Introduction

Informed Dissent has strayed too far from my original purposes. I've been writing personal commentary on there, and I don't want to use it for that... so that's what this is now for.

I'm especially going to use this space for reflection and planning... starting with today's plans.

Informed Dissent is going to become my first scratch space for drafting things I'll eventually post on LessWrong or other sites. I'll use it so that I can link to long explanatory footnotes when I think that something deserves more clarification than I can easily give in an overview... and I'll also use it to just get through the first version of saying something. Usually things come out better on the second or third attempt.

I want to start a sequence on Error Theory and a sequence against Occam's Razor, and a review of cognitive biases. I'll post the first objection to Occam's razor today, hopefully short.

I've been mulling over a revision of how computer programming is done for quite a while... I've been keeping my thoughts on this mostly private, because I think that it could become a major company -- but that's dumb. Nobody's going to steal my ideas if implementing them is sufficiently difficult, and implementing these ideas is sufficiently difficult. So I can safely post them... worst case scenario is that I never write them, nobody ever reads about them, and nobody ever attempts. Best case scenario is I and any cofounders I happen to find eventually implement them on our own, and somewhere in between is that I'm never involved in successfully implementing them but someone else eventually runs with them... As I said yesterday, I have way too many things that I want to do with my life, and not enough time to do them all. If I put a little bit of effort into spreading the ideas that I really want somebody to run with (preferably myself, but I don't actually have time) then more of those things might eventually get accomplished than if I keep my ideas private. So I'll give an overview of my biggest concept of revision today, and start building it up more tomorrow.

I also want to post my second piece on market cap today on my financial commentary blog... I'm going to revoke my previous naming scheme. "Lesson X" is just too pretentious. So I'm going to just go with "Part X" instead.

Next, I need to post more book reviews. I said I was going to do this earlier, but I didn't... so I need to do it today. I'm going to post on The Innovator's Dilemma today, and Zero to One tomorrow... then hopefully move onto biology soon. Sunday, I'm probably going to do a quick post to cover books I've dropped recently... I think I should at least mention that some books just don't make the cut of being worth reading for me, even with sunk costs (3CoY, AotS, tNG are the three I just dropped).

So that's three posts I want to publish today. I also need to finish updating my resume to address what I've been doing with my time over the past few months, and write a cover letter for Oyster.

This feels a bit ambitious for one day, but I think it ought to be manageable.

We'll see.

It took me twenty minutes to summarize what I plan to do... hopefully I can establish some sort of correlation between that time and the amount of time it takes me to accomplish things as I move forward.