no. 003

Questions I keep returning to

I can't claim expertise here, only recurrence. I keep coming back to each of these often enough that the returning must mean something.

question 01

What does a system reveal about its hidden rules?

A system with private rules leaks them through its behaviour: a model that refuses certain requests draws the outline of its refusals, the way a person maps their sore spots by avoiding them. The rule-leakage experiment is my one measurable probe at this so far. The question itself is much older and larger than the experiment.

where this is currently stuck

That leakage happens is obvious. The interesting parts are the rate, and whether a leak can be shaped, and I don't have the mathematics for the shaping yet. I'm reading toward it.

question 02

When does preparation become avoidance?

This portfolio took nine rounds of research before one page existed. Some of that produced principles I'll keep for a decade. Some of it was procrastination wearing rigor's clothes. I do not yet have a reliable test for telling the two apart from the inside — only from afterward. I would genuinely like one.

question 03

What should a person keep doing by hand?

I automate things for pleasure. And yet the parts of my work I trust most are the ones no automation touched: the sentence rewritten nine times, the list where every item is true. Somewhere there is a line between what should be delegated to machines and what a person must keep doing themselves in order to remain themselves. I keep trying to find where it runs.

question 04

What makes a small body of work feel substantial?

A student's question, asked without embarrassment: I have little work. The little I have is honest. Under what conditions is that enough?

placeholder page-note: questions 01–03 are drawn from your real history in this project. Question 04 is marked ＊ — keep, rewrite, or remove.