Study Notes: Nov 30-Dec 31, 2015

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading in this time: 

• Post, "Scholarship: How to Do It Efficiently", by Lukeprog
• Post, "Why startup founders have mood swings (and why they may have uses)", by Anna Salamon and Duncan Sabien
• Article, "How to Be an Anticapitalist Today", by Erik Olin Wright
• Post, "The Confucian heuristic", by Harold Lee
• Post, "Some Practical Writing Advice From Douglas Coupland", by Douglas Coupland
• Post, "Ten brutally brutal writing commandments", by Phil Jourdan
• Article, "10 Ways to Launch Strong Scenes", by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

Other notes: 

• Regarding "Saber Smiths"
• Notes on Antarctic research stations

Homework for the future:

• Read the posts linked to by "Responses to the Anti-Reactionary FAQ.". Eventually. 
• Still on the to-do list: studying the Austrian School of Economics.
• Read Fenrir's Shrine. 
• Also on the to-do list: All of those themes that I decide I want to play with, and cool bits that attract me, and things like that? Let's get systematic about that, put them into a single document (might be public, might not) and work with at least one of them every week. Systematic. Systematic. I do it best when I do it systematically. 
• Also, don't forget to flesh this section out a bit more with goals in general, and maybe include a section on which of those goals were accomplished since the last update.

"Scholarship"

