running in public, tumbling in private

towards iterative refinement of mediums messages and self

i started this substack more than a year ago borne from my qualms of ‘i should be writing more’ finally passing the activation threshold during the pandemic simmer of ‘21. despite the appropriate ritualized beginning of coconut smashings and incense burnings and successfully polishing out a gleaming about page that embodied what this was all about, i barely wrote anything. the few pieces on here were written for other purposes and transplanted to dampen the mausoleum vibes.

many books can be penned about writer’s block with scant interest from anyone other than those indulging in a touch of schadenfreude to distract themselves from their own affliction. but in this case it seemed less like the pen was jammed and more like the book was rarely opened to a fresh page. the inkpot was brimming with ideas but it manifested as scribbles on margins, aphorisms on post-its and vague grandstanding ideas for future books with titles like ‘dreams of the neural net’, instead of the unglamorous, consistent effort to create concrete artefacts.

maybe part of the problem was in the very framing of the above. blogging is supposed to be fun and filled with whimsical rabbit hole diving, not dredging through the coal mines. the liminality of a substack, lying somewhere between the website and the newsletter, reinforced by my explicit intentions of treating this as a place to both run and tumble, probably didn’t help with the feeling of paralysis. do i write a rigorous piece on the psychedelic blurring of science and pseudoscience or a half-coherent meta-ramble on my failures to stick to my past self’s script.

why not both?

because it didn’t happen last time oh slow-to-learn sapien.

peter thiel talks about how he scouts for people with zen-like opposites - incredibly open minded but also stubborn - as markers for their capability to do things. this seems like a useful precept for what i want to do with RT as a foreseeable future project. i want to write rigorous thought essays, book reviews and distillations of scientific papers (with normal capitalizations and all that she-bang) but also just string together thoughts and have fun with the unfolding metaphors and the bees they might attract. and i want to push for quality in my research and articulation while retaining epistemic humility and flexibility, all while pushing myself to simply write consistently.

the nice part of substack is that the blog-newsletter liminality is very much in your control - you can choose which posts land in boxes. i like the idea of only sending out my runs to the world while keeping my tumbles tucked away in the recesses of this site. and there’s a perverse incentive then to make sure i keep running to bury the tumbles.

ultimately, what i really want is to keep pressing the pedal of iterative refinement that writing engenders while also trying to provide value by making knowledge more accessible.

cheers,

ask