Compare like with like
When critiquing my own work it’s tempting to compare it unfavourably with something good. But almost all early drafts need improvement.
For example, here’s the final version of a well-known voiceover:
Space, the final frontier.
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations
To boldly go where no man has gone before.
But here’s an early draft of that famous start to Star trek. tl;dr it sucks too. [Neatorama.com]
The lesson? If your terrible draft lacks sparkle, it might just be because almost everyone’s does, at first. So if you can’t compare like with like, then don’t compare at all.
Unless you really are planning to regulate commerce and so on.
‘Beginner's mind’ keeps you young — even in your 80s
Stewart Brand was on the Ezra Klein Show, talking about his new book Maintenance: Of Everything. He’s well into his eighties, and he said:
“Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”
Well now, it was Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese monk who brought Zen to Northern California, who famously spoke of ‘beginner’s mind’. He said:
“When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can learn something. The beginner’s mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless… The most difficult thing is always to keep your beginner’s mind. … This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner” – Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind: Prologue.
Brand’s mention of beginner’s mind isn’t the only Japanese concept he references. The cover of Maintenance: Of Everything alludes to kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery by means of gold lacquer. With kintsugi, instead of hiding the cracks, you honour them.
You can read the interview’s transcript, or just listen.
My source for this little nugget was Austin Kleon, who also has a new book out in September 2026: Don’t Call it Art.
Meanwhile, I’ve written more about beginner’s mind, and why the greatest experts are serial beginners.
In Influence is everything I’ve mentioned Stewart Brand’s idea of ‘pace layering’.
“Pace layers is an idea Stewart Brand first developed in the 1990s. Civilization, he argued, works as a set of nested layers, each moving at a different speed: fashion changes fastest, then commerce, then infrastructure, governance, culture, and finally nature, which changes slowest of all. The fast layers are where novelty happens, but the slow layers provide stability. Healthy societies need both.
Each layer also requires its own kind of maintenance—and when any of them gets neglected, the whole system suffers.”
And I’ve also reflected on Austin Kleon’s advice about Sharing what you know.
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I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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Notes about notebooks?
Ulkar Aghayeva writes about the history of laboratory notebooks.
Aghayeva, U. “A Brief History of Lab Notebooks.” Asimov Press (2026). DOI: 10.62211/52wg-76ye
Source: Scott Nesbitt’s The Monday Kickoff - well worth subscribing to.
#notetaking #notebooks #historyofscience
I find writing on the train works well. It helps that there’s a good view. Anyone else do this?
#writing #notetaking #writingcommunity #photography
Every Zen garden is unique, but recognizable patterns recur too.
Perhaps it’s the patterns that enable the diversity.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content
Holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
💬 “The Net is not content.
There is great content on the Internet. But holy mother of cheeses, the Internet is not made out of content.
A teenager’s first poem, the blissful release of a long-kept secret, a fine sketch drawn by a palsied hand, a blog post in a regime that hates the sound of its people’s voices — none of these people sat down to write content.
Did we use the word “content” without quotes? We feel so dirty.” — Doc Searles and David Weinberger, New Clues
Plenty of my thoughts about writing, and writing for the Web, are really just paraphrases of something David Weinberger has already said with far greater eloquence and perspicacity.
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“Small pieces loosely joined”. — From fragments you can build a greater whole.
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“Everything is miscellaneous”. — What does it mean to write from the bottom up instead of from the top down?
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“The smartest person in the room is the room”. — The mastery of knowledge is an illusion.
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“The Internet is not made out of content”. — What comes after content?
And what do you know? the author has a new book out in October 2026:
No doubt Beautiful Particulars will also help reshape my brain, and maybe yours too.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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The real science behind Project Hail Mary
Yes, there is some real science behind 📚 Project Hail Mary.
It’s an enjoyable and successful sci-fi novel and film, but the science fiction is frankly quite a bit more fiction than science.
It would hardly give away the plot of Project Hail Mary to mention that it has a lot to do with the microbial contamination of experimental research. I mean, that’s what the story is about – in the same way Andy Weir’s previous novel, The Martian, was all about potato farming.
If this floats your spaceship (microbes I mean, not potatoes), you might enjoy a fascinating article about the real science of microbial contamination in experimental contexts. Apparently there’s a bacteriophage called Φ80 and it’s running amok.
How Φ80 infiltrates research labs.
Scary stuff! Perhaps someone will turn it into a movie.
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for Artists and Fighters, available now.
