I'm constantly at war with the boring parts of me, the worst of which is a habit of ranting excitedly at unsuspecting friends and family about cool ideas. I pin them in a corner and without pausing for breath excitedly launch into a long and complicated rant about the Truth and The Way Things Do Be and The Logic Of It All.
I don't do this because I'm hesitant or uncertain about what I believe. Instead, I'm excited about good ideas, and this motivates me to want to share them. I like the stuff I believe in, because I've spent years searching for logical heuristics and abstractions and laws that I've seen pay rent in the real world. I apply these tools to interesting ideas with an unwillingness to believe stuff just because it makes me feel good. The end result is that I have found a set of beliefs and opinions that have held up to the best of what I can throw against them, and which have pretty good predictive capacity in the real world.
However, when I'm at parties, I don't share these tools- I just share my conclusions, and somehow expect those conclusions to be self evident. So, in an effort to be better at parties, I'm changing my strategy: Instead of sharing my conclusions, I want to start sharing my tools.
(Now, this effort is doomed to fail because it's half-hearted; if I really cared about good parties I'd work more on asking good questions and telling funny stories, and would spend less time trying to optimize my polemics.) (After I finish writing this essay I SWEAR I'll read something by Dale Carnegie, or maybe go talk to strangers.)
So, here is a list of the things I want to write. The first item on it is an essay about the comparative power of 5g vs sunlight. This one is less tool oriented, and more an outgrowth of a discussion I had with a friend about applications of scientific truth- she's afraid of 5g, and as an electrical engineer, I want to figure out how to clearly and kindly share the science behind how it all works, in order to allay her fears and strengthen her joy in science and the natural world.
My other essays are more in line with sharing my favorite mental tools:
Marbury Vs Madison, and the fictional nature of all organizations.
Supply and demand curves, and their applications in how we approach problems.
Lean manufacture, radical honesty, and radical acceptance: What managers of teams can learn from Toyota.
Efficient markets: We will never outperform a monkey with a dartboard
Demand theory of value
Lifecycle cost assessment- introduction to energy cost
All costs are energy costs- how to see clearly to find solutions to the climate crisis
Money as information, and money as liquid power: How control theory and circuits can be used to model inflation, interest rates, and velocity of money.