Author: James Vornov

I'm an MD, PhD Neurologist who left a successful academic career on the Faculty of The Johns Hopkins Medical School to develop new treatments in Biotech and Pharma. I became fascinated with how people actually make decisions based on the science of decision theory and emerging understanding of how the brain works to make decisions. My passion now is this deep explanation of what has been the realm of philosophy, psychology and self help but is now understood as brain function. By understanding our brains, I believe we can become happier, more successful people.

My New Substack

When I saw that Venkatesh Rao, was “retiring” his blog of 17 years, Ribbonfarm and moving to Substack, it solidified my plan to try building audience there as well.

Here’s my first post there: Forget Cognitive Dissonance.

I’ve been writing in this space, hosted one way or another for just about 25 years now. The early days were exciting and we built up each other in a blogging community for a few years. Then with the rise of social media and commercialization of websites with ad driven clicks, blogging died a quiet death for all but a few high profile public intellectuals. I get traffic here from what I think is a small group of regulars plus some pages that Google serves up in the first page or two on note taking tools and camera equipment.

At least for right now, Substack feels a lot like a 2024 version of that early blogging environment with easy interaction with writers and low barrier to entry. Of course the monetization is a big problem with the balance between free and paid content varying wildly between creators.

For now, I wouldn’t think of charging for content as I’m after some more engagement than one gets at a site like this. I’m putting myself on a once a week schedule there with. more frequent notes here.

My other motivation, besides engagement, is to work on writing for a general audience to develop the ideas I’ve put into my manuscript. That’s put aside for the moment, but I know that the next edit should be an effort to be clear and systematic in exposition of ideas. I’m also curious about what subjects a general readership is interested in besides tools for thinking so that I can focus my next big writing project on something that might be more broadly read.

Blog Engine Running: Tools for Deciding

Dave Rodgers always notices when I start feeling the need to write in this space and I thank him for that. I’m glad to know that there are a few consistent readers.

A little while ago, I wrote about my review of what actually gets read here. It’s not the book reviews or philosophy, it’s the discussion of tools. And that makes sense, because it’s by far the most useful information for the largest audience.

And the last section of my manuscript is about positive steps and techniques for making better decisions. So it makes sense to focus there while trying a bit harder to lay out the unique perspective I’ve gained by looking into the brain mechanisms behind our choices. Because it turns out that it’s not so easy to make better decisions when almost all of them take place entirely outside of awareness by processes we have no access to or influence over.

Second Draft of ODB Manuscript Done

After many false starts over the years, I started from scratch and finished a first draft detailing what I’ve learned over the years almost 3 years ago. I let it sit for a long time, but after picking it up again about 18 months ago, I’ve made it through a full reorganization and revision and have something that more resembles a book.

Along the way there were a few long detours into researching probability (focusing on Jaynes’ big book and) Polya’s two part treatise on plausible reasoning) and the neuroscience of perception and valence. So it’s about 75,000 words. A sizable book, but one that’s not really commercially viable in today’s competitive publishing world.

Why would it be tough to get published? Two reasons really. One is that I’m not known in academia, philosophy or as a public intellectual. This little corner of the web is visited occasionally and I’ve never built an audience eager to spend a ton of money on a book. Given the investment a publisher makes in preparing for print and distribution, it’s not a reasonable business proposition. Second, the subject of decision making is a very crowded area in the publishing space. For the most part, Economists have flooded the zone with their discussions of “irrationality” and “bias”. So books on choice and rationality abound, even if they don’t really help us much since most of our decisions are made outside of awareness and can’t be adjusted to avoid our built in biases.

It’s good to have this big project behind me and begin to think about next steps. As I’ve written recently, I’m look at options and but I think there’ll be more effort here as part of the path forward.

What Works On This Blog

L1001460_24-09-26_LEICA M11.

Thinking about how to best use this blog.

When you look at my most read posts here you’ll find it’s all tool posts. The Hobonichi, the Plotter, Cameras, etc. It’s true of my blog reading habits as well. Reviews of software, stationary, cameras, etc. I have to presume this is universal since the tools cut across all of the other areas of interest which are much smaller- topics like decision theory, systems and neuroscience. Yet we know that these small niches are where dedicated audiences are built through consistent posting. I read blogs on AI safety, quantum mechanics and statistics. All of interest, but nothing directly useful to me.

So You’ve Written a Book. Now What?

I’ve long subscribed to the idea that the primary benefit of the act of creating art goes to the artist. So much work is thrown out before ever seeing the light of day and most art never finds much of an audience. While creating is an act of communication, whether through image, music or words, it’s the artist that speaks and the audience reacts. The process of creation is itself valuable to the artist. Also valuable to the audience if anyone is there to appreciate it.

