_This is my qualitative review of a 6 week period from 26 June until 3rd September_. See also [[02021-08 Review]], [[02021-08 Plan]]. After 2 months of peaceful routine ([[02021 Amble 1 – Written review]]), life became much more intense, much more adventurous, and remarkably sociable. ## People and places I spent the last week of July in an old convent about 20 minutes south of Bergerac. I did my 80K day, then a couple rest days, and a couple open days. The open days were mostly calls: several with peers, several with "tools for thought" startup founders, and several fully social. The rest days were yoga, meditation and walking. My first (and long overdue) 1-1 yoga class—gave me things to work on. Connection with the owners, I hope to return—for a yoga or writing retreat, or to host an event there. Then 2.5 weeks at the Château de Freschines. A singular place with a singular owner. A former residence of [[=Antoine Lavoisier]], now fallen into grave disrepair. I found myself writing a daily journal, and this experiment turned into... something. If you wish, you can read the [Journal de Freschines](https://freschines.pjh.is). I'm not sure what I'll think of it a few months from now. But I was surprised how much the act of writing it changed—and greatly enhanced—my time there. It made me more attentive. Then a week in London, 24 hours in Oxford, 5 days in Chichester, and another 3 days in London. I dated and somewhat fell in love with two people during this period (in series, not in parallel). Both affairs were intense, graceful, overflowing—not at all your average Tinder date. One of them might go somewhere. My Google Calendar records 42 events with peers and friends during the period, for an average of 1 per day. This is quite exceptional, by my standards. It's also an undercount, because spur of the moment stuff does not make it into my calendar, and there was an unusually large amount of that too. These events include 14 new and substantial connections with peers—again, remarkable by my standards, especially given that I wasn't actively pushing on this. "Substantial" means engagement equivalent to at least a 30 minute 1-1 call, and "peer" means someone with whom I can discuss what's on my mind in-depth, and/or someone I could imagine working with in the future. Most of these events were accompanied by at least hour of prep and written follow up. These "distractions" from my original plan were entirely welcome—reflectively endorsed *ex ante* and *ex post*, and consistent with my high-level aims for the year. So they weren't really distractions at all, but rather: variations. I give this period a solid 10/10 for inputs and outputs, even though a bunch of writing time was lost to these calls. What created the conditions for all this socialising? Quick thought is that the biggest factors were: 1. Visits to London and Oxford. 2. Interintellect salon—event and prep. 3. Working in public (via notes.pjh.is) and sending a lot of emails. 4. Virtual coworking. I will continue doing all of the above. I will spend at least another 2 months in Oxford / London before April 2022. ## Samuel Scheffler Towards the end of the period I found myself running out of time to meet my "write an EA Forum post" goal, so I resolved to write something "quick": a glorified link post on a Scheffler lecture: [[Sam Scheffler – Conservatism, Temporal Bias, and Future Generations]]. A version of the post was ready to publish by the end of the period, but I decided to delay so I could get a bit more feedback, and do a further round of revisions. It'll go on the EA Forum on Thursday 16th September (probably). ## The Interintellect: Cold Takes, The Age of Em, and Christopher Alexander The recording of my Bostrom, Scheffler and Sidgwick salon was made available on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-uSDlbSXjw). I did several follow up calls with people I met at my first salon. I made a shortlist of topics for my next salon, and pencilled it in for late-September. I didn't actually schedule it, though, so this was my most concrete "miss" from the period, relative to the goals I set. I briefly considered pushing to make it happen, but decided that a rushed commitment to a not-quite-right topic and date could badly derail my next sprint, so I accepted the miss. The salon I'm most likely to host in late September or early October is [[>ii Salon—Most important century]]. I read several chapters of The Age of Em, and all of Holden's blog, in preparation. I attended Patricia Hurducas' salon on "Places to Think". Someone mentioned Christopher Alexander on ceiling height, and his [interest](http://www.iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl119.htm) in "partly inside, partly outside" spaces. I realised that his story partly explains why I'm drawn to cafe terraces, even in winter, and why I find London so much less livable than Paris. ## Independent study vs job opportunities One of my main worries about this period of independent study is that it gets prematurely curtailed by an interesting-sounding job opportunity. Insofar as I am "learning towards my next big project", it is tempting to explore opportunities as they come up. But I fear (a) not learning enough before I leap into my next Thing and (b) not exploring enough to find the Thing I should *really* do. Crucially, this period is not just about _finding_ my next big project. It's also about _levelling up_ so that I can do a good job when I work on it. I find it easy to imagine finding a great idea and some great people, but then diving in before I've done the investment that would enable me to really nail the work. Arguably I made this mistake with 80K. My current approach to this is: 1. Do not actively seek opportunties (do that later). 