Alex Boisvert

In search of causality, composition & the right abstraction. CTO @ Stealth. alex(dot)boisvert(at)gmail(dot)youknowhat. Fediverse @[email protected]

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@fwbrasil @hepin1989 Shipping code and "Algebraic effects and the future of Scala" seem to be the most constructive.

[Tom Hyde @tomhyde_]

I want to quit my job and work on my book, Wonderism, full-time. Below is my application to a popular online grant. If this sounds of value to you, and you have the means to support me, please do reach out. If not, please consider reposting.

Q. What is your story?

I am a writer interested in the connection between reason and aesthetics. I am, in a sense, that combination personified. In school—like so many students in state education—I was faced with the choice between science on the one hand and art on the other. Between logic, laboratories, and stable career prospects; against literature, libraries, and much less of that. They are immiscible fluids, oil and water, we are told, one part passion and the other part rigour, as likely to mingle as diesel in lemonade. But I wanted to do both. I wanted to write about reason and write about it beautifully. This is, I think, far more faithful to the spirit of science than lab coats and calculators; reason as a purely cerebral process is a largely modern misconception. It is intimate, delicate, romantic. How could knowing the world be any different? Karl Popper, the foremost epistemologist of the 20th century, was right when he said that ‘Science is most significant as one of the greatest spiritual adventures that man has yet known.’ This has been, and remains to this day, my guiding inspiration.

After school, I studied geology at University College London. There I read John McPhee’s “Annals of the Former World”. A journalist, not a geologist, McPhee wrote personally about a subject that appeared most impersonal. He had wondered, as a child, not merely what brought the placer gold from the Yukon mountains down into the rivers that divided them, but, far more deeply, “what had put the gold in the mountain to begin with?” This was intended both literally (orogenic gold deposition is mostly the result of hydrothermal alteration of the surrounding fabric rock) and metaphorically (how can beauty inspire us to know?) I took both meanings to heart, and after graduating, moved to Australia to work as a mining geologist. This might appear strange for a writer most interested in art. But it is, in truth, a great source of inspiration for an aesthetic theory in constant contact with the physical sciences. Gold, I have learned, borders quartz; and beauty, I am confident, is a concrete part of this world.

Outside of my academic and professional pursuits, I am interested in philosophy, popular science, science fiction, poetry, and writing. I was inspired by the books of David Deutsch @DavidDeutschOxf and consider myself an optimist in his style: problems are inevitable; they are soluble; people are both fallible and improvable; there is no inherent limit to the amount of progress we can make through conjecture, criticism, reason, and knowledge.

Q. What is your project?

I have suggested that the separations between reason and feeling are manufactured and, inevitably, false. I have also outlined the problem as precisely that clash (or family of clashes): reason/feeling, thought/passion, logic/instinct, sense/sensibility; their various applications: science/art, industry/nature, technology/biology, synthetic/organic; and other related divides: materialism/spiritualism, naturalism/supernaturalism, utility/beauty, function/form… These proposed dichotomies (and others) are a modern deconstruction of an older dispute: between The Enlightenment of the 18th century (representing reason and science); and Romanticism of the 19th century (representing emotion and art). Today, this schism has exceeded conventional wisdom and has been ossified into dogma; it has been codified into equally extensive, exhaustive, and at times exhausting slogans: “head vs heart”, “hot vs cold”, “the rider and the elephant”, “left brain and right brain”, “type 1 and type 2 thinking”. The result is to excise meaning, feeling, inspiration and significance from material, mechanical, technological progress; and to fuse it inseparably to mystical, irrational, primitivist stasis. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. This is the problem I am trying to solve.

My proposed solution is a new philosophy. Wonderism.

There are two meanings to the word wonder: wondering and wonderment. The former is curiosity, imagination, and reasoning in the face of mystery. The latter is astonishment, adoration, and inspiration in the light of discovery. This simple polysemy contains within it every facet of human thought and every feature of the problem described.

I want to write a book. Called Wonderism.

A rough-sketch outline is as follows.

PREFACE (“What put the gold in the mountains?”)

This will be a personal introduction to myself and my relationship to both science and the arts.

INTRODUCTION (“In Wonder It Began”)

This will be an investigation into the history and nature of the concept of wonder. The Greeks called it “Thauma”. Indeed, Plato himself said that all philosophy begins and ends in this unified concept. (Popper would later go on to say: “What matters is neither methods nor techniques—nothing but a sensitiveness to problems, and a consuming passion for them; or as the Greeks said, the gift of wonder.) And the philosophical divide between Plato’s spiritualism and Aristotle’s materialism can be viewed as the progenitor of the problem as described.

BOOK 1: An Ode to Inspiration (“Catching Fire”)

This chapter will be a series of short stories exploring the process of inspiration and using the central icons of fire and flight. The first bird, first campfire, first balloon flight, first stone placed at the foot of The Statue of Liberty, first SpaceX rocket catch. All are literal and spiritual applications of “catching fire” to mean both ignition and inspiration. This will be a modern promethean epic told in short form.

BOOK 2: A Comparative History of Enlightenment and Romanticism (“Songs of Lightness and of Love”)

This chapter will be a comparison of The Enlightenment and Romanticism, focusing on their epistemologies, their unification under Karl Popper’s critical rationalism, and its own elevation into Wonderism.

