Metarat is tough, let’s make movies

Neal “Snow Crash” Stephenson explains.

In this monthly News&Notes issue:

• Metarat is tough: But September is looking good!

• Online Vajrayana Q&A: I host these monthly; the next one is September 21st.

• Let’s make movies: In addition to publishing a video and an audio podcast episode as Posts, I’ve made four short video Notes, included in this News post. Plus: new YouTube channel!

• Audio ubiquity achieved: My podcast should now be available on all services.

• Reaching a dead end in trying to prove a theorem: The wisdom of Teen Talk Barbie.

Metarat is tough,

TL;DR: I intend to write boring difficult textbook chapters in September, instead of fun colorful blog posts. Hooray!

It’s been two months since I’ve written anything substantive. This is embarrassing.

I’ve produced a bunch of one-off, lightweight, popular pieces instead. Readers enjoyed them. (Thank you! I’m glad!) I can turn those out in spare moments, but I also want to aim for long-term significance, which needs full-time work.

Writing a book chapter is a project. Neal “Snow Crash” Stephenson explains:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

“You should be a God-Emperor,” from earlier this month, has been by far my most-read Substack post. I wrote it in two consecutive twelve-hour days. It required almost no thought or background research; it’s very familiar material. It was just writing. Writing is easy.

I’ve started work on the next meta-rationality book section several times in the past two months. It’s actually difficult. The section will make dense logical connections with many other parts of the book, so I need to get the whole thing into my head at once. It also introduces a way of thinking about purpose that is unlike any I’ve come across elsewhere. So, it needs thinking. Thinking is tough.

Repeatedly, I’ve been about three days into reading my notes, to remember what this next section is supposed to be about, and then I get interrupted by something that absolutely must be done right now, often involving a frantic call from my mother’s care facility about an insurance crisis. A week later, once I’ve got their bureaucratic snafu heart-staked, beheaded, and six feet under, I have no idea even what “meta-rationality” is supposed to mean.

However! I’ve managed to clear September, so probably I will be able to work on the book full-time for a month. Progress on that will give me a sense of accomplishing something beyond entertainment. That is important to me, even if not for readers!

Online Vajrayana Q&A

On Saturday, September 21st, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific, I’ll be answering questions (and maybe asking some, and leading discussion) on Vajrayana. That’s the branch of Buddhism I write about on Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires.

I offer these gatherings monthly; you can read more about the purpose and format here. Also, my preparing for the first one prompted a discussion with

Charlie Awbery

, recorded and posted as a podcast, “Transmitting ways of being.”

The session is available only to Evolving Ground members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and 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.

, let’s make movies

Audio and video editing is ludicrously time-consuming, but I can do it in chunks of half an hour to a couple hours. I’ve had fun learning the tools, and exerting a little creativity (particularly in “Wearing human bone ornaments”). I’m terrible at keeping my end up in a conversation, but getting gradually a bit better at it. That’s an enjoyable form of personal development for me.

From last month’s Vajrayana Q&A, I excerpted four short videos as Substack Notes. I’ve embedded them below.

“Notes” are short-to-medium bits that, unlike Posts, don’t seem worth sending an email for. I typically use them for somewhat chewier thoughts than I post tweets for. I write roughly one Note per day. You can see all my Notes here.

Relatedly, I’ve set up a YouTube channel. Please subscribe there! It has one older video which you probably haven’t seen (“Housebuilding”), plus the four new ones. I post different material to Notes and Twitter; likewise I expect different videos will be appropriate for Substack and YouTube, so probably it will have more of its own content in time.

Here are the new videos as embedded Notes:

Audio ubiquity achieved

The Meaningness Podcast should now be available on all podcasting services. There was a technical obstacle to getting this working, which I’ve overcome.

Reaching a dead end in trying to prove a theorem

The title of this post is a play on “math is tough, let’s go shopping,” a catchphrase from the 1990s. The then-high-tech Teen Talk Barbie doll was able to say a few sentences, thanks to breakthroughs in digital circuitry. “Math class is tough!” and “Want to go shopping?” were among them. Perceived as sexist stereotyping, this led to a major media circus.

I was a graduate student in math and computer science then, and “Math is tough, let’s go shopping!” became a standard summary of the experience of reaching a dead end when trying to prove a theorem. Similarly, “Science is tough, let’s go shopping!” is a rueful response to a failed biochemistry experiment.