https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU7efgGEOgk

I wish he'd gotten into more of the detail of the research and index card making here as that's where most of the work lies. He does show some of his process of laying out and organizing the cards into some sort of sections using 1/3 cut tabbed cards. This is where his system diverges wildly from Luhmann's. He's now got to go through all the cards and do some additional re-reading and organizational work to put them into some sort of order. Luhmann did this as he went linking ideas and organizing them up front. This upfront work makes the back side of laying things out and writing/editing so much easier. It likely also makes one more creative as one is regularly revisiting ideas, juxtaposing them, and potentially generating new ones along the way rather than waiting until the organization stage to have some of this new material "fall out".

Ryan Holiday does touch on all parts of his writing process, but the majority of the video is devoted to the sorts of easier bikeshedding ideas that people are too familiar with (editing, proofreading, title choice, book cover choice). Hidden here is the process of researching, writing, notes, and actual organizing process which are the much harder pieces for the majority of writers. Hiding it does a massive disservice to those watching it for the most essential advice they're looking for.

When working on a project, to stave off potential procrastination on finishing, one should focus on the minimum viable version and finish that. They can then progressively enhance portions and add on addition pieces which may be beneficial or even nice to have.

Spending too much time on the things that sound nice or that one "might want to have" in the future will be the death of the thing.

link to: - you ain't gonna need it - bikeshedding for procrastination

questions: - Does the misinterpreted-effort hypothesis play a role in creating our procrastination and/or lead to decision fatigue?

There's something here that's akin to the idea of bikeshedding? Online communities flock to the low lying ideas upon which they can proffer an opinion and play at the idea of debate. If they really cared, wouldn't they instead delve into the research and topics themselves? Do they really want Taibbi's specific take? Do they want or need his opinion on the topic? What do they really want?

Compare and cross reference this with the ideas presented by Ibram X. Kendi's article There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory.

Are people looking for the social equivalent of a simple "system one" conversation or are they ready, willing, and able to delve into a "system two" presentation?

Compare this also with the modern day version of the Sunday morning news (analysis) shows? They would seem to be interested in substantive policy and debate, but they also require a lot of prior context to participate. In essence, most speakers don't actually engage, but spew out talking points instead and rely on gut reactions and fear, uncertainty and doubt to make their presentations. What happened to the actual discourse? Has there been a shift in how these shows work and present since the rise of the Hard Copy sensationalist presentation? Is the competition for eyeballs weakening these analysis shows?

How might this all relate to low level mansplaining as well? What are men really trying to communicate in demonstrating this behavior? What do they gain in the long run? What is the evolutionary benefit?

All these topics seem related somehow within the spectrum of communication and what people look for and choose in what and how they consume content.

What are the problems here in such a democratic process online or even in a modern context?

People who aren't actually stakeholders feel that they're stakeholders and want to control other's actions even when they don't have a stake. (eg: abortion)

People don't have time to become properly informed about the ever-increasing group of topics and there is too much disinformation and creation of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Thoughtful deliberation does not happen.

The quality of legislation has dropped instead of increased.

Bikeshedding is too easy.

What if instead of electing people who run, we elected people from the electorate at random? This would potentially at least nudge us to have some representation by "one of the least of these". This would provide us to pay more attention to a broader swath of society instead of the richest and most powerful. What might the long term effects of this be?

Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.

Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.

Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

Tech solutionism is the presumption that technology (usually by itself) can fix a variety of social, cultural, and structural problems.

It fits into a category of problem that when one's tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

Many tech solutionism problems are likely ill-defined to begin with. Many are also incredibly complex and difficult which also tends to encourage bikeshedding, which is unlikely to lead us to appropriate solutions.

Wouldn't it be better for us to focus our efforts and energies on people who are doing bigger mass scale harms on society?

Surely the ability to protect some of these small harms undergird ability to build up protection for much larger harms.

Why are we prosecuting these smaller harms rather than the larger (especially financial and) institutional harms?

It is easier to focus on the small and specific rather than broad and unspecific. (Is there a name for this as a cognitive bias? There should be, if not. Perhaps related to the base rate fallacy or base rate neglect (a form of extension neglect), which is "the tendency to ignore general information and focus on information only pertaining to the specific case, even when the general information is more important." (via Wikipedia)

Could the Jesuits' descent into the particular as a method help out here?