Inception
I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today
Hey! My name is Ansh and this is The Foxy Hedgehog.
I’ve long had the desire to start a blog and share my thoughts with the world. This is my most serious attempt thus far at scratching that itch. The rest of this post is an introduction to who I am, how I think, and what you might expect to read here.
I was tempted to write up an introduction from scratch, but thankfully my past self did a better job than I feel up to at the current moment, so I’m just going to quote from an interview I did with the excellent Lyndon Purcell:
The word that describes me most fundamentally is curious. I won’t pretend to be curious about every topic under the sun, but the ideas that catch my fancy can quickly spiral into obsessions. It’s a character trait that turned me into a prodigious reader from an early age, consuming literature of widely differing genres and ages, rapidly seeking to absorb as much knowledge as was humanly possible. It’s a drive that has only grown stronger as I’ve aged, even as the task has exploded in complexity and scope: the younger me may have been optimistic about the possibility of satisfying my curiosity, but an additional decade or so has drilled into me the complete futility of such a goal. Still, I muddle on, though now my knowledge acquisition pipeline has diversified and consists of reading blog posts and news and journal articles in addition to books, as well as listening to podcasts, taking online and in-person courses, watching videos, etc. My formal schooling has generally focused on Computer Science and Statistics and I’m due to graduate in a few months with a degree in Statistics and Data Science [NB: I have since graduated this past May]. I want to be clear in asserting that my schooling has been only one component of my learning, however, and my extracurricular interests and pursuits have been broad though likely more shallow in depth.
I would struggle to define a purpose for such knowledge acquisition. It’s undoubtedly instrumentally valuable (in work, school, and ordinary conversation, even), but I would be lying if I pretended even a small percentage of my curiosity was motivated by the possibility of this knowledge being useful. It’s always a delight when it is, but I’ve come to accept my curiosity as a brute fact, an intrinsic value that I seek to optimize for its own sake.
In the process of trying to absorb as much as I can, I’ve begun to think of myself as a collector of different ways of viewing the world. Isaiah Berlin wrote of hedgehogs and foxes, and I would humbly suggest that I’m a hedgehog whose one big idea is foxiness. Scott Page has written a book on the virtues of mental and computational models, models that allow us to categorize and process the information and data we collect throughout our daily lives and it’s this kind of foxiness that appeals to me, likely due to my quantitative background and style of thinking. There are some models that I tend to rely on more than others, perhaps due to quirks of my psychology or cultural and educational background, but I’d like to think that I’m always open to at least considering alien ones who offer novel insights.
Hopefully the name of this blog makes a little more sense now, and credit goes to a random Reddit comment I can’t find which accused the Santa Fe Institute of being filled with hedgehogs whose big idea was foxiness. I thought it was a clever turn of phrase and a good description of myself.
As far as future content, I’m not sure there’s going to be a cohesive theme behind it. I’m just going to write things I want to write, including but not limited to topics from philosophy, AI, economics, fitness, food, and popular culture. I also expect to write some fiction every once in a while, though it will likely be of (even) lower quality than my nonfiction pieces. I’m going to try to post at least one piece every week (planned for Mondays), with an additional weekly recommendations/links post (planned for Fridays). We’ll see how I do!
Thanks for reading and welcome again to The Foxy Hedgehog!