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    <title>Max Langenkamp</title>
    <link>https://yichabod.github.io/</link>
    <description>Recent content on Max Langenkamp</description>
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      <title>What is an institution? Introducing &#39;A Grammar of Institutions&#39;</title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/institution/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/institution/</guid>
      <description>What is an institution? Introducing &amp;lsquo;A Grammar of Institutions&amp;rsquo; This is part of my series on Ostrom. You can also find the root page here.
&amp;lsquo;How should we define institutions?&#39;1 This is a difficult but surprisingly important question; at its core, traditional political science is about the study of institutions. Also, if we want to talk about governance, we need also a vocabulary to discuss the setting where governance takes place.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Ostrom&#39;s Teachings</title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/ostrom/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/ostrom/</guid>
      <description>This is a collection for the most important things I have learned from reading Elinor Ostrom. It is not comprehensive (for that you might turn to the Four Volume tome published by Lexington press). These are just some of the insights that I found most striking.
My plan for the series:
 What is an institution? Introducing &amp;lsquo;A Grammar&amp;rsquo; An overview of Institutional Analysis and Development Reflections on &amp;lsquo;Governing the Commons&amp;rsquo; &amp;hellip;(TBD)  </description>
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      <title>Questions about Governance</title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_governance/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_governance/</guid>
      <description>This is a live document. If you have any suggestions, please let me know at maxlangenkamp[at]me.com
Questions about Governance: A Primer Earlier on, I collected some key questions about economic growth. This page is my attempt to gather the key questions about governance.
As before, I found this exercise especially useful. I will also be using the descriptive/normative division to organize the questions.
A brief note before I get to the questions: as David Levi-Faur points out in the Oxford Handbook of Governance, &amp;lsquo;governance&amp;rsquo; has been introduced only very recently.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/book_reviews/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/book_reviews/</guid>
      <description>Book Reviews Half of these are scribbles for my memory retention that I&amp;rsquo;ve been asked to share.
The Rising Sun: The Decline &amp;amp; Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 * The Making of Buddhist Modernism Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China Skunk Works * Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre The Disgrace </description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/2021_review/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/2021_review/</guid>
      <description>Gorgeous Chemical Fires Note: you are one of a small number of people getting this update (because I care about you or else you are sasha chapin). Perhaps it should go without out saying but I request that you please don’t share this without asking beforehand. (Subnote: the original version of this was hosted on substack and I&amp;rsquo;ve repasted it here so all the links are missing)
As I start this letter, I am 10,000 meters above the ground, squeezed between two strangers with a polypropylene mask over my face.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/age_of_ambition/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/age_of_ambition/</guid>
      <description>Author: Evan Osnos Finished: April 7th, 2022
I want to use this as an example to implement Holden Karnofsky&amp;rsquo;s suggestion that you learn by refining hypotheses.
Summary The book documents the complicated clash of aspiration and authoritarianism within China.
The party &amp;ldquo;shed [socialism&amp;rsquo;s] scripture, but held onto its saints.&amp;rdquo;
Notes The book is broken down into three sections
Random notes:
 The diversity of Western influence in China is fascinating;  Michael Sandel, the Harvard ethics prof, is a superstar in China, filling stadiums with his lectures Xi Jinping&amp;rsquo;s chief anticorruption czar is a big fan of Alexis de Tocqueville   Perhaps the most important event that shaped the CCP&amp;rsquo;s consciousness was the fall of the Soviet Union Bobos were the aspiring middle class  Questions for recall</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/atomization/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/atomization/</guid>
      <description>Feeling into this moment, there’s a sad recognition of how spatially distant my community is. For the past year I’ve been living under the kindness of family and friends, lugging my bags and instrument from plane to plane and guest bed to carpeted floor. I’m about to move into my old apartment in Central Square, where I will be in the same room for three months — the longest stretch of stillness I’ve seen.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/automation/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/automation/</guid>
      <description>Automation and institutional friction re Adam Marblestone’s ‘General automation, and Science’
Adam Marblestone has a thought-provoking post on how much he expects AI to speed up science. He suggests breaking down skills into three types (types 1, 2, and 3).
