Author: James Vornov

A more prosaic approach to the intimate landscape.

The current project has turned into building a portfolio. I’m guided by some brief remarks Joel Meyerowitz makes at the very end of the book How I Make Photographs. He describes his process of culling a shoot down to the “keepers”, but then creating a group of images that are enjoyable to look at and inform the process of the current work. It’s great advice and wish I had figured it out sooner. I’ve been living in the photo stream approach of Flickr and Instagram which promote constant production, not reflective progression.

There’s a nice email service called Refind that sends a few links to interesting web articles every morning. It’s a nice broad discovery mechanism, being something of a substitute for some of the links I used to find on Twitter.

This morning, this discussion of website niche development had me thinking:

The perils of niching down:

The most ubiquitous piece of advice in the creator economy is to niche down. Immerse yourself in one subculture. Pick a topic. Own it. Specialize. Become known for one thing.

This advice is everywhere because in many ways, it works. Internet media is noisy and competitive, and it’s easier to earn attention when your work is hyper-specialized. When you’re focused on a single subculture or topic, marketing and monetization become more controllable and predictable. If your goal is to create things online, and earn a living in a somewhat reliable fashion, niching down is a smart bet.

I’ve always felt a pull to make this site more focused to build some kind of audience outside of my internet friends and those who come here through a handful of search terms that I happen to rank high on at Google, but stick to the idea that it’s my personal online journal and just reflects my current set of interests, reflected here more or less as time permits.

Interesting to read then:

Over the last few years, I’ve met a surprising number of creators who were outwardly successful, with thriving businesses, but who felt trapped and resentful. They followed all the best practices, niched down, created what they thought their audience wanted, etc. And while it often “worked” for generating income, it rarely resulted in them feeling alive, authentic, connected, free. In fact, it led to the opposite. A feeling of deadness, disconnection from self and others, and a perceived loss of agency and freedom.

I’ve written before how I prefer to read reports of tools and techniques by those who use them in a real way for real purposes. So much of this web niching leads to a kind of navel gazing where the tools are used only for the purpose of posting about the tools. Every time a writer I enjoy quits the day job to run their site, I know that in not too long I’ll lose anything but cursory interest. Since I’ve been working on my photography lately, I’ll point to people like Thom Hogan who runs a big site, writes great books, but is a working photographer both leading trips- where he works too and doing commercial work. So too we get the insights of Vincent Versace and Greg Williams both of whom produces their own personal and commercial work. I admire the work and technique, so take the advice seriously.

It seems to me that the passion to create can’t get subsumed in the marketing and meta-talk about the creating. At its heart is the work and Rob Hardy is right that at the heart of creativity is the freedom to pursuit the paths that the work suggests, not service an audience you’ve created in the short term. It is indeed a long game.

I was so fired up to bring my manuscript to conclusion that I started the editing process. I had been in the midst of the chapter on probability which is the end of the first, philosophical section of the manuscript. Since next up was the brain and neuroscience section, I started ramping up some background work there, taking notes on The Idea of the Brain and The Entangled Brain.

Now that I finished note taking on both of those, I returned to the probability section. It’s got a solid grounding, but I realized that it was short and superficial. So I’ve gone back to sources and am taking notes on the first few chapters of E.T. Jaynes’ Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, which I had been reviewing last fall but without good note taking.

So that puts me way behind sharing my work here in public. Yet slowing down for me is fine as I have not deadline or even any compelling reason to actually finish the manuscript itself. As a tool in the process of exploring these subjects, it’s been valuable. It’s also been a project that has provided some focus on my tools like my Linux computer, the Kindle Scribe and Devonthink.

Over and over again I learn the same lesson that the first step is to define the problem and desired outcomes well. Start with the end in mind and Covey phrased it. Only then is it possible to choose a set of tools for the task, with reassessment of workflow from time to time improving efficiency and keeping the work enjoyable.