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💬 “For good or ill, a new generation, though raised in the lap of AI, will not be speaking or writing anything like the ‘intelligence’ that raised it.” - Notes on the artificial style of writing.
#Zettelkasten #LLM #AIPhilosophy #Writing #Notemaking #AIWriting
Notes on the artificial style of writing
In which the artificial style of writing encounters the iron hand of fashion
AI makes writing more bland, as reported by NBC News. This will accelerate the rate at which readers demand new forms of writing that AI can’t yet (or ever) achieve. There’s been plenty of talk about how AI caters to the economic requirement for efficiency (aka reduced labour costs), but there’s another very obvious economic requirement too: novelty.
AI handles novelty of combination very well. Just try asking it for a story about a unicycling giraffe who learns quantum mechanics and escapes from a zoo in the Alpha Centuri star system — it won’t refuse you. That kind of combinatorial novelty it handles with aplomb. At no point will it tell you this is a bad idea. On the contrary, “You might consider how the unicycle itself acts as a metaphor for the observer effect,” says Google’s Gemini as it eggs me on. But it doesn’t produce novelty of expression. Despite the arguable novelty of this scenario, the adventures of a fugitive circus scientist space giraffe, the story, as written by AI, will still be, well, bland.
Cheaper, better and newer. Consumers crave novelty, which drives the endless parade of fashion, and the instant obsolescence of what only yesterday was highly desirable. In a sense, AI writing stands at the end of an era, the era that saw the kind of writing on which AI has been trained as up to date. For example, if a chat-bot wrote an article or a piece of advertising copy in the 150-year-old style of Charles Dickens, it would be quaint, but hardly useable. To achieve the effect it does, of being ‘as good as an average human writer’, it must mimic what’s considered the current writing style, and it does so blandly.
Now the research shows that AI-generated prose isn’t just bland, it’s also distorted in several other ways, many of them, such as pronoun use, connected with style.
How LLMs distort our written language.
But fashions change, and the blandness of the AI style will accelerate the speed at which writing style fashions change. Just as we can’t take seriously today someone who writes like Charles Dickens (unless it’s deliberate pastiche), tomorrow we won’t be able to take seriously any writing produced in the style of a bot. And that means soon we won’t be able to take seriously any writing that’s written in our current style.
You have your own peculiar and necessarily limited interests and instead of spreading the net too widely, maybe it’s worth keeping a bit focused on these. But how? Top level categories in my notes.
#PKM #Zettelkasten #notemaking #Writing #WritingSlowly
Top level categories in my notes
What kind of top-level categories do you have for your notes?
If you’re doing knowledge management you might use or adapt Tiago Forte’s PARA system:
- Projects
- Activities
- Resources
- Archive
Or you might consider using Bob Doto’s four-folder approach:
- In-box
- Sleeping
- References
- Main
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes.
Prolific German sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s second collection of notes, his second Zettelkasten (ZKII) was arranged according to eleven top-level categories, based on subjects or themes associated with his singular major project, a theory of society.
- Organisation theory
- Functionalism
- Decision theory
- Amt: office, post, job, duty
- Formal / informal order
- Sovereignty / State
- Isolated/individual terms, problems
- Economy
- Ad hoc notes
- Archaic societies
- High cultures
In his lecture on Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, researcher Johannes Schmidt of the Niklas Luhmann Archive at Bielefeld University observes that these headings are hardly comprehensive. Instead they strongly echo the progression of Luhmann’s scholarly interests over many years.
“Looking at these you quickly see that this does not describe a certain body of knowledge to work through like in the first Zettelkasten. If you know a bit about the development of Luhmann’s theory you quickly recognize this as a historic record of research interests.”
Simon Willison says:
💬 “I’m effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email.”
I already do this easily via micro.blog and it’s a lot less convoluted. I guess he has complete control of the output though, provided he’s happy to tinker like this.
Finished reading Trip to the Moon by John Yorke
Trip to the Moon by John Yorke 📚 sets out the author’s deeply-considered views on the nature of story and goes further than his previous work on the same theme, Into the Woods.
John Yorke is a highly experienced writer and producer for British TV, and here he presents invaluable insights into how stories really work, from the perspective of someone who absolutely knows what he’s talking about. I found the section on non-western story-forms very interesting, and though I wasn’t convinced by the claim that stories in all cultures are basically fueled by ‘some bastardization of the hero’s journey’, just hearing the argument made by a true expert was very helpful.
More convincing - and worrying - was the claim that effective storytellers ‘unshackle us from empirical observation by drugging us with rage or anger or pleasure.’ Indeed, if this book has a single key theme, it might be that telling stories is a uniquely dangerous skill, whose seductive power we’d do well to understand much better than we do.