Type 1 skills operate in ‘kind’1, game-like domains (Chess, Go, etc). Type 2 skills have lots of demonstration data but not obvious score (e.g. writing essays in response to prompts). Type 3 basically refers to everything else (‘wicked’ tasks like e.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/become_career/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/become_career/</guid>
      <description>Do what you want to become I was listening to a childhood friend talk about his business’ financials when I had a realization; the thing that is so insidious about many who orient their lives around a standardized career (I have in mind my father&amp;rsquo;s career as an investment banker) is not so much that it wastes the golden years of their lives, or that they per se lose the activities and hobbies that were so dear to them.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/better_without_ai/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/better_without_ai/</guid>
      <description>On David Chapman&amp;rsquo;s &amp;ldquo;Better Without AI&amp;rdquo; Loving David Chapman&amp;rsquo;s latest book on AI risk. I’ve been thinking about this since 2017 and the book clarified a lot of confusion I had, particularly around how we conceive of AI (though I have some objections too). Thread: 1/
My favorite parts of the book:
  “Agency” is a nebulous and confusing concept. Our discussions (e.g. the tool vs AI debate) are contentious because our intuitions are confused.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/buddhist_modernism/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/buddhist_modernism/</guid>
      <description>Notes on The Making of Buddhist Modernism  Metadata:  Source/Author (year):: David McMahan (2007). Recommended by David Chapman in [[Vividness]] as one of the core sources for the &amp;lsquo;Consensus Buddhism&amp;rsquo; part of the book. Type:: #Book Read: [[July 3rd, 2022]]    Questions I had going in How do you differentiate between traditional and modernist buddhism? In what ways is Buddhist Modernism not so desirable? How much does Buddhism historically vary?</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/dairik_zen_practice/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/dairik_zen_practice/</guid>
      <description>Dairik Amae on Zen and Practice I recently had the great privilege of visiting my friend JC and his Zen teacher Dairik in Montreal. After a series of matcha tea ceremonies, delectable Japanese breakfasts, and direct meditative instruction, we three along with my friend Mackenzie proceeded to have a dialogue on the nature of Zen and how Dairik conceives of practice. The transcript of our dialogue is below.
Max 0:09</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decentralized_governance/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decentralized_governance/</guid>
      <description>Governing the Decentralized Commons Taking a digital constitutionalism lens to Web3
Enoshima in Sagami Province, from the series &amp;ldquo;Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (富嶽三十六景)&amp;rdquo;
At the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868), there were several agrarian villages in the Yamanashi prefecture. During the civil wars that led to the overthrow of the Ashikaga shogunate, vast swathes of land became commons — the open fields belonged to no feudal lord1.
Amid this free-for-all, some villagers began to take more than their due — reaping more rice crops than was sustainable, cutting down trees than could naturally regrow.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decision_theory/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/decision_theory/</guid>
      <description>Objecting to Decision Theory Two years ago, my friend Tuomas and I took a seminar on decision theory taught by Caspar Hare. I was hoping to learn how to make better decisions, or else see what all the rationalist hype was about1. Tuomas was interested in its applications to AI safety.
As the zealous intellectuals, Tuomas and I were allured by the taste of abstract thought experiments that grew more bizarre and dizzying as we read onwards.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/disgrace/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/disgrace/</guid>
      <description>Read February 12th, 2021
Beautifully written. An excellent example of spare yet striking prose.
