My name is William Wilson. That means I have the same name as the protagonist of a story by Edgar Allan Poe about a doppelgänger, which is a little weird. I commonly go by Will.
Since 2018, I have been building a software company called Antithesis. The company’s premise is simple but outrageous: everybody has been doing software quality wrong, because they are trying to find the bugs that they are looking for. Actually, you need to be finding the bugs that you aren’t looking for. The interesting part is how you do that.
The premise of the company ties together a few of my intellectual interests: modeling catastrophic events, the limits of human reason, and low-level computer architecture. It also ends up touching on everything from fractal dynamics in financial markets to meta-mathematics. I gave a talk about some of these connections here. In that talk I sound like a crazy person who thinks that everything is connected, but in my experience this is one place where the crazy people are correct. Most interesting topics are connected to many other things.
I have given many talks and written many articles over the years. The recent ones are all about Antithesis though, because I am currently a full-time shill:
In this talk I tried to explain the ideas behind property-based testing using Super Mario Bros. as an intuition pump.
In this one I attempted to dissolve the age-old conflict between testing and observability and speculated about why software sucks.
I’ve written some posts on the company blog. One of my most recent ones is a reprint of an email about organizational dynamics that I sent to all of our employees after we raised our Series A.
My other recent hobby is writing unsolicited emails to my friends about interesting books that I have read. Unfortunately I have not had as much time for this since the company entered hypergrowth.
I was pretty early on this whole AI thing. I wrote that piece in 2018, and I think it holds up remarkably well! The only thing I really got wrong was that neural architecture search didn’t actually matter. Turns out all we needed was transformers.
I am an active member of a large and growing Eastern Orthodox parish, where I serve on the church council and sing in the choir. I used to teach Sunday school (teenagers only – I’m not tough enough for the preschoolers), but have temporarily retired from that.
I’m generally very interested in how to teach. My most strongly-held view about teaching is that most kids are smarter than adults think they are, and have not yet accumulated decades of bad intellectual habits, so you can hold them to a very high standard of rigor so long as you pique their interest successfully. Or in fewer words: the job of a teacher is to first inspire interest in a subject and then to make it seem like a worthy adversary. I’ve spent a fair bit of time experimenting on my children with new approaches to math pedagogy.
I’m quite interested in epistemology, and in the history of science as a rich case study of it. I do not believe that mankind’s knowledge increases monotonically, and I collect examples of societies forgetting very important things. I wonder often about what our society might have forgotten that our ancestors knew. I once played a small role in popularizing the replication crisis.
Other kinds of history I enjoy reading: imperial Chinese history, the history of the Mediterranean (all periods), and the history of early modern Europe. I’m fairly omnivorous when it comes to historical method or style, and am as happy with dry economic data as I am with biographies of great men and women. When it comes to famous people, I’m most interested in the ones who led groups of people through things that were very difficult.
I love math, and sometimes read math textbooks for fun. The two kinds I especially like are: (1) meta-mathematics and foundations, and (2) representation theory and its applications to mathematical physics. I like to joke that I wanted to be a physicist, but wasn’t good enough at math, so became a mathematician instead. I think one of the biggest intellectual problems of our era is that humanities-shaped people don’t know enough math and physics, and I would like to help solve this problem but don’t know how.
I think the efficient markets hypothesis is very wrong (as an entrepreneur I am practically required to!), and in particular I believe that markets are systematically bad at pricing risk. I’m generally super interested in the nature of risk and uncertainty, and briefly wanted to go into the re-insurance industry.
I’m interested in the behavior of large groups of people, and in how ideas can cause masses of people or entire countries to act in particular ways. I used to be extremely interested in political theory, but these days I actually find that a bit boring, and prefer to think about how social trust and cohesion can be created and maintained.
I try pretty hard not to think about theology. Partly this is from a stance of epistemic humility (mathematicians are rightly terrified of infinity, and theologians should be more terrified than they generally are), and partly just because I’m not very good at it. I aspire to the religious attitude of the old peasant woman at the back of the church. If you forced me to name a favorite book on religion I’d say Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church but I try to mostly just read scripture.
As awful as it is, LinkedIn was more or less made for this. You can also send me an email at this domain if you can guess the right address or extract it from somebody who knows me.
Types of unexpected emails I’m excited about:
Types of unexpected emails I’m not excited about:
Please don’t let the above dos and don’ts scare you out of reaching out. I am a huge believer in the power of serendipity. If your intentions are good, just stop dithering and send the email!