Surfing uncertainty

What Hacker News says

1. intalentiveNov 2025
   Good summary. For those interested in more details, check out the book Surfing Uncertainty.
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2. joules77Sep 2025
   Good idea. Especially the data ownership flip. Check out Philosopher Andy Clark's work (Surfing Uncertainty/Natural-Born Cyborgs) on these kind of "mind extension" tools. His work was before LLMs showed up, but is still very useful food for thought, while designing this kind of stuff.
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3. maroonblazerJan 2024
   Also an armchair philosopher and I enjoy thinking about these things a lot. The theory you've described is the one that seems to have the most explanatory power.

   Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty-Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind" is a book-length exploration of this idea. Highly recommend.

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4. ted_bunnyAug 2023
   Surfing Uncertainty was a really cool book. I think we think too highly of ourselves.
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5. gnirpsMay 2023
   "I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too)."
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6. williamcottonApr 2023
   Surfing Uncertainty is the book you’re looking for!
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