As predicted, editing is going much quicker since finishing the massive rewrite of Chapter 2. The revisions for Chapter 3 are done and Chapter 4 is well under way. It’s gotten a bit bogged down with some tricky sections that are hard to word right, and I suspect when I wrote the original draft I left them for my future self to sort out. Thanks, past me!
As promised, I’ve also been publishing weekly, with new posts landing on Wednesdays. I’ve got a large backlog of topics to write about, and the list is getting longer faster than I can write. Hopefully you’ve been enjoying these posts, even if they are a bit less polished than what I would normally publish given the timeline.
That said, I plan to skip next Wednesday: I’ll be away on sesshin for the next few days and don’t expect to have time to get even a quick post done.
Thanks to the kind folks at Less Wrong, my posts are also now automatically cross posting there. This simplifies my life, since I was manually cross posting many of them already. And to all the Less Wrong readers seeing the first of these monthly updates: welcome! This is part of a series of monthly updates for subscribers to Uncertain Updates who are interested in what’s happening with progress on my forthcoming book, Fundamental Uncertainty, and they’re the reason I started the blog. You might find these less interesting on Less Wrong, and hopefully they end up staying off the front page so that random site visitors are not annoyed by them.
The Enneagram
Michael Valentine Smith has been writing a wonderful series of posts in the last month on his Substack. I’ve found his posts about the Enneagram insightful (and left a bunch of comments saying as much). I never really understood what was up with the Enneagram before and why people found it useful. Now I do (hint: it shows you how to get out of self-created spirals of suffering) and I expect to have some of my own posts about the Enneagram coming and how I think it may relate to liberation practice (i.e. getting your life to suck less because of self-centered delusions).
Here’s links to those posts (so far) if you’d like to read them:
I also recommend his recent posts “The Hostile Telepaths Problem” and “Subjective Science”.
X the Everything App
It’s never been more over, and we’ve never been more back, than right now, on X, the everything app.
The algo has very much changed for the worse in the last couple months. The “for you” feed shows a lot more viral winners picked by random perturbations and less genuinely good posts. The “following” feed remains fine, but stuff gets easily missed.
At least that’s what I tell myself because my follower count keeps going up but my post engagement remains relatively flat. Alas.
I did take a moment to get in on the recent trend of posting lore about myself:
And as you’ll notice in the screen shot, I now have access to Community Notes. There’s a lot of crap people try to post as notes on posts, but thankfully the crowd is wise and the obvious garbage doesn’t make it out of drafts.
And with that, I’ll end. I have to pack my oryoki set and rakusu and get ready for several days of sitting, standing, walking, and lying down. Try not to burn down the world while I’m out in it.
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