This is probably something I shouldn't admit, since it devalues my archives, but I have this vague sense of consciously working to "retire" an old online persona and trying to incubate a new one, just as a lot more people are beginning to discover it
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When I look back on my "work" (seems like a ponderous word for it) over the last decade, I'm reminded of a Hindi proverb that translates to "excavated a mountain, and a rat scurried out". Not self-deprecation, just the statistics of transience.
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There's like a million and a half words there, and the worth-preserving subset is maybe ideas enough to fill a couple of postcards, and no, they're not lofty compressions that expand to a million if you add water. It's just... thinking is a low-yield process.
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Also, cache invalidation. I started blogging and newslettering and tweeting in 2007, which means 9 of the 12 years of my archives are pre-weirding. I'm lucky *any* of it retains any sort of relevance in 2019.
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If you made AlphaGoZero play against itself trying to come up with 2x2s, it would take 48 hours to come up with everything I have, and more 😆
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There's a lot to be said about creating relatively static content for people to mull over. If the humanities have anything going for them, it's certainly that people can look back at, say, Hume's collected work and take it as a whole without worrying about what he'll do next
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That's taking them at their own lofty self-perceptions. I think people vastly overstate the value of words in general. It's a kind of unwarranted veneration.
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