Study Notes: Jan 1-Feb 6, 2015

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

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

• Post, "How to Write First Thing in the Morning", by Leo Babauta
• Post, "Why Writer's Block is Your Secret Weapon", by Melissa Karnaze
• Post, "How to Make Your Reader Cry: Anatomy of a Death Scene", by Livia Blackburne
• Post, "My charitable donations for 2015", by Topher Hallquist
• Post, "Donald Trump: less than he appears", by Topher Hallquist

Other notes: 

• Notes on: Starvation

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.
• 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.

"How to Write First Thing in the Morning"

• "Don't wake up in the morning with no idea what you're going to write about. Have your topic chosen and give it a little thought the night before. It's great to sleep on it anyway--let your subconscious do the work for you." 
• "Do your research the afternoon or evening before. That way, you're ready to write and don't have to be distracted by going online to look something up. Just look everything up the day before, and save it all to a text file, so you can write without having to go online." 
• "Start with an outline."
• "Do't check email." 
• "I like to have my writing program open (I use WriteRoom, for its lack of distractions) so that it's right there when I wake up. I put the title on the screen, along with any research I might have done the day before." 
• "Check email (or another reward) when you've done an hour." 

"Why Writer's Block is Your Secret Weapon"

• "Your clarity is directly linked to how convinced you are that you have something valuable to say--and that you can say it." 
• "Use writer's block as a signal to stop and reflect on what you fear and why, because if you don't acknowledge the fear, you'll never be able to face it." 
• "Take a blank sheet of paper and write down a one-line summary of what you think you're supposed to be writing. Be as topic-specific and categorical as you can." 
• "Write down all the ideas and opinions about that tpic that have been passed along to you by other people--things that you've read, heard, overheard, or even imagined." 
• "Now put that page aside because that's not the one that's going to turn your block into a weapon. (In fact, it's the one that will keep you stuck. Get another blank sheet of paper. Again, write down what you think you should be writing in the center of the page. [...] It's important to maintain this solitude for the next step. Dig deep into what you have to say, what you think, and what your opinion is, stripped away from all of those from the first sheet. Put it all out on the page." 
• "This second 'clean-slate' page will reveal the true reason why you wanted to write in the first place." 
• "Each time you unblock yourself by writing despite your fears, it builds confidence. You realize, 'Hey, I've got a lot to say! And I've got a unique position!'"
• "You also strengthen your writing so that nothing can faze it. You won't get thrown off by anyone's doubts (including your own), negative opinions, projections, or reservations about your ability to perform. Those will only cloud what you need to say." 
• "To be a resilient and fierce writer, you need to write despite your fears. And you need signals, such as writer's block, to help uncover your fears so you can face them." 

"How to Make Your Reader Cry"

• "Emphasize the good qualities of the dying character. Taggle tells Kate[;] 'You can survive it... And that is all I want. You do not need me.' The narrative then continues. 'And Taggle, who was beautiful, who'd never misjudged a jump in his life..[.]' For the reader, it's gut[-]wrenching to be reminded of just how selfless and special Taggle is as he leaps to his death." 
• "Draw a connection to a previous tragedy." 
• "Remind the reader about the character's journey--how he's grown." 
• "Emphasize close relationship." 
• "Remind the reader of good times." 
• "Show how the survivors are traumatized by the loss." 
• "Rituals of putting the dead to rest." 
• "Show how much the other characters miss the deceased. Kate is an extraordinarily talented woodcarver who depends on her knife for her livelihood. So it's no small thing when she says that she would cut off her carving hand to glimpse a ghost of Taggle." 
• "Have the dying character leave a legacy." 

"My charitable donations for 2015"

• "December's a big month for charitable giving, so in hopes of encouraging other people to increase their giving and/or give to more effective charities, I'd like to talk about my charitable giving for this year." 
• "The single charity to which I donated the most money is GiveDirectly. GiveDirectly is a charity that uses mobile-phone payment processing networks to send money directly to poor people in Africa. I'm extremely bullish on GiveDirectly[...]. The evidence indicates that, contrary to stereotypes, the poor do a pretty good job of spending money on themselves. Furthermore, this strategy is much more straightforward to scale than something like the Against Malaria Foundation, which has an impressive track record but may not have much room for more funding (especially given that they've already got GoodVentures in their corner)." 
• "I'm a huge supporter of animal rights, but unfortunately, we know a lot less about what works in animal advocacy than we do about what works for fighting global poverty. My hope is that Animal Charity Evaluators may be able to change that--and I'm impressed by the quality of research that they've managed to do so far on their quite limited budget." 
• "I'm cautiously optimistic about undercover investigations (which both orgs have historically focused on) as a tactic." 
• "I donated $100 to Cool Earth because Will MacAskill's book Doing Good Better recommended it as likely one of the most effective anti-global warming charities, and estimated that $100 was enough to offset the average American's carbon emissions for a year. Cool Earth is also notable because their approach involves fighting deforestation by helping out indigenous people living in tropical forests. I think there's potentially a lot of value in getting more attention for such neglected approaches to problems like global warming." 
• "I'm feeling pretty cautious right now about donating to organizations focused on existential risk, especially after Elon Musk's $10 million donation to the Future of Life Institute. Musk's donation don't [sic] necessarily mean there's no room for more funding, but it certainly does mean that room for more funding is harder to find than it used to be." 

"Donald Trump"

• Ezra Klein: "Trump's campaign is an embarrassment. His policy proposals are a joke. The saving grace of his candidacy has been the suspicion that he's playing a deeper game--that the offensiveness is calculated, that the proposals aren't serious, that the Donald is more than he appears. But maybe he's not." 
• "I decided to take it upon myself to answer this question by reading two biographies of Trump, by Wayne Barrett and Gwenda Blair." 
• "The Trump that comes across in these biographies is reckless, mendacious, boorish, and corrupt, with no real talents for anything except self-promotion."
• "While I knew Trump's father, Fred Trump, was politically well-connected, I didn't quite grasp the extent to which he got rich through outright corruption, or how the Donald took part in this same corruption." 
• "The Donald himself is alleged to have once boasted--with a restaurant full of people listening--of his ability to buy politicians. Barrett reports that Trump tried to bribe him directly, and Barrett isn't the only journalist to have a story like that." 
• Andrew Prokop: "Trump is presenting himself as someone who has so mastered the corruption of American politics that he can be trusted to resist it." 
• "The most damning thing I've learned through reading these books, though, is that Trump seems to be even less competent at business than I'd previously argued." 
• "If Trump is actually elected, there's a serious chance we could wind up dealing with someone who's willing to engage in reckless, flagrantly corrupt behavior in the name of his own self-aggrandizement. Be afraid." 

Miscellaneous

• Louis L'Amour: "Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." 
• J. D. Roberts: "A reader doesn't pick up a book to remind them of the world they live in; they pick up a book in order to escape it." 
• Nick Stockton, "Science Gets Better at Being Wrong": "University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek[...] in 2013 founded the Center for Open Science. Its flagship product is the Reproducibility Project--100 canonical psychology experiments re-run for verification. The results came out this year, and things didn't look great. Well over half of the experiments didn't work out the second time. [...] It provides data-driven evidence that the field's hypercompetitive push to publish new research is hurting science. And for snigglers who think psychology was a soft target, look out: Nosek is coming after cancer biology research next."