Keeping a journal is a useful tool for the mind.
Biologist Michael Levin has written this, which I at least broadly agree with:
One component to building your own intuition, for having good new ideas, is to show your mind that you’re listening. Again, I have no idea why this works, how generally it works across individuals, or what the mechanism is. All I know is what my experience is and what I’ve suggested to some others for whom it’s worked. The key is that when you get an idea (while jogging, driving, or any other activity), do not let it go and don’t try to just remember it. Write it down somewhere (paper notebook or Evernote software or DevonThink or similar) and go over it later; the key is to get it out of your head, but into a form that preserves it. I’ve noticed that the more you do this, the more the ideas will come. Letting it go and forgetting about it is a signal to your mind that you don’t need ideas; a system that responds to new ideas with a ritual of getting them into a database tends to support their arrival in the future, and frees the creative mind from needing to keep hold of everything in active memory. A close cousin to this is the strategy of offloading all the existing information (ideas, plans, schedules, paper outlines, etc.) into mindmaps, databases, and other tools (see here for more details). I suspect that the more your subconscious believes that the details are safely stored and accessible, the more mind cycles are available for new ideas instead of spending their effort holding on to stuff that’s easily looked up.
I struggle with knowing what to share and what not to share. I usually err on the side of secrecy and caution as a means of allowing for solitary creativity to bloom. I have, however, benefitted immensely from the public writing and generous open-sourcing of thoughts and ideas that many Internet bloggers and autistic archivists have created, so I think there is certainly value to those activities. I am not yet sure what the value will be as a writer, but I think the certain amount of polish and upkeep that publicizing something requires of me will be a good forcing function for me to do clean thinking and follow up on what I put out here. So far, only an hour or so into writing this website, I am finding it difficult divorcing myself from thinking that I am writing for an elusive reader or audience. I am particularly sensitive, I think, because I spend so much time writing only to myself in my private notes. It is my goal to write here as naturally as possible.
Much of the motivation for this website, after all, is to host for myself a polished repository of research.
A Note on Anonymity
I’m pretty sure that at some point, people will connect the dots. At that point, that might be a good problem to have. The active question as I’m creating this website to start is, “How hard should I work to obfuscate things?” Obfuscation makes things slightly less user-friendly in that I have to use pseudonyms for many things. Not only that, but it also makes me question what I should put here and what I shouldn’t.
Hence, “I’ll be exposed at some point anyways” is probably a useful mentality to hold. Just look at Beff Jezos and ACX, after all.
I will continue using acronyms for project names, though. There is power to keeping names close to the chest until they are ready to be revealed. 1
Well, I think it might not be a bad idea to just keep a pseudonym for this website, then, anyways.
A Note on Project Overlaps
It is true that the project subfolders will inevitably have content that overlaps with each other. Initially, I was thinking about restricting, for example, fundraising content for scientific organizations, which FDL might at some point utilize, only in ProgSys. Now, I think the right approach is that there will exist some specific lists or resources that will be most useful for FDL and different lists for ProgSys. So, it actually makes sense to not artificially restrict “what goes where” in the general sense, since even if “fundraising sources” has overlap, there will be utility in placing them in their individual project contexts.
Footnotes
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This probably has more info on this idea: In Depth Meditation, Mantra, and Enlightenment | Dr. K Full vod ↩