Introduction

2020-12-04 • 4 min read

Let Pallas live in the city that she founded.
Let me dwell here lamenting in the forest.[1]

– Virgil

In these great times, wherein every human on Earth can put down their deeply considered ideas and offer them, free of charge, with no thought to their career or reputation, aiming only to shoot up some added utility into the swollen groin of the species and, in so doing, gloriously trace the footsteps of the old heroes – wherein everybody can offer their ideas thusly to their fellow humans – in these great times, it takes a special kind of person, surely, to think they have something to add to the reserves of knowledge already mined by the writer class. But that is what I intend, and will now proceed, to do.

Peter Singer wrote, “Beginning to reason is like stepping onto an escalator that leads upward and out of sight. Once we take the first step, the distance to be travelled is independent of our will and we cannot know in advance where we shall end.”[2] I don’t doubt that this is what reasoning is like for the author of Animal Liberation and “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, but for me reasoning is more like tumbling down into a dimly lit labyrinth. I still don’t know in advance where I’ll end up, but I also don’t know where I’m going, and there are tempting sirens around every corner.

Many of the writers who are most important to me – like Arthur Schopenhauer and Gerald Murnane – are or were relative outsiders. You might think that there’s a correlation between outsiderness and quality of thought or writing. It seems that way to me, but I think that correlation is a product of Berkson’s paradox. Being a good thinker helps a writer achieve fame, but so do a number of other qualities, like having social connections or writing in a popular style. Any of those things will help a writer become famous, which means that the quality of thought will be lower on average among the insiders, because there’ll be among them those who got by mostly with their connections or their popular style, whereas the outsider, having neither of those to their advantage, must become famous (or not) on the strength of thought and expression alone.

Nevertheless, I do think there is something special about outsiders. The epigraph reads:

Let Pallas live in the city that she founded.
Let me dwell here lamenting in the forest.[3]

Two boons favour the forest-dweller. The first is the freedom of not having to engage in the ever-shifting fashions of the city. Whether you want it or not, those fashions may eat your mind; your mind will be preoccupied by the city-dweller’s orthodoxies whether you agree with them or not. (If you are fortunate enough to find a community of people who are focused on what matters, that is a different story.)

The second is the freedom of not having to compete. In a city, you will be comparing yourself to your peers, and you will be tempted to try to one-up them, and to judge your work by their standards. The forest gives you the solitude and quiet needed for experimentation and reflection. (Of course there’s a tension here in that Athens was the forge and founding place for much of the kind of intellectual pursuit that I enjoy. I don’t know how to resolve that though as so often it appears one must strike a balance.)

Here’s what to expect from this blog moving forward:

  1. I’ve decided to make things simple for myself and so will simply write about whatever I’m interested in at any moment. “I learned to trust my obsessions.”[4] That may or may not include things like philosophy, poetry, literature, history, politics, science, programming and music.
  2. I will try to write short pieces, 500 to 2,000 words, which should make for 2-8 minutes or so of reading time. That should make it easier for me to write them and easier for you to read them.
  3. I speak for no one but myself. Other people speak for others, but I don’t know what gives them the right. No popular movement, no democratic process, no Quakerish consensus-making has put me here.

Edit 2023-07-02: I have not really stuck to writing posts of between 500 and 2K words, and in fact have recently changed my approach to write fewer, but substantially longer and more well-researched posts. Example products of this new direction include Against LLM Reductionism and The Prospect of an AI Winter. I endorse this, as I think <2K words are often insufficient to properly communicate and explore a non-obvious proposition. I think generally that a single 5K-word post is more than 10x as valuable as 10 500-word posts, even if most people only read the summary of the former.

Footnotes #

  1. Virgil & Ferry, D. (2000). The Eclogues of Virgil: A Translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ↩︎

  2. Singer, P. (2011). The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ↩︎

  3. Virgil & Ferry, D. (2000). The Eclogues of Virgil: A Translation. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ↩︎

  4. That’s something Robert Bly once said or wrote, but I wasn’t able to find the exact source. ↩︎

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