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A Shard Theory of Everything - by Jason Hausenloy

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Shard Theory is an (insane ambitious) attempt to explain human and AI learning and behavior. The basic premise is that the way we act can be described as following learned context-dependent heuristics, or "shards". I've always been a sucker for simple, grand, ambitious theories (Assembly Theory? defining art?). After about the fifth time giving my ten-minute spiel about why this is so awesome (and making the same joke about how unhelpfully vague the name is), I thought I might collect the explanation in a single place. We can work through an example: Say I'm a baby, and my dad puts a lollipop in my hands. I do a bunch of random actions, and then, by chance, one of those actions leads me to lick the lollipop. Suddenly, I get a rush of endorphins in my brain, and the entire set of context and actions that lead up to me getting that sugar high are "rewarded" — detecting red pixels in my eyes, moving my hand towards my mouth, licking. This creates a "lick lollipop shard" that activates whe

A Shard Theory of Everything My favorite insanely ambitious explanation of learning and behavior Jason Hausenloy Sep 01, 2025 8 2 Share Shard Theory is an (insane ambitious) attempt to explain human and AI learning and behavior. The basic premise is that the way we act can be described as following learned context-dependent heuristics, or "shards". I've always been a sucker for simple, grand, ambitious theories ( Assembly Theory ? defining art? ). After about the fifth time giving my ten-minute spiel about why this is so awesome (and making the same joke about how unhelpfully vague the name is

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