• "Scholarship is an important virtue of rationality, but it can be costly. Its major costs are time and effort. Thus, if you can reduce the time and effort required for scholarship--if you can learn to do scholarship more efficiently--then scholarship will be worth your effort more often than it previously was." 
• "As an autodidact who now consumes whole fields of knowledge in mere weeks, I've developed efficient habits that allow me to research topics quickly." 
• "My first task is to find scholarly review (or 'survey') articles on my chosen topic from the past five years (the more recent, the better). A good review article provides: 
• "An overview of the subject matter of the field and the terms being used (for scholarly googling later).
• "An overview of the open and solved problems in the field, and which researchers are working on them. 
• "Pointers to the key studies that give researchers their current understanding of the topic."
• "If you can find a recent scholarly edited volume of review articles on the topic, then you've hit the jackpot." 
• "Edited volumes are better than single-author volumes, because when starting out you want to avoid reading only one particular researcher's perspective." 
• "If the field is large enough, there may exist an edited 'Handbook' on the subject, which is basically just a very large scholarly edited volume of review articles." 
• Oxford Handbooks, Blackwell Companions, and Cambridge Companions are all listed a lot. 
• "If your questions are basic enough, a recent entry-level textbook on the subject may be just as good. Textbooks are basically book-length review articles written for undergrads." 
• "Use Google Books and Amazon's 'Look Inside' feature to see if the books appear to be of high quality, and likely to answer the questions you have." 
• "Keep in mind that if you take the virtue of scholarship seriously, you may need to change how you think about the cost of obtaining knowledge. Purchasing the right book can save you dozens of hours of research. Because a huge part of my life these days is devoted to scholarship, a significant portion of my monthly budget is set aside for purchasing knowledge." 
• Search Google Scholar and Amazon for key terms. "Review articles will often be listed near the top of the results [on Google Scholar] because review articles are cited widely." 
• "Remember that a 'good' edited volume on a subject does not protect you from the entire field being mostly misguided, like machine ethics or mainstream philosophy." 
• "If you can't find an edited volume on your subject, one may be just around the corner." 
• "Textbooks and review articles will point you to the articles most directly relevant for ansering the questions you have, and the researchers working on the problems you care about. Visit researchers' home pages and check their 'recent publications' lists. Find the papers on Google Scholar and read the abstracts. Make a list of the ones you need to read more closely. You'll be able to download any of them directly from links found on Google Scholar. For others, you'll need to visit a university library's computer lab to download the papers." 
• "To get access to a paper you can't get at a nearby university, you can: 
• "Contact the author via email and request a copy (or a preprint), explaining that you can't get it elsewhere.
• "Ask your friends at other universities to check if their university has access to it. 
• "Look to see if the article has been published in a book that is available at your library or online." 
• "If I absolutely can't get access to an article, I make a judgment as to how much weight to give the study's conclusions, inferring this from the researcher's history and the abstract and responses to the article I can read and other factors." 
• "Be conscious of the tradeoffs involved when reading 100 abstracts vs. reading 100 papers." 
• "You can also try contacting individual researchers. This works best when the subject line of your email is very descriptive, and is obviously about a detail in their recent work. The content of your email should ask a very specific question or two, quoting directly from their paper(s). Researchers are often excited to hear that somebody is actually reading their work closely, though philosophers get more excited than neuroscientists (for example)."
• "If you've done all this work already and you're feeling generous, perhaps you could take a little time to write up the results of your research for the rest of us! Or, help make Wikipedia better." 
• Brihaspati, commenting, suggests using library.nu, Library Genesis, Scrapetorrent, and custom Google search in order to find PDF versions of books. 
• Others suggest using Usenet: Binsearch,info or Giganews; libgen.info/index.php; Scrib; Oyster; Kindle Unlimited; reddit.com/r/scholar.
• In response to a comment by autodidaterous, lukeprog clarifies: "I wasn't claiming mastery of these fields. I was claiming to have understood them well enough to get the information I wanted from them--well enough to have written the (relatively well-researched) posts I liked to in that sentence. Mastery of nearly all fields is not worth the investment of my time. That's what division of labor is for. But I have a much, much better understanding of these fields than reading a few Scientific American and pop-sci books will give someone." 
• Autodidaterous, commenting: "Division of labor is all well and good, but if you've spent much time around others in a business you soon realise that it isn't all that it's cracked up to be. There's a reason why so many of histories [sic] prolific inventors had an enormous array of skills in many different areas: because the only person you can really count on to be there is yourself. Employees and colleagues come and go, the only constant is you." 
• InquilineKea, commenting: "I also try to post as much online as possible with my unique internet name (with my archiving utilities ready to archive them all) since it makes me easy to google what I've written. It also makes it easier for other people to find me, and sometimes they bring up things that I might have forgotten years ago. [...] I do appreciate tools like CliffNotes and SparkNotes. Other intelligent people may see those as signals of 'low intelligence', but my time is extremely important to me, and if I can learn something faster with those (or with a dummies book), then so be it. In fact, I do believe that a lot of things are deliberately inefficient just to sort out the 'highly intelligent' from the 'less intelligent', but those things often impose an efficiency cost on the highly intelligent. [...]What I ultimately hope to do is introduce forums as the primary mechanism of scientific discourse, rather than real-life. There are so many interesting and productive conversations that are now permanently inaccessible because they were communicated verbally, rather than online." 
• Desrtopa, commenting: "One thing that I've found quite frustrating in my own experiences with academia is that rather than encouraging efficient scholarship, political expediency often requires one to be inefficient. One of my professors who has a pretty good record for getting students published taught us that it's usually best to try to name drop everyone working in the same narrow field you're trying to publish an article in, both to demonstrate comprehensive familiarity with the literature, and to flatter the egos of the people reviewing your paper, who're likely to be among the specialists in that field." 
• Jordan, commenting: "Programmers gain status by creating and contributing to open source projects, and by answering questions on Stack Overflow, etc. I think that is a stable equilibrium, both for programmers and for academics. the question is how to get to that equilibrium in the first place." 

"Why startup founders have mood swings (and why they may have uses)"

• 
  
• "Startup founders stereotypically experience some pretty serious mood swings. One day, their product seems destined to be bigger than Google, and the next, it's a mess of incoherent, unrealistic nonsense that no one in their right miind would ever pay a dime for. Many of them spend half their time full of drive and enthusiasm, and the other half crippled by self-doubt, despair, and guilt." 
• "Our recommendation: the next time you're working on something large, important, and very, very uncertain, don't resist the occasional slide into despair. In fact, don't even think of it as a 'slide'--in our experience, it stops feeling like a slide as soon as you stop resisting it. Instead, recognize it for what it is--a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it's time now to integrate it into your plans." 
• "There are plenty of stressful situations which don't cause this sort of high-magnitude cycling. Waiting on blood test results from a cancer scare, or applying to prestigious colleges or companies, or working as a subordinate startup employee--these are all demanding, emotionally draining circumstances, but they don't induce the same sort of cycling. Contrast those situations with these: 


