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Writing an essay is like living in a temporary intellectual home for awhile. It means you are spending time with the subject, getting to know it’s details, nuance, and depth. It’s the opposite of being an intellectual tourist with a passing understanding.

Read Against 3x Speed by David Perell.

See also:

• Writing is like getting naked in public, it’s revealing when you don’t know what you are talking about.
• Jumping into an essay is difficult, start with notes to clarify understanding, and try incremental writing.
• Writing is thinking.

The growing population of cryptocurrency millionaires have created a new self-tenured class. They don’t need money and are free to work on pursuits that match their interests (likely more things related to Web3). This actually a good thing for innovation.

Without the pressures of a stable paycheck, the self-tenured class can work on ambitious projects some which have no financial payoff. Has this ever happened in history?

Read the tweet from Sam Lessin.

Both skepticism and dogmatism are counter to science. With too much skepticism, nothing can be believed—not even our own senses. With too much dogmatism, the wisdom of crowds is unquestioned and quickly turns into the madness of crowds.

Science requires a bit of both to be done effectively. Skepticism to drive the questions and low levels of dogmatism (faith) so that you can build on top of acquired knowledge.

(I first heard this in a talk by Peter Thiel)

See also:

• Entrepreneurship often requires greater degrees of dogmatism (conviction) to deal with skepticism.
• Cynicism also runs counter to science, but it’s more of a skepticism that anything changes.
• Richard Hamming’s You and Your Research about doing truly great work in science.

Some people find it rude to receive a Calendly link when scheduling a meeting. It pushes the effort of finding a time onto them rather going through the ceremonial back and forth of recursively reducing the set of date times to a mutually agreeable one.

To soften the blow to their ego, I find the following line works best:

“How about a call next week? Let me know what works best for you (calendly link if that’s more convenient).”

90% of the time, the person will schedule the meeting using the Calendly link and spare everyone the back and forth. I suspect the “if that’s more convenient” frames the desired outcome better. It shows you care about their time (convenience) and it’s offered as an alternative (not a command that comes off as presumptuous).

Side note, some people have admins who manage their calendars. It’s best to work with them to book the meeting as it’s more likely the person you are trying to meet will rearrange their calendar. (You might still save them time by sharing your Calendly link for reference).

See also:

• Convenience is king and being the one to present a convenient option helps you drive the conversation.
• A similar problem to scheduling is making it easy to say yes to making an introduction (also through convenience).
• Rescheduling a meeting numerous times is a weird flex, but digital status symbols arise from homogeneity.

Cynics believe that nothing ever changes at a fundamental level. By it’s nature, cynicism is a dead end where everything stays the same over time.

Both optimism and pessimism are the opposite of cynicism. Optimists see things getting better over time. Pessimists see the world getting worse over time. They both believe the world changes while cynicism does not.

In that way, cynicism is a helpless ideology because it ignores the world changes.

Read Opt Out of Cynicism by Dimitar Simeonov.

See also:

• On being an optimist with anxiety (things are getting better overall, but nervous about what can go wrong)
• On balance, default optimism is rational because it’s helpful even when faked
• Cynicism implies everything is a complete system, but Godel incompleteness proves it never is

A study of 211,000 COVID-19 cases and 78,000 Omicron variant cases found that the vaccine is only 33% effective at preventing infection by 70% effective at preventing hospitalization.

That more or less confirms earlier guesses that Omicron has more vaccine escape and is less deadly. However, it’s possible that Omicron can kill more people because Omicron is 5 times more transmissible than the COVID-19 Delta variant.

Read Omicron variant more resistant to vaccine but causes less severe covid, major South African study concludes from The Washington Post.

See also:

• Unlike the Delta variant, vaccine escape of the Omicron variant is very real. Previous coverage of Delta suffered from base rate fallacy.

Hypnagogia briefly occurs between wakefulness and sleep. A hypnagogic state can be achieved by purposefully waking yourself during this period and can result in a heightened state of creativity.

Notable practitioners include Salvador Dali, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

Composer Giuseppe Tartini wrote a violin sonata known as the Devil’s Trill after an experience where he listened to the devil play in a dreamlike state. It’s one of the most technically difficult pieces to play for violin.

A simple way to count the number of words written in org-roam notes is to use the following bash script.

cat *.org | wc -w

Assuming your note file names include a date prefix (mine is yyyy-mm-dd--{suffix}), you can count the number of words per year, month, or day using a * after the prefix.

cat 2021*.org | wc -w

See also:

• Querying stats from org-roam

Centralized systems are criticized for making unilateral decisions about what people can see and not see within their privately controlled network. This leads to strong anti-censorship sentiment and desire for censorship free content where anyone can say anything. However, look no further than your spam folder for a glimpse of what a truly decentralized and censorship free content network could look like.

