What we write publicly are reverse queries for the kind of people they invite (and I now have personal data to confirm that it does work very well). But in that context, what about the old queries that get outdated? The benefit of writing in contrast to just thinking in your head, is that you build on top of things, because what you have written has already been given concrete structure. But, what about things you have move past through and no longer represent what you think? For ideas you had flirted with at some point but you later realized some fundamental catch due to which the idea is found to be futile, this stale-query issue is common because, after already figuring out that you have wasted enough time with an essentially fruitless idea, you would be biased not to write further about it explaining why that idea is fruitless. Because at that point, it seems to you that the discovery that the idea is fruitless in not a discovery, rather the moment you had gotten initially involved with the idea was rather the true mistake, and so it’s better to bury it down instead of doing a post-martum. And thus, you end up with some stale reverse queries.

For an example, I had written about investing once long ago. That post gives a very crude understanding of stuff. I understood the topic quite more over time (and had even written another draft on it around a year ago but that stayed in drafts as I no longer was interested in clarifying what I have understood of the topic now, only to conclude in the end that the whole affair is a bad use of time, and it’s better to not focus on these things specially at young age).

Now, there are several options. Either (a) let these stale queries be; they don’t cause any problem. Or (b) remove such stale queries from the place wherever you write so that no more people stumble into them. Or (c) go back and edit those posts/essays and update the ideas. Or (d) write new posts on the ideas doing a post-martum and link to these newer posts on top of the old posts with the stale ideas.

Firstly, do old queries have any unpleasant consequences? I suppose, yes. If right queries attract the right kind of people. The not-right queries invite the not-right people (obviously I don’t mean in sense of wrong or bad people, but not right = not the specific fit). The quality of a good query is that you don’t have to filter the results further. So stale queries will only increase the surface area for people who have had similar thoughts, and is often okay where you think their thinking will also later move on, but it does increases the filtering burden, which isn’t an issue at low volume but is clearly undesirable when volume increases. (Volume won’t effect at platforms where looking for older stuff is not convenient e.g. old social media posts, so they are fine because average reader is not going to read old such queries anyway.)

For blog, (b) seems most convenient option, but I think (d) is more useful, because (i) post martums, I suppose, can reveal a general pattern of mistakes that can even be helpful in irrelevant things, and (ii) post martum posts often can be really good reverse queries for they show the progression of thoughts, and can hence make a person who has had similar progression pause for a moment.

While (c) is more in spirit of Montaigne — the guy who invented essay writing genre (the OG — if you will). His collection of essays were always in alteration and were republished with revisions. This method I believe is really useful for one’s internal notes or writings for one’s own sense-making, because you don’t necessarily need to keep an older copy if you properly update them.

But for a personal site, I believe (d) is the right option specifically for topics that are more important, and (b) for unimportant stuff. (c) is cool, but fixing up stuff is often messier than just starting from scratch.

The biggest blessing we have is the figure-out-ability of the universe. Things happen according to patterns and rules, and those patterns and rules are discoverable. And if we figure out the core patterns, they are fairly consistent and allow us predictability over at-least a short span of time. Had there been no rules, no patterns, if everything was random, we would have been doomed. There is no such thing as randomness, but only probability distributions.

We can always source ideas for interesting games from other people. Games we see on tv, read about in books, so on and so forth. But somehow, the games that turned out to be most interesting were the ones we had invented ourselves.

This can be generalized to a lot of things in life.

While reading an essay, I notice this. Relevant to something in the essay, I recall a similar experience I had also had. But then I notice this. I had mentioned this experience in an email to someone. Writing that thought had created an indexed entry in my brain. Had I not typed that out, my brain could not have indexed that.

Our memories are very quick to fade. When we write them down, we create a hard impression. But once we do that, our brain says — hah, this fool finally wrote it down somewhere, now I can let that memory go. And it goes and archive that memory into the deeper much hard-to-access archives. With that, the memory of that experience is no longer accessible, and a summarized carbon copy of the impression we had made replaces it.

This idea is frightening. Frightening because we are at the mercy of the accuracy of our impressions. This increases up the responsibility for how we write. It’s way more often than not that people retro-fit a narrative or a vision to their story. But we should aim for impartiality. Because if we have made any progress, it is by realizing the susceptibility of us getting fooled by no other but ourselves.

One of the characteristic of a specific kind of faulty premises is that it self-references itself as the ideal premise. (The problem with such logic if not apparent can be seen through Godel’s incompleteness theorem.) The result of such characteristic is that it indirectly mandates that the objective function of a person believing such premise is to spread it as much as he can. But there’s a counter-intuitive consequence of such an objective function. Imagine a few people living on an isolated island hold such a thing and ultimately succeed in selling that idea into the minds of all people in such an island. Now, what are those people supposed to do then? What should be their objective function now that the premise has spread as much as it could be? Well, you can say they also had their own personal objective functions before, why can’t they have again. That is because the premise restricted from them, because it mandated a different objective function — the spread of itself — which ultimately has ceased to be further achievable. If the island is not isolated, then ultimately the people would go out for conquests (which history tells us people usually went to). And the premise would continue to live. But ultimately, the earth is a spheroid — an isolated island in the sea of cosmos. And thus an isolated island is perfectly suitable scale to think why is there no such island where all people are completely sold to such a faulty premise and aren’t living the ideal life as does the “ideal” premise promises them? Because such a self-referentially-ideal premise is like a virus that lives as long as the population of hosts is somewhat immune to it. If the whole population of hosts contracts a fatal virus, it’s not just the death of the population of hosts but also the population of virus itself. That is why there are so many premises mandating the ideal world but not even a single tiny island that represents anything as such. Ironically, if there are any islands remotely resembling an ideal state, they are the kind where people would get horror at even the idea of such an “ideal” premise.

The amount of times I have written something in an AI chatbot’s input field and not pressed enter, and, the proportion of questions I note down to ask to the ones I struck out, because I understand the point already, point out that the rubberducking effects of thinking-in-writing are much underrated, even among people who are somewhat used to writing.

There’s this problem with repeating a certain reference work (even with word-by-word translation) on repeat in attempt to learn language. That is, your brain start memorizing whole sentences and their meanings instead of forming individual word by word associations. Even though, one might be able to fully understand the readings on which the language learner has done his exercise, he might not be able to extrapolate that learning, even to another passage that uses the very same vocabulary. Language learner should thus be wary of this illusion and constantly stream himself newer stuff (even though containing same level vocabulary).

A chair is an enclosing structure. A low-height table with which you are supposed to sit on ground is better than an elevated table and a chair, because on ground, your body is not enclosed in a structure and hence enjoys greater deal of flexibility while moving around.

Example of a good work setup