• "People in the early stages of their first serious romantic relationship (especially those who really really really want it to work, but lack a clear model of how)
• "[...]
• "People who are struggling to write their first novel, make their first movie, paint their first masterpiece, or win their first gold medal
• ...all of which have been known to push people into the same kind of oscillation we see in startup founders. As far as we can tell, there are two factors common to all of these cases: they're situations in which people must work really, really hard to have any hope of success, and they're also situations in which people aren't at all sure what kinds of work will get them there. It's not a response to high pressure or uncertainty, it's a response to high pressure and uncertainty, where uncertainty means not just being unsure about which path to take, but also about whether the paths (and the destination!) are even real." 
• "In our own pasts, we found ourselves wondering our brains couldn't just hang on to the momentum--why they insisted on taking us through stupid detours of despair or shame before returning us back to apparent 'forward motion'. Interesting things happened when we began treating that question as non-rhetorical. What, we wondered, might those down cycles be aimed at? If we were to assume that they were, on some level, useful/intentional/constructive, then what sorts of instrumental behavioral patterns were they nudging us toward?" 
• Authors describe the "voice of confidence" and the "voice of pessimism", state that these are both useful voices to have, because together they will produce a more accurate map than alone. 
• "The euphoric half of the cycle is where assumptions are taken to their conclusion--where you collide your models with reality by building code, attempting to enroll customers, and so on. And the despair half is where those assumptions are challenged and questioned--where all of the fears and doubts and worrying bits of evidence that you've been holding off on looking at are allowed to come forward." 
• "The real power of the down cycle seems to be less that it allows thoughts like 'maybe my startup will never work,' and more that, because it allows such thoughts, it also allows 'maybe my understanding of the sales landscape is wrong,' or 'maybe the product manager we've just spent three months getting up to speed is actually a terrible fit for the team.' Despair can be a key that unlocks whole swaths [sic] of the territory." 
• "When you're 'down,' the obviousness of your impending doom means that you can look critically at your past assumptions without having to defend anything." 
• "Understanding the subconscious intentionality behind this sort of mood swing doesn't make it any less painful, but it can make it far more pleasant--easier to endure and easier to mine for value." 
• This appears to be most useful for neurotypicals. The operating assumption behind this post appears to be that one's depressive/despairing periods have some sort of relationship with reality, but this is not true for depressives, bipolars, borderlines, &c.

"How to Be an Anticapitalist Today"

• "The hallmark of capitalism is poverty in the midst of plenty. This is not the only thing wrong with capitalism, but it is its gravest failing. Widespread poverty--especially amongst children, who clearly bear no responsibility for their plight--is morally reprehensible in rich societies where it could be easily eliminated." 
• "It is not an illusion that capitalism has transformed the material conditions of life in the world and enormously increased human productivity; many people have benefited from this. But equally, it is not an illusion that capitalism generates great harms and perpetuates unnecessary forms of human suffering." 
• "The pivotal issue is not whether material conditions on average have improved in the long run within capitalist economies, but rather whether, looking forward from this point in history, things would be better for most people in an alternative kind of economy." 
• "Where the real disagreement lies--a disagreement that is fundamental--is over whether it is possible to have the productivity, innovation, and dynamism that we see in capitalism without the harms." 
• "Historically, anticapitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism."
• "These logics often coexist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism. These four forms of anticapitalism can be thought of as varying along two dimensions. One concerns the goal of anticapitalist strategies--transcending the structures of capitalism or simply neutralizing the worst harms of capitalism--while the other dimension concerns the primary target of the strategies--whether the target is the state and other institutions at the macro-level of the system, or the economic activities of individuals, organizations, and communities at the micro-level." 

