David R. MacIver's Blog

Hello

2026-04-09

Hello. Remember this place?

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’ve been reading my substack. I’ve enjoyed writing that, and I intend to continue to cross-post relevant posts over there, but I’ve also been missing having a “real” blog, and feeling increasingly bad about the lingering rotting corpse of my old blog, so I’m attempting to revitalise it.

As part of that I’ve moved off Wordpress and onto a static site generator. I’ve also imported all my substack posts into here. Hopefully all of those will work. Let me know if you run into any problems.

One of the big motivators is that I want to do more writing about technical subjects again. I’ve been doing a bit of that over on my notebook but the notebook feels off for anything I want to be taken seriously, because the whole point of things that are on the notebook is that they oughtn’t be taken seriously. They feel even more off on the substack, which has never really been about that. I could start a new blog, but there’s one sitting right here which has historically been for exactly that.

So, here we are, back at the beginning - me writing posts, sometimes about software development, on drmaciver.com.

On Mediocrity

2026-02-24

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/on-mediocrity.

I’m in the middle of a very long draft post, and after I’d already written a very large number of words I started going off on a digression explaining the way I use a particular word and how it differs slightly from the normal meaning. This seemed like a sign that that bit should be its own post, so here it is as its own post.

The word is, as you can probably guess from the title, “mediocre”.

Used normally, “mediocre” means something like “only adequate”, which is compatible with my meaning, but for me it includes overtones of “and could never hope to be better without fundamentally changing its nature”.

The easiest way you can tell I mean something slightly different from the normal meaning is that English is a tonal language, and when I say this word it is usually pronounced somewhere between tinged and dripping with contempt. In my idiolect, mediocre is a much harsher judgement than “terrible”.

This doesn’t, exactly, mean that mediocre things are worse than terrible things. A mediocre meal is edible even when a terrible meal might not be. But it is possible to produce a terrible meal and not have me judge you for it, while I will always judge a mediocre one at least a bit.

(This is not, you understand, to say that I do not ever produce mediocre things. I absolutely do, somewhat regularly. And then I judge myself, at least slightly, for doing so)

Let me illustrate with two examples of adequate meals that I somewhat regularly cook. Both are “low energy” meals - they don’t require much in the way of time, energy, or planning, and they fulfil the requirements of actually having something resembling a real meal:

The first is: Rice, stir fry greens from the freezer, a Thai omelette.

The second is: Leon’s frozen waffle fries, Leon’s frozen gluten-free chicken, frozen green beans cooked in the microwave.

Both of these are adequate meals. The second is mediocre, the first is not. What makes the difference?

It’s not effort or time. The first is a little more effort, and cooking rice takes longer than cooking waffle fries, but not much, and that effort and time can be reduced without the meal becoming mediocre. e.g. the stir fry greens I use microwave just fine, and I often have leftover rice in the fridge that can be reheated, at which point this meal becomes almost trivial. There’s a decent chance that if I’m in low effort mode I’ll fuck up the Thai omelette, but a Thai omelette that you’ve slightly fucked up cooking is still delicious.

It’s also not quality. I made a variation of the rice one the other day where I swapped out the Thai omelette for Tofoo sriracha tofu fried in Schezuan pepper oil. The results were, if I’m completely honest, kinda bad. I hadn’t used this Schezuan pepper oil before and greatly misjudged its flavour profile, and the result was too sour and made your mouth go unpleasantly instead of pleasantly numb. If you asked me to compare this and the fries-and-chicken meal, I’d have to in full honesty admit that the latter was tastier. But I still wouldn’t judge this meal as mediocre, it was just kinda bad. Perfectly edible - I still ate the leftovers for lunch the next day - but I would never choose to cook it that way again.

Fries, chicken, and green beans is, in contrast, honestly a pretty OK meal. It’s filling, reasonably tasty, contains a somewhat adequate amount of nutrition. I wouldn’t evangelise it as a good choice, but I could do a lot worse. Fries aren’t obviously worse than rice, breaded chicken isn’t obviously worse than a Thai omelette. It is still, however, extremely mediocre.

What’s the difference?

Well, if I’m honest, some of it is vibes. This is a bit like the real vs fake thing all over again, and there are parts of this distinction that I can’t quite defend. There are a couple quite specific concrete things I can point to about it though.

The first is that the the rice dish is just more interesting. It has more variety of flavour profile built into it, and permits more variation around that. I will often season it differently - sometimes adding pickled chinese vegetables, or chilli crisp, usually adding some subset of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil, etc. It provides more of a base of variation, and is an easy target of creativity.

Chips and chicken in contrast, I will serve with both types of condiments, ketchup and mayonnaise.

This, I think, is the basis of the second and more important part of the distinction: What happens if I put more effort into the dish?