Yet projects keep presenting themselves. Since Twitter is pretty dead to me at this point, Reddit has emerged as a random feed to satisfy my endless curiosity. Of course the subject matter is a bit different and I miss Philosophy Twitter and Neuroscience Twitter. There’s lots more computer talk presented to me on Reddit, so I’ve gotten engaged in programming languages, specifically this functional programming paradigm that I learned through doing statistics in R. So I’ve spent a bit of time playing with Scheme variants now and reading some discussions on computation. May take some time away from general reading, but it’s all good when it comes to ensuring one lives in a rich, mentally healthy intellectual environment.

My recent reading in the creative space has inspired me to get the manuscript for the Deciding Better book to the next level. Both Rick Rubin and Haruki Murakami both see the artist as the primary audience for their work, with audience developing as a result of putting work out in the world.

I’ve long been convinced that I have something to say about how we should approach decision making in our lives based on my wide ranging explorations of Decision Theory and the underlying brain mechanisms we use to make decisions. In the end, I’ve come to realize that the seemingly naive view of deciding as an intuitive process is the appropriate one. But it’s rare to find a real justification for the idea that decisions simply come from the heart. And that care of that heart is the core of better decisions.

To finally cut through the rationalist, Cartesian fallacy of rationalism and materialism, I had to understand that rational view of decision making. Since those systems do not turn out to be very useful, I turned to an exploration of how we actually do make decisions, using my own training in Neuroscience. Oddly, I arrived back where I started a very long time ago, with an ecological, systems level approach.

It was my own Hero’s Journey:

and I think it’s worthwhile telling.

The hero’s journey is a classic story structure that has been used for centuries. This timeless storytelling technique encompasses the three core aspects of a protagonist’s journey. Using it in fiction often seems like common sense, but the secret is to use it in nonfiction as well.

Of course all of this reading and notetaking get in the way, but as those who have traveled this road before know, it’s about pushing through to the end once the journey has begun.

Stephen Wolfram is the kind of thinker that sees things as simply as possible. His work on emergent phenomenon, physics and metamathematics reveal how what we see as mysterious can be built up from simple parts. I’ve written about how he takes notes, a process that is more about capturing that thought process than cataloging facts.

He’s written a clear and very simple explanation of ChatGPT ,/a> that provided a fundamental understanding of the technology for me.

It had an unfortunate side effect for me last week. I was about to get up and give a lecture a faculty member for the NINDS sponsored course, Training in Neurotherapeutics Discovery for Academic Scientists, when I suddenly realized that I myself am a Large Language Model, knowing that I would soon stand up and for an hour allow my left temporal and frontal lobe language areas to chose words sequentially to go along with the planned talk and accompanying slides. I would be aware of listening to what I was saying and providing oversight, but those language areas would just be generating word strings autonomously.

Of course once I said good morning, all I could think about was what I was saying, so all good in the end.

I really never intended this site to turn into a book blog, but once I started tracking my reading here, it only makes sense to at least briefly write about the books. It seems best to do this to capture first impressions of my first read of the book. If I go back to collect notes and write a summary, then hopefully those notes would lead to a bit more in depth exploration of these themes.

I’ve read most of Haruki Murakami’s books. This collection of essays on the process of writing, Novelist as Vocation, speaks so clearly with the voice that one gets to know through reading the stories and novels. Murakami has written like this before, in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is also a memoir centered around a personal activity that reveals as much about the man as it does the activity.

Like his book on running, this book on writing serves as a memoir that reflects Murakami’s attitude towards the act of creation. Which is pretty simple- sit down and trust the process to produce work. It seems Murakami’s process is very inwardly directed, so the production is not forced or overly planned. It’s intuitive at the start.

But then the craft of editing begins, polishing the output until it seems like a finished product.You can see how Murakami reflects on the work in progress both to improve the work but also to develop his skills as a writer. He found an audience early on, but as he has developed, his audience has grown. While he has high regard for his readers, he sees them a coming along with him on his personal journey. Clearly he’s thought about how to get his work out in front of that audience, but he writes for himself, knowing there are those willing to buy books to see what he’s been up to.

There’s plenty of overlap with Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, probably because of these creators focus on craft and production without much pretension. Both emphasize creation for the sake of self, not for audience. I’d recommend both books to those who find personal satisfaction from the act of creation. I think both provide good advice from accomplished master craftsmen on how to work on craft.