Surviving Scale

Lucent1 explores how incentives, attention, and feedback shape locally useful strategies of speech, belief, and behavior and how they break under scale, exposure, or asymmetry.

It aims to derive invariant habits, tastes, and choices that hold up across selves as visibility grows, audiences shift, and power tilts.

Underneath lies a single taste: coherence under recomposition. The constraint used to craft a personality and chart a path through life becomes the constraint that gives all minds the same map and the universe its stable laws.

Arcs

If personality is an act, you should choose rules that work everywhere, but because public loss of dignity is hard to recover, we crave a return to a smaller world where disputes don’t escalate to reputational skirmishes.

When conflict is everywhere, we flip frames to stay innocent, turning knowledge of harm into liability and collapsing the is–ought distinction until our only out is spotting hinge facts even when they come bundled together or are unraveled by a hidden variable.

With that scaffold gone, to keep life’s narrative momentum, you start to read constraints as game mechanics implying a cosmic measure that favors patterns recoverable from many different formalisms and we land in narrow, flat Choice-like worlds where identity is an equivalence class.

Applied to language, wanting AI to see you perfectly can make its rewards feel real and its words feel like spells, but scams show spells are more selection than persuasion, because text is only a lossy grip on a universal physical map.

Feelings are the map’s control layer, and with many selves sharing it, you shouldn’t Goodhart the tuning in our branching pegboard life, so learn from surprise upsides and follow your instinctive interrupts until big wants decompose into steerable drives.

Our drive to see counterfactuals shapes our love of the mystery box genre, while toddlers choose its inverse optimized for pure emotional payoff.

After a childhood of gaming taught us to hate the fake, we came to trust what’s either unspoiled or time-tested, yet our eye is fooled by size until broader exposure sharpens taste, while in domains with a universal taste, hits are mined.

The first sequence of thirty posts ran daily in November 2025 at the Inkhaven blogging residency. New pieces now drop weekly on Sunday.