A week ago I posted for the first time on Substack and result has been quite nice. More reads of a post coming out of nowhere than I get here on my 25 year old blog based on analytics, but of course RSS reads these days are silent, so total audience size of a blog is an unknown. The community at Substack is really nice, reminiscent of the early days of blogging but enriched with many serious creators. It seems like the audience is looking for engaging content.

Writing on a schedule is a challenge that I’ll have to work on, probably by prepping more than a week in advance. At this point my goal is to see if I can get better at explaining my take on the topics where neuroscience and life meet. So I’m trying to take a single one of the concepts each week and try to make it understandable. So last week it was the illusion of self. This week it I’ve written about externalization of mental events as feedback.

In the meantime, I’m talking to some publishing industry pros about what to do with the manuscript. At this point, all options are still open, but I think a plan is taking shape. This writing, like my photography is my art. It’s for me and it’s my pleasure to share it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 has added image generation. Here’s an example. Love the walnut brown eyes. Lousy bokeh.

Here’s the real thing. With feeling. iPhone 15 Pro Max

Quite a difference here in the real

It’s taken a while for the Kindle Scribe to find its place among my working tools.

As I discussed in my first take on the device, it’s a highly modal experience. There is a Library view of books and PDFs plus a Notebook view of, well, Notebooks. The Scribe was picked up and put down over and over until I understood its strengths and weakness.

Here how I’m using each mode for now.

Notebooks

Quite simply, the Scribe is an excellent digital facsimile of my usual fountain pen and notebook.

There are a few advantages to the Scribe in fact. The stylus never runs out of ink, although the device can run out of juice. I’d say charging is of the same frequency as refilling one of my Pelikan piston filling pens so it really just comes down to the fact the stylus lives with the Scribe while I often sit down and don’t have a pen at the ready. My fault, given how many pens I own. The writing experience on the Scribe is really paper like and reminds me why I never could use the iPad pencil for note taking. Plus, the scribe is the size of my favored A5 size notebooks, but light and rigid enough to write on standing or sitting away from a desk. Notebooks really need writing surfaces for use, a pad like the Scribe can be held with one hand and written on with stylus in the other. Lets just say that the Scribe lends itself to casual use.

In the hybrid analog digital model, the Scribe is digitizing the image of my handwriting in real time and frequently uploading the file for off device storage. If the Scribe is lost or destroyed, my notes are secure. Notebooks can be lost, misplaced or soaked in the rain. Fountain pen ink is water based, so a wet notebook is not only wrinkled, but often smeared to the point of uselessness.

Barring loss or damage, a notebook needs the extra step of digital capture by scanner or photo. I use GeniusScan when I want a digital version of a notebook. I’m selective, copying over handwritten notes that I want to revise as text files. But the PDF images of a notebook sit side by side with PDFs sent from the Scribe, so ignoring the extra step of the iPhone capture, the end result is the same.

My notebooks have a couple of hundred pages, so I’m selective about what I archive digitally. The Scribe has no way of being selective other than exporting a PDF of an entire notebook and deleting unwanted pages or dividing up the file into multiple topic specific PDFs. For now, I’ve settled on starting a new notebook every month, so there are exported Scribe PDFs in a journal folder in DEVONthink for reference. DEVONthink does handwriting recognition and allows searching for notebook contents. I love the fountain pen and notebook experience at my desk. If not for that, I might have switched over to the Scribe completely for this kind of note taking.

PDF Annotation and eBooks

PDFs can be sent through the Send to Kindle service. Though PDFs live in the library, their interface is like that of a Notebook since once the page opens, the natural way to annotate is to write on the PDF with the stylus. Choosing the highlighter gives a transparent way to color over the PDF like one would highlight a paper printout. However, a long press on the text of the PDF allows the more standard type of PDF highlighting with the option of adding a note. Unfortunately, at this point that note only accepts typed input, which is less than optimal on this stylus focused device. Export of PDFs show the handwritten annotations with the highlighted text and note text following the PDF.

eBook annotation is much better developed, where the highlighter choice for the stylus acts in the usual way to select and highlight text. But if you add a note, one can enter either typed text or handwriting. I hope that they bring this over to PDF notes as well. But as with PDF output, we get the highlighted text followed by the note- handwritten or typed. This PDF also nicely goes into DEVONthink where the highlighted text or the handwritten annotation can be searched. The experience here is nice enough that I bought a book through the Kindle store (Thomas Hertog’s On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory) which I am now reading and annotating on the Scribe. So for some types of reading, the Scribe may move me back toward eBooks from physical books read with a notebook at the desk.

Summary

Like all the tools we have for reading and note taking, the Scribe is a product that excels for specific use cases. I’m using it for notes involving brainstorming and option exploration in a monthly journal format, knowing that these kinds of notes would be lost in a paper notebook system. I’m also reading, highlighting and annotating a book with handwritten notes, which solves one of my frustrations with the traditional Kindle format. Amazon seems committed to improving the software on the device, likely to make it more useful in the future.