Blogyear 2014 in review

There were dramatically fewer posts this year (23 or so, from 46 in 2012 and a high of 84 in 2008). A number of possible reasons:  I spent a lot of time in chatter on Twitter and in closed Facebook groups; going to Burning Man did a lot for me but didn՚t do much for my output of prose; I am simply less engaged by politics. Last year՚s blogging residency gave me illusions of writing more seriously, which may have suppressed actual output.

Yet some thematic clusters emerge, if you can call two posts a cluster.

Not sure what the next year will bring to the blog. I may try writing on a more regular schedule, may try some experiments. It՚s time to level up, or so the spirit of new year՚s resolution tells me. That spirit, of course, has notably little power once the holiday season is past.

Objective/subjective

Both these posts try to get at (in quite different ways) the tension between the depersonalized view-from-nowhere of mainstream science and the situated and subjective view of the cosmos we naturally start with. A topic I՚ve touched on before.

Romantic Science
Accursed Ipsissimosity

Philosophy of software

Software is eating the world despite the fact that nobody seems to really understand it very well. Given that this is the one area where I might claim to have some degree of privileged expert insight, I should probably write more about it.

Thoughts on Ted Nelson
Software Studies
Lambda the Ultimate Incantation

The political abstract

I don՚t bother writing much on day to day politics – there are just too many other people doing that. But occasionally I cough up something on the nature of politics, coalitions, conflict, etc.

Vertical and Horizontal Solidarity
Refactoring War

Encounters with rationalism

I have been hanging around a lot with LessWrong people and their ilk (and somewhat cavalierly using them as foils for writing posts that go off on my own tangents). They certainly are a lively bunch and even if I can՚t get down with their program it is usually useful for me to try and articulate the whys and wheres of our differences.

Superintelligence
Reading Recommendations for Rationalists

Encounters with the sacred

The most important things are the most difficult to write about.

Embodiments of the Word
Trip Report
The Sacred and the Rational
Death and Dualism
Death. Thou Shalt Die

Video sampler

Wibbitz is yet another web company with a stupid name doing something small but clever – automatically producing videos based on text web sites. Here's what they make of me:

 

I don't know who the various white-haired dudes who pop up under "digital charnel ground" and "transpersonal metacognition" are, and Google images didn't help.

[[addendum: turns out the video is dynamic, so will reflect the lastest few blog entries, so the paragraph above is becoming increasingly less operative]]

Pouring thoughts into new vessels

This blog is approaching its 500th post (this is #495), which feels like a landmark of sorts. I'm starting to wonder if it's really a good idea to keep it going, based on a few random confluential inputs:

• Internet trendmongers are touting "the death of blogs". This is kind of silly, but not entirely. I already have moved to using Facebook and Twitter for the kind of look-at-this items that might have generated a blog post in the past. They aren't at all substitutes for longer forms of writing, but;
  
  
• I'm actually trying to write some papers for publication, so my deeper thoughts are getting tracked into there rather than here.


• And I'm finding the process of writing rather difficult, because I've always found it difficult to force my thought into any kind of serial form. It feels like trying to nail mercury to a wall.
  
  
• And as it happens, Ted Nelson, an early influence and mentor, has just resurfaced with a new book (an idiosyncratic, self-published thing, like all his others), and it reminded me that one of his dreams was what he called "a decent writing system". I've taken stabs at creating things like that over the years, but there still isn't anything that actually helps me get my thoughts in order. But chronologically ordering them in a blog doesn't make much sense from a thinking perspective.

So, I'm thinking of ending this blog, or perhaps putting it on hiatus, and trying to organize my thoughts in some different way (probably a wiki of some sort), something that would start to approach a book, or at least contain book-like subgraphs.

I'm not sure why this feels so momentous. After all, wikis and blogs are both collections of chunks of linkable text, right? What difference does it make if they are chronological or something else? Well, even though it is the thoughts themselves that are important, not the form into which they are poured -- it does, in fact, make a difference. This is a lesson I have to teach myself over and over again, for some reason. Blogs and wikis have entirely different genre conventions. Blogs are inherently about the passing parade, they are inherently dated and nobody wants to read blog posts five years old. Whereas a wiki page is topical, it is supposed to be a timeless representation of some topic or concept, it is synchronic rather than diachronic. That sounds better, somehow, but in fact I'd probably miss the chatty, conversational, transitory qualities of a blog post. Writing wiki pages would feel pretentious.

In the Nelsonesque utopia, or my version of it, you wouldn't have to choose, one wouldn't be confined to one form or onother; chunks would be chunks and they could be effortlessly and semi-magically arranged into whatever structures were appropriate to a particular purpose or reader. Timeless truths would emerge from discourse; knowledge construction and knowledge in its finished forms would coexist with their relations clearly visible and navigable.

But nobody seems to be building a system like that. Nelson has famously failed to get his ideas into practical implementations, and nobody else seems to think it's very important. Hm, I smell another distracting side project coming into view...building software is probably easier for me than coherent long-form writing.