Edwin

Deutsch & Popper’s ideas applied to personal effectiveness

📘 Book: Podcast: Conference:

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

This week I had the pleasure of being joined by @DavidDeutschOxf to explore the intricacies of creativity, the self, the mind, and of course, the Fun Criterion.

https://t.co/6wVsVkMvuD

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

First, GLP-1s. Now this.

Others will soon follow.

Don’t Die is the sunrise on the horizon.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@Ray_S_Percival @DavidDeutschOxf Thank you! I appreciate that @Ray_S_Percival

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

This week I had the pleasure of being joined by @DavidDeutschOxf to explore the intricacies of creativity, the self, the mind, and of course, the Fun Criterion.

https://t.co/6wVsVkMvuD

[Ray Scott Percival @Ray_S_Percival]

Inside the Intellectual Hive: Conjecture Conference, Oxford 2026.

(Partner: Conjecture Institute)

A brief visual glimpse of the conference atmosphere — the talks, informal exchanges, and good company around them.

The full professional recordings of all talks and discussions are expected soon.

@reasonisfun @DanGMartin1 @MartvMegen @maxdesalle @Brigadirk @Edwindoit @Sam_kuyp @FitzClaridge @Ankreijenbroek @Code_of_Kai @DKedmey @dela3499 @ChipkinLogan @maria__violaris

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@kaurimark Hi Kauri, It's likely we will organize more! Hopefully yearly. I'll post about it, but we also have an X account: @conconeurope

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

Can’t wait! If you can’t attend, video recordings of all the talks will be available online for free. You can find the speaker lineup here: https://t.co/OXzNWIwdpb

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

We hope everyone has a wonderful at Conjecture Con Europe in a couple weeks!

Some talks by Conjecture Institute Fellows at the event:

@Ray_S_Percival - Why False Ideas Persist Among Rational Agents: The Paradox of "Bertrand Russell Island"

@maxdesalle - Venetian Doges, Futarchy, and Error-Correcting Governance

@Sam_kuyp - How the Popperian idea of a problem situation and problem solving has guided my research, with examples

@maria__violaris - Is it possible to communicate across the quantum multiverse?

@tomhyde_ - An Aesthetic Theory of Romance

There will also be a Q&A session with Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf 🥳

Thanks to organizers @Brigadirk, @DanGMartin1, @Edwindoit, @AmaroKoberle, & @_prashan7h for your hard work on this.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@levelsio It reminds me a bit of the stress of having a bunch of highly capable engineers constantly waiting for work. You feel guilty and pressured to come up with tasks and tackle the next big thing because you don’t want to waste the opportunity or have them sit idle

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

Generally, it’s a mistake to wait for the “simple one-click setup” or “consumer friendly” version of whatever AI assisted productivity tools you’re considering trying, whether that’s OpenClaw, Hermes, or the next shiny thing.

The whole point of LLM-assisted tools is that they are composable and customizable. To truly benefit from AI’s ability to extend your reach and productivity, you need a working understanding of how your systems and tools are structured. Own your data model on your device, use open-source applications, understand the architecture of your project, set up the basic networking, and investigate what’s going wrong when bugs occur.

That is how you actually benefit from frontier AI. When a better model arrives, you’re not stuck waiting for a vendor to productize it. You already understand your own system well enough to know what to ask, what to automate, and where the model can give you leverage. And you’ll also know when a new tool or model is irrelevant to your system, and you can simply skip it.

In a sense, this is nothing new. It has always been better to take the sovereign, boutique approach to software, but the bottleneck used to be the complexity and time required to build your own tools. Before 2026, it wasn’t possible for the average person to build their own tools to exactly their liking, so they had to rely on big vendors and app makers: your Notions, ClickUps, and the like. But now, in a single weekend, you can build most of the systems and functionality you need.

Create, don’t wait.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

Best yet: whenever a new AI model is released, you can instantly update and enhance your apps instead of being locked into yet another app or vendor. The data and its structure are now the core, no longer the app’s features

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

Local data ownership is a massive unlock.

