📚 Finished reading: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman and I can’t say I’ve learned too much. The book was for the most part a validation of my approach to blogging which has in turn been my approach to life in general: do not be afraid of half-assing when the alternative is no ass at all.

I have been reading Oliver Burkeman’s “Meditations for Mortals”, which builds on many of the concepts first mentioned in “Four Thousand Weeks”. One of them is looking at various aspects of life not as a to-do list that needs completing but as a river you dip in and out of as needed.

One big to-do list that has followed me for more than a decade now has been my ever-growing Instapaper queue. However, the river metaphor didn’t quite work there: the constant flow of a river implies I’d be looking at the newest thing each time I dipped in. But that’s what social media and RSS are for! Dave Winer himself has used the term River of News to describe a type of an RSS aggregator. What, then, to make of Instapaper and what purpose does it serve?

So here is how I’ve been thinking about it: Instapaper (or any other read-it-later service) is where all the hot takes I encounter go to cool down. The Senate of my reading Congress, if you will. And most things I put there will, in fact, turn out to be pieces of misshapen plastic not worth my time. But now and then a masterpiece may come out of the fire that will be worth sharing years hence. So, I really don’t care about the great resignation in academia all that much any more. C.S. Lewis talking about cliques? Yes, please.

Looking at years-old essays and blog posts removes current-event noise from my interpretation. Usually I also can’t remember why I saved an item in the first place. So, the piece will have to stand on its own without the benefit of my knowing that Tyler Cowen, or Cory Doctorow, or whomever else’s link blog I follow had put in a good word about it. Is QAnon destroying the GOP from within? I won’t have to read Ben Sasse’s ten thousand words from 3 years go on it because the answer was clearly “Yes”, and the deed is now done. How does Zeynep Tufekci keep getting the big things right? I don’t have to read the 4-year-old article now since there is a whole book about it (and not the one you think). Etc, etc.

The emerging pattern is that big news pieces in publications like The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic are the lowest yield, as they either become stale or discredited. Give me a thoughtful Substack newsletter any time! Better yet are items that were old when I saved them, like that C.S. Lewis speech from a few paragraphs up, or this brief remembrance of Paul Feyerabend that ends with a poignant paragraph:

Beneath Feyerabend’s rhetorical antics lurked a deadly serious theme: the human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble it may be, often culminates in tyranny. Feyerabend attacked science not because he actually believed it was no more valid than astrology or religion. Quite the contrary. He attacked science because he recognized—and was horrified by—science’s vast superiority to other modes of knowledge. His objections to science were moral and political rather than epistemological. He feared that science, precisely because of its enormous power, could become a totalitarian force that crushes all its rivals.

It was written in 2016. Eight years later, we are in for some crushing.

I enjoyed how this essay about Tolkien was progressing, and then it touched on Taleb and the Incerto and I fell in love:

So how is goodness preserved for Tolkien? This brings us to Tolkien’s great prayer. We are familiar with the idea of a catastrophe. Or, to use more updated terminology, we might adopt Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of a black swan. A black swan is a completely unforeseen and cataclysmic disaster, something that seems to unmake the world. But Tolkien also envisioned the opposite of such an event, in which the effect works in the other direction, in which “everything sad comes untrue,” as Samwise says near the end. This kind of event, which Tolkien called a “eucatastrophe”—the “hope unlooked for” when all seems lost—allows good to face evil even though history remains something of a long defeat.

“Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.”

Yes, they’ve mangled their Talebisms a bit (catastrophe and eucatasrophe can both be black swan events) but that was a beautiful formulation of an antifragile way of life.

“What weather they shall have is not ours to rule” indeed. (↬John Brady)

📚 Finished reading: Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis, who was clearly a genius with words. The elevator pitch — a retelling of the Greek myth of Eros/Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters — does not do it justice. It is, most of all, the clearest and the most visceral explanation of myth and myth-making I’ve encountered since Girard. Indeed, there is a clear connection between the two.

And I know I keep dunking on poor Joseph Campbell, but “Till We Have Faces” also showed how poor of an attempt Campbell’s was to explain myth by intellectualizing it, and turn every old tale into monomythical slop.

Kickstarter developed into a book and board game promo machine, and Alphabet in Motion is the most recent project that got my interest. It’s a pop-up book about typography, and that would have been enough of an elevator pitch to get my interest but that video is quite something.(ᔥswissmiss)

📚 Finished reading: A System for Writing by Bob Doto, and it is the book Antinet… aspired to be but didn’t quite make it for reasons Doto explains in depth. A slip-box, zettelkasten — call it want you want — won’t make you a better writer, but with good notes any writing will be more fun.

M. John Harrison in an unpublished interview from way back before Sunken Lands… came out:

If people didn’t have Joseph Campbell’s artful wish-fulfilment (sic) fantasy to place them at the centre of events and keep them enchanted with their own reflection, they might dump their wish to be princess of all they survey, and instead channel their dissatisfactions into making a better world for everyone.

This line of thinking is why I am a grateful reader of Harrison’s and… not a Campbell fan.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.

📚 I’ve just finished reading a preview of Useful Not True from Derek Sivers, and you can too if you click on that link. It is a slight book that very much deserves to be a book and not a blog post — I can’t wait to get a hold of a hard copy.

Sivers takes the aphorism that all models are wrong, but some are useful — well-known to statisticians and, increasingly, scientists of “hard” sciences — and applies it to mental models. At least that is how I read it: he never mentions the aphorism by name and stays clear of explicitly aligning himself with any particular school of thought. I wouldn’t expect anything else from the author of How to Live.

The stated intent is to introduce the reader to reframing as a way to — and this is now my interpretation — decrease anxiety, increase agency and lead a more purposeful life. It does that splendidly. So well, in fact, that I plan on buying a dozen or so to give out as presents this holiday season (apologies if I have now spoiled the surprise). There is some selfishness there: conversations would be so much more fruitful if we didn’t have to preface everything we said with “I believe that…” and other true but not very useful verbal ticks.

📚 Finished reading: The Friction Project by Robert I. Sutton, one of those books that should have been a blog post. The fluff is a rapid-fire succession of case studies that are too brief to be memorable but too detailed to be quickly filed away. Just listen to the podcast episode and skip the book.