Team environments contain lots of activities (meetings, answering questions, reports, etc) which are quite tricky because they’re *sometimes* very valuable. And that makes it easy not to notice when you’re only doing them to hide when feeling aversion to tough creative problems.
I’ve noticed that displacement activities are much more obvious when working alone. There’s no mailing list of questions to answer, so hiding often look more like surfing the internet, cleaning the house, etc. It’s much harder to accidentally convince yourself that that’s work!
It’s funny: if I get into a good awareness state while in the middle of some tough creative work, I can feel a noticeable “baud rate” of aversive impulses, graspings for easy escapes, etc. Many times a minute! Usually can’t de-identify enough to see that.
Like the past few minutes, while I’ve been intending to read some very dense 19th century psychology papers, I suddenly felt it was very important to write on Twitter about a totally unrelated topic. w̸̩͊h̴̻̔a̴̲̎t̴̼̔ ̵̝͘ả̴̧ ̸͕̿s̶̭͊u̴͔̽r̸͎͝p̵̖͂r̵̥̂i̶̻͆s̵̉ͅe̵̺͝
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One favorite detail comports with my experience: not feeling “beholden” to members, but that they “formalize” my activities—a sense of seriousness and earnest responsibility.
@craigmod Interesting to see how much more serious Craig is about promoting and enriching his membership program than I am. I wonder sometimes about how much I “leave on the table” by keeping mine at greater distance—but I’m terrified of the “cage” he describes, and I feel its proximity.
@craigmod On cynical days, I fear that almost everyone everywhere (incl me) is accidentally spending most of their time pursuing fake goals (being an artist -> “doing” a membership program), and that one must summon tremendous obstinacy, determination, and inconvenience to do otherwise!
I was surprised by some very odd typographic choices in Tufte’s new book. Halfway through, he explains: “Systematic regularity of text paragraphs is universally inconvenient for readers… Idiosyncratic paragraphs assist memory and retrieval” A fascinating idea—I’m not sure!
The tyranny of the grid! The tyranny of text-in-boxes! The oppressive constancy of text-in-boxes-in-rectangles! It is good to see attempts to systematically break this.
“Nearly every paragraph in this book is deliberately visually unique."
Unsurprisingly, he draws a great deal on typographic ideas from poetry, but his ideas about “text matrices” seem mostly influenced by principles of information architecture.
It’s an odd phenomenon: if I tweet anything even slightly crypto-adjacent, my inbox suddenly overflows with grifters—along with thoughtful, well-intentioned people to be sure, but the grifter quotient is quite noticeable. What produces this effect?
In general I really like the variability that comes from having a tweet amplified into different communities.
e.g. sometimes I’ll get retweeted into meditation/philosophy spaces and get lots of great responses with a wonderfully different way of seeing the world
Sometimes Weird Anonymous Twitter will notice something I’ve written, and I’ll get to bear witness to a ton of inscrutable but fascinating conversation reliant on mysterious memes!
No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
As an adjunct to his new map/territory essay, @Meaningness wrote a great blog post introducing his readers to @withorbit and describing how it might help people build meta-rationality. His descriptions of Orbit are in many ways much better than mine! metarationality.com/now-with-orbit
I'm particularly tickled by his description of how the prompt-writing process impacted the prose during the editing process. I had a similar experience with "How to write good prompts." I don't understand this very well yet!
I also really enjoyed his observations about @_awbery_'s use of SRS as part of a program to shift the way they think, a "fundamental reorganization of their worldview and way of thinking and acting."
Sutherland’s ’63 Sketchpad thesis is a great counterpoint to my whining about troubles of doing both research & implementation. His final iteration (incl far-reaching abstraction insights) took ~1 year, including custom hardware! cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UC…
Blackwell and Rodden, who wrote the new preface for the thesis’s ’03 publication, note: "The struggles of developing custom hardware while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are also far removed from current research experiences.” Maybe that should be less frequently true!
(though as I’ve mentioned before the struggles of developing custom software while also exploring far-reaching abstractions are more than I can confidently handle!)