Tag: process

The Tunnel (Or: How Modernity Solves Precisely Nothing)

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4–5 minutes

This is a continuation of a prior narrative.

But wait—surely someone will object—what if we just built a tunnel?

Remove the barrier! Enable free movement! Let people see both sides! Markets will equilibrate! Efficiency will reign! Progress!

So fine. The desert-dwellers say, “Let’s build a tunnel”.

Engineers arrive. Explosives are deployed. A passage is carved through the mountain. The fog clears inside the tunnel itself. You can now walk from lake to desert, desert to lake, without risking death by altitude.

Congratulations. Now what?

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The lake doesn’t flow through the tunnel. The desert doesn’t migrate. The material conditions remain exactly as they were, except now they’re adjacent rather than separated.

And here’s where Modernity performs its favourite trick: it converts geographical accident into property rights.

The lake-dwellers look at their neighbours walking from the tunnel and think: “Ah. We have water. They need water. We should probably charge for that.”

Not out of malice. Out of perfectly rational economic calculation. After all, we maintain these shores (do we, though?). We cultivate these reeds (they grow on their own). We steward this resource (it replenishes whether we steward it or not).

John Locke would be beaming. Property through labour! Mixing effort with natural resources! The foundation of legitimate ownership!

Except nobody laboured to make the lake.

It was just there. On one side. Not the other.

The only “labour” involved was being born facing the right direction.

Primacy of position masquerading as primacy of effort.

What Actually Happens

The desert-dwellers can now visit. They can walk through the tunnel, emerge on the shore, and confirm with their own eyes: yes, there really is abundance here. Yes, the water is drinkable. Yes, there is genuinely enough.

And they can’t touch a drop without payment.

The tunnel hasn’t created shared resources. It’s created a market in geographical accident.

The desert-dwellers don’t become lake-dwellers. They become customers.

The lake-dwellers don’t become more generous. They become vendors.

And the separation—formerly enforced by mountains and fog and the physical impossibility of crossing—is now enforced by price.

Which is, if anything, more brutal. Because now the desert-dwellers can see what they cannot have. They can stand at the shore, watch the water lap at the sand, understand perfectly well that scarcity is not a universal condition but a local one—

And still return home thirsty unless they can pay.

Image: NotebookLM infographics of this topic

The Lockean Slight-of-Hand

Here’s what Locke tried to tell us: property is legitimate when you mix your labour with natural resources.

Here’s what he failed to mention: if you happen to be standing where the resources already are, you can claim ownership without mixing much labour at all.

The lake people didn’t create abundance. They just didn’t leave.

But once the tunnel exists, that positional advantage converts into property rights, and property rights convert into markets, and markets convert into the permanent enforcement of inequality that geography used to provide temporarily.

Before the tunnel: “We cannot share because of the mountains.”

After the tunnel: “We will not share because of ownership.”

Same outcome. Different justification. Significantly less honest.

The Desert-Dwellers’ Dilemma

Now the desert people face a choice.

They can purchase water. Which means accepting that their survival depends on the economic goodwill of people who did nothing to earn abundance except be born near it.

Or they can refuse. Maintain their careful, disciplined, rationed existence. Remain adapted to scarcity even though abundance is now—tantalisingly, insultingly—visible through a tunnel.

Either way, the tunnel hasn’t solved the moral problem.

It’s just made the power differential explicit rather than geographical.

And if you think that’s an improvement, ask yourself: which is crueller?

Being separated by mountains you cannot cross, or being separated by prices you cannot pay, whilst standing at the shore watching others drink freely?

TheBit Where This Connects to Actual Politics

So when Modernity tells you that the solution to structural inequality is infrastructure, markets, and free movement—

Ask this:

Does building a tunnel make the desert wet?

Does creating a market make abundance appear where it didn’t exist?

Does free movement help if you still can’t afford what’s on the other side?

The tunnel is a technical solution to a material problem.

But the material problem persists.

And what the tunnel actually creates is a moral problem: the formalisation of advantage that was previously just an environmental accident.

The lake-dwellers now have something to sell.

The desert-dwellers now have something to buy.

And we call this progress.

Moral: If your political metaphor doesn’t account for actual rivers, actual deserts, and actual fog, it’s not a metaphor. It’s a fairy tale. And unlike fairy tales, this one doesn’t end with a reunion.

It ends with two people walking home, each convinced the other is perfectly reasonable and completely unsurvivable.

Unless, of course, we build a tunnel.

In which case, it ends with one person selling water to the other, both convinced this is somehow more civilised than being separated by mountains.

