Anton Waagaard
@antonsaccount.bsky.social
Developing tools, algorithms and workflows for geometric rationalization, material-aware design, and digital fabrication. Also curious about embodied cognition, meaning-making, and art-science fusions.
New piece exploring the gap between encountering ideas and integrating them, touching on: why encountering new elements ≠ forming new associations, the metabolic cost of genuine reorganization, and second-order heaps' exponents and what they reveal about learning
Living a life permeable to structural novelty
On bounded novelty regimes, predictive homeostasis, why surface diversity masks structural homogeneity, and ways of thinking that resist their own revision
open.substack.com
November 2, 2025 at 1:05 PM
New piece exploring the gap between encountering ideas and integrating them, touching on: why encountering new elements ≠ forming new associations, the metabolic cost of genuine reorganization, and second-order heaps' exponents and what they reveal about learning
Artists and designers often speak of an aspirational goal of "getting to the point where you don't know what you're doing." Keith Sawyer's "Learning to See" made it clear to me why that state of ambiguity is so important in the creative process.
open.substack.com/pub/creative...
open.substack.com/pub/creative...
The pedagogy of perception: a book review of Keith Sawyer’s "Learning to See: Inside the World’s Leading Art and Design Schools"
For some time now, I have been interested in the pedagogical methods through which creative capacities are developed, which is a domain where empirical analysis has often yielded to anecdotal observat...
open.substack.com
October 30, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Artists and designers often speak of an aspirational goal of "getting to the point where you don't know what you're doing." Keith Sawyer's "Learning to See" made it clear to me why that state of ambiguity is so important in the creative process.
open.substack.com/pub/creative...
open.substack.com/pub/creative...
Been thinking about the relationship between constraints and affordances in digital design. An exploration of how deliberately limiting a system's lexicon and syntax can create the conditions for more powerful, emergent affordances to arise. creativeresiliencefusions.substack.com/p/subtractiv...
Subtractive affordances, translations of value, and why constraints matter
The digital medium at its most fundamental level, is a substrate of pure potentiality, a quality that distinguishes it radically from its physical predecessors.
creativeresiliencefusions.substack.com
August 9, 2025 at 3:32 PM
Been thinking about the relationship between constraints and affordances in digital design. An exploration of how deliberately limiting a system's lexicon and syntax can create the conditions for more powerful, emergent affordances to arise. creativeresiliencefusions.substack.com/p/subtractiv...
1/7
High-fidelity text is an increasingly unreliable proxy for judging human expertise. Here's my proposal for a set of five axes along which communication can embed computationally/biographically expensive signals that are somewhat difficult to counterfeit:
High-fidelity text is an increasingly unreliable proxy for judging human expertise. Here's my proposal for a set of five axes along which communication can embed computationally/biographically expensive signals that are somewhat difficult to counterfeit:
July 4, 2025 at 8:02 PM
1/7
High-fidelity text is an increasingly unreliable proxy for judging human expertise. Here's my proposal for a set of five axes along which communication can embed computationally/biographically expensive signals that are somewhat difficult to counterfeit:
High-fidelity text is an increasingly unreliable proxy for judging human expertise. Here's my proposal for a set of five axes along which communication can embed computationally/biographically expensive signals that are somewhat difficult to counterfeit:
Reposted by Anton Waagaard
a plea to think carefully about surprisal + what it means to understand how we understand >> link.springer.com/article/10.1...
brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social
brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social
What’s Surprising About Surprisal - Computational Brain & Behavior
In the computational and experimental psycholinguistic literature, the mechanisms behind syntactic structure building (e.g., combining words into phrases and sentences) are the subject of considerable...
link.springer.com
February 25, 2025 at 9:26 AM
a plea to think carefully about surprisal + what it means to understand how we understand >> link.springer.com/article/10.1...
brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social
brand new paper in Computational Brain and Behaviour with @andreaeyleen.bsky.social at @mpi-nl.bsky.social
Reposted by Anton Waagaard
My RAND paper showed a temporary funding cut would have long-lasting effects on overall research output through its adverse impact on investment in young PIs.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
The Matthew effect, research productivity, and the dynamic allocation of NIH grants
Funding is important for research. However, research funding may suffer from the Matthew effect: the more researchers already have, the more they will be given. I develop an empirical framework to st...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
February 8, 2025 at 10:34 PM
My RAND paper showed a temporary funding cut would have long-lasting effects on overall research output through its adverse impact on investment in young PIs.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...