Unexpected possibilities

New ways of interacting with readers

In this issue:

• Facilitating community: how and how much?

• Substack “Notes” for quarter-baked ideas

• This is an informal multi-topic update post. Like those? Hate them?

Thank you, paying subscribers!

First, a big thanks to the many of you who signed up for paid subscriptions!

This means a lot to me, both as encouragement and as practical support.

It also motivates me to produce more goodies for paying subscribers. I can’t promise anything yet, but I have several sorts in process, including book chapter previews and audio recordings.

Facilitating community

Substack is making me rethink the ways I relate to and communicate with readers. I’m discovering possibilities I had not considered. Will they be fruitful?

My aim in writing is to be useful to you—so your opinions about how I can do that best matter. I would like us to have a frank conversation about this, individually and as a community.

I hope you will express your views—by email, or better as comments on the substack post itself, so others can read them and reply.

I’ve also included inline poll boxes, if that’s easier.

I’ve been surprised and touched by the numerous, thoughtful comments on my recent Substack posts. “Getcha boots on” has more than thirty after just a week.

I’m vaguely aware of an informal community around my writing. I’ve mostly ignored it, for lack of time. I may now have time enough to participate and facilitate.

Substack—I discovered this week—is not just an email delivery service. It is also a platform for online communities, with forum and social network features. The vigorous discussions in comment threads on my posts suggests substack has exceptionally low friction for participation. And you are already involved, even if only by receiving emails! Maybe Substack is best for community participation, even if some other option such as Discord is technically superior.

In any case, there’s a tradeoff between my spending time writing versus spending time engaging with community. That can be textual, real-time video, or in person. Again, what matters to me is what would be most useful for you. What do you think about this?

“Notes” for quarter-baked ideas?

I often have quarter-baked ideas: too complex for twitter, but not thought-through enough for a formal web page. I’ve rarely made those public, for lack of a sensible medium.

I’m experimenting with using Substack’s “Notes” feature for this. I’ve written five Notes so far:

• Meta-rationality and multi-rationality – separate developmental stages?

• Life is a catastrophe—but not a serious problem – no existential fear

• The forklift driver and the nature of fiction – characters do as they like

• Dissatisfied with Dzogchen – where’s the account of activity?

• Psychologists should blog phenomenology instead – drop the pretense!

These are 100-500 words each. (My web-book pages are typically 1000-5000 words.)

You can Like and comment on Notes; please do! Several of you already have.

There’s a big problem with Notes: most subscribers may never see them. You won’t if you subscribe by email, unless you go to my Notes tab on the web to check. If you use the Substack app, they are available in your Following feed, but easy to miss.

(If you are not already using the Substack app, I recommend it; it’s surprisingly good!)

When I’m in writing mode, I could spin off several short pieces per week. I could make them substack Posts rather than Notes, but then you’d get an email (or app notification) for every one.

Do you want that? I’ve previously promised no more than one post per week; but we could reevaluate that?

Alternatively, I could list and link Notes in less-frequent general update posts, as I did above. Or, I could limit quarter-baked ideas to one per multi-topic update post, and include its full text as a post section there. Or, would you rather all my writing effort went into larger, more serious work—finishing another of my books-in-progress sooner?

Informal update posts: Like them? Or not!

This post is a somewhat chatty letter about what I’m up to, covering multiple topics informally. Maybe reading these more often would be interesting for you?

I have mixed feelings as a reader myself—it’s great when someone explains how they doing something cool or unexpected; it’s time-wasting fluff cluttering my inbox otherwise.

So, how often do you want informal updates? Never? At limited intervals (once a week or once a month maybe)? Whenever there’s something I find interesting, regardless of how recently I posted one of these?

Better without AI: It’s a real book! You can buy it!

I feel silly saying this again, since I’ve already tweeted it 4,237 times, and mentioned it repeatedly in the newsletter. However! I discovered last week that several people who follow me closely on twitter were somehow still unaware that, yes:

Better without AI is a finished book, which you can buy as a paperback or Kindle.

So they promptly did.