The insights of Trip to the Moon are profound, though a more rigorous edit would have served the work well. In places the text feels unbalanced. Crucial developments are often truncated in the main chapters only to resurface in the lengthy commentary at the back. Despite this imbalance, the author’s body of work remains vital for any aspiring writer. Start with Into the Woods before tackling this more fragmented sequel.
💬 The fight against the far-right is much more compelling to voters when it is framed in the practical opposition to corruption than the ideological opposition to populism. — Ian Dunt, Substack.
A lesson from Hungary for the rest of us.
Make YouTube videos and you’ll eventually be tempted to sit in a bath of ketchup or jump into a tiny pool with a goat – but either would bring relief from the cat photos the rest of us seem compelled to post.
How do social media platforms trap users in networks they would rather leave? | UNSW
On Mastodon, Harold Jarche points to the renewed relevance of Harold Innis, the mid-20th century Canadian scholar who called out US media imperialism for what it was.
💬 “We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises.”
I’ve written about Innis’s lost notes but his warnings about the distorting power of the media are very appropriate now.
I’m reading about the traditional Japanese porch, the engawa, seen here at the Shugakuin Imperial Villa.
But right now I’m sitting on the typically Australian version, the verandah, an idea the colonialists took from India.
In each case, inside and outside connect quite elegantly.
Jorge Arango’s book, Duly Noted: Extend your mind through connected notes, has its own Flickr page, with a set of photos, images and screenshots — illustrations that inform the book’s text. I like this idea and am saving it here in case it’s useful in future — whether for me or for someone else.
Thoughts on ‘The Memex Method’
Today I noticed that the ridiculously prolific author and tech activist Cory Doctorow is commissioned to publish a book in 2027 on “The Memex Method”, which he described in a post of that name back in 2021. The basic idea is that he publishes continually in public by means of many, many blog posts, then collates it into books.
💬 “Traditionally, a writer identifies a subject of interest and researches it, then writes about it. In the (my) blogging method, the writer blogs about everything that seems interesting, until a subject gels out of all of those disparate, short pieces.”
I mentioned this post back in 2023, when I suggested: to build something big, start with small fragments.
Writing is still about thinking
According to author Larry McEnerney, writing is an essential part of a sophisticated thinking process. He says:
💬 “So here’s what you’re doing, you are thinking about your world in very difficult ways. This is a terrifically good thing, and it’s the source of most of the value of your work. Now, you are also writing about that world, and this is where it starts, the problem starts arising. Unlike a journalist, almost surely you are using your writing process to help yourself think. In other words, the thinking that you’re doing is at such a level of complexity that you have to use writing to help yourself do your thinking.” - Larry McEnerney: The Craft of Writing Effectively | Youtube
In my own reading I’ve felt there’s a difference between published writing as useful information (e.g. ‘how to fix that annoying computer problem’) and published writing as the voice of a human grappling with complexity (‘how I fixed my annoying computer problem ‘).
In the first instance I don’t care if the ‘author’ is AI, so long as the suggested fix actually works. I don’t need evidence of a thought process; I just want to fix my computer. In the second instance, the central thing I’m looking for is evidence of human thought. And if the writing starts to smell of AI, I don’t bother even finishing it.
But even though the AI-written information articles always seem highly plausible, I’ve found the ‘information’ contained to be highly untrustworthy. Sometimes it’s correct and helpful, other times it’s wildly off beam. That’s not exactly ideal. I noticed that at least one version of Microsoft Copilot says it’s ‘for entertainment only’ - which makes it a bit worrying that they named it Copilot.
So whether I do need a human or don’t need a human, either way, AI prose isn’t really doing it for me.
Well, here are some articles that consider the vexed question of whether AI text counts as writing, or just glorified Lorem Ipsum filler – or worse:
- Alex Woods | Don’t let AI write for you.
- N. Cailie | I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era.
- Elizabeth Spiers | The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites.
- “We can decide that we want to be human” | The Guardian.
- Less Wrong | Folie à Machine: LLMs and Epistemic Capture.
- Manuel Morale’s two-step process for writing AI-free blog posts (an amusing response to an interesting discussion).
I’m the author of Shu Ha Ri: The Japanese Way of Learning, for artists and Fighters, which I wrote myself and I also took all the photos myself. If you’re interested in learning, teaching, art, fighting, or Japanese aesthetics and philosophy, you might just find this short book of relevance to you.