I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but haven’t really taken action on it. The key issue that I want to address is that I tend to fill post space with commentary on current events, which then encourages me to spend a lot of time reading the news and staying current with what other people are thinking.

Most of my most popular posts are in that vein, but it’s not really what I want to spend my time reading and writing about. Part of my dissatisfaction/confusion about what to do with my time has also lead to a drop off in my writing productivity. My general lack of focus and the amount of time that I’ve had to dedicate to staying on top of current affairs has made other projects that require more concentrated effort founder and go unfinished.

So, thinking out loud, what I’d like to do is to make this site sort of a similar production to what Dan Carlin does with his Hardcore History podcast. I still want to write about current events, but I’ll start doing that on other sites rather than distorting the focus that I want to put on this site.

Because people also tend to prefer a mix of audio, video, and text material on the web, I’ll aim to produce fewer, bigger, better-researched pieces that incorporate speech as well as text.

My top focus will be on the history of the English-speaking world, with some broader material on the rest of the West. I’ll still produce individual book reviews, but I think I’ll shift more over to syntopic reading of certain topics or periods in history instead.

I think what’s good about what Carlin does (even when I don’t agree with him) is that every piece of material that he puts out is researched to a higher standard of quality than we typically get from either the internet, TV, or magazines. When I also think about what I liked the most about reading Moldbug’s corpus (and that of others on his level) was that focus on history.

When I ponder over the writing that I’ve actually felt good about, it tends to be the stuff that doesn’t just come off the top of my head, that required a lot of outside research. There are also far more people out there just saying whatever comes to mind, and fewer producing more focused work that requires some investment. While I can compete just fine on writing quality alone, I do sometimes feel like a windbag.

If I do manage to pull it off, I think this kind of material can also reach a less ideological audience and have more of a beneficial effect while also being a more enjoyable side project for me. If I take the same hour or two I would spend every day staying on top of events on working on longer term projects, I’ll be able to get a lot more done that’s useful.

You might have  noticed that I’ve been posting a whole lot less lately. This has been mostly because I’ve had a whole lot of work come up, and haven’t been able to stick with my previous schedule which meant a few hours every day dedicated to writing and research. First, I cut back on research time, but that just meant I had less that was interesting to say. Then, I cut back on writing time, but still found myself falling behind on real-paid-work.

I will be returning to regular blogging soon, but at a diminished pace. I apologize for not being as communicative about this as I could have been.

I’ve been travelling this week, so time for posting has been tight.

Having spent a fair amount of time on the internet, I’ve also become more familiar with drama and how to avoid it. Here are some good ways to avoid drama:

• Don’t make it personal — you’re here to accomplish some impersonal set of goals on the internet. You’re not really here to make friends, although that might happen now and again.
• Don’t play power games when there are unclear lines of authority.
• Girls on the internet are usually bad news.
• Be mostly indifferent to how people are feeling about you at any given moment.
• Don’t be needy.
• Setting up exchanges with uneven, shifting, or unpredictable value is a recipe for difficulties later on, no matter how much that people like you.
• Hitching your sense of self-worth to your e-fame is a recipe for difficulties later, because people will sense that, and then condition you to behave in a way that damages you.
  • Ex: Lindsay Lohan makes great money by drawing attention to herself through bad behavior… until she’s no longer insurable, can no longer get regular work, and her scandals no longer scandalize because she’s already so scandalous.
• Hew towards generosity over asking for favors from people. If you actually want favors from people, giving more than you expect to get is a great way to trigger peoples’ sense of reciprocity.
• The internet leads to skewed behaviors and reward structures compared to the richer world of social relations that it’s just a model of — the internet is a computer model of society, but not the thing itself.
  • Further, when you communicate with someone through a medium, it creates a worse mental model of that person than you might have otherwise.
• The internet is great at reaching semi-differentiated masses of people at scale, but not so great at generating trust or encouraging compliance.