  The book is about a professor, David Lurie, who has an affair with a student of his and leaves his city life in South Africa to go to live with his daughter in the countryside. Some men break into the farm, rape Lucy and set David on fire. The second half of the novel deals with the aftermath.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/email_spoof/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/email_spoof/</guid>
      <description>Trying (and Failing) to Spoof Hotmail Suppose one day you were bored and began to examine emails in the raw packet form. You would see something like
Received: from mail-qr1-x642.google.com (mail-qr1-x642.google.com [IPv6:2607:f8b0:4864:20::642]) by mxa.mail.yahoo.com with SMTPS id 5fb88148210cz.64.2019.07.11.16.33.39 (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Thu, 11 Jul 2019 16:33:39 +0000 (UTC) Received-SPF: pass (domain of google.com designates 2607:f8b0:4864:20::642 as permitted sender) client-ip=2607:f8b0:4864:20::642; Authentication-Results: mxa.mail.yahoo.com; dkim=pass header.i=@google.com DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=google.com; s=20161025; h=mime-version📅message-id:subject:from:to; bh=dZZ/1uN7EMoYbtIRVtP6loc8vk6vg2vW23aa5iTM0HU=; b=SpbOlScW2KZD1wL30zfL.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/energy_longevity/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/energy_longevity/</guid>
      <description>Energy practice as longevity intervention Cultivating energy capacity can increase your subjective lifespan.
Longevity researchers talk about extending the human lifespan1. People immersed in the ‘productivity subculture’ talk about carefully managing time or attention to get more things done2. I claim they share an underlying desire; to bring forth more from life, to have more vividness, richness, satisfaction. One factor that hugely mediates how much you can make of life is energy.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/impro/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/impro/</guid>
      <description>Source/Author (year):: Keith Johnstone (1981)
This is one of my favorite books of all time. Below are some excerpts
Big points
Education  Education is often a destructive force  &amp;ldquo;People think of good and bad teachers as engaged in the same activity, as if education was a substance, and that bad teachers supply a little of the substance, and good teachers supply a lot. This makes it difficult to understand that education can be a destructive process, and that bad teachers are wrecking talent, and that good and bad teachers are engaged in opposite activities.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mit_legacy/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mit_legacy/</guid>
      <description>The Legacy and Experience of MIT: Safetyism, the Nixon enemy list, and the loss of innocence with Luke Igel Luke Igel and I talk about our experience and the history of MIT.
Table of contents Excerpts
Personal reflection on coming to MIT
Hacks at MIT
The feeling of apocalypse as COVID arrives
Hope for preserving MIT culture
MIT&amp;rsquo;s loss of innocence
On cybernetics, Cybersyn, and von Neumann
When did the humanities begin at MIT?</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mloss_essay/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/mloss_essay/</guid>
      <description>How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI Acknowledgements We would like to thank many different people for contributing to the research that comprised this post. Tim Hwang and Teddy Collins at CSET for originally sparking this research question, Helen Toner for her early encouragement and feedback on research framing, Tuomas Oikarinen for sharpening our arguments, Tan Zhi Xuan and Serena Booth for providing several helpful resources.
Summary This post is authored by Max Langenkamp, who did this research during his MEng at MIT’s Algorithmic Alignment Group, and by Dylan Hadfield-Menell, associate professor and Max’s supervisor.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/nondual/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/nondual/</guid>
      <description>Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such On Zoran Josipovic’s Implicit-explicit gradient of nondual awareness or consciousness-as-such
This is just an explanation of a paper that I found very provocative: 1) it provides a theory of nonduality grounded loosely in neuroscience and 2) it relates in a deep way to some of the core claims of Heidegger, which are important for understanding the grand mistake within analytic philosophy.
Nonduality has typically been in the realm of Tibetan Buddhism.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/pain_resources/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/pain_resources/</guid>
      <description>Assorted resources for chronic pain (Last updated March 11th, 2023)
This is a scattered list of the resources I have either read or plan to look more into regarding chronic pain. I have been sitting on this for too long so am releasing this disorganized collection on the hopes it is more helpful for people than nothing. I will have better documentation in the future.
Books Healing Back Pain, John Sarno</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/rising_sun/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/rising_sun/</guid>
      <description>The Rising Sun: The Decline &amp;amp; Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-45 Author: John Toland Finished April 23rd, 2023
Overall comments:
  Very compelling. Sympathetic, perhaps overly so at times, to the Japanese, but it feels like a fair assessment
  Several unforced errors all the time in warfare on both sides
  Both countries have strenuous conscientious objectors. In some ways the objectors, like Prince Konoye, are more courageous than those in the U.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/sartorial_display/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/sartorial_display/</guid>
      <description>Sartorial display In the renunciative view of Buddhism I was first introduced to, which bears significant similarity to Protestant Christianity, ostentatious clothes were seen as vain, even arrogant. That comes from a view whereby the material world is seen as a tempting seductress one must kick in the face. To be pure, one needs to climb out of the muck of sin samsara.