Smashing Capitalism

• "The argument goes something like this: the system is rotten. All efforts to make life tolerable within it will eventually fail. From time to time small reforms that improve the lives of people may be possible when popular forces are strong, but such improvements will always be fragile, vulnerable to attack and reversible." 
• "At its core, capitalism is unreformable. The only hope is to destroy it, sweep away the rubble, and then build an alternative." 
• "Even if there is no systematic tendency for crises to become ever-worse, what can be predicted is that periodically there will be intense capitalist economic crises in which the system becomes vulnerable and ruptures become possible. This provides the context in which a revolutionary party can lead a mass mobilization to seize state power, either through elections or through a violent overthrow of the existing regime. Once in control of the state, the first task is to refashion the state itself to make it a suitable weapon of socialist transformation, and then use that power to repress the opposition of the dominant classes and their allies, dismantle the pivotal structures of capitalism, and build the necessary institutions for an alternative economic system." 
• "Some people argue that the failure of revolutionary movements was due to the historically specific, unfavorable circumstances of the attempts at system-wide ruptures--revolutions occurred in economically backward societies, surrounded by powerful enemies. Some argue that revolutionary leaders made strategic errors, while others indict the motives of the leadership: the leaders that triumphed in the course of revolutions were motivated by desires for status and power rather than the empowerment and wellbeing of the masses. Still others argue that failure is intrinsic to any attempt at radical rupture in a social system because there are too many moving parts, too much complexity, and too many unintended consequences. As a result, attempts at system rupture will inevitably tend to unravel into such chaos that revolutionary elites, regardless of their motives, will be compelled to resort to pervasive violence and repression to sustain social order. Such violence, in turn, destroys the possibility for a genuinely democratic participatory process of building a new society." 
• "To actually transform capitalism, visions that resonate with anger are not enough; instead, a strategic logic that has some chance of actually accomplishing its goals is needed." 

Taming Capitalism

• "Here is the basic argument. Capitalism, when left to its own devices, creates great harms. [...] Nevertheless, it is possible to build counteracting institutions capable of significantly neutralizing these harms. Capitalism does not need to be left to its own devices; it can be tamed by well-crafted state policies." 
• "To be sure, this may involve sharp struggles since it involves reducing the autonomy and power of the capitalist class, and there are no guarantees of success in such struggles. The capitalist class and its political allies will claim that the regulations and redistribution designed to neutralize these alleged harms of capitalism will destroy its dynamism, cripple competitiveness, and undermine incentives. Such arguments, however, are simply self-serving rationalizations for privilege and power." 
• "The idea of taming capitalism does not eliminate the underlying tendency for capitalism to generate harms; it simply counteracts their effects. This is like a medicine which effectively deals with symptoms rather than with the underlying causes of a health problem. Sometimes that is good enough. Parents of newborn babies are often sleep-deprived and prone to headaches. One solution is to take an aspirin and cope; another is to get rid of the baby." 
• "In what is sometimes called the 'Golden Age of Capitalism'--roughly the three decades following World War II--social-democratic policies, especially in those places where they were most thoroughly implemented, did a fairly good job at moving in the direction of a more humane economic system." The system: addressed "serious risks" (especially health, employment, and income) through "publicly mandated and funded social insurance"; built infrastructure (education, public transportation, rec facilities, R&D, &c.); and "created a regulatory regime to curb the most serious negative externalities of the behavior of investors and firms in capitalist markets--pollution, product and workplace hazards, predatory market behavior, and so on."
• "What had changed was that the state took responsibility for correcting the three principle failures of capitalist markets: individual vulnerability to risks, under-provision of public goods, and negative externalities of private profit-maximizing economic activity."
• "Everywhere today, even in the strongholds of Northern European social democracy, there have been calls to roll back the 'entitlements' connected to social insurance, reduce taxes and public goods, deregulate capitalist production and markets, and privatize state services. Taken as a whole, these transformations go under the name of 'neoliberalism.'"
• "Perhaps in the long run capitalism is not tamable. Defenders of the idea of revolutionary ruptures with capitalism have always claimed that taming capitalism was an illusion, a diversion from the task of building a political movement to overthrow capitalism. But perhaps things are not so dire. The claim that globalization imposes powerful constraints on the capacity of states to raise taxes, regulate capitalism, and redistribute income is a politically effective claim because people believe it, not because the constraints are actually that narrow." 