2. If timely opportunities do come up, spend hours or days exploring them, but (almost) definitely not weeks. In this spirit, I did a day of consulting for the team at Freschines, halving my hotel bill and ruling them out as future collaborators. I met two potential cofounders from the effective altruism community, one for the first time. And after some effort to talk him out of it, I agreed to help Joseph Walker, the host of one of my [favourite](https://josephnoelwalker.com/88-radical-uncertainty-mervyn-king/) [podcasts](https://josephnoelwalker.com/john-kay/), for a couple of days in October. He will pay me partly in cash, and partly in 1-1 tutoring calls—I'm excited about the latter. I have a very small number of friends who, if they called me asking for help laying concrete, would get an affirmative reply. One of them did call me, however, so I spent a happy weekend on mixer duty, shovelling and mixing and wheeling and shovelling. ## Virtual coworking This period cemented my belief that [[Virtual coworking is really good]]. Several days were saved, or at least made considerably more focussed, by the hard commitment of a peer waiting on the other end of the line. There were also many fun, interesting and fruitful chats around the edges. ## Funding The most important of these coworking chats, for me, was a thread in which Mr Peter McIntyre pushed me to get through my "ugh"-field and apply for a grant from the [Effective Altruism Long-Term Future Fund](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future). For not entirely unreasonable reasons, I was feeling much better about the idea of bankrolling 2021H2 via 1-3 months' work on micro-SaaS, rather than via 1-3 days writing a grant application. Peter forced me to stare at that time difference a bit longer, and suggested that my chances of getting funded were higher than I thought. So I wrote the darn thing, and sent it. (It did indeed take nearer to 3 days than 1.) ## Funding: approved **Yesterday I learnt that my grant application was approved!** It is a generous self-development grant, which will cover my salary and expenses for 6 months. So—I now find myself greatly enabled. Writing the application looks like a good decision *ex ante* and *ex post*. Thanks for the push, [Pete](https://mcntyr.com/)! And thanks [Aron](https://twitter.com/aronvallinder?lang=en) and [Arden](https://twitter.com/ardenlkoehler?lang=en) for comments on the application. And, most of all, thank you to the donors and the team at the [Long-Term Future Fund](https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future). I've not yet had time to process the "hey, you're funded now" feeling. Morning-after: a sense of "legitimation" is noticeable, and welcome. There's a sense of "wow, I really have to put this privilege to good use". I already had that (the story of my twenties...), but it's even stronger now. I guess that's because there are identifiable "investors" who have placed a bet on me specifically, rather than just a group of which I am a part. There's a related "gosh, I had better use this time in a way that the donors and grantmakers will approve of" feeling. It is clear that I will now wonder "what will they think of this?" when I write and review my sprint plans. For the most part, I'm happy to have that push—these are donors and grantmakers whose opinions I respect. Insofar as the pressure for legibility is unwelcome, I'm fairly optimistic that I can dial down my worries about being misunderstood, the prospect of apparently—or actually—failing in public. I guess that having an agreeable fallback plan that is not linked to my reputation in the EA community helps a bunch here. It's also the case that, in my grant application—which I've just re-read—I did a pretty solid job of not committing myself to anything in particular. So... "new life". Huh—why did I type that? Well, it kinda feels like I have a job again—but not in a bad way, more in a "ok, well now I have an Actual Legitimate Thing I can say that I am doing and people won't wonder if I'm secretly in rehab or something" kind of way. Hmm. I didn't think I was missing that, but at some level, it seems like I was. I'll say that the "funded" period starts at end September, and runs up until the end of March 2022. ## Where to live My dream itinerary looks set to continue (sometimes I pinch myself). From 23rd September, 5 weeks in Reykjavik: catching up with old friends and hopefully staying long enough to meet a newborn. And working with good focus and energy, I expect—the familiar Reykjavík pattern, that I've never improved upon: flat, pool, cafe, walk, flat. End October I'll spend a week in London and Oxford, then attend the Effective Altruism conference. November to December I'll return to Penne d'Agenais. January: a fortnight in Venice (coworking, and a friend's 50th), then Oxford until end of March. ## Music blog I finally started my music blog! It's at [https://mtv.pjh.is](mtv.pjh.is). The blog is running on [Blot.im](https://blot.im), a beautifully crafted tool that lets me write posts in Obsidian, and publish and edit them in seconds. The