Discussion Thread 8/2

Welcome back to the discussion thread. I’m trying to get this on a normal schedule but long-time readers will know having a job outside of this makes me really bad at anything more granular than “about once a week, I guess” in terms of publishing rhythm. I hope I improve on this, but for now enjoy the small amount of premium uncertainty I provide.

Book Club

Reader Jay has once again reminded me that about six months ago I did a bunch of posts on doing a book club, but never did it (again, apologies: my life is often dicey) At the time the options suggested were these:

1. The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

2. A Guide to the Good Life, William Braxton Irvine

3. The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

4. The Winter King, Bernard Cornwell

5. Dawn of Everything, Greaber and Wengrow

6. Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Ligotti

7. Power of Regret, Pink

8. Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

9. Worth the Candle, Alexander Wales (Fair warning: this is a pretty long webfiction about a guy who gets sucked into a world that runs on DnD rules and goes on adventures)

10. The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher (Full disclosure: this is the one I suggested.)

And I believe we had settled out on The Meditations. Unless there’s an outpouring of support for some other book, I’m opening up the discussion thread for Book 1 on Friday. If that pace ends up being too slow, we can speed it up for the next week.

Freelance Writing

I’ve recently hung out my shingle for freelance writing. The dream is to eventually have 100% of my work be writing of some form or another, and this is shaping up to be part of that puzzle.

I’m pretty good at writing relating to the general tech/start-up spaces, with a specialty in employee value prop but pretty high general abilities otherwise.

Note that I haven’t been doing freelance very long, so while I’m turning out good product I have not entirely worked out the bugs in the what you want vs. what I instinctually write process yet. That means the bad news is my first draft might significantly “off vision”. The good news: theoretically unlimited revisions/rewrites.

Phoenix Meetup

There’s a meeting for the overall SSC/ACX/Rationalist Universe this Saturday, 8/6. If you think you might like to go, let me know at residentcontrarian@substack.com and I’ll give you the details.

Plugs

Guess who gives out completely free plugs to his thousands-strong audience? It’s me. This is especially true for other writers/content creators. Let me know if you have anything you want plugged and there’s a good chance I’ll slap it up.

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Ruins blog has a piece up on the present limitations of AI art. It’s a good piece for people like me who mostly know AI art as a way to get free logos for their blog to catch up on the state-of-the-android-art.

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Chris Krycho is a pretty good writer whose pieces tend to hit on issues of faith, programming/tech stuff, or often both. This is pretty representative.

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Remember my post on earwax/q-tips? This is very much in the same vein but is, somehow, grosser. You’ve been warned.

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Eureka Health is a data-science app for self-experimenters. It’s still in beta, but it’s a pretty customizable platform that takes inputs from wearable health devices, your impressions of how you feel, and other inputs like diet and exercise and then lets you compare them fairly easily within the app looking for correlations or to track things like how a new medication is working.

I like the idea of an app that lets the non-mathy Gwern themselves, and the platform seems good for general self-experimenter stuff. Full disclosure: I’ve done some work for these folks in the past, but they didn’t ask/aren’t paying me for this.

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Lumpypot has some thoughts on general interactions between Christianity and politics. I know this guy; he’s a good guy. When I am looking for someone who agrees with David French more than I do but who I don’t dislike, this is who I talk to on Discord.

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As I’ve mentioned recently, I have a discord now. This is generally open for anyone who needs access to me for any reason, but we also gently argue about whether or not Tae Kwon Do is a good idea and stuff similar to that. Occasionally I’ll even try to explain how my writing process works (TLDR: It’s a mix between “I dunno” and “I guess I spent too much time on AOL Instant Messenger as a kid).

Lurkers are welcome, and this is also the easiest way to send me a DM if you don’t want to actively participate in the room.

Coming soon:

On Being Rich-ish: The Lessons You Learn When Suddenly Middle-Class.