Turning meta-rationality inside-out

Plus: upcoming live Substack 🙋 AMA, Vajrayana ࿇ Q&A, new short 📺 videos

In this monthly News&Notes issue:

• 🙋 Substack live video AMA: You can participate! Starts October 19th

• ࿇ Vajrayana Q&A Zoom: the next one is October 12th

• 🌞 Help me update LED recommendations: against the ❄️ winter blahs

• 🙃 Metarat is tough: maybe it’ll help to turn it inside-out?

• 📚 An unfinishable encyclopedia-writing project: major re-thinking required

• 🎥 Let’s make movies: short videos you may have missed

Housekeeping stuff first, then some meta-rational reflection on writing and reading the meta-rational Part of the meta-rationality book, and then two fun video shorts…

Substack live video AMA

Let’s do an experiment! I’d like to better facilitate community around the sorts of things I write about. Evolving Ground provides a venue for the Buddhist aspects. (The Q&A sessions I’ve done there have gone well.) There’s not yet a venue for discussion and collaboration around meta-rationality or meaningness. (Apart from the comment sections on my posts, which are sometimes vigorous and productive!)

Substack has just introduced a new live video feature for this purpose. I’d like to try it! The video is broadcast-only, so it’s less interactive than a Zoom, where we can all see each other, but it’s accompanied by live text chat. So let’s give that a go first, and maybe switch to Zoom later. (If you’d definitely prefer Zoom, or some other platform, let me know!)

“AMA” means “ask me anything.” I’ll check the chat during the live session, but will give priority to questions posted in the chat earlier. I’ll open the Substack chat on Saturday October 19th, and you can ask questions (and get community discussion started) there then.

The live video session will be Tuesday October 22nd at 8 a.m. Pacific Time (11 a.m. Eastern). It will last as long as it takes :)

Participation is possible for subscribers (whether contributing or free) only:

Substack live streams are available only through the app, on mobile devices:

You’ll get a notification when we go live, with one-click instructions for how to get in.

Vajrayana Q&A

Vajrayana is the unusual branch of Buddhism I discuss here on Substack, and on Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires. I offer live Zoom gatherings monthly, answering questions, and maybe asking some, and facilitating discussion (together with Jared Janes, Evolving Ground co-founder). You can read more about the purpose and format here. The video excerpts I’ve posted will also give a sense of what they may be like.

The next one will be on Saturday, October 12th, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific. The session is available only to Evolving Ground members, but membership is free. If you sign up, you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to the session date you’ll get the zoom link.

Think ahead and bring your puzzlements, problems, and excitements!

Help me update LED recommendations for the winter blahs

On the equinox, a week ago, it was cold and dark and rainy, and I was feeling the first twinges of the winter blahs. So I turned on the industrial LED panels for the first time this year, and felt much better.

Two posts last year explained how VERY bright lights can chase the blahs away: “YOU NEED MORE LUX” and “Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs.”

Absolutely tons of people tweeted that they tried this, and it dramatically improved their lives—much more even than I was expecting.

LED technology improves every year, so I’d like to update the posts, and I’d like your help.

Have you tried industrial-strength LEDs? Do you have any practical advice about what type to buy, how to mount the lights, brands or formats that did or didn’t work well, whether high-CRI is better, how many watts were enough for you, or anything else that could benefit others?

Turning meta-rationality inside-out

After a couple months of making no progress on the meta-rationality book, I got it unstuck in September. My previous monthly News&Notes post complained about the difficulty. Overcoming it required rethinking the overall structure of Part Four. (That is the part I am working on; it is the part that is actually about meta-rationality.)

The restructuring turns it inside-out. It is a matrix transpose—in other words, a diagonal flip, turning rows into columns and vice versa. To simplify, let’s say the Part had four major themes: purpose, ontology, epistemology, and system creation. (It actually has several more.) I thought that, after an abstract conceptual overview, it would be good to illustrate each theme more concretely in the domain of software development; and then to treat each theme at greater length and greater generality. So a simplified outline was:

• Abstract conceptual overview

• Illustrations of the major themes in the software domain

  • Software purposes

  • Software ontology

  • Software epistemology

  • Software creation

• General discussion of purposes

• General discussion of ontology

• General discussion of epistemology

• General discussion of system creation

I found that the “Software purposes” section simply couldn’t be understood without an extensive discussion of purposes in general. So I wrote that, and then the illustration in the software domain.

It seems likely that the same problem will apply to the other major themes. And, it turns out that explaining the software domain is a lot of text. So there’s another problem, which is this structure will give the impression that the Part is about software development, which it isn’t. That’s just meant to be an illustration. And there’s meant to be lots of examples from other domains.

So it seems a better structure will look like this:

• Abstract conceptual overview

  • Some short specific examples mixed in

• Purposes, considered meta-rationally

  • Conceptual overview

  • Short specific examples

  • Extended illustration in the software domain

• Meta-rational ontology

  • Conceptual overview

  • Short specific examples

  • Extended illustration in the software domain

• Meta-rational epistemology

  • Conceptual overview

  • Short specific examples

  • Extended illustration in the software domain

• Meta-rational system creation

  • Conceptual overview

  • Short specific examples

  • Extended illustration in the software domain

Inside-out, in other words.

An unfinishable encyclopedia-writing project?

There’s another problem. I made an annual plan on January 1st this year. Its top priority was to finish writing the meta-rationality book. In February, I made a plan for its Part Four. The plan’s summary text included:

• This Part introduces a domain that has had no previous book-length discussion (and mostly no formal discussion at all). It aims to be the first book in a new field, not a summary of a well-understood field, nor a narrower contribution within an existing substantial field

• Cannot provide comprehensive or even extensive treatment of any of the topics it covers

• Must not go over 200 pages. If I aim for 125, it might come in at 175. Don't let it turn into an unfinishable encyclopedia-writing project (like Meaningness).

• Cannot include more than a very few detailed case studies; choose wisely

That seemed realistic to get written in a few months. However, the chunks I have already published are fifty thousand words: about 140 pages. And, the outline suggests they are roughly a quarter of the Part. (Less, actually, since there are more than four major themes.) And that is supposed to be one of five Parts.

Just Part Four now looks like an “unfinishable encyclopedia-writing project.” Oh dear. Parts One and Two are both basically finished; they run to about 125 pages each, are reasonably easy reads, and took about two full-time months each to write. I was somehow expecting Part Four to be the same, and it’s not—at least not as I’ve been writing it in the past few months.

This calls for major rethinking. Is it feasible to back up and write a 200-page version? Can I make that understandable? The concepts in Part Four are difficult and will be unfamiliar to nearly all readers. Readers have found the more abstract chunks hard going. If a 200-page version was all like that, it might make no sense at all. Alternatively, if the short version was mostly concrete examples, I doubt readers could extrapolate from them to the more general lessons that could be applied in their own work. It would just be a collection of interesting anecdotes.

This raises serious questions of purpose for me personally. I want to do whatever is most useful (while enjoying it). I have many unfinished projects, most of them probably unfinishable, which diminishes their usefulness.

Is it better to backburner Part Four in favor of something finishable?

Or is it the most useful thing I can write, so I should press on, accepting that it may take years?

Or abandon the current tack, and try instead to somehow write a much shorter version that is still understandable?

New videos you may have missed

I post short videos as Substack Notes. You’ll have missed those unless you use the Substack app and click the “Following” tab in Notes regularly. (This is not ideal!)

Alternatively, you can follow me on YouTube, where I post most of the same ones.