Escaping Capitalism

• "One of the oldest responses to the onslaught of capitalism has been to escape."  
• "Escaping capitalism may not have been crystallized into systematic anticapitalist ideologies, but nevertheless it has a coherent logic: capitalism is too powerful a system to destroy. Truly taming capitalism would require a level of sustained collective action that is unrealistic, and anyway, the system as a whole is too large and complex to control effectively. The powers-that-be are too strong to dislodge, and they will always coopt [sic?] opposition and defend their privileges. You can't fight city hall. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The best we can do is try to insulate ourselves from the damaging effects of capitalism, and perhaps escape altogether its ravages in some sheltered environment. We may not be able to change the world at large, but we can remove ourselves from its web of domination and create our own micro-alternative in which to live and flourish."  
• "The movement of farmers to the Western frontier in nineteenth-century United States was, for many, an aspiration for stable, self-sufficient subsistence farming rather than production for the market." 
• "The efforts by certain religious communities, such as the Amish, to create strong barriers between themselves and the rest of society involved removing themselves as much as possible from the pressures of the market." 
• "The Do It Yourself movement and the 'sharing economy' may be motivated by stagnant individual incomes during a period of economic austerity, but they can also point to ways of organizing economic activity that are less dependent on market exchange." 
• "It is grounded in the following idea: all socioeconomic systems are complex mixes of many different kinds of economic structures, relations, and activities. No economy has ever been--or ever could be--purely capitalist. Capitalism as a way of organizing economic activity has three critical components: private ownership of capital; production for the market for the purpose of making profits; and employment of workers who do not own the means of production." 
• States, families, community-based networks and organizations, cooperatives, and peer-to-peer networks are all examples of economic systems which blend capitalism which other approaches.
• "We call such a complex [mixed] economic system 'capitalist' when capitalist drives are dominant in determining the economic conditions of life and access to livelihood for most people. That dominance is immensely destructive." 
• "One way to challenge capitalism is to build more democratic, egalitarian, participatory economic relations in the spaces and cracks within this complex system wherever possible, and to struggle to expand and defend those spaces. The idea of eroding capitalism imagines that these alternatives have the potential, in the long run, of expanding to the point where capitalism is displaced from its dominant role." 
• An analogy is used, with a non-native species being introduced to a lake ecosystem. The non-native species may be gobbled up, or it may find a small niche, or it may displace native species (in this example, capitalism). 
• "This way of thinking about the process of transcending capitalism is similar to the popular, stylized story about the transition from pre-capitalist feudal societies in Europe to capitalism. Within feudal economies in the late Medieval period, proto-capitalist relations and practices emerged, especially in the cities. Initially this involved commercial activity, artisanal production under the regulation of guilds, and banking. These forms of economic activity filled niches and were often quite useful for feudal elites. As the scope of these market activities expanded, they gradually become more capitalist in character and, in some places, more corrosive of the established feudal domination of the economy as a whole. Through a long, meandering process over several centuries, feudal structures ceased to dominate the economic life of some corners of Europe; feudalism had eroded. This process may have been punctuated by political upheaveals and even revolutionaries, but rather than constituting a rupture in economic structures, these political events served more to ratify and rationalize changes that had already taken place within the socioeconomic structure." 
• "This strategic vision is implicit in some currents of contemporary anarchism." 
• "The only hope for an emancipatory alternative to capitalism--an alternative that embodies ideals of equality, democracy, and solidarity--is to build it on the ground and work to expand its scope." 
• "We can get on with the business of building a new world, not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old." 
• "Eroding capitalism is not a fantasy. But it is only plausible if it is combined with the social-democratic idea of taming capitalism. We need a way of linking the bottom-up, society-centered strategic vision of anarchism with the top-down, state-centered strategic logic of social democracy. We need to tame capitalism in ways that make it more erodible, and erode capitalism in ways that make it more tamable." 

