I've got to do at least one essay per week to continue my plodding journey to famousity. I've neglected this for some time in order to deal with a multiplicity of family problems. You don't want to know, moreover I don't want to tell. Nevertheless, I am quickly regaining my balance and it feels good. It has been some time since I've taken an assessment of where I'm going and what I'm doing in concert with you, my readers and fellow travelers on the road to continuous enlightenment and ultimately to wisdom and realization of 'thou art that'.
Strategery
In the largest sense of my current intellectual pursuits I am moving sideways in my career. I think I have struggled through the last year in dealing with my difficulty in dealing with the fact that I am not coding on a day to day basis. There has been something of a hole in my soul missing the sense of accomplishment that comes with building elegant, logical spaces for my customers to work through their decisions. So I'm stepping back from that with the tacit acknowledgement that it's a two edged sword. I love to code just as I love to write compelling paragraphs in prose. But I need to do other things to make the enterprise of my business perform as it should. Others can code. I am uniquely situated to do those other things. So I will.
Secondly, my journey through Stoicism continues. I feel very strongly about the gut sense I have developed over the past few years. And so I continue to be refreshed in this, not only by my own work but in concert with the LA Stoic Meetup group, led by DK. Beyond what it means to me in releasing myself from the tyranny of political gossip and blather, it is an important way to engage fellows and the public. I see it as part of my civic duty. In close proximity to the Stoic is the IDW participation that I have attached myself to. My aim in this is to establish and maintain a space for that part of me which is a combat epistemologist. I rigorously parse what people say and am determined to be honest in my feedback. I practice the Abstention Principle in politics, and yet I feel the need to be compellingly disconfirmatory in my political speech. In other words, I don't care who is right. I care what is right. I expect people to be logically consistent as they are capable of being and intend to bring that context right up front, doing so without any particular ambition or agenda other than letting people know there are dispassionate ways to be correct. The difficulty in all of this is that there will always be a temptation to follow too much of my curiosity. I can get bogged down. But I'm also not particularly trying to make friends or make nice. I'm trying to achieve a command of civility in truth telling and sense making.
Thirdly, I'm aiming to expand the imaginative aspects of my life. Tangential to my desire to clean up my health (which is kind of a barbell effort, live on the border of injury while making myself harder and harder to kill) I'm learning yet another dimension of cooking, eating and drinking. My aim here is to both lose the remaining 22 pounds and to become a master of cooking fish. Check back with me after the summer.
And finally I am changing my reading a bit. The same informative and entertaining habits are likely to stick, but I want to spend less time putting other people's ideas into my head. That means Blinkist. That means less Audible and more Kindle. It means less Science Fiction and more History. And I'm going to add poetry into the mix. I forgot how satisfying it is to write that way and I haven't in much too long.
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Practicality
In the realm of the technical and professional I a convinced that the future is the Apache Beam framework and that the world of data will approach the realm of IoT. Everything is a data stream, and all applications are the tactical management of these data streams. Operationally this will all be some Kafkaesque future. Confluence are the masters. So we will be replacing databases with streams, and the world of data will be the fast sort and the slow sort. Hmm. I should map Kahneman over that. In the meantime, I'll keep my head above the code and try to start thinking in terms of service products that involve wrangling those streams and sending them where no man has gone before. Also this should be the guiding light for the LOGOS Project that will be my side gig, with a helping of Smart Cities.
The Stoics and IDW are mostly driven by my primary podcaster Eric Weinstein. So I may very well continue what I've started in putting answer context here and elsewhere. It's coming naturally. The stuff of Weinstein gets my attention, and I think he's broad enough to keep it. So far it's not difficult to keep up, but it has certainly put others, particularly Peterson, on the back burner. I'm sticking to Sam Harris because he too gets my goat in a certain compelling way. But I'm definitely coming around to recognize his way of thinking about meditation. I think we'll have to come up, in toto, with a new religion. I will continue to write here and over at Quora, because Quora is the precursor to LOGOS. Also I expect to do a bit more American Wag. I just dont' have the rhythm yet. While I'm at it and thinking about a new religion let me give you this aside with regards to my high level look at university. H/T Bryan Alexander:
Aside on the University
I think the university should be in charge of pedagogy and research. I think that scholarship should be exported. I primarily I think that the university is oversubscribed. There are too many of them and we don't need them to be entry level employee generators. The cost of training employees should be born by business. So the entire debt to society universities are costing should be shifted away from the current economy. Trim university systems and make them excellent at pedagogy, scholarship and research.
The matter of pedagogy has the common sense benefit of preserving the culture of academics who perform for academics. We can have a great deal of confidence that will work without much change - but it will only work if scholarship is exported. I want the province of fact checking of the entire realm of knowledge to be shifted from journalism to a kind of partnership of publication. In other words, academics should be paid not so much to train some selection of undergraduates but everyone, and especially global media networks through the same mechanisms they use. I don't want the editorial board of the NYT curating the truth about New York City. I want scholars at CUNY and Colombia doing that. It is therefore the priority of pedagogy to have more integrity than mere publication.
Scholars will do journalism better than journalists will do scholarship, so they must because the incentives for scholars is to be correct and comprehensive. The incentives for journalists is to be first and topical.
The university fails because it is not responsible for the ignorance and lies that are promulgated more rapidly than their pedagogy. It makes the university insular and only responsible for its own truth rather than a truth which should be accessible to the world. If the university cannot reach the world then it will exist in isolation and ultimately be reduced to monasticism.
I am pessimistic that universities can make this change before they are forced into the monastic position. Rather it will be visionary individuals who will do so. I think it will be a long time before the traditional philanthropists admit the necessity of endowing great podcasters. Although there is something to be said in defense of Mercatus. https://www.mercatus.org/
I will write more poetry, so expect more stuff from the Eruditorium. My flirtation with returning to Cobb the Comic is too near realtime and I can't keep all of those characters up to date on things worth remarking on. Twitter speed is what it is and I don't have the patience for it. I could have followed Gen. Q Soliemani into Heaven, but nobody really cares any longer. Comics need to be fast and I don't have a system that's fast enough.
Exercise, diet blah blah. I'll take pictures and post them on Facebook. I won't mention it again until I lose another bowling ball. I will continue to post reviews on Goodreads, and reblog them here (which I haven't been doing).
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