Tim Hwang is an artist whose medium is the organization. He’s held jobs at Google, Substack, and Inflection AI, among others, and founded many more organizations and events on the side, including ROFLCon, the Awesome Foundation, the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, and the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence.

In this conversation we explore why he once ran a four-day workshop treating tarot as a design problem; why we should start far more organizations; how Tim talked his way into a nuclear power plant; and whether AI alignment could be rebuilt from Christian priors rather than rationalist ones. And we end on outsider art, private notebooks, and the ambition of making something with exactly one fan.

Mentioned in this episode

* The Possessed Machines: Dostoevsky’s Demons and the Coming AGI Catastrophe — the anonymous essay Tim helped bring into the world

* Proceedings of the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence, including VirtueBench and Working Paper No. 21, Frontier Lab Monasticism

* The Rule of Saint Benedict

* Henry Darger, and the American Folk Art Museum, which holds portions of his work

* Gwern Branwen‘s website, built as a decades-long project

* Joseph Rotblat, the only physicist to leave the Manhattan Project, and the Pugwash Conferences he helped found

* Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government

* C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

* Simone Weil

* Claude’s constitution

Transcript

/The following transcript has been cleaned up and filler removed. The transcript was made by AI, and checked by a human, but errors may remain./

Introduction

Michael Nielsen: Hi, welcome to the Good Conversation Project. My name’s Michael Nielsen. I’m a research fellow at the Astera Institute, and I’m joined today by Tim Hwang. Tim is coming to us from New Jersey, where he’s just moved into a new house. He is a man who has not only worn many hats, but has indeed created many hats. In his day job he’s had important positions at Google, at Substack, at Inflection AI, and many other organizations. But he’s perhaps the only person in the world I know who has a hobby of starting organizations and starting think tanks. They’ve included the Awesome Foundation, ROFLCon, the Institute for Christian Machine Intelligence, the California Review of Images of Mark Zuckerberg, the Bay Area Infrastructure Observatory, and a whole bunch more.

I’ve known Tim for fifteen years or so, so we know each other pretty well, but this is an excuse to ask some of the questions that I’ve never asked before, on this podcast. So thanks for agreeing to participate, Tim.

Tim Hwang: Great, Michael, thanks for having me on the show. And yeah, I can’t believe it’s already been fifteen years. It’s a little wild.

Michael: I think it was 2011 or 2012.

Tim: Yeah. I’ll check the email inbox. I mean, it’s there, so I’ll find it.

Michael: This is back when you were, I think, director of special projects at Imgur, a very long time ago.

Tim: Imgur, yeah, that’s right.

The Program on Advanced Divination

Michael: I wanted to ask you about a project that you did about seven years ago. This was a four-day workshop, I think it was in LA, the workshop on advanced divinatory practices. I’m sure you remember this well. We’ve chatted about it a couple of times, but I’ve never really asked you why you did it, how it came about. My understanding, correct me if I’m wrong, is you were going to get together a whole bunch of tarot card readers and astrologers and people like this, and then also some designers and people with that kind of background, and try to answer the question of what would divinatory practice look like in 2050? With the idea that [divination] had always been with humanity, and it was always going to be with humanity. So I’m very curious — where did that come from? What was the genesis of the idea?

Tim: Yeah, that’s a great place to start. I really love that project and would love to bring it back at some point. Background for the listeners is that I ran a seminar, as Michael mentioned. It was called the Program on Advanced Divination. And the origins of it really came from the idea of — I was in LA at the time, this was kind of during the rise of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, and I had a bunch of friends who were living out in Brooklyn who were very into tarot card reading. And in the media there was a lot of discussion about the alt-right. And at the time I was reflecting on the emergence of all of these different types of phenomena, and thinking about the hypothesis that maybe what connected them all was a generally felt sense of dislocation. And the idea that these tools of belief, divinatory systems, might really be something that people felt they needed — certainly things that people were using to guide their lives. And that we might want to think about it seriously, right? That we might want to think about divination not just as some weird thing that people do, but actually as a kind of design practice. Like, there are good and satisfying divinatory experiences and there are less-than-satisfying ones.

And so the whole idea was, could we just take that premise seriously — get a group of eight to ten people together for four days to really investigate that idea, and bring together some people who are practitioners, right? Dyed-in-the-wool full-time tarot card readers. And then people who think of these things in more of a design lens: okay, well, what makes an interface engaging? And are there ways of bringing those principles into how we think about divination? And so divination as a design method, as a medium, was really the premise.

Michael: So in some sense the kind of people who make video games today — it’s not that different than making a tarot deck hundreds of years ago. There’s a lot in common in terms of the psychology.

Tim: Totally. I mean, there’s a really interesting intellectual question of what divination even is, and would we call it a kind of game? Because a divination method which is purely deterministic — I feel, at least personally, and now we’re talking about taste — is not so satisfying. But one of the great things about, say, the traditional Rider-Waite tarot deck is that it is just so good at creating a set of symbols that is very easy to imprint a story on top of. It’s very narrative-rich. And that almost sits a little bit outside of a game, traditionally constituted.

Michael: Right, I see. It’s interesting. It’s maybe a little bit more like a movie in some sense, just in the sense that you have these archetypes, and movies do tend to build very heavily on them — not all movies, but many movies. You know who the trickster figure is, you know who the hero is, all these kinds of things. And so you hang off a conventional story. Whereas in a game it often seems like it’s a little bit more about the mechanics — there’s a particular goal and the question is how do you navigate to that goal. Tarot seems a little bit more like the first, but active as opposed to passive.

Tim: Totally. And I think there’s this really interesting set of practices around how you ascribe meaning to phenomena, right? Which is at work in how you design, say, a quote-unquote good divinatory method. One of the people there was Danielle Baskin, who may be familiar to some of the listeners, kind of a Bay Area-based artist. And Danielle had this incredible one that she talked a little bit about, which was basically — she’s like, I noticed Solo cups everywhere, with that very specific ‘90s design, which is like a blue stripe and a purple, this very dated logo. And Danielle was just like, I basically have a divinatory method, which is wherever, whenever I see it in the world, I take it as a sign of something. So if it’s flipped up, that’s a good sign. If it’s crushed out on the street as a piece of trash, maybe that’s a bad omen. And what I like about that is it’s almost like ambient divination, right? It’s just taking these signals and trying to figure out how do you create these storylines, how do you create these narratives between all of these different data points.

And I think that’s just a really interesting way of thinking about what divination is doing — it’s sort of leveraging a very natural process in storytelling, but creating a kind of scaffolding for it to occur.

Divination, fiction, and personality tests