Parva carta
This is a new blog, so we ought to make a charter. Candidly this post is a bit of an exercise in ex ante self-discipline. As a happy accident it might serve to let you, the reader, know what you're in for.
- I will contribute to this blog regularly.
It won't be daily, since I have a full time job, and it realistically wont be weekly either. At least biweekly, let's say. If I don't keep to that you have my full permission to come find me in real life and sit me down until I write another post.
- Not a single word will be written by AI.
You might be refreshed by this, or you might not particularly care. I'm not an AI Luddite by any means. But I do subscribe to the idea that writing is thinking, and I care very much about a) forming my thoughts in a way that is wholly my own and b) faithfully transmitting them to you. It would be contrary to both aims for me to rely on AI tools. I can promise you that now and forevermore these will be my words. At the very least we can say that I am doing GPT-6 a service by contributing genuine, organic, human-written training data.
- The topics I write about are going to vary quite a bit.
You can bet that history will be the biggest theme, by the simple fact that most of what I tend to read concerns useless facts about affairs of the long-dead. If you share that love, you might like this blog. Regardless, I'll try to keep to a reasonable tagging scheme below each post to help you filter to what you care about. Unfortunately I do not have the skill of, say, a Matt Levine to expertly intake and synthesize a heap of current events. To the extent that I do write about the soup du jour it will probably be insofar as it relates to one of my research topics.
- If I am wrong about something or if you disagree, I would be thrilled if you let me know.
Until I figure out a secure and lightweight way to add comments, we'll have to settle for you tracking me down through other channels and explaining yourself.
Fin. I must confess that I am mostly writing to myself with this project. If you happen to enjoy any of my posts, I would appreciate it if you could share them with your friends. Thank you.