BOOK 3: Terrorism (“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”)

This chapter will explore the erroneous applications of wonder. The opposite of wondering is boredom. And the opposite of wonderment is terror. You can plot this on a "political compass”-style graph to yield four quadrants: Wonderism, Scientism, Terrorism, Mysticism. The title is taken from Goya’s famous inscription and his statement: "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders". It will cover religious irrationality, scientific and other secular authoritarianism, sophistry, slavery, and war.

BOOK 4: Art (“The Language of Wonder”)

This chapter will cover art as the key mode of communicating emotions. It will focus on semiotics, the philosophy of symbols, and art as an alternative to language. It will also explore “the great un-mystery” of art (namely beauty) and aim to debunk various fallacies surrounding it. Finally, it will outline some tenets of a Wonderist style, prose in the immediate, but all forms more generally. As I have explained above, I want to “Wonderise” the mundane through aesthetics. This is one of the core tenets of the work: namely that, in order to communicate well, one must not merely say the thing but sing it also. I intend to do both.

BOOK 5: A Guide to Radical Humanism (“Man the More”)

This chapter takes its title from an inversion of Byron (“I love not man the less, but nature more”). It aims to be an optimistic tour-de-force in the Deutschian tradition: people are universal, the glory of the universe.

The remaining material is undesignated pending structural decisions. It includes an aesthetic and heroic theory of romance (i.e. person to person relationship; love); a list of my picks for the modern wonders of the world; the Wonderist manifesto; and more.

I am currently employed full-time at a salt mine. The work is physically demanding and doesn’t leave much time for research. I would use any support as a means to quit my job and work on the book full-time, systematising my research, developing the philosophy, and accelerating the writing process for a 2026 first-draft. I would hope, with your sponsorship, to make the new year my very own “annus mirabilis”.

A year of wonders.

[Dan O'Neill @dp_oneill]

This point is so rarely made.

The mere existence of private insurers doesn’t have to make healthcare the bureaucratic mess that it is. The problem is the endless (and often pointless) variation in networks, benefit details, pricing, payment & coding rules, etc.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@fwbrasil Makes sense, thank you for the explanation.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@fwbrasil I was under the impression that the JVM optimizes polymorphic calls through inlining in hot spots (when the references to objects are deemed constant within the context). Is that not the case? Or are you talking in the general case where this may not happen

[Bark @barkmeta]

Let me explain what just happened 👇

5 minutes before the President announced a halt to attacks on Iran… someone placed a $1.5 BILLION bet on stocks going up and dumped $192 million in oil.

5 minutes…

These trades were 4 to 6 times larger than anything else in the entire market. Whoever did this wasn’t guessing. You don’t risk $1.5 billion on a hunch.

There was zero public indication this announcement was coming. No leaks. No press. Nothing. The only people who knew were in the room when the decision was made.

Someone in that room picked up a phone.
And within minutes they made more money than most Americans will earn in a thousand lifetimes. In a single trade. On a war that cost you $4+ a gallon gas and $16 billion in tax dollars.

American citizens funded this war. Politicians are profiting from it.

This is not the first time. Every major announcement from this administration has had massive suspicious trades right before it dropped. Tariff reversals. Policy shifts. War decisions.

This is the most blatant insider trading operation in the history of American politics. It’s not even close. And it’s happening over and over in broad daylight.

You would go to federal prison for trading on a tip from your cousin. These people are front running war decisions with billion dollar bets and nobody will ever ask a single question.

Nobody will be investigated. Nobody will be charged. By tomorrow this will be buried under the next satisfying headline. Just like last time. And the time before that.

The game is rigged. And they’re not even trying to hide it anymore…

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

In case my followers are wondering what I'm up to these days ... built with #scala, #htmx, #alpinejs and too many other libraries to count. AMA.

[Fanstake @FanstakeHQ]

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[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@debasishg @simonw I would much prefer "generative engineering" as I feel the "vibing" part is lost when thoroughly reviewing, testing, etc.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@fwbrasil I'm sad there's still so much infighting and ill will around the Scala community ... Wish everyone did as much as you, and extended more good faith to get along

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@jdegoes Agreed, from a modeling and implementation standpoint there's a natural fit. I also think capabilities (in Pony style) are a good fit to reign in some of the power delegated to agents, whether it's access to resources/date, or quotas on their consumption/spend.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@fwbrasil The real game changer is making good (though not necessarily great) many-core performance with direct-style, without having to use futures/effects and other reactive suspension mechanisms all over the place.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@EconBerger It was certainly a banger at the time and now TBH feels somewhat inadequate compared to the UN's declaration of human rights.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@marius And corrupt profiteers

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@jdegoes You would ensure safety through capture checking? Or something else?

[Charlie Bilello @charliebilello]

The Interest Expense on US National Debt rose to a record $1.15 trillion last year, an increase of 97% over the past 3 years. The US Government now spends more money on interest than it does on National Defense.

https://t.co/l5IYmkf6Ih

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@__Speedy2 @SKOBUFFS22 @FanstakeHQ @PregnonEmmanuel @bensteinberg27 It's not a bet. It's an incentive (structured as an NIL deal) to join your chosen team. Think of it as a signing bonus. If he doesn't, you get your money back.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@runarorama Because they're not after people but natural resources.

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@kubukoz import scala.language.respectSubtyping

[Alex Boisvert @boia01]

@jdegoes It would be best described as a micro benchmark, from which few generalized conclusions can be drawn.