The rice dish, I can very easy turn into a pretty respectable meal. If I add a second vegetable dish to it, it’s starting to look like an actually good meal. I can turn the Thai omelette into a side dish accompanying a main. The stir fry vegetables are easily doctored up with the addition of e.g. extra ginger and some spices. I could do a coconut rice instead of a plain one, or swap it out for a more interesting rice than a basic Thai jasmine white rice. There are a million directions to go in to make the dish better, many of them easily accessible.

I do not, to be clear, that often go very far in those directions. It’s common for me to do maybe one improvement, typically in the form of some sort of accompanying condiment, slight improvement to the vegetables, or replacing the omelette with something equally easy. But even at its most basic version of this dish, the possibilities are there.

In contrast, the fries and chicken… where do I go from there? I can put more effort into getting good results, e.g. by putting some fat and salt on the waffle fries and making sure they’re well separated on the pan before cooking them, but the fundamental character of the dish is pretty stable and putting in more work doesn’t really produce a better dish, just a better execution of an adequate dish.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s possible to do very good fries and chicken. I’m not sure I can make my own waffle fries easily enough to be worth it, but I can certainly do something in the space of crispy potatoes with breaded chicken and a vegetable side dish and get a very good result. This is a fairly big step change in the recipe though.

Sure, I can make my own fries, but that’s a hell of a lot more work than putting some waffle fries in the oven. Breading and frying my own chicken is even more work. Sometimes that’s work worth doing! I like fried chicken, and I like putting work into meals. It is not, however, at all contiguous with the lazy meal I started with, it’s its own separate thing with a passing resemblance to it.

This is, I think, the core thing I am pointing to when I describe something as “mediocre”.

With the basic rice meal, I am operating in a process where I can decide how good a dish I want to make, and then make it to that standard. I choose to make an adequate dish, because that is currently the right trade off for me - I have limited time, energy, and ingredients to hand, and limited motivation to do something great, so I’ve chosen a level of quality appropriate to that and executed on that.

Frozen fries and chicken, in contrast, I’ve rather locked myself into the quality level as soon as the process has been chosen. If I wanted to produce a good meal, I wouldn’t put in a bit more effort, I would choose an entirely different plan.

Mediocrity is not just about quality, it is about acting in such a way that you can be responsive to level of quality the situation demands. If you produce something merely adequate because you decided adequacy was sufficient, or because you failed in your attempt to do better, that’s one thing. If you behave in such a way that you can cannot hope to be better than adequate, that’s mediocre.

My running example makes it sound like this is about premade goods, which do indeed tend to lock you into a plan, and probably are the easiest way to produce mediocre results, but I don’t think this is essential. There are, for example, plenty of mediocre writers - people who produce slop, even without the assistance of an LLM.

Many of these people are writing every word from scratch themselves, but they are doing so to make quota, without putting much thought into it, or in response to whatever will get them clicks.

Sometimes this produces mediocrity because they are operating in an environment where they have to churn something out too fast for thought - I can just about produce good work daily for a few months, but I pretty rapidly lose the plot after that, and if I had to produce five new pieces a day you’d pretty rapidly find what my version of slop looks like - but I think often it runs deeper than that. The reason the process is not sensitive to the needs of quality is that the person executing it is not.

This is a very easy place to end up if you are just naively following incentives. The short-term rewards for “good enough” are not actually much less than the short-term rewards for “actually good”, and it takes a lot less effort. If you don’t develop your own aesthetic sense that you can follow independently of external reward signals, you will very rapidly converge into the aesthetic equivalent of frozen chicken - broadly palatable, but incapable of becoming better without fundamentally changing your character.

This might be what you want. That’s allowed. We cannot choose excellence in all things. I, for example, have a fairly mediocre dress sense. I don’t dress badly, but I don’t dress well, and I would need to profoundly change my approach to clothing in order to do better.

I’m also mediocre at editing. It’s probably my greatest weakness as a writer - shortly after writing this sentence I’m going to finish this piece and click publish on this piece, probably without so much as rereading what I’ve written so far. Unlike the dres sense, this is something where I’d like to do better, but it requires a genuine investment of effort and practice that I simply never manage to budget the time for.

I do, for the record, judge myself slightly for both these things. The editing more than the dress sense, but I do consider both to be flaws. That’s OK, human beings are flawed, but it doesn’t make the flaws not problems.

More importantly, it doesn’t mean we get to ignore our flaws.

It is, more or less, OK to choose mediocrity, particularly in specifics domain where there’s no compelling reason that you need to be good at. But if you are mediocre at something, let it be because you’ve chosen to be, not because you’ve unconsciously slid into that state.

More, if you’re mediocre at something that I should be able to depend on you being actually good at, I’m probably going to be furious at you in a way that I will not not be if you are just bad at it, because to me mediocrity means something worse than failing: It means you don’t care to do good work, and I can forgive almost any failure but that.