In most of the arts, we create a body of work and seek an audience. I make images and share them in a variety of ways including here on the site. There was Flickr, now there’s Instagram but at this point, we’re without solid social media support for my kind of photography. Since I’m producing it anyway, I remain motivated to carry the camera and make casual images, although no longer so focused on the craft.

Now having nearly completed a 75,000 word manuscript about how the brain decides almost entirely outside of our awareness, I’m now learning that non-fiction publishing is definitely not art. In fact, I’ve finally come to realize that having completed a manuscript is a distinct disadvantage in the commercial publishing world. I think I was a bit taken in by the self-publishing industry which operates a bit like social media- getting creatives to make product for free then monetizing their effort with services and platforms.

Non-fiction publishing is very crowded and there are lots of books on the brain, lots of books on irrational decision making and while none are really similar to mine in form or content, the manuscript I’ve produced has clarified my thinking and provided lots of opportunity for research, but doesn’t have the kind of simple point that the industry is looking for. It seems most likely I’ll finish the edit, self publish electronically through a few channels and move on to the next project.

I’ve enjoyed having the room to fully develop ideas as I’ve found the short form of blogging to be limited as a way to tell big stories. I do want to publish here more once the manuscript is edited and out, possibly elaborating on the ideas in the book which can serve as a basis for the ideas that’ I’ve been exploring.

The Purpose of Casual Photogrphy

L1000995_24-09-22_LEICA M11 Monochrom.

 

 

This is an image from a recent hike in nearby Michaux State Forest taken with the M11 Monochrom and 35 mm APO Summicron ASPH, my current favorite for casual photography in the woods. Even though this is a relatively light and compact combination, why drag an expensive, extreme high quality kit into the woods on a Sunday walk with the dog?

Photography is a practical art. It documents the world, preserving a split second of events in visual form. So it’s useful to journal our lives, from personal moments like this hike on a misty early fall day to events of global significance like war and natural disaster. Of course, this kind of personal image may resonate with others as an image or as a reminder of the quiet of the woods. That’s art as communication where I’ve made some image or artifact and by sharing it, I connect with other people. A basic human need that transcends the particular medium used.

Somehow, beyond the need to communicate with others, we also have a need to create. I assume it’s one of those behaviors that humans are born with because its contributed to the success of our species. We’ve got these big brains involved in a deep, abstract understanding of world unparalleled in other species. But what good are these novel thoughts and insights if they aren’t expressed in the common culture? I believe the urge to make art facilitates the creation of our shared intelligence through culture. The sharing of stories seems an obvious way to enrich thought through saying things in a way that is more subtle and compelling than an explicit telling of the how and why.

While words convey much, our insight comes through other sensory channels so we also communicate visually and acoustically through pictures and music. These channels can have great power, being closer to experience than the abstracted semantic world of language which evokes experience. My photograph here is closer to lived experience than a poem about the misty woods. I can imagine an even more powerful experience through music that communicates how it felt to be there.

Of course, being in the woods is the only real experience. Looking at the image reminds me of the experience and compels me to load the puppy in the car and seek out more life.

In Defense of Writing a Book

This gave me pause:

Why To Not Write A Book · Gwern.net:

So, a book is a lot of work for a writer, even if it is mostly already-written writing, which crowds out new writing or exploration, and which tends to freeze them in place. But it gets worse.
A book commits you to a single task, one which will devour your time for years to come, cutting you off from readers and from opportunity; in the time that you are laboring over the book, which usually you can’t talk much about with readers or enjoy the feedback, you may be driving yourself into depression .

It reminded me of why I spent over a year on a first draft of the ODB manuscript and now the better part of a year editing, rearranging, doing deeper readings and thinking, thinking, thinking. You see, I’m writing for me, not to pursue a new career as a published author. For a long time, I’m been frustrated with the blog format to outline complicated ideas in depth. I’d write a post, but I had trouble writing it to be self contained enough to stand alone as an essay. Or having to repeat background over and over across essays to provide the background to understand the underlying framework.

Clearly, the answer to these problems is the extended format we call a book. Where development of ideas can proceed step by step with enough room to dig a bit deeper. That was the impetus to collect the ideas into a single work.

What I didn’t expect, but should have known, was the enormous value to me as author in working through the process of explicitly laying out the ideas clearly enough that an interested reader with limited background could grasp the big picture. Explaining the ideas to a reader means that you have to understand them yourself. Can’t get away with half baked ideas and unjustified assumptions. Plus, as one thing leads to another, one discovers all sorts of implications and truths that the writing process uncovers.

