Uncommon Knowledge
Social media fragments common knowledge. When different groups consume different news, share different assumptions, and inhabit different epistemic worlds, the recursive structure of common knowledge fails.
Topic
Science
A collection of 22 issues
Limits of the Transformer Architecture and a QCD-like Alternative
The transformer architecture has no physics below the token scale. You cannot ask "what is the next character" if you trained on subword units — the question is literally undefined.
The Transformer as Renormalization Group Flow
The forward pass through a transformer implements a Kadanoff-Wilson renormalization group flow, coarse-graining microscopic token representations into stable semantic attractors.
A Stationary Action is Stable Information
[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM]
There is a maximum amount of information that any observer can extract from a physical system. This limit emerges from the structure of phase space itself. A system's state occupies a region defined by its position and momentum, and quantum mechanics forbids this
The Hard Problem as Hidden Relationality
[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM ]
There is a pattern in the history of physics. A puzzle appears insoluble for generations. Brilliant minds propose baroque solutions — new entities, hidden mechanisms, radical revisions to metaphysics. Then someone notices that the puzzle rested on an unexamined assumption. Remove the assumption, and the puzzle
It from Bit, Bit from It
[Updated 6 February 2026 -MFM]
tldr; If we view the limit where measurement efficiency eta approaches 1 as a boundary condition, then what the Quantum Zeno Effect seems to show is that a quantum-to-classical transition requires an irreversible step that dissipates at least the Landauer bound.
If you have ever
The Synchronization Tax
[Updated 6 February 2026. -MFM]
A physicist, a computer scientist, and a banker walk into a bar. They cannot agree on who got there first.
This is not a joke. This is a central problem of physics, computer science, and economics.
The physicist points out that simultaneity is relative — who
The Causal Arrow of Altruism
I recently explored group selection and kin selection models in an essay on Radamacher Complexity and Group Competition, attempting to reconcile seemingly irreconcilable differences using measures of model Rademacher Complexity. The essay chose to use the definition of group selection provided by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson (NTW) 2010, which also
Rademacher Complexity and Models of Group Competition
What do Radamacher Complexity and mean field approximations have to do with kin and group selection models in evolutionary biology? And what might consideration of the Radamacher Complexity of kin and group selection models suggest to us about cooperation and competition in human groups? Here are tentative answers to what
Invention as Exploration
Richard Sutton's Bitter Lesson is that general methods leveraged by more computation beat specialized intuition encoded in domain-specific algorithms. The Bitter Lesson gets lots of attention these days because of its implications for artificial intelligence. But for a patent lawyer like me, it's more interesting for