Real Utopias

• "There is thus an inherent tension between the real and the utopian. It is precisely this tension which the idea of a 'real utopia' is meant to capture. The point is to sustain our deepest aspirations for a just and humane world that does not exist while also engaging in the practical task of building real-world alternatives that can be constructed in the world as it is that also prefigure the world as it could be and which help move us in that direction." 
• "Real utopias thus transform the no-where of utopia into the now-here of creating emancipatory alternatives of the world as it could be in the world as it is." 
• "Worker cooperatives are a real utopia that emerged alongside the development of capitalism. Three important emancipatory ideals are equality, democracy, and solidarity. All of these are obstructed in capitalist firms. [...] In a worker-owned cooperative, all of the assets of the firm are jointly owned by the employees themselves, who also govern the firm in a one-person-one-vote, democratic manner. In a small cooperative, this democratic governance can be organized in the form of general assemblies of all members; in larger cooperatives the workers elect boards of directors to oversee the firm." 
• "Clusters of worker cooperatives could form networks; with appropriate forms of public support, those networks could extend and deepen to constitute a cooperative market sector; that sector could--under possible circumstances--expand to rival the dominance of capitalism." 
• "Public libraries are another kind of real utopia. [... They] embody principles of access and distribution which are profoundly anticapitalist. Consider the sharp difference between the ways a person acquires access to a book in a bookstore and in a library. [...] In a bookstore the distribution principle is 'to each according to ability to pay'; in a public library, the principle of distribution is 'to each according to need.' What is more, in the library if there is an imbalance between supply and demand, the amount of time one has to wait for the book increases; books in scarce supply are rationed by time, not by price." 
• "A waiting list is a profoundly egalitarian device: a day in everyone's life is treated as morally equivalent." 
• "Libraries can also become multipurpose public amenities, not simply repositories of books. Good libraries provide public space for meetings, sometimes venues for concerts and other performances, and a congenial gathering place for people." 
• "A final example of an actually existing real utopia is the new forms of peer-to-peer collaborative production that have emerged in the digital era. Perhaps the most familiar example is Wikipedia. Within a decade of its founding, Wikipedia destroyed a three-hundred-year-old market in encyclopedias; it is now impossible to produce a commercially viable, general purpose encyclopedia [... and] it is funded through a kind of gift economy that provides the necessary infrastructural resources."
• "If we imagine this model of collaboration being extended into the world of production of goods, not just information, then it is possible to imagine p2p collaborative production encroaching on the dominance of capitalism." 

Taming and Eroding

• "Give up the fantasy of smashing capitalism. Capitalism is not smashable, at least if you really want to construct an emancipatory future." 
• "If you are concerned about the lives of others, in one way or another you have to deal with capitalist structures and institutions. Taming and eroding capitalism are the only viable options. You need to participate both in political movements for taming capitalism through public policies and in socioeconomic projects of eroding capitalism through the expansion of emancipatory forms of economic activity." 

"The Confucian heuristic"

• "Like a lot of people, Confucius was bothered by 'bad inequality'--the kind of hierarchy where the elites actively oppress the poor and the lower class at best toils away, and at worse foment short-sighted peasant rebellions. The usual Western response to bad inequality is leveling--knock down all hierarchies as 'elitism' and 'privilege,' and even everything out until there's no concentration of power such that anyone can oppress his fellow man. Sometimes that can be a helpful approach, but there can are several side effects. One is that while some kinds of inequality can be gotten rid of--wealth, family inheritance, ethnic inequalities, and so on--there are many more you can't touch. [...] Knock down aristocracy, and you simply get meritocracy that privileges diligent, politically savvy nerds instead.
• "A related problem is that in telling a story about eliminating inequality, this leveling frees up the new elites--the winners in the new 'emergent inequality'--to deny that they're in fact elites. [...] When they're in competition with the weak, they see it as a contest between equals and have no compunction about using their strengths to exploit them, all cloaked in egalitarianism. (This is in fact a criticism that has been leveled against meritocracy--the winners feel like they have earned their advantages, and therefore feel no noblesse oblige.)"
• "Confucius took a different tack--he say hey, there's always going to be inequality, let's not kid ourselves. Instead, let's formalize it into really visible hierarchy, and, crucially, tie great power to great responsibility." 
• "He spends a lot of time talking about rights and responsibilities in different kinds of relationships, and promoting rites--think 'etiquette'--to make clear that the weak respect the strong, and that the strong have obligations to the weak." 
• "A lot of the problems that people complain about today have to do with social atomization and the lack of agentic leadership in powerful institutions. Confucianism would diagnose some of these problems as stemming from our willful insistence on a veneer of equality. With this egalitarianism comes a withdrawal of respect for the elites, and so the elites don't feel like elites--they just feel like average folks without any extraordinary sense of duty." 
• "The Confucian prescription: make it really clear who the elites are and pay them respect, and tie them to one-on-one relationships with their inferiors that come with corresponding obligations." 
• "A lot of the social problems that usually concern us are enormous society-wide problems that we individuals can only do so much about. But the strength of Confucianism is that unlike many other political philosophies, it is scale-free; you don't need to be a philosopher-king to start putting it into practice. Everyone, whatever his station, has the ability to start fostering stable, explicit, human-level relationships, and openly acknowledge respect and obligation as appropriate. And this matters: from relationships within a family or workplace up through the administration of a country, almost all the things we care about are mediated through human interactions. And if we can get those relationships right, a lot of previously intractable institutional problems will suddenly seem less daunting." 

