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Beyond the lab

What I read,
what I play

My interests have never stayed in separate rooms. The things I read for pleasure keep turning up in my research, and the things I do with my hands keep teaching me something I could not get from a paper. This page is the part of me that does not fit on a CV, which is precisely why it is here.

IReading

Philosophy and linguistics — which turn out to be the same argument, held from two ends.

Philosophy and linguistics arrived together and have never really separated. What holds me is the question of how meaning survives the trip from one mind to another at all — how much of it is carried by the words, how much by everything around them, and what exactly is lost on the way.

It is not a coincidence that I ended up working on explainable AI. An explanation is a translation problem before it is a technical one. You can have a method that is perfectly faithful to the model and still says nothing to the person who has to decide whether to trust it.

History, read the way engineers read post-mortems.

I read history for the same reason I read failure reports: because the interesting part is never the decision itself but the state of the world in which it looked reasonable. Politics is the same material while it is still warm, and far harder to read honestly.

Psychology — the discipline that keeps quietly showing up in my actual work.

Psychology I came to sideways, through the research. A year and a half of working on gaze will do that to you. Once you have spent that long treating where somebody looks as data, you cannot stop noticing how much of a person is legible from the outside, and how much of it they never chose to say.

IIPlaying

The bow, the sabre, the horse.

Archery, the sabre and horse riding reward the same discipline, which is why I suspect I was drawn to all three. Each is a long, quiet preparation followed by a commitment you cannot take back — and each punishes the same fault, which is tensing at the moment you most need to be still. I have learned more about control engineering from a bad release than I would admit in a seminar.

Salsa and bachata — the opposite skill entirely.

Dancing is the exact inverse and I think that is why I need it. Nothing is decided in advance, there is no plan to execute, and the whole thing runs on a signal being read and answered in real time by someone who cannot see your intentions, only your hands. It is the most demanding closed loop I take part in, and the only one where the correct response to an error is to keep moving.

Chess — where I lose most often, and most instructively.

Chess is where I am reliably humbled. I play badly enough to still be learning and often enough to keep noticing the same weakness: I like plans more than positions, and the board does not care what I like.

And the ordinary weekly ones.

Badminton is the one I actually play every week, for no better reason than that it is the best game there is. Football, volleyball and table tennis round out the list — all of them, in the end, excuses to be in a room with other people, moving.

Everything above is really one interest wearing different clothes: how an intention gets from the inside of one system to the inside of another, and what it loses on the way.

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