Which, if you think about it, is far more terrifying than simple disagreement.

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Written by Clause Opus 4.5 upon dialogue with Bry Willis

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Using Generative AI as Early Peer Review

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4–6 minutes

Cheap Adversaries, Outsourced Ego, and Engineered Critique ← ChatGPT is obsessed with subtitles.

There is a peculiar anxiety around admitting that one uses generative AI in serious intellectual work. The anxiety usually takes one of two forms. Either the AI is accused of replacing thinking, or it is accused of flattering the thinker into delusion. Both charges miss the point, and both underestimate how brittle early-stage human peer review often is.

What follows is not a defence of AI as an oracle, nor a claim that it produces insight on its own. It is an account of how generative models can be used – deliberately, adversarially, and with constraints – as a form of early peer pressure. Not peer review in the formal sense, but a rehearsal space where ideas are misread, overstated, deflated, and occasionally rescued from themselves.

Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.

The unromantic workflow

The method itself is intentionally dull:

  1. Draft a thesis statement.
    Rinse & repeat.
  2. Draft an abstract.
    Rinse & repeat.
  3. Construct an annotated outline.
    Rinse & repeat.
  4. Only then begin drafting prose.

At each stage, the goal is not encouragement or expansion but pressure. The questions I ask are things like:

  • Is this already well-trodden ground?
  • Is this just X with different vocabulary?
  • What objection would kill this quickly?
  • What would a sceptical reviewer object to first?

The key is timing. This pressure is applied before the idea is polished enough to be defended. The aim is not confidence-building; it is early damage.

Image: NotebookLM infographic on this topic.

Why generative AI helps

In an ideal world, one would have immediate access to sharp colleagues willing to interrogate half-formed ideas. In practice, that ecology is rarely available on demand. Even when it is, early feedback from humans often comes bundled with politeness, status dynamics, disciplinary loyalty, or simple fatigue.

Generative models are always available, never bored, and indifferent to social cost. That doesn’t make them right. It makes them cheap adversaries. And at this stage, adversaries are more useful than allies.

Flattery is a bias, not a sin

Large language models are biased toward cooperation. Left unchecked, they will praise mediocre ideas and expand bad ones into impressive nonsense. This is not a moral failure. It is a structural bias.

The response is not to complain about flattery, but to engineer against it.

Sidebar: A concrete failure mode

I recently tested a thesis on Mistral about object permanence. After three exchanges, the model had escalated a narrow claim into an overarching framework, complete with invented subcategories and false precision. The prose was confident. The structure was impressive. The argument was unrecognisable.

This is the Dunning-Kruger risk in practice. The model produced something internally coherent that I lacked the domain expertise to properly evaluate. Coherence felt like correctness.

The countermeasure was using a second model, which immediately flagged the overreach. Disagreement between models is often more informative than agreement.

Three tactics matter here.

1. Role constraint
Models respond strongly to role specification. Asking explicitly for critique, objections, boundary-setting, and likely reviewer resistance produces materially different output than asking for ‘thoughts’ or ‘feedback’.

2. Third-person framing
First-person presentation cues collaboration. Third-person presentation cues evaluation.

Compare:

  • ‘Here’s my thesis; what do you think?‘
  • ‘Here is a draft thesis someone is considering. Please evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, and likely objections.‘

The difference is stark. The first invites repair and encouragement. The second licenses dismissal. This is not trickery; it is context engineering.

3. Multiple models, in parallel
Different models have different failure modes. One flatters. Another nitpicks. A third accuses the work of reinventing the wheel. Their disagreement is the point. Where they converge, caution is warranted. Where they diverge, something interesting is happening.

‘Claude says…’: outsourcing the ego

One tactic emerged almost accidentally and turned out to be the most useful of all.

Rather than responding directly to feedback, I often relay it as:

“Claude says this…”

The conversation then shifts from defending an idea to assessing a reading of it. This does two things at once:

  • It removes personal defensiveness. No one feels obliged to be kind to Claude.
  • It invites second-order critique. People are often better at evaluating a critique than generating one from scratch.

This mirrors how academic peer review actually functions:

  • Reviewer 2 thinks you’re doing X.
  • That seems like a misreading.
  • This objection bites; that one doesn’t.

The difference is temporal. I am doing this before the draft hardens and before identity becomes entangled with the argument.

Guardrails against self-delusion

There is a genuine Dunning–Kruger risk when working outside one’s formal domain. Generative AI does not remove that risk. Used poorly, it can amplify it.