Yet we can also see clothing as a gift.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/skunk_works/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/skunk_works/</guid>
      <description>Source/Author (year): Ben Rich (1996)
 Overview  A biography of one of the most innovative organizations in the world; the Skunk Works branch of Lockheed. A great treatise on the aerospace industry, how military contracting works, the difficulties of bureaucracy, and how to manage people.   Notes  Kelly Johnson: a top secret classification increases costs 25% and vastly decreases efficiency Trusting a small team was key to Skunk Works success Quality control happened daily, in the form of self-checking, rather than at the end of the project as was standard elsewhere in the industry The Navy is far more stringent than the Air Force Kelly&amp;rsquo;s most important principles of operation:  Program manager needs full control of his project in all respects Number of people involved in any given project must be viciously restricted.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_not_inevitable/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/tech_not_inevitable/</guid>
      <description>Technology is not inevitable When talking to certain technologist friends about brain-computer interfaces and artificial general intelligence, I’m struck by how often I hear that such idea-complexes1 are referred to as ‘inevitable’.
In this example, my friend (who I’ll use to represent the various people2 who’ve held this stance) basically says: ‘if it is physically possible, and there is economic incentive, it’ll happen’. Let’s put aside the initial question about the ambiguity of what counts as BCI/AGI.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/therapy/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/therapy/</guid>
      <description>Choosing a therapy  There are dozens of different therapeutic modalities. I provide my opinion on a small subset of modalities, informed by two years of (nonprofessional) exploration. This may be helpful for people trying to navigate therapy or &amp;lsquo;self-healing&amp;rsquo; more generally.
 Context Two years ago, in the midst of a personal crisis, I started taking ‘self-healing’ as a goal very seriously. I spent hundreds of hours reading about different approaches to therapy, trying techniques and taking notes on my experience.</description>
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      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/projects/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/projects/</guid>
      <description>Projects  patriot proteins. Hold the Declaration of Independence as a 3D printed protein in your hand. plugging in a USB: what&amp;rsquo;s the worst that can happen?. Where some friends and I use a Raspberry Pi Zero to inject malicious keystrokes into my computer. For MIT&amp;rsquo;s Computer Systems Security class (6.858). deep learning with satellite data. A writeup of the landslide detection project I did as a visiting researcher at University of Sannio.</description>
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      <title></title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/writing/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/writing/</guid>
      <description>Essays See also my Book Reviews. (Not) Spoofing Hotmail July 21st, 2023
In which a friend and I try and fail to spoof an expired email protocol.
Sartorial Display July 1st, 2023
Wearing clothing deliberately.
The Legacy and Experience of MIT: Safetyism, the Nixon enemy list, and the loss of innocence with Luke Igel June 16th, 2023
Luke and I talk about our experience at MIT and its history.
Energy Practice as Longevity Intervention March 18th, 2023</description>
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      <title>Ostrom&#39;s Teachings</title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/telescopic_poem/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/telescopic_poem/</guid>
      <description>  const content = ` * I * Yawning, I * Yawning, Yawning, Yawning * I saw her * made * tea * love`; const node = createTelescopicTextFromBulletedList(content); const container = document.getElementById(&#34;text-container&#34;); container.appendChild(node);   </description>
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      <title>Questions about Economic Growth</title>
      <link>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_growth/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>https://yichabod.github.io/posts/questions_about_growth/</guid>
      <description>This is a live document. If you have any suggestions, please let me know at maxlangenkamp[at]me.com
Questions about Growth There is much ado about economic growth1. I wanted to better understand the debate, so I decided to collect the key questions. This essay is a breadth-first examination of growth and governance using questions
Why questioning instead of summarizing? Questioning requires understanding the intention of research in a way that summarizing does not.</description>
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