About...

…me

I’m a researcher and learning enthusiast originally from Germany since having moved abroad, currently in the end stages of my PhD. On this website and on the wider internet I go by Nauka, although this is not my real name.

This site is meant to be a place distinct from my professional or private identity to allow for more casual and experimental content, so I would ask you to stick to the pseudonym when commenting or referring to this side. That being said, I’m not planning to publish stories based on embellishing confidential information form nor is there evidence of me harboring sympathies for scientific racists and neo-nazis, so my real identity is not a secret, and I will not delete this site nor send a mob towards anyone referring to me by my clearname ¹, I’m, simply asking you politely to help me keep this separation.

Note: While I am trying to control the pathos in my writing, but often fail. If I do and for any feedback/advice, please feel free to reach out via mail at contact at this websites URL.

…this website

I would like my website to serve two purposes

• a public platform to share my writings and other projects
• a private meta-structure imposed on my projects to help me order my thoughts and have them placed into a larger whole that I can incrementally grow and refine.

It is heavily inspired by Gwern.net, matt.might.net and other researchers I admire.

Current design intentions

The idea is that things move from the (private) Zettelkasten style pile of notes and documents (that I might share once I am more confident to help people like me who struggle with anxiety and impostor syndrome realise that the mess is okay and can be part of a process) into the public blog section once they are polished enough to enjoyable reads but don’t yet meet serious intellectual rigor standards, then move into a more detailed research section which functions as proto-papers and finally (hopefully) results in an artifact that is some useful, standalone piece of writing, software, a peer-reviewed publication etc.

By having the whole process in form of a website I’m tinkering on I hope to hack one of my maladaptive coping mechanism of bouncing around projects and procrastination. I’m setting this up in october 2021 2022 and will do a review blog post a year afterwards which I’ll link here, which is also when I’ll update this section. This is an experiment for me, but I’m as excited about it as I’ve rarely been.

Update from 2022: Well, this went interestingly. The update post will be me writing the actual “how I made my website” post once I have had time to edit it. Basically, the system worked, but one of the things I ended up not procrastinating on was…working on the website for a year. So I guess, mission accomplished, task ignored.

What I did do is detailed in this blog post

…my interests

I’m interested in complex adaptive systems, especially economies, political and social systems. To study them, I try to use three lenses

• mathematical methods rooted in ML and optimisation theory. Here I have an academic education and professional background, particularly in generative models for graphs and sets, reinforcement learning and game theory.
• a media criticism and philosophical lens, where I mainly hew to post-modern and infinitist approaches
• a historical lens, where I tend to historical materialism, annals and peoples history

Current reading list

• Discovering symbolic policies with deep reinforcement learning
• Causal Bandits with Unknown Graph Structure

Where I’m aiming to be (and where I think I am)

See this blog post