The hard problem with hard problems

2026-02-13

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/the-hard-problem-with-hard-problems.

For reasons that are neither here nor there, I’ve been getting Claude Code to write a solar system simulation for me recently. It keeps getting it wrong, and I’ve kept getting incandescently angry at it for this.

Dave pointed out to me recently that, in Claude’s defence, gravity simulation is actually a very hard problem that very clever people struggle with. I fully agreed with this, but also don’t consider it relevant.

One of the ways you can tell it’s not relevant is that the actual gravity simulation is done in REBOUND which, as far as I know, is written entirely by humans. It was originally written by Claude, but I was also worried about it getting that right, so I replaced it, and none of the problems went away.

The actual problem that I keep getting angry about Claude with is that it keeps cheating - sneaking in shortcuts where it violates the laws of physics, sometimes because it’s too hard for it to do the right thing but usually because it made some stupid mistake it’s covering up, or writing tests that don’t actually test the problems I’m pointing out to it and then claiming that the problem is fixed. The problem is not that it’s getting it wrong, it’s that it’s not trying to get it right.

When a coding agent does things like this our running joke on Discord is “Oh, so it can replace human engineers”.

It’s very tempting though to just stop there and go “Oh well, I guess this problem is too hard for an LLM”. Some problems genuinely are. But the thing is, although it’s being given a hard problem, it’s not the hard problem it’s stuck on. What it needs here is not to be smarter, but to be better shepherded through the basic processes of software engineering.

This isn’t a problem we see only with LLMs, it’s a problem all over the place.

A previous organisation I worked at was… quite dysfunctional. It had many positive features, but it also was a total mess where I was often amazed that anyone ever got anything done. I used to ha-ha-only-serious joke that this was a result of its two biggest problems:

The biggest problem was that it had grown too rapidly.
The second biggest problem is that it could blame everything else it was doing wrong on the first biggest problem.

Depending on how grumpy I was on a given day, I might reverse the order of the two.

Many of that organisation’s problems were legitimately caused by their rapid growth. Keeping an organisation functional during rapid growth is legitimately a hard problem. Also many of that organisation’s problems were straightforward unforced errors caused by e.g. bad policies or inadequate adminstration, but instead of being treated as addressable they just said “Yup we sure have grown a lot crazy how nothing works properly any more”.

You see this over and over again in a lot of projects. People try to do something legitimately hard, and also fail. This is the expected result when trying to do something hard, so the hardness of the problem acts as an emotional shield against failure: You don’t have to feel bad about failing, you were just trying to do something hard.

This conflates two claims:

I tried to do something hard and I failed.
I tried to do something hard and as a result I failed.

I could try to make a soufflé. This is supposedly a hard cooking task. I will likely fail at it, at least the first time. This is because it’s hard. But if I try to make it out of cabbage, the reason I failed to make a soufflé is not that soufflé is hard.

This is, obviously, a ridiculous example, but I don’t find many of the other examples I run into in practice much less ridiculous. People engaged in hard problems often over-focus on the hard problem, because that is where they expect to fail, and as a result neglect basic housekeeping and maintenance tasks. I don’t want to cite specific examples because they’re a little too pointed, but for example I’ve seen software projects which are trying to solve hard problems which have completely inadequate testing and that are constantly bogged down by bugs as a result, or where the basic foundations of the project are garbage in a way that means that you have to be hundred times as clever to achieve basic things.

There are a variety of reasons why this happens and ways that it can. I don’t want to diagnose them all, because that’s not the hard problem with hard problems.

The hard problem with hard problems is noticing that the reason you’re struggling isn’t that the problem is hard.

When you notice this, you can diagnose the specific problem you’re actually running into, and fix it. Your problem will still be hard, but it will no longer be unnecessarily hard.

When you don’t notice this, you will probably fail to solve your problem, and then you’ll have an excuse for your failure which prevents you from learning from it, which is much worse than merely failing.

How to be less box-shaped

2026-02-07

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-be-less-box-shaped.

Hi all,

Been a while. I started a new job at Antithesis back in November and it’s been taking up most of my mental energy, and what’s left over has largely been spent on some coding projects, so there’s not been much brain space for writing recently. I’d like to fix that.

But anyway, that’s not what this post is about, this post is about C Thi Nguyen’s new book “The Score”.

First, my review of it: This book is excellent. You should go read it. I think it is very unlikely that anyone who likes this newsletter would not like this book.

If you are already familiar with Nguyen’s body of work, it will probably be about 80% familiar, but even the familiar bits are helpfully clarifying and much of the remaining 20% is genuinely interesting. There are bits of the book I expect to revisit over and over again.

