Q: Curt: –“How old were you when you first began deriving first principles and

Q: Curt: –“How old were you when you first began deriving first principles and essential truths? Also, Kiev….?”–
1) “I was born this way”. My mother said I was born an 80 year old man. At twelve I set out my mission. By high school I’d worked on the common problems like faith. By freshman year, I was working on general rules that we would call philosophy, and by junior year produced my first serious work on the philosophy of art.
The same technique I used then on the philosophy of art, is the technique I use now. I’ve just used that technique (first principles) on more questions in more fields, and in doing so discovered increasingly more primitive first principles that unify the fields.
I think my handwriting (bad) and the painful experience of using typewriters was the hindrance to my early development. As soon as we had computer keyboards that problem went away.

2) I’ve had immune system issues (allergies) since early teens. I had a resulting cancer in 2002, again in 2009, and a necrotic gallbladder and liver damage in 2012 that almost killed me. At that point, I got divorced, got rid of the company, cars, houses, etc, and with a backpack of computers, a suitcase, and three duffel bags I set out to travel the world expecting to die. And otherwise to find a country where I could start a company to produce a product I wanted to build, with the anticipation that it would be a small company that would pay for funding the Institute.
When I arrived in Turkey I met a friend who convinced me to try Ukraine. The same dev here in seattle that costs 200K, costs 35K there, So, he set up lawyers, devs, admins, everything and so I stayed. Found a ‘girlfriend’ rather quickly.
So I merged my Institute, a business, and my intel work into a pretty good quality of life that was intellectually interesting. When the war broke out it was exciting for a bit, but eventually it drove up the costs of the company I was building until I had to mothball it, and return to the states for more funding since getting funding in Ukraine was impossible at the time for obvious reasons.
Once I returned to the states it took a year to get over the pneumonia I”d been struggling with since 2015, and was damaging my lungs. Next my mother had been hiding the severity of her illness. So I took care of her until she passed, and worked entirely on my intellectual project. Then of course we had covid.
I would return to Kiev, L’viv, or maybe, move near my friends in Portugal if I had more confidence in my health.
The tech has finally evolved to the point where we aren’t fighting to make it work (we were bleeding the edge of what was possible), and the AI revolution has radically simplified the back-end features of the software, so ‘delay’ has probably saved me millions and allowed me to finish the intellectual project. I just need to get a little more of my health recovered to before restarting the company, And I don’t want to do that until we’ve published more of the work.

So, that’s the story. And I’ll save this little post for the other people who ask. 😉

Reply addressees: @Family_FirstBro