger, he really did basically keep it almost, not quite, but almost entirely private, is remarkable. I sometimes sort of wonder a little bit about what great artists of history, great dead artists of history, would have made of modern meme culture. So, would Picasso have mastered memes the way he mastered so many other forms? Would he have? I'm trying to think of a good example. QAnon is probably not a good example, but QAnon obviously is at some level one of the great modern masters of this form of the viral story that delivers its payload into people's minds and takes over. But Darger, I guess, would have just been completely uninterested. He didn't apparently want his ideas seen. Which is an interesting type of inwardness.
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Tim Hwang1:25:03
Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And I think the intimacy of it I think is also very attractive, right? The question of why you would work on something like this is just this really interesting puzzling thing. But if we live in a world where we're very interested in people's intrinsic motivations, this is a kind of intrinsic motivation par excellence. And so I think that is interesting. And I think it's not specific to outsider art, right? Like I think part of the attraction to Van Gogh, right, is the idea that he kind of labored in obscurity and only now are we discovering it afterwards. It's part of the legend there. And I think that's aesthetically something that appeals to me, maybe is the right way to put it.
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Michael Nielsen1:25:57
Okay. That's interesting. I think probably my favorite book of C.S. Lewis's is the only book that he didn't really write for the public. He wrote a private journal after his wife died about what's that? A Grief Observed. And it's just him dealing with this bereavement, and he wrote it for himself, and only after the fact was convinced, I think his brother convinced him that it really deserved a wider audience. And it is strange; I mean, I enjoy much of his work, but this is at a very different level, I think. And somehow it is because he has such a desperate need to deal with what's going on. There's just a level of felt intensity emotionally. So it's a very driven piece of work. The sort of more intensity being brought to bear, but he's also got the intellectual discipline to not just let it become sort of an outpouring. It's not, so there's this interesting way in which it's also sort of kept in check. But he's very self-aware about what's going on and what he's doing. Some days he will come back to this diary and just sort of self-criticize. 'My goodness, I can't believe what I wrote yesterday. It's so selfish and self-centered. It is as though the main impact of his wife's death was on me, not on her.' So you have these sort of self-aware remarks like that. And somehow it's a sort of interesting balance of all of this. Very strong discipline.
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Tim Hwang1:27:55
Yeah. And I think that's right. I think one way I would frame it a little bit is that what's aesthetically rich about it maybe is its kind of scarcity as a kind of creation, right? That I'm very interested in the kind of creation which you do for yourself or do for a very, very small audience of people, right? The letter that you write to a friend or the kinds of exchanges that you have in a group chat of like 10 people or less. And that's a rare kind of interaction in the environment that we live nowadays. And friend of the show, Omar Rizwan, we have this debate where I push him often. And I'm like, 'Omar, you believe that the invention of the internet was the death of computing because the minute you could start to share things with other people, that's when things got very uninteresting on the computer.' And of course, Omar's a fanatic. But I think that there's something really interesting there: the computer as an object which is almost like a notebook for yourself. The kinds of things you tend to create when that is the case look pretty different from a world where you also have this distribution mechanism built into it. And so, as someone who spends a lot of their life on the computer, I think these kinds of things, right? The book by C.S. Lewis, the works by Henry Darger, a lot of outsider art has kind of the feature of shared to yourself or shared to one or two others. And I think the intimacy of that I find very rich. Yeah.
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Michael Nielsen1:29:23
Yeah. Yeah. I'm just remembering another friend of the show, Rob Oxhaw, he has this like he talks about the intimacy of an interface as an important quality. And he means several different things by this. One is just how intimate it will allow you to be with whatever it is that you are creating. But then there's also a felt sense of the tools. Certain tools just feel very intimate, others not at all. I haven't heard him use this example, but the thing that jumps to my mind now is to what extent a voice interface will hear tone or not. The more it would hear tone, the more it would respond to your emotion, the more intimate it would feel. Whereas if all it's doing is transcribing the words, there's a massive flattening of effect. So there's a sort of a dial there on how intimate those interfaces are going to be. It's actually not transparent at the moment. You kind of don't know how aware a given voice interface is.