This is a book about scoring systems. A scoring system is a way of producing a number which tells you which of two things is better. It tells you what, in this particular situation, you are supposed to care about.

The basic question of this book is as follows: There are two common ways we use scoring systems: The first is in games. The second is in metrics (e.g. performance metrics at your job). In games, scoring systems are fun. In performance metrics, they are soul crushing. Why is that?

I must admit, I got to the end of the book, and I still don’t feel like I 100% understand the answer to this question, but I am definitely more productively confused about it.

Here is one part of Nguyen’s answer that stands out to me the most: It’s about convergence. Through their widespread and permanent deployment, metrics have the property of making everything the same. If everyone is trying to produce the perfect result across some metric, you end up with a sort of bland sameness of every result being close to identical. Games, in contrast, by being things that you can take up, put down, and shift between, instead create a world in which everything is different, because you can always shift between different scores.

I think this is not always the case. In many professional games and sports, you in fact see exactly this sort of convergence. It’s also telling that that often produces very boring play, much like the theory would predict.

This is not Nguyen’s only conclusion though, and I intend to reread bits of it in a more targeted manner to understand them better.

For now though, I shall present you with a grab bag of thoughts in which I randomly talk about things more or less about or inspired by the book. It’s somewhere between a summary of key bits of it and my own riffs on some of the ideas.

Funnily, reading this book comes right off the back of a recent conversation with Lucy. We were talking about the terrible books we’d been reading recently, and at some point in the conversation I said “You know… Maybe we should read… good books?”

Anyway apparently manifesting is real now, because without making any particularly deliberate change of behaviour other than declaring my intention, the next two books I read were good. This is the second of those and it is, as mentioned, very good.

Prior to this conversation, I’d been in a bit of a reading slump. I’d been reading a lot, don’t get me wrong, but it was mostly books with titles like “The Shadow of Mars” or “Undying Immortal System” or “Chaotic Craftsman Worships the Cube”.

This might come as some surprise to you, as everyone seems to think I’m absurdly well read, but this happens to me pretty regularly. I go through periods of months or even years where my reading drops off almost entirely. This is… not fine exactly, but it’s just a problem to be solved, not a character flaw, and I know of a couple of ways to solve it.

The first is to do what I’m doing now: Read good books. Except… “good” isn’t quite right. It is often the case that I have many good books on my shelves, and absolutely none of them appeal. This is because what’s needed is not just for the book to be good, but also for the book to be good in a way that I actually want right now. This is often quite eclectic, and prone to changing at the drop of a hat.

This is fine, as long as I know what I actually want right now, but I often don’t. Sometimes that’s depression, sometimes the rats in my brain are just yelling YEARNING but can’t tell me for what.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution to this: Read more until I find out what it is I want. But, given that I don’t currently want to read, how do I do that?

Well, it’s easy: First I make up a number, and then I set myself a goal of making that number go up. I create a score.

That number can be anything, but the two obvious choices are number of books read and time spent reading. Making those numbers go up requires me to read more books, so I do.

This is an example of what Nguyen calls a Suitsian Game, or what Bernard Suits just calls a game: A voluntary attempt to overcome an imaginary obstacle. There is no particular extrinsic reason to want that number to go up. It’s just a number. But by taking it on as a temporary goal, I have chosen to play a game with myself.

Crucially, by making it into a game, I have separated my goal (make the number go up), from my purpose - read more books.

Except of course, “read more books” isn’t quite right. As we’ve established, I’m reading plenty during my off periods, just not the sorts of books that I actually want. If I just wanted to read more, I’d just trawl through Royal Road some more and read things like An Infinite Recursion of Time. What I want isn’t exactly to read more, but to have my life enriched by reading. And no number can easily capture that.

This isn’t necessarily a problem, as long as I relate to the number the right way.

The problem is there are two ways I can relate to the number.

The first is that I can treat it as what Agnes Callard calls a proleptic reason to do things. I am not making the number go up because I care deeply about the number, it is serving as a stand-in for my true harder to grasp goal. At some point I get to let go of the number and let me newly acquired (or, in this case, reawakened) value drive me to do the thing that the number was merely a stepping stone towards. At some point the score becomes unnecessary and I can let go of it because I’m reading on my own.

To use, instead, Nguyen’s distinction, there is a separation between my goal (make number go up) and my purpose (have my life enriched by reading). The advantage of treating this score as a game is that the goal is disposable, and I can easily stop playing the game when it no longer service my purpose.

The other way I can treat these numbers is less good for me. Instead of a game, I can treat the numbers as a measure of how well I am doing. A metric. If I do this, I risk falling afoul of what he calls value capture: The complex value I started with (have my life enriched by reading) gets degraded into following the simple measure (e.g. number of books read, amount of time reading) that I used to track it. I change my behaviour to match the goal, even when it doesn’t serve the purpose.