service is now one of my top picks in [[How to start a blog in 5 seconds for $0]]. Blot significantly raises the chances I'll start an "ideas" blog—for notes that should be posts—in the next months. ## Milestones, targets I hit most of my stated milestones and targets. I think they were fairly well set: they gave the period some urgency and focus, but left enough slack to explore the unusually large number of unexpected cool things that came up. I've already commented on the II Salon milestone miss. I hit all my lead metrics, and massively exceeded the "calls with peers", "new connections" and "peer helps" targets. I'm especially happy with the apparent effort:impact ratios of several of the "peer helps". I won't elaborate on those here for the sake of privacy. I need to think about what peer and social metrics to aim for during the next period—my instinct says: "less... perhaps even set an upper bound". I met all the lag metric targets without much in the way of specific effort to do so. ## Ideas So far this review is quite different from the [[02021 Amble 1 – Written review]]: I've not written much about what was on my mind during the period. I'm running out of time now, but some record can be found in the [[Journal de Freschines]] and the [[Changelog]]. I feel like I have quite a lot of stuff brewing at the moment. OK: push an extra 15 minutes to write something... One important theme was Holden trying to reset my priors about the next 100 years. As I wrote in the journal: > He wants us to expect the truth to be weird. If you zoom out on history, looking on a million or billion year timescale, developments in the last few centuries look _very_ weird, very exceptional. A lot is happening in the current pixel. So we should expect more weird stuff to go down. I appreciated his comment on weirdness: > "Avant-garde" thinking involves developing a higher weirdness threshold, a bit like mainstream vs avante-garde jazz. It's not "anything goes" but it is: much greater caution about dismissing something on the grounds of weirdness. And wrote this in response: > I think one of my biggest mistakes between 2010 and 2016 was failing to appropriately downrate the "weird = very suspicious" rule of thumb, despite my growing interest in very ambitious projects. I think was largely due to my 2010 megadose of Nietzsche, plus missing a bunch of basic ideas from economics (e.g. EMH), plus not knowing much about how innovation works. Thiel's "good idea that looks like a bad idea" thing was a penny-drop moment. Rob and I spoke about scaling EA memes and Nietzsche's psychological critique of Christianity (viz. it's too demanding). Rob threw out the idea of "9-5 longtermism": a non-totalising commitment to focus your career on longtermist aims, but not feel obliged to do more than that. Might be something there. I rewatched The New Pope, and deepened my affection for David Lynch. I'll have to write about those two sometime soon. My [[List of people developing optimistic futurist aesthetics]] note didn't grow much, but I did meet someone who shares my concern that bad aesthetics are becoming a major bottleneck for effective altruism. I wonder if some of this is due to the "selflessness" ideal, which I think most people find attractive in small quantities, but unattractive in the extreme. Metaphilosophical questions continue to nag at me: I may do several weeks on Nietzsche in the next sprint, though I guess that might make things worse. Perhaps Nietzsche and Sidgwick, with at least one tutor from GPI? AK and I talked about the [Alexander Berger interview](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/alexander-berger-improving-global-health-wellbeing-clear-direct-ways/) and metacognitive virtues. From my notes: - [[Cluster thinking vs sequence thinking]]: AK wants to say there's not a real distinction; AK has only one perspective—"it is mine, I don't get it?!" - [[Epistemic modesty]]: PH: does this favour explicit reasoning or priors? Priors come from the world as much as from you. - Worldview diversification: AK thinks does not make sense. - [[=Mervyn King & John Kay]] railing against expected value reasoning: I tried to explain their alternative proposal, but I don't fully understand it. Settle for the first robust reference narrative you can find (satisfice), then take insurance against downside risk (robustness), try to expose to upsides (asymmetric returns). Don't attach explicit probabilities, because you will fool yourself and others into thinking you know more than you do, and become less perceptive. - Theory vs practice: PH hunch is that some Oxford EAs are too focussed on theory, and attempting a rather naive transform from theory to practice. AK wants to understand why heuristics that work actually work—just how much we should trust them. PH is fine with handwavy fudging, AK wants to fudge to three decimal places. AK asked for some Nietzsche reading. I shared some; to my great surprise, she actually read it. We began a promising conversation, but it was interrupted by more immediate concerns. Keen to see where this thread goes. I continue following [Zohar Atkins](https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins) with great interest. Zohar on Schlegel: ![[Pasted image 20210914125046.png]] [Transcendental baffoonery](https://mobile.twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1425181273639866369). ## Closing remarks 11/10. Onwards! [[02021-09 Plan]]