Welcome to my home on the internet! I'm Hazard. I live in Pittsburgh. These days I split my time between writing and scheming with my friends about how to jump-start an intellectual renaissance without getting corrupted by coalitional politics.

My writing runs the gamut from personal introspective essays like How to Absorb a Shared Success Script (while also thinking you're living without one), to trying to figure out wtf is up with Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, to developing a new Type of Guy theory, to graphically exploring how arguments that look like they're about definitions can secretly be about how to make decisions.

Soon all my writing will live on this site! Until then, my new stuff mostly goes on Substack, I sometimes cross-post on Lesswrong, and I'm always threading up a storm on twitter.

Things I'm actively exploring and writing about:

Self

• Praxis and theory of resolving internal conflict, parts work, and non-self-coercion. Getter better at doing what I want with the full force of my being. Surfing the Giant Wave that is me instead of Pushing the Giant Boulder that is me up a hill. Dissolving the illusory gap between "what I want" and "what is good for me".
• Refactoring the concept of "self-deception" into "motivated lack of introspection" while attempting to actually explore the mechanics of how it all works. The depressive realism story of self-deception (we deceive ourselves because the truth would wound the ego too much) is suicidally incurious about the nature of suffering. The Elephant in the Brain story of self-deception (we deceive ourselves to more effectively deceive others as we selfishly skirt pro-social norms) is suicidally incurious about power dynamics. I want to give a more accurate and useful account, grounded in a pragmatic exploration of how self-knowledge works at all, let alone how it gets fucked up.
• Better articulating the ways that the desire to "be cynically in the know about the way things really are", to "not be naive", and to "not be a sucker", all conspire to get me to dissociate from my surprise and confusion which has the net effect of crippling my ability to understand the world.

Relationships

• How to better do the "non-naive trust dance". Getting faster at discovering and creating(?) value alignment between me and new friends (and old ones! And my family!).
• Double Binds as the prototypical model of how domination works in the modern world (and how it creates pressure to self-deceive in order to less painfully comply with the delusion of a powerful party).
• How to synthesize genuine win-win responses to conflict so that relationships can be something other than taking turns submitting to the other's preferences.
• Understanding the multi-dimensional spectrum of coercion, how the different aspects relate, and what it would look like to have relationships that aren't founded in mutual low-key manipulating the other into acting as an emotional pacifier whenever painful feelings come up.

Groups

• The way scapegoating dynamics create situations where people suppress information about wrongdoings, making it hard to talk literally about crimes.
• The boundaries between denotative and enactive language games, what happens when people refuse to adjust their interpretive frames, and how some language games have a parasitic relationship to language games I care about.
• Common knowledge, schelling points, and preference falsification as key lenses for understanding group phenomena.

Other

• I want to learn everything there is to know about the material and political reality of the Internet. From how the protocols work, to how the fuck they ever got agreed upon in the first place, to where are all the cables, to who runs ICANN and what are their vested interests?
• The field of Distributed Systems is secretly the study of the limits of intersubjective reality.
• How the inexact sciences shot themselves in the foot by trying to ape the methodologies of "hard sciences", leaving the field with p-hacked studies reporting on meaningless surveys that don't replicate. What would real psychology and sociology look like?

If anything I'm up to excites you or connects with stuff you care about, let's talk!

I'm grateful for every time others have helped me understand the world better. I glow with joy every time I'm able to share something useful to someone who needed it.

DM me on twitter (@natural_hazard) or email me at natural.hazard@protonmail.com.