Detroit, Consciousness, and the Geometry of Heartbreak
Welcome to the publication. Here’s what we’re building.
Here’s something that bothered me for years: smart people hold onto bad ideas with a ferocity that looks irrational from the outside. A gifted physicist defends a dying framework. A CEO doubles down on a strategy everyone else can see is failing. A person stays in a relationship that’s visibly destroying them.
The standard explanation is psychology — ego, sunk cost fallacy, cognitive dissonance. These aren’t wrong, but they’re descriptions, not mechanisms. They tell you that people get stuck. They don’t tell you why getting stuck is the default and getting unstuck requires something specific.
The answer turns out to be structural. If you’ve built enough of your identity, competence, or resource network on top of a particular commitment, then abandoning it doesn’t just cost you the commitment — it costs you everything built on top of it. The excision cost exceeds the carrying cost, so you carry. Not because you’re stupid. Because you’re solving the optimisation problem correctly given the local topology.
This is basin dynamics. And once you see it, you see it everywhere.
Detroit didn’t fail because its engineers couldn’t design electric cars. It failed because its entire supplier network, manufacturing infrastructure, dealer franchise model, and profit structure were load-bearing walls built on the internal combustion engine. The excision cost of going electric wasn’t a product redesign — it was a corporate demolition. So they carried. Correctly, locally. Catastrophically, globally.
The Hard Problem of consciousness isn’t hard because subjective experience is metaphysically mysterious. It’s a scope error — asking why this specific system generates experience presupposes that experience is something systems generate rather than something measurement does. Dissolve the scope error and the problem evaporates. Not solved. Dissolved. It was never there.
I could keep going. The is-ought gap. The way attention mechanisms in transformers mirror geometric structures in differential topology. The particular mathematics of why love — actual love, between actual people — is the mutual expansion of reachable state space.
These aren’t analogies. They’re the same dynamics in different substrates.
What this publication is:
I write across four categories, clearly labelled so you always know what you’re getting.
HELY5 — “Hákon Explains Like You’re 5.” Complex systems stripped to their load-bearing structure, no jargon. Economics, technology, culture. If you want to understand how something actually works rather than how it’s marketed, start here.
Formal Systems — The rigorous work. AI architecture, mathematical philosophy, whitepapers. This is where the proofs live.
Fiction & Verse — Novels, stories, poetry. I’m writing a book that braids the Völuspá, mathematical philosophy, and a love story set in contemporary Reykjavík, because those three things turn out to be the same investigation. The fiction isn’t a break from the technical work. It’s the same work in a different medium.
Meditations — Personal essays on resilience, gratitude, and the practice of building a life worth living. These are the shortest pieces and sometimes the ones that matter most.
You might be here for the AI research. You might be here for the poetry. My bet is that if you stay long enough, the distinction stops mattering.
Welcome. Let’s get to work.