This isn’t a hypothetical risk. I’ve done the “number of books read” metric a number of times in the past. It’s worked very well for getting me out of reading slumps. I strongly recommend it as a method. But at some point the process I always start to notice that I’m deliberately picking shorter, easier, books to read because if I pick a long and difficult book then I will make it much harder to keep the number going up at the rate I want it to. Usually that’s a sign that it’s time to stop tracking the number. I’ve not actually tried the reading time one, but there the failure mode would be spending all my time reading trash, which is if anything even worse.

A healthy relationship to scores requires this willingness to understand the difference between your purpose and your goal, to playfully pick up and put down goals as they are and aren’t working for you, and to hold these goals lightly.

This is easy when those scores are created by you - as long as you are capable of noticing that this is happening, which is a lot of what this book exists to help you do. It’s significantly harder when those scores are imposed on you by other people.

There’s a section of the book where I kept thinking “Hmm the logical person to bring in here would be…” and then the next chapter he brings them in. My initial reaction to this section was “Fuck, I wish I’d written this”. On further reflection, I don’t think that’s right. I’m glad he wrote it and I didn’t, because it’s also not the thing I would have written linking this work, even if I had ever got around to it because I last wrote notes on this subject a good seven years ago and never revisited it properly. If I ever do get around to revisiting this topic properly, I’ll get to draw on Nguyen’s work on this as well.

The works in question are “Seeing Like a State” by James C. Scott, “Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences” by Bowker and Star, and “Epistemic Injustice” by Miranda Fricker, and the broad theme here is something like… the way that we simplify the world in a way that erases individual and between-group variations, and who this affects and who it doesn’t.

I got extremely into this as an issue a while back. I still think it’s important but it’s on my long list of things that I never quite manage to articulate well enough to write about and never quite treat as important to prioritise figuring out how to do that.

If I try now I will probably fail, so I’m going to stop this section here. This is just a placeholder to note that there is something important here, and I’d like to owe you an essay about it, but my track record does not suggest I will ever write that essay. I might write you some more targeted ones though.

A recurring theme throughout the book is that there are four bargains that you can make with the world, in which you sacrifice something that matters to you for power.

Each of these bargains offers you something and takes something from you in exchange. Together they offer you great power, as well as great cost.

Nguyen does not call them the four great bargains. He calls them something else. More on that in a moment, but first, I intend to tell you what these bargains are. I’ll try to follow Nguyen’s framing as much as possible, but these are all in my own words, and any errors introduced are mine and not intended.

The first bargain is Mechanical Rules (Rules for short).

Mechanical Rules gives us clear procedures that everybody can follow in the same way. This make policies consistent and universal. It lets us replicate the way we make decisions from one location to another. This forms the basis of being able to conduct large scale civilisation, because it allows you to make things that work in a context free way. If everything has to be handled differently and by an expert, you will struggle to ever have enough of it.

The cost of mechanical rules is that you no longer get to handle each case differently. If the system is to work without expert judgement, you need to remove expert judgement from the system. You can’t make exceptions based on discretion or circumstance. If you do, you lose the power that rules granted to you.

Rules offers us accessibility, and asks us to sacrifice adaptability.

The second bargain is Replaceable Parts (Parts for short).

Replaceable Parts asks us to make everything interchangeable. One screw is much the same as another, one factory worker is much the same as another, one bag of sugar is much the same as another. As long as we do, we will be able to produce consistent results over and over again.

The downside is that we can no longer benefit from individual variation. You will never end up in a situation where what you have determines what you make, because what you have is always the same. That one bag of sugar that was interchangeable? It wasn’t, until you made it so. Brown sugar is highly variable in flavour - even between allegedly the same types, and if you are using it then you need to adapt to that variability and get to benefit from its specificity.

Those workers you made interchangeable by giving them assigned roles and Mechanical Rules to follow actually aren’t - they have different strengths and weaknesses, and you can always achieve better results by playing to those strengths and weaknesses, but those results will change as your workers do.

Parts is the bargain that gives us reliability, and asks us to sacrifice specificity.

The third bargain is Centralised Control (Control for short).

Control asks us to make decisions in an organized way, from a central location. This lets us coordinate actions across many contexts. To do this we compress information into legible forms, reducing it to the key features that matter, and then make sensible, rational, decisions, on the basis of that information. This lets us coordinate vast numbers of people and resources into a coherent direction and plan. As long as those people actually follow the plan.

Control offers us coordination, and asks us to sacrifice autonomy.

The fourth bargain is Scale, and it subordinates the other three. It says, if you do these three things, vast powers will be available to you, because what you can do once you can do many times. You can run nations, corporations, and do things far larger than anything you can manage as an individual. All it will cost you is your ability to handle the small things in more suitable ways. One size fits all, and if it doesn’t, that’s too bad for the all that it doesn’t fit.