"Some Practical Writing Advice From Douglas Coupland"

• "The moment your writing feels like homework is the moment you should stop doing it. It means that your project is either wrong or has gone off the rails. This is when you have to be honest with yourself about why you're writing whatever it is you're writing." 
• "Most people are only good for one proofread no matter how much they love you. Use the request to proofread sparingly, and only ask people to proofread after you've gone over your work a thousand times and feel confident that it's as clean and tight as it can get." 
• "Many editors are happy to meet a new face for lunch. Many are just plain bored. Phone and ask to meet them, but... you have to bring a large pile of pitch ideas with you or the lunch will go nowhere." 
• "Intern as much as possible, free if possible. The moment someone goes on maternity leave, you're in. This is true for most jobs, actually. Nobody wants to go through 200 resumes when there's a warm body right there in front of them." 
• "People who come out of the magazine track often don't understand why people from the lit stream see getting published as being mystical. One writes to be read and readerships are to be expected; don't be cosmic, just get your stuff out there." 
• "Your life doesn't change much after being published. 'The calm following the calm.' Even if a book strikes big, life doesn't change much. Calibrate expectations." 
• "With extremely few exceptions, writers need to be roughly thirty to start writing novels. If you're under thirty, cut yourself some slack." 
• "Writing can be a profoundly jealous business. Don't let yourself be sucked into jealousy spirals. You're doing what you love doing, right? It's the only reason you're doing it." 
• "A good teacher is someone who taught you what to love. A bad teacher is someone who taught you what to hate. Use your judgment." 

"Ten brutally brutal writing commandments" 

• "Temper cruelty with moral uprightness. Be cruel to the world, but kind to your characters. Be kind to your readers, but cruel to your characters. Be cruel to your readers, but have the world's best interests at heart." 
• "Take some responsibility for the horror of being a human being. You didn't ask to be born, but you have asked for a fuckload of other things since then." 
• "A safe guideline for rule-breaking is: For every four literary conventions you follow, break one. Too little rebellion is as boring as too much. Break this rule as well, but not just for the sake of breaking it." 
• "Try writing in response to another novel. The dialogue between the two could amount to something greater than either. [...] If you thought Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian was nihilistic to excess, try to create a response to that nihilism without mentioning cowboys or bloodshed, but also without ever forgetting that you're responding to Blood Meridian." 
• "Read some of the world's great aphorists. An aphorism, when it's well crafted, contains good lessons in writing." 
• "If you are not arrogant enough to want to surpass your inspirations, and if you aren't humble enough to accept the help it takes to get there, you may be boring." 
• "Only correct someone's spoken English when you're willing to make an enemy for no good fucking reason. Written English, though--that's fair game, always, because it is Important." 
• "Read good literary criticism. Try your hand at the art of writing about sophisticated concepts accessibly. It helps. Maybe the most fruitful literary criticism to read is the kind that explains a book you love in a way that you disagree with so intensely you're almost tempted to send hate mail. Now is the time to defend your interests." 

"10 Way to Launch Strong Scenes" 

• "Any story or novel is, in essence, a series of scenes strung together like beads on a wire, with narrative summary adding texture and color between." 
• "The word beginning is a bit misleading, since some scenes pick up in the middle of action or continue where others left off, so I prefer the term launch, which more clearly suggests the place where the reader's attention is engaged anew." 
• Action Launches: "The sooner you start the action in a scene, the more momentum it has to carry the reader forward." 
• "The key to creating strong momentum is to start an action without explaining anything." 
• "Get straight to the action." 
• "Hook the reader with big or surprising actions." 
• Narrative Launches: "In large doses, narrative summaries are to scenes what voice-overs are to movies--distractions and interruptions." 
• "A scene launch is actually one of the easier places to use a judicious amount of narrative summary, so long as you don't keep the reader captive too long." 
• "Save time by beginning with summary. Sometimes actions will simply take up more time and space in the scene than you would like. A scene beginning needs to move fairly quickly and, on occasion, summary will get the reader there faster." 
• "Communicate necessary information to the reader before the action kicks in." 
• "Reveal a character's thoughts or intentions that cannot be shown through action." 
• Setting Launches: "Sometimes setting details--like a jungle on fire, or moonlight sparkling on a lake--are so important to plot or character development that it's appropriate to include visual setting at the launch of a scene." 
• "Engage with specific visual details." 
• "Reflect a character's feelings through setting." 

Miscellaneous

• Jhumpa Lahiri: "Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, 'Listen to me'."
• Neil Gaiman: "When writing a novel, that's pretty much entirely what life turns into: 'House burned down. Car stolen. Cat exploded. Did 1500 easy words, so all in all it was a pretty good day.'" 
• Ben H. Winters: "Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it."
• Charles Finch: "There are a lot of ways for a novelist to create suspense, but also really only two: one a trick, one an art. The trick is to keep a secret. Or many secrets, even.[...] The art, meanwhile, the thing that makes 'Pride and Prejudice' so superbly suspenseful, more suspenseful than the slickest spy novel, is to write stories in which characters must make decisions. 'Breaking Bad' kept a few secrets from its audience, but for the most part it was fantastically adept at forcing Walter and Jesse into choice, into action. The same is true of 'Freedom,' or 'My Brilliant Friend,' or 'Anna Karenina,' all novels that are hard to stop reading even when it seems as if it should be easy." 
• Neil Gaiman: "A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick--a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart,"
• "Skip around. non-sequential [caps] writing is easier." 
• Michelle Hauck, "Writing and Selling A Fantasy Series, with Michelle Hauck": If an editor is going to feel you out, then you need to have sequel ideas. "The good thing is to market a sequel you don't need a full three to five page synopsis. All you need is a few paragraphs. [...] People might read sequels for the returning characters, but they want to see something new. Moving the story toward the least-known society gives me an opportunity to add that novelty. [...] The pitch for book three was even shorter and pretty vague. Publishers just need to know you have a direction and main idea. It was just six short sentences: a recap of the main obstacle and some either-the-character-does-this or they-do-that sentences. [...] I really think being prepared and sending that pitch had everything to do with getting multiple books."
• Ursula K. Le Guin: "Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality." 
• Albert Camus: "The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself." 
• Onyomi, commenting on "Link-Manuel Miranda": "I have read about similar problems with many music stars: their early stuff is often better precisely because they don't get to call all the shots. They have to seriously consider the input of a team of experienced professionals. Once they make it big people treat them with reverence and they can also afford to fire people who don't treat them with reverence; hence, the end product ends up being worse. I think basically kicking Lucas out of the new films was probably the right thing to do, but not because he would have had nothing good to contribute, but because he still cast too long a shadow and would have caued others to defer too much to his judgment." 
• John Schilling, commenting on *: "Improving on a classic tale by making a version where everyone is weaker than the original, is an interesting idea with great potential but difficult to do well.[...] Origin stories are another neat idea that are sometimes hard to do well and often inappropriate. In particular, trying to shoehorn more than one or two origin stories into a single movie is usually a mistake." 
• King Richard, commenting on "Is neoreaction a photographic negative of Marxism?": "One of the problems I encounter with neoreactionaries is that they have read the same handful of books, do not understand the context of the books, and spend countless hours speaking to each other about the ideas presented in those books *as they were presented* in those books. It is, in the end, a not-very-insightful book club. But this is very common amongst autodidacts, especially those who believe they have achieved some sort of gnosis. Compare neoreactionaries with Objectivists: both have[...] an overly-verbose mediocre writer as a primary hero (moldbug vs. Rand), both have an inexplicable attachment to Austrian economics, and both believe that the statement 'reality is real' is something profound ['Neoreaction is the acknowledgement that you can only work with how the world was, is, and is going to be.' vs 'A is A']. [brackets original]"
• Mark Citadel, commenting on *: "The New Right lives on today through Alexander Dugin and various others in Europe, and primarily I would say it came out of that pagan mysticism very much present in the works of Rene Guenon and earlier Evola. Though Dugin is an advocate of Russian Orthodoxy, there are distinct pagan elements to his philosophy as well. He wants to marry the two."