February 23rd, 2021
- found myself idly thinking of a good magic act, that would involve a reference to the psych studies showing that when kids are young, they can't handle conservation of volume of liquids, and (separately but relatedly) they think you have more liquid if you pour it from a short stout glass to a tall skinny one
- and using some various physical trickeries
- whether
- geometric (weirdly shaped glasses that have nonobvious thicknesses)
- optical (lens shit)
- hiding liquid somewhere (a la infinite soup bowl)
- chemical (maybe there's a little powder that could react with a liquid to make something either have more volume or just change in color in a way that seems to affect size)
- one could get grownups to have similar confusions as little kids
- and with the right framing this could be a very funny act
- fascinating to see which basic concepts don't have a common iconography associated with them
- eg willpower, why, desire
- Convo w Sasha Chapin about writing coaching
- M > "having no demands of my future self"
- my future self can't do anything for me anyway
- S > you're very verbally expressive, you have a lot to say, a lot going on in your head etc
- but you haven't found a... something
- people adapt themselves into ruts
- hard to find the jump on your own
- "production function"
- M > people say I take a long time to get to the point, both with my tweetstorms and with my blog posts
- S > ...sort of. More like your presence on the page isn't constant.
- a lot of good writing has a kind of 1am barstool quality, where the two people talking are the only people in the room
- (aside: he has a colorful orb thing and I'm thinking it would be cool to have sync'd-over-zoom color lights for a call)
- would give a sense of shared context
- Neitzche - an idea is never just an idea
- it's also got a ball of hot stuff
- and sometimes in your writing those get disconnected
- meandery
- not necessarily bad, but yeah
- what if you wrote from a place of conviction...
- [then maybe edited to...?]
- M > that would require me to want to edit tho
- school stuff
- S > is there a version of editing that doesn't suck so much
- is there a version of editing that's good?
- S > self-editing is kind of like rubber-ducking
- notice what the common critiques of you are, and ask if you're doing those things
- eg me, being glib
- S > one technique I use sometimes is writing draft 2 with draft 1 up next to me
- but not copy-paste
- work on writing with a friend
- eg Ben Hoffman, since you said he had thoughts on your writing before
- incorporate their suggestions
- S > strengths are weaknesses & vv
- your introspective vibe means you'll lose viscerality, but you won't be full of shit so much
- S > what we might work on
- M > idk, I want more surface area
- M > UX, perspective-taking
- S > on some level, it's all entertainment
- S > being okay that not every piece of writing does everything
- & re UX, portable chunks
- M >
- S > nonmonoticity
- M > fun very important
- a friend asked about synchronicities
- > Does anyone have good models for the “think of someone as they are calling, and lights flicker at the same time” kind of synchronicities?
- I don't have any model that suggests any particular rate (high or low) for said synchronicities occurring "in the territory", whatever that means, but learning McGilchrist's hemisphere model gave me a sense for how such synchronicities just are part of the right hemisphere's world. They're not super-imposed, they're just part of what's going on. They are no more or less real than the discrete fungible things that make up much of the left hemisphere's world, which is to say "somewhat but not in an absolute sense".