Now I will admit, as Gwen points out well, is that there is a huge opportunity cost in communicating on a regular, more limited basis. So often I’ve thought about writing here, but the priority just isn’t high enough to put aside the current activity to spend even a few minutes on a brief post.

Let this post stand as the justification to myself of the choice of working on the manuscript for hours when I could be writing here.

Return of the Bullet Journal

Notetaking has been a theme here for a long time and it’s interesting for me from time to time to take a longer view of my tools and workflows. In general, for a given season in my professional and personal careers, I settle into some set of tools that for the time being, simply work. As the setting or tasks shift, I tend to experiment with tools, old and new, until I reach a new equilibrium.

A few years ago, I read Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method and incorporated some of his conventions into my note taking. Nothing too formal, just the idea of mixing To Dos, longer form thoughts, event logging and planning into a stream of consciousness format in a dedicated notebook. Last year, I actually transitioned, more or less, to a Bullet Journal for tracking the monthly calendar events and planning my day. In the end, I was frustrated with how a bound notebook mixed up planning for the year, month, week and day which were separate sections in my old Hobonichi, so I moved my new Bullet Journal style into a ring binder from Plotter.

Moving book notes into a dedicated notebook or the Kindle Scribe has had mixed results. For detailed note taking on the substance of a book, for slowing down and really digesting a text, it’s been great. But it takes discipline to get those notes into a usable digital form, mostly because my summaries, reactions and personal takes on subjects get buried among the notes on the text itself. I don’t generally need to go back to those text notes, I’m more interested in my take aways and my own ideas. So I took a cue from something that Cal Newport has mentioned regarding lowering friction in taking book notes. Now Cal is one who highlights and writes notes in his books. I’ve never been comfortable with that since I find that my interest the first time through a book is often different than later, finding my highlights and notes interferes with my interaction with the text.

So I now have a second note taking flow for reading notes in which I simply jot down ideas using the BuJo “rapid logging” approach. These are not long narrative notes as I’d use for journalling, not summaries of the book contents and arguments but an abbreviation as to source and the thought in brief, just enough to trigger a recollection of the idea. Sometimes even a page number if I want a reference for later.

This faster style of note taking has has allowed me to speed up my pace of reading of interesting non-fiction as I explore some new areas around the neuroscience of decision making.

A Few Notes on the Apple Vision Pro

I picked up my reserved Vision Pro yesterday morning and just had time to get it up and running at home before I needed to prepare for a business trip. So I won’t get anymore actual usage until Friday at the earliest. In the meantime, while there are some great reviews out there, here are a few quick observations I think are important.

  • I don’t think its been fully realized that this is the first “halo” product for Apple. The demo slots were full at the store all day and the Apple employees all agreed that the Vision Pro was going to be driving store traffic like crazy just from those who are curious and want to check it out. One couldn’t demo Google Glass or any of the many generations of VR headsets. Apple stores have clearly driven sales and relationship with users. This is a big attraction and certainly will help move other types of products big and small even if most don’t actually buy this first gen product.
  • The fit is fiddly. I had lots of light leak from the suggested face measurements and moved to a more narrow fit. But a fit I now realize is a better seal at the bottom, but not quite as comfortable.
  • The video pass through is great to have as it prevents the claustrophobic disconnected feeling I’ve gotten with VR headsets. You have a setting in which the information is being projected. But it’s by no means Augmented Reality in that the video quality isn’t good enough to use for tasks in the real world while augmenting the activity with projected information. The interface, video and photos are shockingly clear and real. The real world is diminished. So if I were a surgeon, I’d need a video feed of the operating field to look at, not the pass through video. My impression is the EVFs (electronic view finders) on my cameras are better video, but then I never try to read text on paper through an EVF.
  • The diminished quality of the real world and the astounding quality of the computed world is why for now this is device to immerse in, using the video pass through just for environmental awareness. If not using apps, looking at video, one would immediately want to take it off.
  • And when you do take it off, it’s true that the real world seems somewhat diminished. I know that my iPad screen has the same resolution. It’s just removed. I’m in the real world, not immersed in it. The world of the Vision Pro is one of hightened immersion.
  • And yes, we’ve been through this before. The Mac with a single floppy. The iPhone with no apps other than Apple’s. This is a better experience than we’ve seen before and will be interesting to see how it evolves.
  • I’m thinking about the Vision Pro as “headphones for the eyes”. There’s a Steve Jobs video clip I’ve seen where he makes the point that headphones are a portable great sound system substituting for the room, speakers and big devices. The Vision Pro adds vision to that mix. It’s a display device with control by gesture. Nothing more or less.