https://borretti.me/article/i-wish-people-were-more-public

Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have rarely wished the opposite. Consider this post addressed to you, the reader.

Your Writing

I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts. If I like what I see, I reach out. This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.

And, from the other side, I have often written a post where, just before publishing, I would think: “who would want to read this? It’s too personal, obscure, idiosyncratic, probably a few people will unsubscribe to the RSS feed for this”. And always those are the posts where people email me to say they always thought the same thing but could never quite put it into words. I really value those emails. “I am understood” is a wonderful feeling.

I try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet.

Your Books

If I follow you on Twitter, and you have posted a picture of your bookshelf, I have probably scanned every book in it. This is why I appreciate Goodreads. Like many people I have been reading a lot less over the past ~5y, but since I made a Goodreads account earlier this year, I’ve read tens of books. Reading in public has helped to motivate me.

You may say reading in public is performative. I say reading in private is solipsistic. Dante, in De Monarchia, writes:

All men on whom the Higher Nature has stamped the love of truth should especially concern themselves in laboring for posterity, in order that future generations may be enriched by their efforts, as they themselves were made rich by the efforts of generations past. For that man who is imbued with public teachings, but cares not to contribute something to the public good, is far in arrears of his duty, let him be assured; he is, indeed, not “a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” [Psalms 1:3] but rather a destructive whirlpool, always engulfing, and never giving back what it has devoured.

My default mode is solipsism. I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness. I’m halfway through a textbook and think: why? Why am I learning geology? Why this topic, and not another? There is never an a priori reason. I take notes, but why tweak the LaTeX if no-one, probably not even future me, will read them? If I stop reading this book, what changes? And doing things in public makes them both more real and (potentially) useful. If you publish your study notes, they might be useful to someone. Maybe they get slurped up in the training set of the next LLM, marginally improving performance.

And Goodreads, for all its annoyances, is a uniquely tender social network. Finishing a book, and then seeing a friend mark it as “want to read”, feels like a moment of closeness.

I have a friend who lived in Sydney, who has since moved away, and we don’t keep in touch too often, because the timezones are inconvenient, but occasionally she likes my book updates, and I like hers, and I will probably never read that avant-garde novel, but I’m glad she is reading it. It is like saying: “You exist. I exist. I remember. I wish you happiness.”

Your Flashcards

Lots of people use spaced repetition, but most everyone’s flashcard collections are private. They exist inside a database inside an app like Anki or Mochi. You can export decks, but that’s not a living artifact but a dead snapshot, frozen in time.

One reason I built hashcards: by using a Git repo of Markdown files as the flashcard database, you can trivially publish your deck to GitHub. My own flashcard collection is public. I hope that more people use hashcards and put their decks up on GitHub.

The point is not that you can clone their repos (which is close to useless: you have to write your own flashcards) but because I’m curious what people are learning. Not the broad strokes, since we all want to learn thermo and econ and quantum chemistry and the military history of the Song dynasty and so on, but the minutiae. Why did you make a flashcard out of this Bible passage? Why does it resonate with you? Why do you care about the interpretation of that strange passage in Antigone? Why did you memorize this poem?

Your Dotfiles

Computers mediate every aspect of our lives, yet most people use their computers the way they came out of the box. At most they might change the desktop background. Some people don’t even change the default icons on the macOS dock. Even most Linux users just use the stock configuration, e.g. GNOME on Fedora or whatever.

I’m interested in people who customize their experience of computing. This is often derided as “ricing”. But agency is interesting. People who remake their environment to suit them are interesting. And I am endlessly curious about how people do this. I like reading people’s init.el, their custom shell scripts, their NixOS config. It’s even better if they have some obscure hardware e.g. some keyboard layout I’ve never heard of and a trackball with custom gestures. I put my dotfiles up on GitHub because I imagine someone will find them interesting.

etc.

And beyond my selfish curiosity there’s also the Fedorovist ancestor simulation angle: if you die and are not cryopreserved, how else are you going to make it to the other side of the intelligence explosion? Every tweet, blog post, Git commit, journal entry, keystroke, mouse click, every one of these things is a tomographic cut of the mind that created it.

https://borretti.me/article/i-wish-people-were-more-public