World’s Finest Handmade Overton™ Windows
Welcome to The Market for Meaning. I’m Christopher Diak, and I’m delighted you’re here. This blog is dedicated to producing the finest Overton™ windows this side of the Internet, composed of hand-selected frameworks and undigested lived experience.
This is a blog about everything. It is generalist by design and disposition.
Generality is an act of resistance against the coercive power of specialization, which forces otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people to be complicit in the absurd.
You may wonder, as many have: “What is the market for meaning?”
As I define it, TM4M is the capacity to monetize the production and exchange of symbolic representations, narratives, and values without a specific, physical form.
These aren’t the artifacts of our culture, digital or otherwise, but patterns of thought and behavior which underlie them. Patterns which can be priced.
More on that soon.
About Me
Born and raised in Vermont, I'm an associate at The Chernik Group, a fully remote private practice of academic coaches, tutors, and writers. I’m also a cognitive scientist working in the Lab for Mind, Brain, and Computation at Dartmouth College.
Previously, I was at Harvard. I completed my M.Div. at Harvard Divinity School in 2024 and trained as a business ethicist and scholar of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, writing on FTX, OpenAI, Nestlé, and other companies. Additionally, I was one of the first three model teachers at OpenAI.
As an undergraduate, I trained in research laboratories at Harvard Medical School and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience of the University of Pennsylvania, and was a student member of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness.
In the past two years, I’ve generated, written, and read more than 5,000,000 words with GPT-3, GPT-4, and o1, mostly for research and personal use—roughly 50 books.
