My essay ideas are impolite — they seize my attention when I must do important things.
My idea backlog is a giant txt file with 6,000+ essay/project ideas that I will never complete:
Sometime in early 2024, I recorded this note to my idea backlog:
crows vs. kindergartners vs. a math professor, “intelligence as negative entropy”, entropy extraction
I have zero clue what it means, but I suspect some personal experiences became entangled:
— I started seriously using LLMs for work, and their behaviors were inscrutable. What the h*ck is going on with language models.
— I had recently listened to Jamie Loftus’s funny/awful experience with Mensa.
— My daughter was born in 2022; little humans are wild.
— I’m a few decades old now, and I feel the gunk in my mind’s gears. I can’t absorb textbooks like I used to.
— I was working closely with a mathematician with an Erdős number of three. His brain works so good.
— Information theory is simple enough for me to pretend to understand it.
— What a wonderful gift to be alive.
I developed a clever method that prioritizes high-quality viral essays. If I were a disciplined writer, I would use it. But no — I simply transcribe my conversations with the loudest voices in my head (no, not literal voices — they’re just my model’s weights and biases du jour).
On 2024.07.14, the mystery of CROWPOWER yelled at me until I wrote 739 words about it. My first drafts looked like this:
Two weeks later, I tried to give my idea a spine:
And then I let it sit for three months. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I bookmarked papers like Information Compression as a Unifying Principle in Human Learning, Perception, and Cognition during that time. I probably realized that my entire idea was bogus and/or cliche. Sometimes things need time to breathe.
On 2024.10.13, I took another stab at it:
And then I got stuck again, and it sat for another three months.
After a short trip to Cambodia, I picked the essay back up on 2025.01.05. One big idea made it into my essay notes: A few thousand crows with error-correction equipment could emulate a CPU like a Tinker-Toy computer. This simple idea became the Rosetta Stone that let me translate between biology, computation, and information.
I also wrote down a bunch of ideas that didn’t make it into the essay. For example, intelligence seems highly dependent on personal motivation. What if you asked somebody to retake an IQ test and gave them $100,000 for each point increase? I suspect scores would increase on average, but not by much. Doesn’t this severely complicate measuring non-human intelligence? And on, and on, and on.
Six months later, on 2025.06.22, I rewrote the intro to focus on the history of horsepower.
The new horsepower intro unblocked the essay — suddenly everything I’d been failing to say had a thread running through it.
From a clean slate, I spent every minute of my discretionary time writing this damn essay. I worked this way for six days, and then it was finally complete.
This essay took a year of calendar time and ~80 hours at the keyboard. I am a very slow writer, but this one was glacial even for me.
I log all my edits to git, so it was easy to see how it developed:
2024.07.11 — 12 words — braindump mixed with other notes
2024.07.14 — 739 words — first real outline; mostly “tk:” stubs
2024.07.29 — 1,705 words — expanding 2024 skeleton
2024.10.13 — 1,982 words — added “joepower”
2025.01.05 — 2,419 words — crowputing and employing crows
2025.06.22 — 3,414 words — “…and no horses on the moon”
2025.06.28 — 4,861 words — rewrote the whole thing with scaffolding notes
2025.07.01 — 2,714 words — removed scaffolding notes
2025.07.01 — 2,783 words — final edits; submitted to contest
2025.09.03 — 2,746 words — published alongside prize announcement
Astute readers understand that none of my essays are ever good enough to publish. But I hit that publish button when my curiosity and pride and shame reach equilibrium.
My hunger for useless knowledge takes me to weird places; my brain refuses to leave the restaurant until it’s tasted everything on the menu. “I can improve upon these recipes!” No, no, I can only cook inedible sins in my kitchen. It’s torture until I remember that I don’t have to be smart if I’m funny — I suddenly fall madly in love with the enormous mess I’ve made, and I want everybody to know how wonderful it is to be alive.
I was elated when Adam Mastroianni crowned my essay the winner of his 2025 Blog Extravaganza. My friends probably weren’t too surprised — Adam and I share an uncommon reverence for bad jokes and amateur science.
But I’m a bit disappointed that “crowpower” and “joepower” haven’t wormed into our lexicon. I half-expected those words to flourish in a certain unnamed AI safety forum (from which I maintain a healthy distance). It’s wild how everybody trusts intelligence benchmarks, but nobody knows what we’re measuring. I barely have the vocabulary to explain my confusion. It’s like trying to describe Bitcoin to an ancient Aztec person.
And now here we are. I am so grateful that Jordan & Carter asked about my CROWPOWER essay. I think I needed some flattery/encouragement. “I can improve upon these recipes!”
Here’s something I grapple with: writing about things I know, versus writing about things I don’t know. It’s the difference between writing to teach and writing to learn.
For example, this is supposed to be an interview about how I wrote CROWPOWER. Simple questions: When did you write it? How long did it take? What was your process? What do you know?
But all I care to talk about is how opaque my creative process is, especially to myself. Whoops — here I am making a mess in somebody else’s kitchen.
My favorite essays are those that seem to be about one thing but are actually about something else entirely.
I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but this is one of the greatest literary feats I’ve ever seen. Its genius is completely orthogonal to its content: gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114
But this is not one of those essays. It is exactly what it is.