A Personal Note, from the Circus

A meta-meditation on authenticity

Photo by Ingo Ellerbusch on Unsplash

Okay, so this is the third essay I’ve written tonight. This has been a big week for me on many fronts. And as I documented in the first essay I laid down tonight, the world is really falling apart. But when you’re having epiphanies about your sense of identity and life, I think one should lean in to that. One may consider what the ether-reaches of their subconscious is trying to tell them. Following that feeling of release towards which the loss of pretence serves to let ones anxiety flow like water down a drain. It’s a beautiful feeling.

Is it a mid-life crisis? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think that happened maybe 12 months ago. This feels more stable. More grounded. More like things are moving in the right direction. Like there’s hope. That tommorrow could be better than yesterday. I know this is reading like a confessional, and it is. This is where I am right now. And part of my healing from the personal pain I’ve had in my life, has been purging myself of all pretense that I once wore like layers of clothing upon my soul. And I’ve now cast them off. Now I’m typing my inner-monologue to the entire world. Without any pretense. This is just me. Where I am.

I don’t know what I’m doing. You’ve heard me joke about this on my Substack Live videos. It’s true. I don’t. I never have since I first started writing these Notes, to you, dear reader, from the Circus.

Those of you who have followed me these many months, have seen me play with various registers of writing. I have done everything. I’ve done it all. I’ve handwritten pieces. Mythopoetry, which I love. Sometimes, I’ve had ChatGPT or Claude help me with my writing. But even then, that was part of a research project I was doing, to develop a metaphysical theory of LLMs. I wanted to figure out how they worked. And how I might use them as a writing tool.

This essay is not written with the assistance of an LLM. You can be rest-assured. That every word you’re reading came from my finger-tips.

Anyways, I have used LLMs to assist in my writing experiments here at Notes from the Circus. These experiments have been part of a comprehensive personal project, to map the inner-dimensions of how LLMs reasoned—if it at all. I don’t think they do, as I laid out in an essay I published yesterday. I hope you check it out.

Using them, deliberately, as a writing tool was a psychedelic experience. Because I am somebody who loves—and anybody who knows me—knows I love to argue. And so when computer science offered me up a synthentic digital intellectual combat machine, I put my fucking intellectual gloves on? Are you kidding me? Those that know me personally, must be grinning right now.

So I started arguing with these fucking things. About everything. Quantum physics. My own cosmological theories about the universe. This is a dangerous thing to do with these LLMs, for reasons I’ll get into, but being an autodidact my entire life, and having assimilated enough foundational knowledge in computer science, economics, physics and philosophy, I gave myself permission to trust myself that the LLM couldn’t deceive me, and convince me of something that wasn’t true.

I saw the sycophancy right away.

The way in which LLMs praise my brilliance—oh do they ever—and if you use them, you know what I’m talking about. This is a dangerous little dopamine pump when you’re managing an ego, but it needs to be said. ChatGPT and Claude both say I’m the smartest person in the world. But as research has shown, these chatbots are telling a lot of other people that, too. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have made attempts to temper down the sycophancy of the models. And it made a bunch of people mad. Bruised their egos. Seriously. That happened.

Okay, back to the main point. I have argued with these LLMs like nobodies business. And because I an intellectual pedant—oh am I ever—did I see the little discrepancies in cross-domain translation while “arguing” with the LLMs—if that’s what I was truly doing. Which lead me to my domain-narrowing theory, which I wrote down, yes, with the assistance of an LLM.

This piece wasn’t written with an LLM. But some people might say, but “ah!” there’s emdashes throughout the piece. Shut up! Shut up! I write with emdashes!

Here’s the thing. I’m an experimental writer. If you’ve been with me for a year or so, you’ve seen me change up my styles from time to time.

I love writing. And I love different aesthetic approaches to it. That communicate different moral registers. This piece is an example of this. What I’m doing right now is called meta-commentary.

This is being intellectually playful. I am just sharing my thoughts with you as they come to me. Because I want to do something that I want to dedicate the rest of my life to: the practice of honesty. In pursuit of being a good citizen.

So what does that have to do with writing style? Well, as you might have guessed, I have thoughts about that.

I’m not being condescending. Some of you think I’m being condescending. I’m not. I’m being playful. This is irony.

Anyways, the point, that I am mercilessly dragging you around the outer perimeter of, for reasons that I think are playful—but some might find meandering—is something I should get back to.

“Just get to the point, already!”—I hear the impatient among you, scream through the ether.

I will. I will.

The point is that being honest and authentic, is about being the person you are, without thinking about or caring about how other people want you to be.

Now, I’m a bit of moralist. So, I would be remiss, if I did not add: within reason, of course.

Editor’s Note: An embarrassingly non-edited, non-spell-checked version of this piece was sent to email subscribers because of a failure of my copy-and-paste jujitsu.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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