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
I am a researcher, educator, and designer working in the Lab for Mind, Brain, and Computation at Dartmouth College.
Drawing on literature from cognitive science, organizational behavior, and deep reinforcement learning, my research studies how mental representations are composed and the limits of reasoning, executive function, and working memory under capacity constraints. I often wonder: “How do the strategies we use to think shape what can be thought?”
Previously, I was an associate with The Chernik Group specializing in executive functioning, metacognition, and habit formation.
As a student at Middlebury and Harvard, I was fortunate to work with some of the world’s great laboratories in biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence:
Rapoport Laboratory, Harvard Medical School
ChatLab, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania
Joshua Greene Laboratory, Harvard University
Model Behavior Team at OpenAI
While at Harvard, I worked for five years as a program manager for The Spiritual Lives of Leaders and The Forum for Growth & Innovation at Harvard Business School, and as a research associate in the General Management and Finance Units.
I grew up on a sheep farm in Grafton, Vermont, as the eldest son of artisans Tom and Linda Diak, and was the first member of my family to go to college. My wife, Rachel Aurora, is a studio artist working in paint, ceramics, and herbal medicines.
I hold an MDiv from Harvard Divinity School and a BA from Middlebury College.