Scale offers us portability, and asks us to sacrifice context.

Each of these bargains is a foundation of the modern world. We could not have achieved what we have achieved without them. They are the technology upon which our civilisation rests.

Nguyen is fully on board with this, and wants to be clear about that. James C Scott seemed to want to throw it all in and move to small scale anarchy, but Nguyen in contrast is fully on board with the benefits of modern civilisation and has an interesting, nuanced, account of the trade-offs involved with each of them.

Which is why it is so annoying that he actually calls these four bargains “The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy”.

The following two paragraphs are one of my favourite small bits of the book:

What’s the antidote? I have a book on my shelf that exemplifies the opposite tendency. It is a simple book, called Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home. They take you through a lot of basic recipes: how to make a good omelet or sauté some fish. And for every dish, they give you two completely different recipes: Julia Child’s and Jacques Pepin’s. And next to the recipes are sidebars in which they bicker with each other. They explain why their version of the recipe is the way it is, what decision they made to get which effects—and why the other person’s recipe misses the mark. The book is formatted this way because it is the companion piece to an old PBS TV show. It is the record of an argument—a rowdy conversation between friends.

And the effect on me, as I learned to cook from this book, was to undermine the sense that there is a single, correct way to cook. Instead, it revealed every cooking act as a set of decisions through a network of legitimate but different alternatives. You want your scrambled eggs to be fluffier? Use higher heat and faster motion. You want them to be like sweet pudding? Turn the heat down low, add more butter, and stir it for a long, slow time. And once you learn those two endpoints of cooking scrambled eggs, you will know how to improvise in between. The book uses mechanical recipes to communicate—but by pairing different recipes and introducing dissent, it frames them differently. It undermines the monolithic authority of the classic cookbook, offering a landscape of variation, of different choices you can make, guided by different tastes. It is an unsettled cookbook. The paired recipes appear not as the Right and Official way to do things, but as points on a wide spectrum. The book uses mechanical recipes to create space for your culinary agency.

I’ve ordered a copy of the book. I suspect I won’t actually like the recipes very much - My dietary requirements are almost completely incompatible with French cooking - but I love the idea.

In Learning to walk through walls, which is one of the big places I’ve previously drawn on Nguyen’s work, I talked about two competing moves:

Noticing you’re playing a game that you don’t need to be, and stepping out of the rule set.
Building restricted games to help you navigate a more complex skill by turning it into a serious of discrete moves.

Recipes serve a similar function. Cooking is a running theme throughout this book - which I of course really appreciated - and one of the points that he makes several times is how these mechanical recipes act as a great starting point for cooking, but you do need to be able to break out of them, and many people don’t even start from them, in contrast to a more traditional approach to cooking:

I asked my mom to teach me my very favorite Vietnamese dish: hot and sour catfish soup. So she did—or she tried to. What she gave me wasn’t anything I could follow; it was nothing like a recipe at all. It seemed to me, at the time, like this vast and disorganized ramble, a weird organic messy flowchart of possibilities and decisions and judgment calls. I was supposed to add tomato and pineapple but I was supposed to taste the ingredients first. If one was sweet and the other sour, I was probably fine. But if they were both particularly sweet, I would need to balance them with some extra vinegar. Or if they were both sour, I might need to add a little brown sugar. My mom wouldn’t ever tell me how much; it all depended on how things were tasting that day.

This is a level and type of cooking skill that I envy, truth be told. It’s not mine though, and I’m not going to try to acquire it. As with many things one envy’s, what I want is the upsides without the cost.

I am an improvisational cook, for sure, and can adapt a recipe on the fly, but what I cannot do that is adapt a recipe to achieve a consistent result like this. It’s an impressive level of dedication to a single dish, and one that comes from a lifetime of skilled practice and you cannot, I think, easily shortcut that practice, and while the skill implied is fascinating to me it’s also not one where I’m prepared to do the legwork.

The reason we start with recipes is that they are easy. Mechanical Rules grants us the promise that anyone with the basic prerequisite skills can follow the instructions and get the desired result. When you’re a manager, you want that because you want your workers to be fungible. But when you’re an anyone, you want that because you want to be able to follow the rules and get the desired result, and it’s pretty great that you can do that.

The Julia and Jacques approach that Nguyen is pointing to here is that two recipes is a lot better than one, because it’s also the entire continuous spectrum of recipes in between those two, and this helps you notice that in fact there are no barriers around you that you cannot walk through. It won’t teach you to the depth of experience found in his mother’s approach to hot and sour catfish soup, but it will give you the foundation you need to move as far in that direction as you are prepared

When I first found about this book, my initial reaction was to go ugh. I hate the title, the subtitle, and the cover. It looks like the worst sort of airport book self-help trash. If I did not already have an extreme amount of faith in the author and his abilities as a thinker and a writer, I would not have bought this book without a resounding endorsement from someone I trusted.

