0. 31 Posts, 1k Words, 2^15 Total

 

 

The received wisdom - or so friends and trusted advisors and internet randos (and in particular DF, who is all three) have told me - is that if you want to get good at something, you have to go do a lot of it, and in particular, that if you want to get good at writing, expressing yourself, and rapidly clarifying ideas for a relatively public audience, the indicated thing to do is to write a long series of blog posts.

Separately, people I speak to on topics close to my heart - mathematics, yes, but also aspects of phenomenology, mechanism design, mental health, personal history, and stranger topics yet - have regularly bemoaned the fact that I lack a central repository of all the delicious shiny drippings from my brainpan, or at least have asked me where such a thing might be found and seemed sad when I firmly informed them that such a thing did not exist and quite likely never would. (To all such people: I would apologize for my lateness, but it is in the nature of a mathcritter to delay and to be slow but firmly correct, rather than to be biased towards action. This is a personal vice which I am determinedly correcting now. Maybe some of you will end up seeing this post - I genuinely hope that it cheers you.)

To that end, and to make good on commitments that I have made to myself, to research colleagues, and to numerous friends, I am (gods help me) finally starting a blog; after all, blog posts seem descriptively to be the source of most of the social status accredited to and accepted by those in the Reverend Bayes Cinematic Megaverse (RBCM), and anyway I really do need the practice writing clearly and relatively quickly about assorted topics. Having decided as much, though, I found myself left with one more important question - how much writing should I do, and on what schedule?

I have heard plans of 30-day and 100-day and “until I run out of steam” plans, and word-count plans on a variety of different schedules and on a variety of different lengths, but never have I heard of combining the two. Perhaps the one I’m about to describe will catch on. (I strongly suspect not, but I can be certain that it won’t if I don’t do it myself, and equally certain that it won’t if I don’t explicitly describe what I’m doing and why.) I have settled on the following structure: I will write 31 posts, including this one. Each post will be roughly 1k words, and each post will be relatively self-contained and about a topic somehow dear to me - though some of them might be one of a pair, or one of a short series, or about a topic less important to me personally but which I think I have some advantage or special insight on, or which I think might be useful to other people. In sum, I will end up with 2^15 = 32,768 words, or maybe a few more; the power of two delights me for personal reasons, and 32k seems like a natural number of words to end up with as a result. This shall be both a strict lower bound and a weak gesture at an upper bound, that I might not feel compelled to write forever and thus end up writing nothing. More is not better here. Likewise, the roughly daily schedule I plan to post these on will hopefully spur me towards a measure of speed and forestall my otherwise pernicious urge to edit and edit forever until the delicious posts all mold over in my drafts folder. Slower is definitely not better here! And of course, the shape of the ultimate aim is to end up with 32k words - if I should fall well short on one day and go overlong on another, this is entirely acceptable, as long as it all balances out in the end. Some topics call for many more words than others, after all. I am generally allowed to write up posts in advance - I plan to post this zeroth post on June 30th (that is, July 0th), but as I type these words it’s the afternoon of June 20th, the eve of the summer solstice - so long as I end up with one post per day. One might justly draw a correspondence between the looseness of wordcount and the looseness of time.

Naturally, I will generally follow epistemic and discursive best practices as they are understood within the RBCM. I will always avoid literal and factual falsehoods, especially straightforward ones, and truthseek and truth-track instead; seek to express myself clearly, precisely, and capably; mark and defend my claims as needed, giving a sense of how certain I am in them when that’s appropriate; keep my observations and my scholarship separate from my inferences and my guesses whenever sensible; give examples when it’s practical for me to do so; and generally aim to give light rather than spit heat. I do this not as an attempt at superiority, nor particularly as an attempt to pander to an audience likely to be drawn largely from the ranks of the RBCM, but out of a sense of aesthetic joy in doing so, and because I feel that it would totally defeat the grander purpose of the whole project - that being to practice expressing myself clearly and crystallizing ideas floating around my head in some more durable and legible form, so that more people might grapple with and enjoy them, and that even should I vanish without a trace some fine day, some meaningful trace of me might remain.

One last question remains - what do I plan to write about? I have a list of about 50 topics sitting in a gdoc right now as candidates for a post, about a third of which are bolded as particularly promising topics; they range from (as above) mathematics to mental health topics to strange aspects of phenomenology to personal lore and projects to other, stranger things. You may notice that 50 is larger than 31. This is no accident. Some of the topics will likely not see the light of day, and others might end up too short to make up a full post and thus be fused with another similar topic - for instance, I have a post planned which details my theory of how delta-thin hyperbolic spaces are an excellent match for the cognitive binding of olfaction into specific scents, and another which lays out my theory of how flavor pairing works in cooking and drink-making; perhaps these will each end up being too short to fill out a full 1k words with, in which case they will be a single post. Or perhaps not, and they will remain separate!

At the end of the day, though, I am writing all of this for myself, and not particularly for anyone else; writing it because I want to improve my craft as a writer and as an expresser and distiller of ideas, and anyone I manage to impress or delight somehow as a result will just be gravy. Let me then leap into the sky and land face-first to seize recklessly upon the ideas I seek to express, and let me come up with writing worthy of display rather than a faceful of embarrassment.

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