The word belief originally meant something like “hold dear”, or “to care for”, or “to have faith in”. It’s since picked up other meanings – one of the more tedious ones is something like a shallow, simplistic, literalist notion of “real or not” truth. Someone might ask “do you believe in ghosts?”, and if you said yes, they might go, “Ha! Silly superstitious fool, ghosts aren’t real, there aren’t literal supernatural beings that haunt us, you’re so naive to believe that.” And sure, there’s a very primitive way of “believing in ghosts”. Looking through that particular lens, I would say that I don’t really believe in ghosts. But there is a sense, for example, in which I believe that Santa is Real. Not that there’s a literal man who lives in the North Pole and so on, but that there is a story of Santa that many people choose to participate in. The punchline is “Santa is real and he uses you as a delivery mechanism for presents.” I could go on about this for hours, but I trust you get enough of the idea for me to move on.

The above paragraph I think presents me as slightly wooey, or woo-adjacent. I have sympathies to woo, I just also simultaneously think that it’s important to be able to switch modes as necessary. Which brings me back to the tagline of this substack: in this house we surf all the channels at once.

So. There are things that I believe, right? Things that I think I know to be true. It’s murky because it’s intertwined with things that I want to be true, which may not be as true, or may not be true at all. And I believe that a lot of the point of Thinking — good, meaningful, effective thinking — is to discern what’s what. I believe that that’s a consequential thing to do, to work towards having increasingly accurate-enough models of reality, models of my own behavior, and so on. It’s worth trying even if you know in advance that you’re not going to get it totally right. It’s helpful to remember that everything is murky approximations, and to always leave room for further clarification, further renegotiation. It’s helpful also to be able to be quick to say “I have no idea how to model this,” or “my current model of this is,” “I have no idea,” “I’m not sure,” “I don’t know,” and so on.

( “Advanced Stupid” is when you mistake your model of reality for reality itself, and then make ruinous decisions as a consequence. Nothing can truly ever be the last word on anything. Models are always murky. Reality always has a surprising amount of detail, and some surprising detail can ruin your life.)

I believe that it’s generally helpful to work backwards from desired outcomes. I’m not sure that I always believed this. This is something I experimented with, and I found it to be so effective that it’s become a stronger mental habit. When I was younger I was more carefree, chaotic, irreverent, meandering. I’m still like that, and probably always will be, but I’ll say that I’ve gotten better at it! I’m more ‘purposeful’, even in my ‘purposelessness’.

^ There are paradoxes like these at the heart of most interesting things. I think this is really more a problem of language than a problem of reality. Reality exists however it pleases. It’s the ways we attempt to carve up reality that produce all sorts of “logical errors”. The issue might be that we’ve spent so much time and energy over our lifetimes conceptualizing reality, that we oftentimes struggle to experience it without subordinating the world to thought.

There’s often a valuable truth that’s the opposite of any valuable truth. I just said that it’s helpful to work backwards from desired outcomes. It can also be a trap. Because sometimes you don’t know what you want. I try to give as much context as I can to what I’m saying, but we don’t have the time and space and energy to get into my entire life history. Even if I had decades of time to get into it, I’m not sure I’d be able to do a good job.

Elsewhere I wanted to say something like, I do my best writing when I’m writing for myself, or when I’m writing for someone else that I care about. As my audience grows, and I get an inflated sense of self-importance, I start feeling like I should do some “Good, Proper, Important” writing for “The World”. But The World isn’t a real thing. It’s an abstraction. A spook. I cannot actually conceive of “The World”. So whenever I try to write “For The World”, I end up writing