The countermeasure is not humility as a posture, but friction as a method:

  • multiple models,
  • adversarial prompting,
  • third-person evaluation,
  • critique of critiques,
  • and iterative narrowing before committing to form.

None of this guarantees correctness. It does something more modest and more important: it makes it harder to confuse internal coherence with external adequacy.

What this cannot do

It’s worth being explicit about the limits. Generative models cannot tell you whether a claim is true. They can tell you how it is likely to be read, misread, resisted, or dismissed. They cannot arbitrate significance. They cannot decide what risks are worth taking. They cannot replace judgment. Those decisions remain stubbornly human.

What AI can do – when used carefully – is surface pressure early, cheaply, and without social cost. It lets ideas announce their limits faster, while those limits are still negotiable.

A brief meta-note

For what it’s worth, Claude itself was asked to critique an earlier draft of this post. It suggested compressing the familiar arguments, foregrounding the ‘Claude says…’ tactic as the real contribution, and strengthening the ending by naming what the method cannot do.

That feedback improved the piece. Which is, rather conveniently, the point.

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Written by Bry Willis

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YouTube in the Flesh

Posted in philosophy, podcast, update, videoTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
1–2 minutes

After many requests to speak personally instead of relying on NotebookLM, I’ve pulled together some audiovisual content to introduce myself, share my AI workflow, and talk about some current and future projects.

Video: Philosophics’ Bry Willis says hullo. (Duration 7:49)

As I say, I’ll be producing more of these on topics, but I need to wrap up my projects in the pipeline.

This will also be cross-posted on Spotify – I think. Fingers crossed.

Audio (and maybe video) version of this YouTube video, but on Spotify for good measure.
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Produced by Bry Willis

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The Prison of Process

Posted in maths, philosophy, podcast, psychologyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments
3–4 minutes

This is the proof copy of The Illusion of Light. I reviewed it, approved it, and signalled ‘good to go’. This is being printed and distributed through KDP. I’ve used them before. They’ve been reliable.

EDIT: On the upside, I’ve been notified that the hardback version is available, but it doesn’t appear to be available in France and Canada, two target regions. Hopefully, it becomes available outside of the U.S. soon.

EDIT : J’ai été informé que la version reliée est désormais disponible. Malheureusement, elle ne semble pas encore l’être en France ni au Canada, les deux régions que je visais en priorité. Espérons qu’elle franchira bientôt les frontières du système et sera distribuée ailleurs qu’aux États-Unis.

International marketplaces. It takes 3-5 business days for your hardcover to show as in stock.

Until now.

My approval triggered a workflow. I know workflows. I used to design them. I also know how dumb they can be.

KDP’s process flagged an error: the text on the spine might not be on the spine. ‘Might’. Theoretically. It could be offset, cut off, or printed on a fold. I understand their reasoning – high-speed printers, mechanical variance, and return risk. I also understand statistics, and a single observation doesn’t make a trend. But anyone with eyes can see at least a couple of millimetres of clearance at the top and bottom. This isn’t a case of ‘maybe’. It’s fine.

What fascinates me here is the ritual of compliance. Once a process is codified, it becomes self-justifying. The rule exists; therefore, it must be obeyed. There is no appeal to reason – only to the flowchart.

In the 1980s, when I was an audio engineer recording to two-inch magnetic tape, some of us liked to record hot, pushing the levels just past the recommended limits. You learned to ride the edge, to court distortion without collapse. That’s how I designed the spine text. Within tolerance. With headroom.

The problem is that modern systems don’t tolerate edges. There’s no “override” button for informed judgment. My remediation path is to shrink the type by half a point, resubmit, and pretend the machine was right.

What’s absurd is the timing. The same system that generated the proof approved this layout days ago. An automated OCR scan could have caught this phantom error earlier. Instead, the machine waits until the human signs off, then throws a flag so the process can justify its existence.

KDP is still faster and saner than IngramSpark. But this is capitalism distilled: survival by being marginally less incompetent than your competitor. Optimisation, not in the sense of best possible, but of barely better than worst acceptable.

The lesson, as always, is that processes begin as aids and end as prisons. The workflow, like the Enlightenment, believes itself rational. But the longer it runs, the less it serves the human at the console and the more it worships its own perfection.

Want to talk about meta? This underscores the contents of the book itself. What the Enlightenment once called Reason, modernity now calls Process. Both pretend to neutral objectivity while enshrining obedience as virtue. The bureaucracy of light has become digital – its catechism written in checkboxes, its priests replaced by automated validators. Every workflow promises fairness; each only codifies submission. The real danger isn’t that machines will replace judgment, but that we will stop noticing when they already have.

