One thing I've noticed I'm curious about: how do you stay motivated to read as much as you do? (Is it direct enjoyment, or coherence with a long-term plan, or…?)
I usually do not find reading to be on my “subjective Pareto front,” i.e., most of the time there is some other thing to do (whether prayer, work, gym, programming practice, socialization; or more mindless forms of video-watching or news-reading) that seems to offer a better trade-off in terms of wellness, enjoyment, profit, or numbing from unpleasant circumstances. And then there are a few books that I'm working on at any given time, but it's rare for me to make my way the whole way through one rather than getting 5 to 50% of the way through and feeling as though I've gotten the gist of it or come to some impasse; and once I've come to an impasse, it's rarely the case that I can rally to make my way through it.
I think this has been a challenge I've faced personally, both trying to keep up with your research and writing here, and also trying to generally get to a broader, more stable, well-rounded understanding of, say, history.
Hey, thanks for the question, that's an important one.
I had to figure that motivation out in high school and undergrad, and I did it using a sort of half-economics, half-systems-biology approach. I aimed to improve my rate and capacity for digesting difficult written materials, and I approached it like designing a factory or a cell. I developed a detailed model of my inputs (books, articles, reviews, comments, fictions, etc) and outputs (memories, notes, confusions, conversational affordances, new motivations and demotivations, etc) and my implicit operational units for handling different transformations of the inputs and outputs ("work modes" like "reading math" and "parsing experimental claims" and "memorization" and "internal memory and rumination compartments" like "caches" and "back burners" and so on).
The detail mattered, but some coarse principles also emerged from the process.
(1) I have to make sure there is both long-term, short-term, and medium-term payoff for intensive reading to stay motivated. These need to be grounded in history and big-picture thinking long term, in positive community relationships medium term, and in personal relationships and self-satisfactions short term. All of those need to be coherent and consistent: the personal relationships need clear connections to community relationships and those need clear connections to big picture conditions.
(2) Self-trust for all of that motivational expectation is crucial. If I work myself too hard for something that's not worthwhile, when I really should have known, I'll lose motivation overall. This means needing to be honest about why I'm reading what I'm reading – sometimes, as in my Halloween letter, it's "get to know a girl," other times it's "impress a particular academic" or "be able to rebuff a certain kind of troll cleanly." Becoming less dishonest with myself about why I was reading often meant abandoning plans – when you discover it's "to seem clever" and nothing else, it's probably not a sustainable plan since there are so many other ways to seem clever and "actually reading" is really usually one of the least efficient.
(3) I had to learn to organize the reading so that I would be able to do what I planned to do predictably and simply. I spend an unusual amount of time making sure I have simpler prerequisites down. One of the primary reasons I emphasize tradition so much in my thinking is that it's my way of organizing my digestion of information. If I plan to read something conceptually difficult, I will often read a history of the idea and a biography of the author to finish it. I also reread and plan to get different things on different rereads: I'll do a "range finding" read of a book, determine the prerequisites I'll need to "truly digest it," which often includes a biography or a history of an institution or movement that the author worked for or fought for or against, then reread it.
(4) You can do deliberate practice with specific drills for surprisingly complex reading skills. I have one philosophy book that I read every year as a sort of self-check and re-exercise of baseline skills. I began writing glossaries like the recent mimetics one as a maturation of a daily practice of writing about the Wittgenstein-sense "deep grammar" of a single word that was important to me every morning in my early 20s. I read a random library nonfiction book every day for a few weeks in my late teens as another sort of drill. This kind of deliberate practice is the best way of getting to know the details I was talking about in the first part of my answer: those are personal and they only become clear from experience.
With what you're describing with those impasses, at those I stop reading, too! I think and write myself some notes about the prerequisites or motivations I might be missing, and then I read something else or talk to someone about it. Sometimes it takes me five years to get back to a book I put down that way (though more usually it's a day or two). Sometimes that means cancelling research contracts and refunding clients! I have to be honest about it, though, or the whole system loses capacity because I can't manage the motivations as tightly.
Open sub-thread 1: As I close out Arc 2 here, what are your thoughts on what I’ve been doing so far and what I should do next?
(Explanation of the arcs: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/laying-the-hedge-arc-1)
I’m excited to see what happens next, venturing outside the Motte and Bailey
Thanks, anything you’d be particularly interested to see?
I’m interested in every step. Saying any one thing would seem proscriptive. Things are realigning so there are openings everywhere.
Alright, cool. Good to know you’ll be here for whatever comes next.
