TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Why write?

I haven't posted anything of substance here in a long time. Life has been weird since a couple days after my September 2014 post. I'm in a mind state I've been in before, and I'll work through it eventually, but during this time I'm just not capable of caring about much of anything beyond what I deem necessary in order to get to tomorrow, so my actions are limited.

I'd like to write more. I enjoy playing with ideas, not necessarily taking them seriously, but sometimes updating to some conclusion that results from playing. For example, it's kind of fun to think about ideas that would make big democratic governments work more efficiently, And by exploring that thought-space, one can arrive at conclusions where doing X is significantly better than doing Y, even if this other totally different and opposing thing Z is better than all of them. It's like noticing that a flu is strictly a lot better than stomach cancer, even though they're both terrible and being healthy is totally superior. Except it's funner to work with more abstract things than sicknesses, and it becomes more exploratory that way (since things aren't self-evident, or "trivially derived from some framework but I'll never show you a proof"... you have to do work to explore), and in the end sometimes you'll have something you can reduce back to a less abstract belief or suggestion.

What little idea playing I've been doing lately has taken place mostly in the context of my head. And unsurprisingly, it has less quality. Writing (and the concurrent and following process of editing) creates a better environment for exploring, because you have to crystallize what exactly you're thinking and not just rely on your brain's intuition. I have many thoughts that are interesting, but not expressed in words, but then I forget about the thought because I didn't write it down.

See Full Post and Comments