Humayun Khan

Who's building the Cursor for writing? I want to practice "vibe writing," just speaking stream of conscious thoughts and AI cleans it all up for me.

normalize not staying in your lane

AGENCY VS NPC What are the limits of agency? 1) Until five minutes ago, the West was run by NPCs. You slotted into your role, waited decades to be president, propped up the postwar order, established the establishment. 2) Now it's run by high agency people. You can just do things people. Tech people, Trump people. Because the Internet increases variance. It means that small groups[1,2] of highly motivated individuals — as small as one, like Satoshi or Elon or Trump — can change the world. 3) But there are limits to agency. Historic forces, genetic constraints, physical limits. A high agency person can’t just grind their way into starting for the Lakers. They can’t intuit the preimage to a cryptographic hash. They can’t turn rye into wheat by pure willpower. 4) That way lies Neo-Lysenkoism. Lysenko was a communist who denied that genetic constraints existed at all — and executed Darwinists who thought they did. He believed rye could become wheat by pure willpower. 5) And, confusingly, the same NPCs that just ran the West also believe in a Neo-Lysenkoism where a Down's Syndrome patient[3] is only constrained by societal expectation rather than unfortunate chromosomal aberration. Genetics denial also underpins their insistence that XX=XY. And economics denial underpins most socialist policy. 6) So — wait. What then is the difference between the determined technocapitalist idea that “you can just do things” and the delusional communist idea that “constraints do not exist”? Does the far left also in some sense have a high agency model of the world? 7) To complicate this further, the technolibertarian view on agency often doesn't extend to the rest of the world. Deepseek can also just do things. As the military says, "the enemy also gets a vote."[4] 8) Moreover: high agency, taken to the ultra-alpha extreme, can impede large-scale cooperation. There is a reason beta cooperation arose[5]. Every man cannot be a leader on everything; indeed, he can only at most lead on one thing. 9) Steve Jobs' famous memo on how dependent he was on his species[6] acknowledged this. You are probably not leading the engineering of the screen you're looking at now. And you can't become a good leader till you've become a good follower, as you don't even know what good instructions look like. 10) As I think through this, I think the key distinction is numerical. The technocapitalist is soberly enumerating known constraints and calculating ways to solve for X=Y, while the delusional communist is simply asserting that XX=XY. And the technocapitalist also knows how to build teams, manage budgets, handle personnel, and generally acknowledge reality. 11) Or, to paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr: may God give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be, and the mathematics to know the difference. We can just do things. But only if you can do the math.