Some Brief Updates
The big news is that I’ve been working on a book, a nonfiction memoir, and have been making steady progress on that front. The (extremely optimistic) goal is to finish the first draft by the end of January, and then hopefully the cycle of revisions will conclude before I die. I’ve been saving my best stories over the years for a book, get excited!
Aside from that, I’ve previously made some declarations that I need to either walk back or modify. In June, I wrote Testing a New Approach: Write Fast, Break Tihngs about my goal to publish posts more frequently, and I have to say this endeavor has mostly been a failure. One upside it has borne out is that I’ve cut back on my notorious verbosity, which is probably welcome reprieve to many of you. The other upside is redirecting whatever time and energy I would have devoted to Substack to my book instead.
My election post-mortem There's no debating cult members is one I stand by, but it could’ve used more nuance and less histrionics. When I described the cult of personality around Trump (which no one has even tried to rebut), obviously I wasn’t labeling every single person who pulled the Trump lever as being part of a cult. Voters are notoriously and rationally ignorant about all sorts of issues, and it wasn’t until I read
‘s post-mortem The Reckoning that I was reminded how truly insane some Dem-affiliated positions come across to normies who only barely dip a toe into the information ecosystem.I’ve been too-online for so long that I just got used to how unhinged transgender activists, woke identitarians, and far leftists can get. I’ve already repeatedly said my piece on those subjects, so what more was there to add? But I’ve now heard from dozens of normie liberals in real life who look over their shoulder before confessing to me that they can’t get behind transwomen in women’s sports. I’ve been in the soup for too long and forgot just how shocking any of those positions come across to someone encountering them fresh for the first time. That realization definitely shifted my initial gut impression for what could possibly motivate a Trump vote to one that is slightly less despondent.
But the epistemological crisis I described absolutely remains live:
We’re in an unprecedented epistemic ecosystem where people adopt ardent beliefs based on half-remembered tweets, ethereal wisps floating across their newsfeed pipeline, and I’ve lost faith in the utility of rational discourse.
I’ll very likely stick to my proclamation about significantly paring down my political commentary. If I am going to opine on anything, I’m now far more interested in meta-commentary about discourse in general (See my recent posts on Intellectual Insecurities and NPC Dialogue Trees for examples) rather than object-level disputes. If I am going to dive into the latter, for a podcast episode for example, it won’t be without screening through a basic honesty and sanity check filter. Or if the conversation is bound to be really funny in a shitshow kind of way.
Holla.
Your lawyering anecdotes are by far the best part of this blog. I'll preorder as soon as you let us know we can.
"We’re in an unprecedented epistemic ecosystem where people adopt ardent beliefs based on *half-remembered* tweets, ethereal wisps floating across their newsfeed pipeline..."
I wish more would highlight the "half-remembered" part. It only dawned on me recently just how much misinformation is born of commentators who are overconfident in their memory. Sometimes the deception isn't even intentional; most people have horrendously bad memory and get innocuous details wrong on a regular basis. The whole reason students have to put time into studying for tests is because retaining information is hard, yet a whole generation of commentators thinks they have flawless recall when it comes to obscure political trivia from 8 years ago. I would write a piece about this but then they would probably just forget what it said.