Read The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization by Byrne Hobart.

See also:

• One reason why it would look like your spam folder (at least from the onset) is that decentralized systems are most attractive to outcasts of other systems.
• It’s not just content—crypto is the new forum for old scams.
• Web3 suffers from many examples like this.

The unifying desire to make money through speculation is what will make Web3 successful.

At first, decentralized systems are most attractive to outcasts of other systems, but now that some people are making a lot of money from it, they will want to protect their investment and drive out bad actors.

For example, the killer app for cryptocurrency was facilitating illegal transactions, but now the killer app DeFi. This increasingly mainstream surge is driven by the promise of making money and when bad actors get in the way, there is strong interest in removing them.

See also:

• Decentralized systems that work need hierarchical regulation and start to resemble centralized systems (absolutists will never be happy)

One issue with decentralized systems is that, from the onset, such systems are most appealing to outcasts of other systems. These outcast groups are more extreme (political views, illicit activity) than those using mainstream systems. This can be an impediment to development and growth of a network.

An example of this is free speech absolutists who are banned from a centralized system like Twitter for harmful content. They naturally flock to a decentralized system to evade censorship (like Mastodon) thereby flooding the new decentralized system with content that repels mainstream users and hinders adoption (Mastodon has unfortunately found a niche with the far-right).

Read The Promise and Paradox of Decentralization by Byrne Hobart.

See also:

• Decentralized systems that work need hierarchical regulation otherwise a small in-group implicitly comes into power.
• The internet has American values encoded like freedom of speech, making certain kinds of content impossible to eradicate.
• Other negative consequences of informal structures like a decentralized system.
• Web3

After meeting in person with my teammates for work, I realized it’s far easier to joke around and riff in person rather than on Zoom. For this group of people, my primary means of communication was Zoom for the past 6 months and the effects were noticeable.

It has something to do with removing latency and improved feedback with body language. Everyone can hear even if there are overlapping voices. Jokes are more responsive.

See also:

• Self-presentation causes zoom fatigue, less so for in-person meeting with close colleagues.
• Low-bandwidth collaboration would benefit from a snappy way to make jokes. For example, a funny Slack emoji to react to a comment.
• The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. An under looked at cause might be jokes.

In anticipation of a wave of cases due to the COVID-19 omicron variant, NYC requires private employers with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccination for in-person workers. Every worker must have their first vaccine does by December 27, 2021.

This is a sweeping mandate is the most ambitious to date. However, the next NYC Mayor takes over in January so it’s anyone’s guess if it will stay.

See also:

• OSHA mandate-or-test workplace vaccine rule pushes COVID-19 prevention onto employers (and is held up in court battles)
• COVID-19
• American values are incompatible with managing the pandemic

After looking into linting prose in Emacs, I found a way to roll your own prose linter setup using vale (an extensible prose linter), efm-langserver (a generic language server), and eglot (a language server mode for Emacs).

Configure efm-langserver

In /${HOME}/.config/efm-langserver/config.yaml add the following setup for linting with vale. (This was difficult to figure out because of the non-existent documentation, but I found someone else’s efm-langserver config for vale).

version: 2
root-markers:
  - .git/
log-file: /{SOME PATH FOR LOGS}/efm.log
log-level: 1
tools:
  vale: &vale-lint
    prefix: vale
    lint-command: 'vale --output line ${INPUT}'
    lint-stdin: false
    lint-ignore-exit-code: true
    lint-formats:
      - '%f:%l:%c:%m'

languages:
  org:
    - <<: *vale-lint

Configure Emacs

In your Emacs init.el, configure eglot to use efm-langserver when using org-mode. Vale has support for org-mode files as of v2.2.

(add-hook 'org-mode-hook #'eglot-ensure)
(add-to-list 'eglot-server-programs '((org-mode) "efm-langserver"))

Now when you open an org-mode file in Emacs you’ll see all your prose linting issues!

See also:

• Turn Emacs into a focused writing tool
• Using an LSP server with custom vale styles could be an interesting way to set up an organizational linter for engineers

When there is no formal structure in a group of people that interact over any significant amount of time, informal structures appear. Informal structures are communication channels through networks of friends in the group that share similar beliefs and traits that give rise to influence. This is the nature of elites—a small group of insiders that exhibits informal influence over a larger group because they know how decisions are made.

