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.

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.

Google Bard Is the Perfect Chef’s Assistant

If you look at my instagram feed, you’ll discover what’s really important to me. At least what I want to share in public through images. In between the puppy pics, hiking views and my personal photography are food images. Some restaurant images, but most often my cooking.

I’ve played around with the AI tools that we’ve all been hearing so much about, but I didn’t want to pay for ChatGPT and found the Microsoft offering underwhelming and often just a regurgitation of Wikipedia like summaries. Or search like links to the many, many ad based cooking sites that

But in the last few weeks, I’ve discovered Google Bard. Tried it for some medical background information with references and found it pretty accurate. Used to summarize some excerpts and it was pretty good.

But it’s become indispensable for cooking advice. I treat it as an experienced advisor.

It works well in a conversational approach where you ask it about techniques, variations and alternative approaches.

For example, today I brought home a whole Black Sea Bass that I want to bake. So I started a conversation with Bard about how to bake it. It started with simple butter and lemon techniques, so I had to ask it about how to bake without using butter. I asked it about oven temperature, using convection roasting and then broiling. Bard actually warned me away from broiling an turning as an experienced chef might:

Turning the fish:

Turning the whole fish during baking isn’t necessary for even cooking. The high heat and covered environment typically ensure even cooking throughout. However, if you’re concerned about even browning, you can carefully baste the top side with pan juices halfway through baking.

So, skip the broiling and focus on these techniques for a deliciously crispy skin without butter: high-temp baking, patting dry, scoring the skin, high heat oil, and potentially salting and lemon juice. Enjoy your baked black sea bass!

So far it’s helped me with a Moroccan Lamb Stew and a boneless chicken thigh sauté with fennel. Each time there we variations or techniques that Bard suggested that I didn’t have in my toolbox. It’s breaking me out of decades long habits of cooking.

Reading 2023 In Review

This was the first year I ever kept track of my reading. I ended up with a total of 44 books or more. There are a few photography and dog training books that I never toted up, so it probably was around 50. But 8 or 9 of them were long audio books of 48 hours each or more, mostly Stephen King’s Dark Tower plus Under the Dome and The Stand. Books of Jacob was also a long book and not a quick read.

The audiobooks have been a revelation for me. They are available very easily by borrowing them from my Public Library with the Libby app. They play directly on the iPhone making it easy to “read” while in the car or engaged in simple activities like cooking or straightening where video just doesn’t work. Libby’s discovery mechanisms are rudimentary compared to what we have in the world of streaming music and video, so I need to go in with a list of titles or authors rather than category or type. This is one reason why I’ve been binging book series like The Dark Tower or now the Iain M. Banks Culture books. Oddly, Libby only has the first 3 or 4, so I may need to buy some, probably in the Apple Book app. I need to see whether Audible would actually be more economical. I should note as well that availability in Libby for big authors audiobooks is spotty, so it’s easier to stick to big names like King.

I struggle a bit to fit other reading into the day’s schedule, but it’s an ongoing project to map out the day and get priorities in. Reading for pleasure tends to be one of those activities that ends up toward the bottom. Priorities, I found, tend to reveal themselves in the choices we make rather than result from intention.

Reading 2024

Currently Reading

Nonfiction

None

Fiction:

The Anomaly: A Novel by Herve Le Tellier (audiobook)

Deciding Better:

The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are by Alva Noë

Jewish Studies:

Madreigas Haadam – Darchei HaBitachon (The Path of Bitachon as Explained by the Alter of Novardok) By Rabbi Moshe Weiss (Translator)

2024 Reads

Fiction:

Ballistic Book 3 in the Gray Man Series by Mark Greaney

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk, Jennifer Croft (Translator)

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North [DNF]

Livesuit by James S. A. Corey

Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation by Ken Liu (Trans)

Back Blast by Mark Greany

Dead Eye by Mark Greaney

G-Man by Stephen Hunter

Standing by the Wall: The Collected Slough House Novellas by Mick Herron

Beyond the Hallowed Sky: Book One of the Lightspeed Trilogy by Ken MacLeod

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

Audiobooks:

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

How High we Go in the Dark by

Mr Mercedes By Stephen King

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Matter By Iain M. Banks

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Dust by Hugh Howey

The Outsider by Stephen King

The Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King

Shift by Hugh Howey

The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

Salems’s Lot by Stephen King

Wool by Hugh Howey

It by Stephen King

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

Pet Seminary by Stephen King

The Stand by Stephen King

The Player of Gams by Iain M. Banks

Nonfiction:

Reviving Classical Liberalism Against Populism by Nils Karlson (Open Access)

Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland

The Traveling Photographer’s Manifesto: A Guide to Connecting with People and Place Kindle Edition by David Hobby

Your Dog Is Your Mirror: The Emotional Capacity of Our Dogs and Ourselves by Kevin Behan

Sporting Dog and Retriever Training: The Wildrose Way: Raising a Gentleman’s Gundog for Home and Field by Mike Stewart, Paul Fersen, and John Newman

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others by T.M. Luhrmann

Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity A Theory of Belief, Imagination, and Group Identity by Neil Van Leeuwen

Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport

The Self Delusion: The New Neuroscience of How We Invent?and Reinvent?Our Identities by Gregory Berns

Natural Dog Training: Working from the Dog’s Point of View by Kevin Behan

Ikigai & Kaizen: The Japanese Strategy to Achieve Personal Happiness and Professional Successby Anthony Raymond

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton

The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley.

Shaarai Teshuvah (The Gates of Repentance) by Rabenu Yonah

Reading Plan

I’m continuing the plan from 2023 more or less unchanged. I ended up neglecting my updating of this page. I’ve got four categories of reading: Fiction, Nonfiction general reading, books related to the On Deciding . . . Better project and my Jewish Philosophy reading. The idea is to have variety but focus on finishing a book in each category. Always having a few ready on deck of course.

In fiction it’s worked out well to alternate between genre fiction (thriller, SciFi and Fantasy) and what’d call literary fiction.

The nonfiction category is for general information, filling in gaps in my understanding of the world. It’s been physics, politics and creativity for the most part. Choice is based solely on serendipity and seeking variety.

Next is my project specific reading for this project, On Deciding . . . Better which has been going on 25 years now. Last year, I spent time on the fundamentals of statistics and Bayesian reasoning. I really wanted to catch up more on the neuroscience side, but spent way more time than expected on theory and philosophy of probability purely out of interest.These books get written and then reviewed for note taking as I described here.

Finally, I spend time every morning on a work of Jewish ethics and philosophy. Having read through some recent commentaries over the last few years, I’m going back to sources. Last year I finished Nefesh Hachaim and I’m now about halfway through The Gates of Repentance which is not about repentance per se but rather how to be better broadly adhering to the religious and civil guidelines and laws of Jewish Life. Now this doesn’t generally so directly enter my notes here, it is foundational to my thought and personal growth. I take notes as I read, filling one page of notes every morning as a reading quota.