anti·u·ni·ta·ry: against the single, settled view.
This publication is my primary outlet for writing content that I am interested in professionally and personally. That means there will be a wide range of topics that will be published, though content will be primarily centered around technology trends, markets, economics, politics, philosophy, and cognitive science. My hope is that this publication will spark interesting debates amongst my audience, whether in alignment or disagreement with my remarks. I am merely looking to engage in intellectual conversation with like-minded individuals and hopefully push the dialogue forward somewhat.
Who is the author?
I’m currently building Seven Bridges, an independent research firm focused on building quantitative data products for hedge funds and high frequency trading firms. Previously, I was a managing director and senior equity research analyst at D.A. Davidson, where I spent the majority of my time on frontier AI labs and compute infrastructure. I also recently graduated from the University of Oregon where I studied philosophy, ethics, and cognitive science.
What are some things I’m passionate about?
The trajectory of human civilization. How we accelerate and evolve as a species in a rapidly changing world. Has led to interests in substrate independence and whether consciousness is tied to biology or something more portable. Along with the idea that given sufficient computational power, an advanced civilization could simulate entire societies indistinguishable from reality.
Investing in humanities. We're severely underweighting the disciplines that study what is uniquely human such as art, literature, philosophy, and psychology. As AI fundamentally reshapes society, these fields become more important, not less. I believe we should be creating a humanities-equivalent of the Arc Institute to incentivize meaningful humanistic work so societies can better absorb rapid technological change.
Make learning cool again. The current education system is one of our country's greatest failures, where we're rewarding credentialism over genuine mastery or the literal love of knowledge that philosophy was named for. We are not educating children at the pace we should be, especially when new tools exist that could fundamentally change how we teach. Reform is hard, but we owe it to future generations to fight for their success.
How can I support the publication?
Right now, consuming antiunitary content is completely free to the reader. That being said, it would be much appreciated if you are able to support this Substack and become a paid subscriber. Becoming a paid subscriber of this publication will allow me to spend greater time on writing quality content, as well as potentially pursuing other content forms such as podcasting.
The only time in which I can foresee there being paid content would be either in the form of market commentary and/or content in which there is substantial data being provided by my startup, Seven Bridges.
Contact
I love meeting and talking to new people. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this publication or just comments in general, feel free to reach out at alex@platt.kr.