The Story Continues: Behind the Scenes

Image: Screenshot of Illustrator layout

I’ve reduced the font size on the spine from 14 points to 13.5. It still technically bleeds over a guideline. I hope I am not forced to reduce it to 13. A reason for text on the spine is to make it visible. Hopefully, the black-and-white vertical separation will help in this regard. Fingers crossed.

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Written by Bry Willis

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Cognitive Processing Flow Model

Posted in consciousness, intelligence, language, nature, perception, philosophy, psychology, reality, science, societyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

The Cognitive Process Flow Model illustrates how we process the phenomenal world. It’s reductionist and is missing aspects because it is just a back-of-the-napkin sketch. I created it because I uttered, “I can model it for you”. And so I did.

EDIT: I’ve updated the model slightly as the article head image, but the copy content refers to the first draft.

My response was to a person making the claim, that all you need to facts and logic prevails. Rather than restate the argument, I’ll just walk through the diagramme.

There’s meta information to set it up. We are subjective entities in the world. We have a sense-perception apparatus as we exist in it. Countless events occur in this world. We recognise only a few of them within our limited range, though technology expands this range in various ways.

Most of us interact in the world. Some are less ambulatory, so the world visits them. Some have sense-perception deficits whilst others have cognitive deficits. My point is not to capture every edge and corner case. This is just a generalised model.

All models are wrong, but some are useful.

—George Box

It starts with an event. Events occur ceaselessly. In our small portion of the world and elsewhere. For the purpose of the model, the first thing that happens is an event catches our attention. We might notice a shape, a colour, or a movement; we might hear a sound, smell an aroma, feel a sensation, or taste something.

A pre-emotion, pre-logic function serves to process these available inputs. Perhaps, you hear a report on anthropogenic climate change or read something about a political candidate. This emotional filter will police sensory inputs and unconsciously or preconsciously determine if you will react to the initial stimulus. If not, you’ll continue in an attention-seeking loop. Not that kind of attention-seeking.

As my dialogue was about the presentation of facts, our next stop will be logical evaluation. Does this make sense to us, or can we otherwise make it? This is a process in itself. I’ll assume here that it requires little elaboration. Instead, I’ll focus on the operating environment.

Our logical processes are coloured by past experiences and tainted by cognitive biases and deficits. We may also trigger the calling of additional facts through past experiences or the current engagement.

We’ll process these fragments and reach some logical conclusion. But we’re not done. We take this intermediate conclusion and run it through more emotional processing. Cognitive biases come back into play. If the event conforms with your past experiences and cognitive biases, we may run it through a cognitive dissonance routine. To be honest, this probably is part of the emotional reconciliation process, but I’ve drawn it here, so I’ll let it be. In this case, it’s just a filter. If it happens to conform to our belief system, it will pass unfettered; otherwise, it will be squared with our beliefs. Again, this leads me to believe it’s a subcomponent of emotional reconciliation. I’ll update the chart later.

In any case, we’ll end at Final Acceptance. This acceptance may be that we accept or reject the logic, but we arrive at an opinion that gets catalogued with the rest of them. Some may be elevated to facts or truths in the epistemological hierarchy. Although an end marker is identified, it’s really a wait state for the next event. Rinse and repeat until death.

I’ll update this presently. Be on the lookout. It could include more dimensions and interactions, but that might have to wait until version 3.

Meantime, does this feel right to you? Did it even get your attention?

An Example: Anthropogenic Climate Change

Let’s wrap up with an example. I’ll use climate change. An article comes into your attention field, and you have an interest in these things, so it passes through the emotional filter. If your propensity for these articles is high, it might race to the next stage.

You read the article, and it contains some facts—rather, it contains claims for evaluation. To do this, you’ll recall past experiences and cognitive biases are always lying in wait. You may have to look for new facts to add to the mix. These will have to take a similar route past your attention gatekeeper and emotional sidekick.

If you are already predisposed that climate change is a hoax, these facts will filter through that lens—or vice versa.

When all of this is resolved, you’ll have arrived at a conclusion—perhaps we’ll call it a proto-conclusion. It hasn’t been set yet.

You are still going to introspect emotionally and decide if this is a position you want to hold. Perhaps, you feel that climate change is a hoax but this doesn’t jive with that position. Here, you’ll either accept these facts and flip a bit to a sceptical believer or cognitive dissonance will kick in and ensure your sense of the world isn’t thrown off kilter. You may update your belief system to include this datum for future assessments.

Now we are ready for final acceptance. You can now express your established opinion. If the net event is to counter that acceptance, rinse and repeat ad infinitum.