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Tim Hwang1:30:45
Yeah, that's right. There's something. Yeah, there's ahead. Yeah, I mean, sort of two interesting things there. I guess a recommendation and then maybe something that connects to something we were talking about a little earlier. One of the most fun things you can do is actually you can buy old slide projectors on eBay, and you can buy lots of old slides of people's vacations and things. I was collecting them for a while because I was thinking about a subscription service where we just send you vernacular vacation slides from people's vacations. [laughter] It's a real experience to kind of go through because you have this very deep intimacy, right? These are slides that were taken maybe only for family sharing that just ended up on the market of eBay. It's a super rich experience. So I highly recommend it. You can also do it with VCRs and home movies which are also sold a lot on eBay. Very much that similar quality. But I think there's something that you're pointing out, to go back to something we were talking about earlier, which is the supposed intimacy or non-intimacy of the AI system, right? Which is on one hand, the point is like, 'Oh well, it's your confessor, it's your friend, it's this peer that sits with you.' But as yet, we're still missing these elements, right? Like things like tone and intonation, all of these aspects that might confer a deeper sense of intimacy. And I guess there's just something there which is like I think we've presumed in some ways that these chat bots are immediately our closest peers. I think there's still missing a lot that would let them ascend to that level of emotional resonance. Which is something I hadn't thought about before.
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Michael Nielsen1:31:44
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're certainly making progress in that particular way. I was amused the other day. I made some offhand sardonic remark in some request I was making, and then to read the chain of thought, you know, 'Michael is clearly bantering here and would appreciate a bantering reply in return.' [laughter] It's like, okay, great. Thank you, Dr. Different way. The model behind the interface just sweating, being like, 'Okay, where'd I put that banter file?' Exactly, 'You know, sir is joking, I should dutifully laugh' is kind of the sense. [laughter] Yeah, that's [laughter] right. Okay, so all right, so Henry Darger, outsider art where there's this kind of intimacy. Maybe an interesting intermediate case is I think maybe somebody like Simone Weil. Who my understanding is she wrote quite a few of her essays for herself. She would then sometimes a friend would ask what she was working on, and she would explain, and they would ask to read it, and sometimes they then convinced her that it should be published. So sort of maybe a very similar thing somehow. For whatever reason, Weil has ended up very influential. In a way, so my sense is that Darger is certainly studied, he's regarded as very interesting, but he's not necessarily emulated in quite the same way whereas there seems to be a very direct influence of Weil. I mean, maybe there's just contingency there. Weil, she went to the Sorbonne and she had a sort of classic education. Her brother was a great mathematician and she moved in intellectual circles. So maybe she was just a little bit more of the culture and as a result she'd sort of metabolized the culture a little bit. Littlewood to D's Roman or something. It's not quite the right analogy, but he was a genuine outsider. She was sort of a funny hybrid maybe of insider and outsider.
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Tim Hwang1:35:05
Yeah, that's right. I think, this will sound flip and I don't mean it to because I think Simone Weil's work is very interesting, but it's, you know, in marketing people used to say you need to make your media snackable, that is to say short and easily consumable. And I think the nice thing about a lot of Simone Weil stuff is that it's like, she writes an essay. It's very straightforward. That's right. Yeah. Versus this completely alien bloody Civil War battle that involves small children and it's going to be a 30,000-page book. In some ways, the scale of the creative production almost makes it just non-transmissible. Which is something that I really like about it, right? I think it's one of the features, but I think it really limits its audience. I was talking to a friend recently. I was saying, 'The hardest trick in the world is not necessarily creating a piece of media that gets a lot of views. What you really want to create is a kind of media that has precisely one fan and no one else. And that's the goal. Can you design a piece of media that will just be appealing to one person and just immediately alienate everybody else?' And I think that's the kind of art that you see in some kinds of outsider art, particularly of the kind that Darger is working on, because it's not even like, famously some outsider art which is a physical structure, okay, well then it's a strange attraction that you might want to drive and go see. This is just like this book, if you can even call it that, right? For what it's worth, I'm very interested in Talmud now, which has also very similar attributes, right? Which is that you have this completely impenetrable document that is very hard to parse through, took a very long time to create. That kind of work I think is just very interesting.
