✦Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

Episode #557: Measuring What Matters: When Breaking Things Apart Loses the Truth

Episode #557 · June 29, 2026 · 1h 4m

MP3 · Apple Podcasts · Spotify

About this episode

In this episode, Stewart Alsop sits down with Aaron Lowry, founder of Circulatory Fidelity, to dig into some genuinely mind-bending territory — from Aaron's framework for measuring load-bearing dependencies between things, to the multi-agent AI lab he's built to do cross-domain scientific research, to the surprising parallels between entropy, ontology, and hand-wrapping a wiring harness on a vintage car. They also get into abductive reasoning, the problem of combinatorial explosion, why consensus is the secret engine of civilization, and what it actually means to build a system with an explicit ontology versus just winging it. Check out Aaron's work at circulatoryfidelity.com.
Timestamps
00:00 — Aaron explains his framework of abduction as a third mode of reasoning alongside induction and deduction, describing his approach as "cataloging shadows" of things we can observe but not yet define.
05:00 — The conversation shifts to consensus mechanisms, measurement systems, and how shared definitions in language and commerce reduce friction in civilized society.
10:00 — Stewart and Aaron discuss communication loss in human language, how close-knit groups develop lower-loss protocols, and the parallel to business relationships and trust.
15:00 — Aaron breaks down Circulatory Fidelity as an algebraic measuring tool for load-bearing dependencies between things, connecting it to relevance realization and combinatorial explosion.
20:00 — Aaron describes his multi-agent AI lab, including domain tiers, inter-domain translation using semiotics, and how he coined the term complexity to replace the ambiguous word "synergy."
25:00 — Discussion of ontologies, Poincaré discs, and how Aaron's lab explicitly structures relational primacy versus reductionism through a theology agent and an adversary agent.
30:00 — Aaron walks through how his agents manage circulatoryfidelity.com and how the adversary functions as a generative tension mechanism against overclaiming.
35:00 — The episode closes on Aaron's work in vintage car restoration, tying craftsmanship, wiring harnesses, and the philosophy of participatory creation back to his broader research posture.
Key Insights
  1. Abductive reasoning is the overlooked third pillar alongside induction and deduction. Drawn from C.S. Peirce, it works with less firm structures — more intuitive, more shadow-tracking — and Aaron sees it as the right tool for discovering patterns that conventional scientific measurement tends to miss.
  2. Cheap factorization is powerful but dangerous. Most of reality can be broken into parts and measured accurately, but some things lose all their relevant information the moment you separate them. Knowing which is which is the whole game.
  3. Consensus is infrastructure. From a gram to a traffic light to a shared definition, civilization runs on agreed-upon measurements. The moment consensus breaks down — as the French discovered after their revolution — entire systems become unstable and costly to operate.
  4. Constraints are affordances. Entropy and gravity aren't just limitations — they're the ground on which everything is built. Aaron argues that persistent laws of nature are tools, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away, it just makes your model wrong.
  5. Ontology is always present, whether you name it or not. Every agent, every system, every framework has one built in. The question is only whether you've made it explicit and intentional — or left it implicit and unexamined.
  6. Generative tension is a design principle. Aaron built an adversary agent specifically to challenge overclaims in his lab, mirroring the way opposing forces in nature and tradition keep systems honest and prevent overfitting to comfortable conclusions.
  7. Creation is participatory. Whether wrapping a wiring harness for fifty hours or building an agent network, Aaron sees making things as an active, relational process — posture, attention, and intent are what turn potential into reality.
Episode transcript
Stewart Alsop III00:00

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts.

Guest00:36

I'm gonna have to allow something.

Stewart Alsop III00:38

Oh, wait, it gave you a pop up there.

Guest00:41

It did. It gave me a pop up. I had to give it permission. That was actually something that was consistent with all the different devices too. I had to allow permission for all of them.

Stewart Alsop III00:50

Yeah, that's normal behavior, but this is the first time I've heard that there's a pop up to actually begin recording. I like that. welcome to the Crazy Wisdom podcast. I'm going to leave that in, just so everyone can be aware if you watched. A couple weeks ago, I went on a deep dive with Michael about how I was building this application. And here we are again. Welcome, to Aaron Lowry, who is probably now the most interviewed guest I've ever had. great pleasure to talk to you again.

Guest01:22

Always look forward to our conversations, man. Yeah.

Stewart Alsop III01:26

So let's go into all the crazy stuff you've been doing. Can you talk more about, your theory and your actual agents that you're building? Circulatory fidelity is. Did I get that right?

Your first full transcript is free. After that, an email opens every transcript in the index — a list of readers we can write to, not a guest book.

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