See also:

• This idea comes from my reading of The Tyranny of Structurelessness.
• The concept of elites seem to be explained by dyadic ties in network theory: the stronger the tie between two individuals, the more overlap they have in friendship circles. By definition it is exclusionary and the flow of information is more tightly bound to that group.
• In-group favoritism shows that elites (the in-group) will give preferential treatment to other members of the in-group.
• All bridges are weak ties, for elites that means they can have a wide reach if they also maintain a large number of acquaintances (such as a following on social media).

Emacs can be customized to create a beautiful, focused writing environment akin to Ulysses, iA Writer, Bear, or other minimalist markdown editors.

Reduce visual noise

• Use writeroom-mode to hide frames and headings in the default emacs chrome
• Compile emacs for the natural title bar in macOS. This further reduces visual noise and makes for a more minimalist look and feel.
• Use a theme like doom-plain-dark or doom-plain-light for fewer colors and visual cues that can be distracting.
• Change links styles to remove bold (it’s already underlined).
• Hide markup characters like ~/emphasis/ by enabling org-hide-emphasis-markers to reduce the number of sigils like brackets, parenthesis, tick marks, etc.

Use a different font for writing than for coding I personally prefer monospace fonts for writing because it pairs well with org-mode headings and gives it a typewriter look and feel.

I don’t like to use the same font for writing as I do for coding. Mainly because it needs to look good larger than what I code in (Cascadia Code) and having a separation between writing and coding makes it easier to concentrate (“I’m in writing mode now”).

Monospace font recommendations:

• iA Writer Duo (what I’m using)
• Colophon Space Mono (more rounded and spacious)

Other proportional fonts:

• Monotype Bembo (used by Edward Tufte, similar to Georgia or a Garamond to give it a journal-y feel)

Transparency You can add a little extra flair by adding transparency to the background. Eval the following elisp expression using M-:, (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha 80).

See also:

• Using vale with emacs for prose linting further improves the Emacs writing environment
• This is a good example of improving the ‘hand feel’ for writing on a computer

The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman.

Some of the downsides of informal structures in an unstructured group are:

• Decision making: people will listen to others because they like them, not because it is a good idea or significant
• Accountability and responsibility: the informal group has no formal responsibility to the wider group. Their influence is not based on what they do and so they can not be compelled to act in the best interest of the entire group.

Read The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

When rules are implicit, only those who know how decisions are made can participate. The only way one can know how decisions are made are to spend enough time cultivating friendships with the elites that establish the informal structures of the group. Therefore, informal structures are exclusionary (one must be a member of the elite) and have other negative consequences.

Formal structures counteract these issues by making decision making explicit. Everyone now has the opportunity to participate because it’s more clear how to do that.

See also:

• This idea comes from The Tyranny of Structurelessness
• Unstructured groups form the basis for elites

An elite individual is an oxymoron. The nature of an elite is membership to a group that exhibits informal influence or control over a larger group. This is often misused in politics “candidate x is an elite”. Regardless of how well known an individual is they can never be an elite.

From The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

A commonly cited reason for Web3 is that centralized systems (government, banking) are broken and decentralized systems are the way forward (blockchains, cryptocurrencies). The problem is that fully decentralized systems have all sorts of issues in the same way that, for example, truly free markets do—exploitation, theft, perverse incentives, and so on. As such, engineering solutions can only go so far and are doomed to rediscover the need for hierarchical regulation to make it work.

Read 100 years of whatever this will be from apenwarr.

A problem with Twitter’s advertising business is that it’s product is used for text-based information (tied to the physical world like work or current events). Users are more engaged and combative on Twitter, making it a poor fit for direct response advertising (users are probably more annoyed by it too).

Contrast that to Instagram, images and short videos that are highly produced to show your best self. Users are taking a break from something else to look at it and the aspirational content makes it a great fit for direct response advertising.

From Twitter Has a New CEO; What About a New Business Model? by Stratechery.

A commonly cited success story of NFTs is CryptoPunks. They were 10,000 uniquely generated pixel art avatars released on the blockchain for free. They’ve since become a hugely sought after item with market prices greater than $7MM.

I didn’t understand what’s going on until hearing Kevin Rose and Aftab Hossain talk about collecting them—these are Star Wars action figure collectors sharing their passion for buying the digital equivalent of a Rocket Firing Boba Fett.

It’s far more endearing to think of NFT enthusiasts as Star Wars action figure collectors.

See also:

• CryptoPunks prove that NFTs provide digital scarcity because there is a market (buyers and sellers).
• Web3 as weaponized Star Wars action figure collectors is an interesting dystopian angle.
• Bitcoin and Ethereum use the same amount of electricity as the country of Austria whereas those tiny Star Wars action figures were a one time plastic. The difference in relative pollution curves might match the difference in price ($150,000 for the most rare Star Wars toy, $7MM for the most rare CryptoPunk).