About

Hi! I'm Logan. 🦎 I'm an incoming college freshman studying Symbolic Systems at Stanford.

Briefly:

  • I want to learn everything;
  • I think AI is the most interesting, impactful, and tractable field in my lifetime;
  • I love philosophy, even though philosophy doesn't really work;
  • I think we should believe things and love things anyway.

Not Briefly:

I want to learn everything is usually what I lead with. Early on I got into philosophy in search of a foundation for a systematic understanding of the world; most of my other interests subsequently developed from that same point.

Math, computer science, and logic study the extensions of fundamental logical systems. Cognitive science and linguistics allow us to understand how perception and language shape meaning and cognition; building artificial intelligence, while instrumental in itself, necessarily reflects on our understandings of ourselves — modeling our distribution of language so well as to create meaning itself; what it means to be an agent, or to be intelligent.

I think AI is the most interesting developing field right now, and it'll be the most transformative force of my lifetime, because it fundamentally shifts the kinds of problems that we can apply the speed, scalability, and precision of computers to. I'm grateful to be growing up at a time where I can witness with wonder the process of that expansion, and help shape its future to ensure it goes well.

My research interests include:

  • AI-human analogs, particularly with regards to cognitive architectures (e.g. modeling AI architectures off psychology's models of human cognition)
  • Other kinds of interesting techniques (e.g. LLM debate)
  • Prompt engineering — eliciting responses at the edges of the distribution of outputs (in strangeness, usefulness)
  • Mechanistic interpretability — especially where mech interp can tell us new information about language or concepts. (It's still insane to me that we can have things like word2vec and semantic similarity metrics.)
  • Moral philosophy and philosophy of language, especially with regards to what "morality" even looks like in non-human intelligent systems.

Yet, all of these things said, if there is one thing that philosophy has taught me, it is ironically that there are domains that logic, that philosophy's traditional rational method, cannot touch. There are no systematic understandings — at least, none that are securely founded.

Philosophy does not make progress in the way that other fields do, because it is fundamentally distinct from them. It is more fundamental. There is no canonical metaphysics, no canonical epistemology, no canonical aesthetics, no canonical ethics, in the way that there are, say, canonical representations of classical mechanics. To me it philosophy is a process of clarification — what can be thought, and the consequences of doing so.

This clarification can't touch the whole world, all of human experience, all of the thing we're referencing when we talk about "being human." There exists that which cannot be said, but can be understood. (Sorry, still working on a way to say this that's actually meaningful lol) (Just read Wittgenstein's Tractatus bro). This is the domain of art and literature — part of it, at least, and not exclusively. Hence my interest in art, literature, religious texts; their interpretation and comprehension as the collection of human wisdom, a way to transfer the things that can't be said but can be understood.

In the absence of coherent abstract values, I turn to people, and to vibes, and just try to do my best to build something that's consistent and valuable ontop of the sandy, shifting foundations. I speak of aesthetics instead of ethics or truth to make that clear — they are the same thing but I think it's more intellectually honest to talk in terms of the former. I care a lot about emotions, and relating to ours and others' in healthy and productive ways. I'm interested in building social infrastructure — connecting (and connecting with) people, and building tools to make that easier. I find meaning in relationships, valuable work, learning and understanding, and something like "spiritual experience" above all.

An incomplete list of things I love can be found on the Aesthetics page.

Some other things I care about and enjoy include hanging out with friends, bouldering, hiking, writing, un-designing, writing and playing music, the interrobang (‽), and watching minecraft videos.

For info on what I'm up to right now, see Now.

Reach out

  • Email me at logangraves dot com
  • DM me on Discord at lgngrvs
  • Schedule a 1-on-1 on my Cal.com

More contact/identities info available here. :]

*(Psst! Here are some conversation topics I might enjoy)

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