🌿 Foraging in High-Dimensional Data

My talk from the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute 2025 Storytellers Salon

We evolved to live in richly-structured environments that reward open-ended search.

Now we sit at screens all day being tube-fed by recommendation algorithms.

The untold riches of hyperspace await us, if we develop new tools for exploration.

The Web has become a “Dark Forest” with very short horizons and constant looming threats. But we could have a “Safe Savannah” that makes it easier to find new ideas, that rewards divergent thinking and creativity, that better helps us understand each other and collaborate (or choose not to)…

Here are some early sketches of this coming revolution.

Slides here if you want a better look, and some tweets that offer extra depth.

Context

Founded by my friends, academic power couple Jacob Foster and Erica Cartmill, The Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI) is one of the coolest programs I’ve ever been involved in. It’s a three-week residential program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland where a wild variety of researchers, from animal cognition to AI to the philosophy of language and beyond, come together to inspire one another, form interdisciplinary working groups, and birth cool projects. It is, as my friend Adam Safron put it, “Nerd Valhalla”.

Every year DISI invites a handful of “storytellers” — artists, film-makers, authors, and other non- or para-academics — to join the scientists and stir things up. And then on the second Tuesday, they host a fancy evening for the storytellers to give lightning talks on whatever they want. So I swung for the fences.

This talk is a quick introduction to the biggest and most exciting idea on my horizon: how we can draw from thinking in fields like complex systems science and game design to imagine new ways of navigating high-dimensional data, heal our relationship to the Web, and maybe transform the labor economy for the better.

Just a teaser for more fleshed-out thinking to come. If this inspires or provokes you, let’s chat because this feels like the most important area to apply myself right now.

PS — This was the first year I was lucky enough to attend DISI in person. I attended DISI 2021, but it was held remotely, which was not at all the same. Here are my slides from the “Diverse Aliens” presentation that year, where some friends and I suggested that the search for unfamiliar minds might benefit from a much wider, humbler, and more agnostic approach.

Huge thanks to everyone at DISI, all the staff and fellows and storytellers who made this such a fertile and memorable experience. And a special shout-out to fellow DISI Storyteller and wonderful multimedia artist Ollie Palmer for recording this talk. (Check out his work! So cool.)

I will have much, much more to share about it soon. If you are looking for great things to fund, please let me introduce you.