Matt Brooks

I'm an AI-era rationalist / postrat / EA-adjacent builder.

My core pattern: find the highest-leverage bottleneck between now and a radically better future, then build the coordination, taste, and information infrastructure around it — without sacrificing kindness, beauty, weirdness, or inner aliveness.

What I orbit

Transformative AI is my center of gravity. Capabilities, alignment, control, evals, timelines, governance, agentic risk. I treat it as a civilizational phase change: potentially utopian, potentially catastrophic, and mostly bottlenecked by human coordination, incentives, and judgment.

What I'm building

AI-safety capital allocation: infrastructure to route money, talent, and attention toward high-impact projects. My bet is that the binding constraint is great ideas, operators, and organizations, not raw funding.

What else I care about

• Community as a living ecology: keeping the rationalist/EA/postrat world open, weird, sincere, and uncaptured.
• Contemplative practice: Buddhism, jhanas, metta, valence, qualia: approached as a tractable engineering problem for reducing suffering.
• AI as a cognitive exoskeleton: agents, notes, and search as a future cognitive OS.
• Posthuman flourishing: longtermist futures where the upside should be as exciting as the downside is scary.
• Effective compassion: animal welfare and impact that scales, over purity and performance.
• Taste and "vibe": aesthetics as a real form of cognition.
• High-agency talent: finding the hidden diamonds and routing around credentialism to back people who build.
• Empirical self-optimization: sleep, security, workflows, 80/20 defense.

What I value

Truth-seeking that isn't sterile. Impact over feeling good. Open-heartedness as a sacred value, don't close, don't calcify. Agency. Stewardship: be a good ancestor. Beauty and aliveness.

The synthesis I'm after: Bayesian clarity + effective compassion + high-agency building + contemplative depth + community/vibe preservation + civilizational stewardship.

Where I get caught

Over-indexing the meta layer. Living in a high-context bubble. A fungible-suffering consequentialism that can read as emotionally alien. The pull between legibility and aliveness. Curiosity as both a virtue and an escape hatch.

In a phrase: I'm trying to be a vibe-sensitive civilizational mechanic attempting to build pipes for grace. Money, AI, grants, notes, communities, meditation, and media are the pipes. Less suffering, more aliveness, kinder people, and a future worth inhabiting are the grace.