Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

Incidents and Accidents: A Game-Theoretic Study of Risk, Agency, and the Architecture of a Life A formal distinction between mistakes and accidents becomes possible once we analyze human action through the lens of game theory and probability. Every life, whether in sport, work, relationships, or citizenship, unfolds within a set of strategies, constraints, and payoffs. Some outcomes are predictable within this landscape; others are not. A coherent view of risk begins here. Mistakes arise from within the system. An individual selects a strategy—consciously or implicitly—based on skill, history, conditions, and goals. Each strategy carries a known or knowable distribution of outcomes. A skier misjudges a landing, a motorcyclist enters a corner too hot, a climber misreads the rock, a physician makes a timing or inference error. These failures occur inside the expected payoff distribution. They are endogenously generated losses that result from bounded rationality, limited information, cog...

  Planetary Dysbiosis Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — November 2025 In medicine, gastrointestinal dysbiosis describes what happens when the delicate ecology of the gut—billions of organisms in dynamic balance—falls out of alignment. A shift in diet, toxins, or antibiotics can cause one species to dominate, and the system’s elegant self-regulation falters. The result is inflammation, metabolic confusion, and the slow unraveling of harmony. The moment I encountered this concept, I thought of the planet. Earth’s biosphere was never designed to accommodate a single species with the power to alter oceans, atmosphere, soil, and climate in a geological instant. Natural law evolved to manage variation, competition, and slow drift—not an abrupt, globally dominant primate whose ingenuity outpaced its ecological wisdom. What we now call the environmental crisis is, in biological terms, planetary dysbiosis: an imbalance created not by malice but by speed, ...

  Conversations with the Stars Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — November 2025 There have always been aliens living quietly among us. We call them geniuses. Their intelligence bends the normal curvature of the human cognitive landscape. They see structures the rest of us only dimly perceive; they move through conceptual space with a speed so far beyond the ordinary that they might as well be governed by different physics. Every few generations, one of these beings arrives, a Planck, a Newton, a Curie, a Ramanujan, a von Neumann, an Einstein, a Hawking, and suddenly the rest of humanity must revise its understanding of reality. And yet for most people, encounters with this level of mind happen slowly and often unexpectedly. I remember the moment I first brushed up against the edges of that world. I was twelve years old, and one morning I simply woke up and asked myself, what is space? It was not a school assignment. It was not something an adult h...

Walking In The Sky (The 3 mile an hour illusion) Created by Aubrey Lieberman in collaboration with ChatGPT 5.1 turbo — November 2025 There is a peculiar kindness built into the human perceptual system, and it reveals itself whenever we move through space. Walking at a natural pace—three miles an hour, give or take—our minds loosen. Thoughts wander, recombine, stretch into new shapes. The trees lean in, the air lifts slightly, the forest opens and closes with every step. Our bodies settle into a rhythm our nervous system has known for hundreds of thousands of years. We walk; we look; we think. And somehow the world feels exactly matched to the speed of our inner life. The illusion is simple and astonishing. On foot at walking speed, the world arrives gently. On a highway at eighty miles an hour, looking toward the horizon, the distant landscape still seems to drift past at three miles an hour. In a glider thousands of feet above the forests and ponds, the terrain slides beneath the wing...