Blogs that have improved the way I think

I wrote last week that if you started your own blog (not a Substack, that's the metaphorical equivalent of writing for Uber) and emailed it to me, I might read it – and if your words make their way into my thoughts, I'll share them.

Which means that I ought to share some of the words that have already earned their way into my mind, not because I want you to know what I'm looking for (eww, gross, we might as well wait for the Giant to kill us all) but because I want you to know what I'm thinking about.

Also because these writers might be worth your time and attention.

The first piece of online writing that effectively rewrote everything I had ever considered was Paul Graham's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" from 2009. It was a companion piece to Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez's Your Money or Your Life, in the sense that I had already been working towards financial independence (since 2004, when I graduated college and found a copy of YMOYL at the public library) but now I understood that I was also working towards mental independence. Pair it with Graham's later and more complete essay "How to Do Great Work," which Larry and I have read aloud to each other twice since it was published in 2023.

The next piece of online writing that changed everything was Carey Wallace's "On Discipline," published in Comment Magazine in 2011:

I thought of [writing for at least five hours a week] as a simple commitment, something that could be fit into the context of any life, with enough discipline. I was shocked to discover how much it actually demanded. The problem is this: creation requires firing on all cylinders. If people carved out time on a Saturday morning, but were out till three on Friday night, the time was compromised. If they hadn’t been eating well, the time was compromised. If they were distracted by other pressing worries, the time was compromised. Part of an artist’s task is to shut out these distractions and listen only for the voice of their work, and no artist can survive without that species of discipline. But many of the problems the artists in the program faced were genuine, too visceral to be ignored. In fact, introducing discipline in one area seemed to exacerbate problems in the others. “When I push on one area,” one artist said, “the rest of my life seems to go crazy.”

There is no such thing, we discovered, as disciplining one corner of a life. There are only disciplined or undisciplined lives.

This piece was sent to me by a person who was, at the time, urging me not to pursue this path. I decided to pursue it even harder, and have emailed this essay to pretty much everyone who's ever become my friend.

A few years later I read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and The Sequences and poked my head into that whole deal, and it turned out to be adjacent to my deal at two differing vertices:

1. It's not about making art, which is to say that it's not about organizing a specific and unique arrangement of thought and insight at a level of quality that continues to provide new and relevant information every time the work of art is perceived
2. It focuses on a dink/donk rating system that prioritizes and incentivizes groop-a-doop (a term I just made up, although you can read it as the middle tier in Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle)

That said, I still think about "Slack," (Don't Worry About the Vase), "Sabbath hard and go home" (Compass Rose), and "Sort By Controversial" (Slate Star Codex) on a regular basis. I also have to thank Compass Rose for introducing me to the idea of Taking Children Seriously, although it turned out to be an enormous distraction that made me into a less-capable teacher for at least four months, so perhaps thank isn't the right word. It was interesting to think about, until I found the flaw in it, and now I don't have to think about it anymore.

The two people whose blogs were most effectively like the kind of writing I want to read are, respectively, "pointless" by Dave Malloy and "paperpools" by Helen DeWitt. Neither of those blogs are currently active, but the archives are worth reading if you're interested in the process of uncompromising artistry. DeWitt is my favorite living author and Malloy my favorite living composer, if you're curious – and it's funny how imprecise the word "favorite" can be when you don't understand what I mean, which is to say that I would like my work to be like theirs, which is to say that if it happens my work will be nothing like theirs but aspects of my process might be similar.

On the subject of precision: I've been thinking most recently about Elliot Temple's writing on philosophical and artistic standards. I'm interested in the idea that many of us don't fully understand what someone is trying to tell us, either because their message is unclear or our attention is diverted or, more often, because we are not able or willing to understand the meaning being presented (Ray Peat also warned us about this in his discussion of William Blake, and it's one of the ongoing threads in George Eliot's Middlemarch [which quotes that same Blake poem about the clod and the pebble]).

Here's a sample from Temple's "Dialog: Non-Consumption of Philosophy" that gives you an idea of what I've been considering:

Elliot: Do you think every set of artistic standards is reasonable and equally correct, or are some mistaken?

John: Some standards, like “the more green paint, the better” are silly.

Elliot: Do you have one complete set of artistic standards that you decided on, and use to judge all art, including your own?

John: I don’t know; I hadn’t thought about that.

Elliot: How can you do any art without some artistic standards to guide you in deciding how to do it? You must have some sense of what you think is good art.

I do, in fact, have a sense of what I think is good art; much of what I hope to do next is to continue to refine and specify.

Now you know what I think might be good blogging.