Welcome to Contemplations!
A quick intro and what to expect
Who are you and what is this?
My name is John. My background is in mathematics and machine learning, but I spend perhaps just as much time pondering the circumstances we humans find ourselves in. For over a decade, I have maintained a personal journal named Contemplations, and my hope is for this substack to be the public continuation of these reflections.
What should I expect?
I mainly write about technology, society, and introspection, and I expect these subjects to be the primary focus of this substack as well.
Contemplations tend to be unstructured. I make no promises about the clarity of my thoughts, or how well researched they will be. The primary purpose of sharing my thoughts publicly is rather to serve as a record of proof of what I thought in the past, and to allow feedback to catch errors in my thinking process.
I make no promises about how frequently I will be posting. If anything, expect it to be highly infrequent and irregular.
Why choose to write publicly?
The reason I chose to not write publicly until now is that I found the thought of sharing my contemplations publicly frightening. People process feedback differently, and I tend to take feedback perhaps not personally, but at least seriously. Additionally, people on the internet are not always known to be kind in their words.
However, I have come to believe that the reason I find public writing frightening is the reason that it is healthy.
When you keep a thought locked in your mind, it is likely to face less critique and opposition than if it were announced publicly to the world. Most ideas have valid critiques, and not all of them are damning, but knowing which ideas and critiques hold water is a hard task. Institutions and societies spend years and decades debating some ideas. Don’t try to carry this burden yourself.
If you find yourself with ideas or thoughts that you want to build your life around, then it only makes sense that you want to test their validity first, and thankfully most individuals have the foresight to take at least this precaution. However, this is an outcome-centric view of idea validation. There is value in challenging even ideas that have no meaningful impact on your life outcomes. It is through the challenging of ideas that we are forced to become better thinkers.
By announcing a thought to the world, you gain information and wisdom at the expense of mental and emotional energy. There is a mental cost to researching and expressing a thought in writing, and an emotional toll in receiving or not receiving feedback and digesting its implications. In return, we gain a better understanding of thoughts others relate to or disagree with, their reasons, and gaps in our understanding or thinking process.
At this current point in time, I believe that I have overlooked the potential advantages to public writing – I kept my contemplations private for years and only discussed a handful of them with my closest of friends. This is tantamount to being an overprotective parent of your ideas, shielding them from harm but harming their potential long-term success.
Correspondingly, I believe that going public will be difficult, but will be positive in the long term. The only way to see if I am right or not is to try.
Hmm, I don’t know if I buy what you are saying…
If you find yourself thinking this, then I just ask that you comment and share why. In doing this, I hope we can come to a better shared understanding, all while reaping the rewards of having honed our minds together.