Open sub-thread 2: Is there any recent new natural science you’re excited about?
I’ve been interested to see continued progress on the “amplituhedron” formalism in particle physics, recent Quanta article connecting it to origami here: https://www.quantamagazine.org/origami-patterns-solve-a-major-physics-riddle-20251006/, and interstellar comet 3I/Atlas has been very surprising, some latest coverage here: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-interplanetary-race-to-study-interstellar-comet-3i-atlas/
One thing I've noticed I'm curious about: how do you stay motivated to read as much as you do? (Is it direct enjoyment, or coherence with a long-term plan, or…?)
I usually do not find reading to be on my “subjective Pareto front,” i.e., most of the time there is some other thing to do (whether prayer, work, gym, programming practice, socialization; or more mindless forms of video-watching or news-reading) that seems to offer a better trade-off in terms of wellness, enjoyment, profit, or numbing from unpleasant circumstances. And then there are a few books that I'm working on at any given time, but it's rare for me to make my way the whole way through one rather than getting 5 to 50% of the way through and feeling as though I've gotten the gist of it or come to some impasse; and once I've come to an impasse, it's rarely the case that I can rally to make my way through it.
I think this has been a challenge I've faced personally, both trying to keep up with your research and writing here, and also trying to generally get to a broader, more stable, well-rounded understanding of, say, history.
Hey, thanks for the question, that's an important one.
I had to figure that motivation out in high school and undergrad, and I did it using a sort of half-economics, half-systems-biology approach. I aimed to improve my rate and capacity for digesting difficult written materials, and I approached it like designing a factory or a cell. I developed a detailed model of my inputs (books, articles, reviews, comments, fictions, etc) and outputs (memories, notes, confusions, conversational affordances, new motivations and demotivations, etc) and my implicit operational units for handling different transformations of the inputs and outputs ("work modes" like "reading math" and "parsing experimental claims" and "memorization" and "internal memory and rumination compartments" like "caches" and "back burners" and so on).
The detail mattered, but some coarse principles also emerged from the process.
(1) I have to make sure there is both long-term, short-term, and medium-term payoff for intensive reading to stay motivated. These need to be grounded in history and big-picture thinking long term, in positive community relationships medium term, and in personal relationships and self-satisfactions short term. All of those need to be coherent and consistent: the personal relationships need clear connections to community relationships and those need clear connections to big picture conditions.
(2) Self-trust for all of that motivational expectation is crucial. If I work myself too hard for something that's not worthwhile, when I really should have known, I'll lose motivation overall. This means needing to be honest about why I'm reading what I'm reading – sometimes, as in my Halloween letter, it's "get to know a girl," other times it's "impress a particular academic" or "be able to rebuff a certain kind of troll cleanly." Becoming less dishonest with myself about why I was reading often meant abandoning plans – when you discover it's "to seem clever" and nothing else, it's probably not a sustainable plan since there are so many other ways to seem clever and "actually reading" is really usually one of the least efficient.
(3) I had to learn to organize the reading so that I would be able to do what I planned to do predictably and simply. I spend an unusual amount of time making sure I have simpler prerequisites down. One of the primary reasons I emphasize tradition so much in my thinking is that it's my way of organizing my digestion of information. If I plan to read something conceptually difficult, I will often read a history of the idea and a biography of the author to finish it. I also reread and plan to get different things on different rereads: I'll do a "range finding" read of a book, determine the prerequisites I'll need to "truly digest it," which often includes a biography or a history of an institution or movement that the author worked for or fought for or against, then reread it.
(4) You can do deliberate practice with specific drills for surprisingly complex reading skills. I have one philosophy book that I read every year as a sort of self-check and re-exercise of baseline skills. I began writing glossaries like the recent mimetics one as a maturation of a daily practice of writing about the Wittgenstein-sense "deep grammar" of a single word that was important to me every morning in my early 20s. I read a random library nonfiction book every day for a few weeks in my late teens as another sort of drill. This kind of deliberate practice is the best way of getting to know the details I was talking about in the first part of my answer: those are personal and they only become clear from experience.
With what you're describing with those impasses, at those I stop reading, too! I think and write myself some notes about the prerequisites or motivations I might be missing, and then I read something else or talk to someone about it. Sometimes it takes me five years to get back to a book I put down that way (though more usually it's a day or two). Sometimes that means cancelling research contracts and refunding clients! I have to be honest about it, though, or the whole system loses capacity because I can't manage the motivations as tightly.