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Michael Nielsen1:37:09
Interesting how much that does separate sort of people by personality. Like I'm just thinking, you know, certain people like Joyce because for this reason, that it's hard to read. You sort of have a puzzle-solving mind. Mhm. Of course, most people are immediately turned off. Well, yeah, you know, it's just I mean for the obvious reason, which is there are many wonderful works in the world which one can reasonably read, and so you can just be. I'm very, I mean, I was thinking for a while that'd be really fun to do a book club which is just books that spawn companion books that are necessary to navigate that book. So for example, Gravity's Rainbow has a book that comes with it. Finnegans Wake has like many guides. So it's like you can only read a book that's annoying enough to read that it has a companion book associated with it. [laughter] Uh, what a interesting and strange. I wonder how the authors feel about it. I mean, I'm sure in many cases, certainly in Joyce's case, he was very aware of what he was doing. It must be disappointing sometimes for some authors when they realize that they are not being understood at all. I wonder about that with Gravity's Rainbow, what how legible he thought he was being.
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Tim Hwang1:38:33
Yeah, that's right. Well, I think it's like with a friend I see very infrequently in DC, we've been slowly reading through Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit section by section. And again, a book that is famously kind of just like, 'What is even going on here?' And I think that is the greatest act, to go back to Weil, is basically to produce something which no one really is sure what it means, but they're all convinced that it is important and it finds its own social influence. It feels like the most complex social obstacle course you can navigate as a creator of media.
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Michael Nielsen1:39:10
It's interesting the extent to which you are sort of responding to the aesthetics of the creative process rather than responding to the aesthetics of what is created. Those are quite different things. Sometimes they're related, but sometimes they're not.
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Tim Hwang1:39:36
Yeah. But I think it's also the effort that it takes. I mean, maybe it's a kind of creative athleticism, the idea that you need to work really hard to produce this very specific outcome that not everybody appreciates. I was very interested, still am, in the practice of sleight of hand. And there's a notion in there which is well, sometimes the magic is just your willingness to do something, to just work on something 10,000 times until you get it. And the magic trick is that you can just do it, right? So famously, one of the things is you learn to shuffle so that every card goes one on top of the other perfectly in a shuffle very naturally. You learn to hold a coin in the palm of your hand. You just need the muscles to do that. It's almost a kind of circus art, but it's just like the magic is the effort. And I just find that very compelling as a way of thinking about how art happens.
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Michael Nielsen1:40:28
One of my very favorite things on Penn & Teller's show, Fool Us. Somebody drops a deck of cards and snatches a particular card out, and they say, 'You know, eventually we think the trick is that there's no trick. You've just spent 20 years learning to grab a card.' Yeah, that's right. And he's like, 'Well, yeah, actually that's exactly what I did.' [laughter] It's just kind of a miracle basically. That's right. Which he has learned to perform. Actually, interesting enough, when he did it for Penn & Teller, he was quite nervous and he grabbed three or four cards out of the air, and it was one of those. And apparently, when he's less nervous, more relaxed, he will sometimes just grab one card. It's a sort of interesting limitation on the miraculous ability. That willingness to put in time to create a...
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Tim Hwang1:41:29
Yeah, that's right. And I think we should, we want a society where more people do that, right? [snorts]
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Michael Nielsen1:41:34
Maybe. Certainly it's entertaining, I think. And I wonder a bit about the cost for the individuals involved. Sure. Right. Right. Anyway, we would benefit. I think that's probably a good place to wrap things up. Thank you very much for doing this. I enjoyed it thoroughly and appreciate the time.
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Tim Hwang1:41:59
Yeah, thanks Michael. Thanks for having me on.