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Exorcising Us of the Primer
us of the Primer July 2024. Part of “Letters from the Lab”, a series of essays on my research written for patrons.
When it wants to introduce a conceptual topic, it begins with concrete hands-on projects: Turing machines, microeconomics, and mitosis are presented through binary-coding iron chains, the cipher’s market, and Nell’s carrot garden. But if you remove coercion from the picture, and we’re imagining that people will choose to play whatever they find most fun, that means you’re in competition to out-fun Fortnite, or League of Legends, or Stardew Valley, or whatever—games exquisitely optimized to be as viscerally enjoyable as possible. Nell usually encounters a subject first through a discovery-oriented activity (like the chains in Turing’s castle), then once she’s built intuition and meaning through concrete interaction, she finds a book which details the topic more formally and in greater depth.
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