Fortunately I did have that faith, and took the corresponding leap and the book is, as I mentioned, excellent.

But… the impression of the book as a self-help book isn’t entirely wrong. This is not a book about how to fix the world. This is a book about how to navigate a world that is trying to squeeze you into a tidy set of boxes where you can be one among a set of Replaceable Parts following Mechanical Rules under Central Control to produce a society that works at Scale. This is good for you only to the degree that you are box-shaped, and the book is trying to help you push back against that tendency.

And… it’s only OK at that, because although it is written as if it were a self help book, it is really a philosophy book, albeit one written in an engaging and accessible manner for a general audience, and philosophy is much better at helping you understand the problem than it is at providing you a solution.

Nguyen’s proposed solution is games: By learning to play with rules, we can start to add play and flexibility and personal meaning back into a world that has tried to force us into simple and easy to understand shapes.

To which I say… well, maybe.

I think this is a better solution for Nguyen than it is for me, because Nguyen is delighted by games in a way that I simply am not. I like games, don’t get me wrong. I think they’re fun, they offer an interesting lens on the world, and they are provide a great way to engage with and socialise with others.

A lot of Nguyen’s work starts with Bernard Suits’s ideas around games, which are roughly:

A game is a voluntary attempt to overcome an unnecessary obstacle.
14
This is the “portable definition”, but the distinction between it and the more formal definition doesn’t matter here.
In a sufficiently advanced utopia, there would be no necessary obstacles, therefore everything that we choose to spend our time doing must be a game.

The primary definition has never quite sat right with me. I think it’s an excellent lens on games, but not necessarily a good definition of one. I think, for example, you could regard proving a theorem in pure mathematics as a game under this definition, and while I don’t think it’s exactly wrong to do so (this is, after all, the formalist position in philosophy of mathematics), it feels to me at least like you are missing a lot of the richness of the mathematical experience in reducing it to that.

I think a weaker form of Nguyen’s thesis - that games help us to relearn play in a world so steeped in rules as part of its essential nature - is clearly true, and I am glad of them for that (and for their own sake), but as a solution, or even the starting point of one, it leaves me unsatisfied.

Fortunately, for me, I think the book itself is a better solution than the solution it presents is. Sometimes the thing you need to solve the problem is not a solution, but just to be able to see and describe it clearly. To acquire the tools of interpretation that let you look at the world and say “Ah, I see what is going on”, and know what it is that you want about it to be different.

This book has certainly helped me with that, and I intend to revisit it, probably several times, because my first read I basically wolfed down the contents, and it deserves a more thorough chewing on.

In review

As I said at the beginning, this book is excellent. You should go read it.

Part of why I say that is a sort of altruism. I like Nguyen, and want his work to do well, and while you are, by default, an anonymous reader, I at the very least want the best for you in that you are a person and I wish you well as a result of it, and I think this book would be good for you.

But partly I say this because, for my own sake, I would really like there to be a broader understanding of these sorts of issues. Nguyen talks about one of the costs of Scale being in the form of Fricker’s notion of hermeneutical injustice - people lack the tools to understand and communicate their experience, because they must communicate in the sanitised language of legibility - but another form of hermeneutical injustice is that people lack the tools to understand what is happening in the world, and how it is shaping them. This book is one part of that tool set.

We’ll never have a world where everyone understands this. It is the nature of tools like this that they decay at scale. But if we, as individuals, understand this, then we can build communities that do too, and even if we can’t - and don’t really even want to - push back on the broader legibilising forces of the world, we can at least understand them enough to build shelter from them.

Making connections

2025-11-03

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/making-connections.

I sometimes think I only have two moves in writing: “These two things you thought were different are actually the same thing” and “These two things you thought were the same are actually different”. This isn’t quite true, e.g. there’s also “Look at this thing, isn’t it neat!”, but they’re fairly major parts of what I write.

These two moves are actually the same thing, because they’re both just special cases of the more general skill you might call “practical ontology”, or perhaps “personal construct psychology” if you’re George Kelly - finding the right concepts with which to carve up the world in order to better engage with it.

But they’re actually different things, because they point you in very different directions. “Actually the same thing” is mostly about drawing analogies between different situations in order to help you understand each better, while “these two things you thought are the same are actually different” is more about causing you to look closer at the specific situation and see whether you are applying an inappropriate strategy that you’ve learned in a context which is more different than you think.

These two observations about these two moves are actually the same observation.

Anyway, this is a “these two things are actually the same thing” post.

