Until five minutes ago, I was vaguely planning to write privately a bit more exploring various ideas before deciding on another topic to publish a second post on. We had just wrapped up at our weekly discussion group (often philosophy; sometimes science and technology too). It started as an interesting discussion about neuroscience and consciousness that was loosely based on reading this post. We had fun on tangents bouncing around neural network interpretability, attempts at tying in Kuhn and Schopenhauer, debating whether any scientific realm (e.g. neuroscience, biology) can even be goal-driven by nature, and how academia and job search dynamics (among many other things) are changing with ChatGPT/LLM adoption.

Finally, we ended on an interesting discussion around the efficacy and efficiency of actions which build public awareness around issues, and what the payoffs might be for individuals choosing to take part. In this dialogue, I brought up that people can optimize for different goals, and sometimes they may prioritize the stated impact/outcome whereas other times they could optimize how they feel about their actions whereas the rest of the time they do some third thing. But let's pause on that for a moment..

At the end of the night, we were chatting about writing in public at the top of the Tube’s escalators and I shared my vague strategy about posting every so often. A trio of voices chimed in with radically-candid feedback that writing regularly with a forced goal was how many people got started, and that this approach would almost-certainly be more effective than what I was doing. I had to laugh - this immediately brought into focus the payoff optimization point I had brought up earlier.

Thanks to their feedback, I was faced directly with the choice: do I continue a path that might be effective and I definitely feel good about, pivot to trying a daily public writing practice with some strong expert advice backing its effectiveness even if it would cause some discomfort in the short-term, or do some goal factoring to figure out what that third thing was anyway?

While I might later figure out a third option because I do love a good meta-analysis, I'm sticking with the object-level thing and pushing this post out tonight. I recently learned that the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex (aMCC) is a part of the brain that grows when you do things you don't want to do (though the post on neuroscience that we read tonight might doubt this claim, to be continued on this topic!). Perhaps doing the hard thing now will make doing it easier in the future; this is surely how it's worked with other goals like the gym and meditation.

Though it wouldn't be fair to say that I don't want to be writing and publishing. Only a part of me was resisting, and having now started it, I'm glad I did. It's great to be held to account for my own goals like that; keep that feedback coming y'all :)

With thanks to: David, David, and Matthew who challenged me to set an arbitrary, uncomfortable publishing goal and make sure I hit it

Written from: a train from London to Thornton Heath

While listening to: