What I'm doing now

This is a Now page and was last updated Jan 1, 2025

Questions

There are a few questions I’m particularly invested in right now:

• What lessons can be generalized from skill acquisition / motor learning research to non-motor expertise?
• Closely related: how general can a theory of expertise even be?
• What blocks exist to taking knowledge and skills from experts and teaching them directly to novices? (For instance: maybe experts do X, but you can only do X successfully if you already know Y, so you can’t just teach novices X)
• For any given domain, what are the tradeoffs between capabilities, skill, and understanding in performance?
• What’s the lowest-friction stack for building extremely personal applications and tools?

Work

I’ve started looking for full-time work again – after contracting for nearly two years, it’s time to be a part of a more permanent team. I’d love to find a role where I can work towards answering some of those questions.

Expertise

This remains my primary interest, and the thread that runs through a lot of my work (even the low-friction stack is related; I want it to be as easy and quick as possible to build tools and experiments to test out means of accelerating the development of expertise and understanding).

I published three series of Ten Thousand in 2024 – on software development, on academic philosophy, and on fiction-writing – and I’m planning to do more of it in the coming year. I don’t have anything concrete on the calendar yet, though.

Family

We’ve made it through another year, tackling middle and high school, starting to do college visits, and in general growing up. We’re healthy and optimistic for what 2025 will bring.