Once your data lives on your device, you:

- Can build exactly the tools you want (e.g. with Claude Code / Codex)
- Have no dependence on product decisions of others
- Reduce external attack surface: no always-online backend; data stays local and under your control

I’m moving my productivity system (KEE) from Notion → local Markdown + Obsidian, and automating everything around it.

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

We hope everyone has a wonderful at Conjecture Con Europe in a couple weeks!

Some talks by Conjecture Institute Fellows at the event:

@Ray_S_Percival - Why False Ideas Persist Among Rational Agents: The Paradox of "Bertrand Russell Island"

@maxdesalle - Venetian Doges, Futarchy, and Error-Correcting Governance

@Sam_kuyp - How the Popperian idea of a problem situation and problem solving has guided my research, with examples

@maria__violaris - Is it possible to communicate across the quantum multiverse?

@tomhyde_ - An Aesthetic Theory of Romance

There will also be a Q&A session with Advisor @DavidDeutschOxf 🥳

Thanks to organizers @Brigadirk, @DanGMartin1, @Edwindoit, @AmaroKoberle, & @_prashan7h for your hard work on this.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@astupple Well deserved, tremendous book!

[Conjecture Institute @ConjectureInst]

https://t.co/Z6cdqHDN80

[Christian Dean @christiandean_]

Merz has called for the systematic review of all EU legislation.

That's over 140,000 regulations.

Knowing the EU, that will take over 140,000 days.

So, I made https://t.co/lfGC0ixevD where Grok 4.1 will review every document since 1958 -> 2025.

[Brad Ingarfield @BradIngarfield]

Your brain also didn't evolve to do calculus. Yet here we are.

Evolution explains how we got here. It doesn't explain what we're capable of now that we're here.

Every generation thought its information environment was uniquely overwhelming. The printing press. The telegram. The 24 hour news cycle.

The answer was never less data. It was better thinking.

You're not a caveman drowning in a data storm.

You're a universal explainer who was never taught to reason.

That's a solvable problem.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

Thank you Brian, I appreciate the remarks and suggestions of areas to look into. It's a fun project. I haven't had a thorough look at all the authors you mention yet, but here are some initial thoughts/questions on your three points:

On the social constitution of the self: I agree that other people are a massive factor in the development of the self, even the most important environmental factor. But I'm not yet convinced it's a necessary condition rather than a powerful accelerant. Consider: the first creative being to evolve had no other selves to interact with, yet something like a self must have emerged anyway. If it hadn't, there would be no second self for anyone to interact with either. So at minimum, creativity in interplay with observation of reality has to be sufficient to get some form of self (or multiple selves), or even some completely different form of organisation, off the ground.

On World 3: I take your point that the self is anchored in World 3 objects. But I think framing World 3 as inherently social cuts against Popper's own characterization. Isn't the whole point of World 3 is that it consists of objective knowledge that exists independently of knowing subjects? A solitary creative mind (wheter human or not) can generate and engage with World 3 objects — theories, problems, conjectures — without a social context.

On selves not having aims: I'd like to understand this distinction better. If the self is a conflict resolution process, that process is necessarily directed at specific problems. If the self isn't what determines that directionality, then what does?

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

I’ve been digging deeper into the nature of the self and tried to condense my current view into one working model — largely based on the ideas of Deutsch and Popper. It will evolve as I learn more.

Criticism and comments are very welcome:
https://t.co/xl5dRBbUVJ

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@ConjectureInst @ToKTeacher Love the cover!

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@kaurimark I can definitely recognize this. It’s become very easy to tell whether something is AI if you just leave the prompts at their defaults, so prescribing at least some kind of style guide seems mandatory.

I’m going to give Every a try!

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

I’m curious about modern AI-assisted writing workflows. What tools excel at copy-editing and maintaining style consistency? Right now I use AI to generate examples and tighten prose, but I lack coherent prompt structure or native-app experience.

[Edwin @Edwindoit]

@dela3499 @every Nice, Spiral (from every) looks interesting. I’m going to experiment with it a bit.

I’m also vibe coding a minimalist local editor, partly for fun and partly to reduce context switching and avoid copy-pasting