One evening recently, I was visiting two friends of mine and we were talking about memory. I said that I don’t have a very good memory for facts, but I have a very good associative memory. I remember patterns, and how things fit together, and can often recall relevant information and methods that I’ve seen before that are appropriate to the situation.

My two friends agreed that their memory was also similar, and one of them said (paraphrasing from memory) “I think maybe being able to make that sort of connection is just what intelligence looks like”.

That stuck with me, because I think it’s very right, and it points to one of the biggest comparative differences in what you are good at when you are smarter than the others around you. If you are smart, you are good at making connections between things. That’s a large part of what being smart means.

I’m aware it’s gauche to self-describe as smart, but I don’t think saying “I’m good at [things that are classically associated with intelligence]” is any better even if it avoids saying the word, and I’m on the record as thinking it’s important to acknowledge and talk about intelligence.

You’re probably smart too. I say this not to flatter you, but because I think my stuff is primarily interesting to people who have the same sorts of problems I do, which means that my target demographic is mostly my fellow smart nerds who are somehow still not very good at life. (Sorry. I say it with love). As a result, you’re probably good at this too, and it’s worth knowing how to use it well.

Anyway, I recently introduced two… let’s say friendly acquaintances, in that I know and like them but don’t know or interact with them enough for the label “friend” to really apply, to each other. I was catching up with one of them about what he was doing, and when described it, the way he described it made me think of this other person I knew, and her research into a very similar area. I mentioned this, he was interested, and now I’ve introduced the two of them.

I don’t know if anything will come of it - I’d give like… maybe 2% it results in an interesting collaboration, and say 0.1% that it results in a really important project for one or both of them, and most of the rest of the time they just have an interesting conversation and never talk again, or maybe casually stay in touch.

Which is to say… it probably won’t achieve anything, but for the amount of effort required from everyone involved, this is a ridiculously good deal. It required almost no effort from me, the cost to them is one conversation that they’ll probably enjoy, and although the probability of anything major resulting from it is pretty low, it’s not that low, and the upside is pretty huge if it pays off.

I have some abandoned writing on luck that I never finished off, but one of the results from Richard Wiseman’s study on luck, and what makes people lucky, is that the biggest difference is whether you notice and take opportunities.

The sort of opportunity that, in my opinion, matters the most is these sorts of relatively low effort things that there’s negligible cost to trying and a reasonable choice of it resulting in something big. My post about looking for new projects last year was an example of this - relatively easy to do, and it resulted in some much more interesting work than I’d have found if I went looking for contracts and projects directly. I’ve previously used tweets as another example of this - it was, once upon a time, an incredibly low effort way of creating potential opportunities.

But anyway, this isn’t a post about how to be lucky, this is a post about how to make the people around you luckier: Make connections between them.

A classic sociology (which may even be true! Certainly it feels true) result is the strength of weak ties: The social connections that are most useful to you are the ones that aren’t that close, because if you know someone super well then you probably already have access to many of the same connections and opportunities as they do. I’m not sure if this is part of the original observation, but there are also just more of them.

As a result, these sorts of opportunities for introductions tend to come up with people you know less well. You’re more likely to get a job opportunity via someone you’ve not talked to in a few years, you’re more likely to meet potential partners at a party hosted by someone you’re not that close to than you are via your best friend.

Actively navigating these connections for people and making introductions along those weak ties is, thus, a huge favour you can do for the people around you to make their lives better.

This may seem like I’ve taken two unrelated senses of the phrase “making connections” and talked about them independently but, well, you see, these two things are the same thing.

The difficulty with proactively making these connections between people (as opposed to doing it in response to requests, or creating opportunities for it to happen naturally) is that you’ve got to actually figure out which people to introduce. If you just introduce two random acquaintances to each other, probably nothing very interesting will happen. Sure, they both know you and have that in common, but thinking that is enough is Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship is transitive.

But if you’re good at making connections between ideas, at the sort of associative pattern matching that lets you encounter something and go “Ah, that reminds me of…” and pull in some seemingly completely unrelated topic, then you can also easily be good at figuring out who should talk to whom: When you’re talking to someone, if that happens and what they say reminds you of something that relates to someone else you know, that’s an opportunity for an introduction right there.

It’s especially valuable if they’re likely to be useful to each other in some way, but that’s not even required really. If you have interesting and compatible conversations with two people about similar subjects, maybe they’d like to have those conversations with each other.

Either way, if you’re talking to someone and they remind you of someone else, ask them if they’d like an introduction. It can’t hurt to ask, and there’s a reasonable chance that doing so will pay off massively.

Reduce the need for active stabilisation

2025-11-01

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/reduce-the-need-for-active-stabilisation.

I recently visited my parents and accidentally left my Kindle behind at their house. I’ll claim it back soon, but in the meantime I’ve been reading on the Kindle app on my phone, and it’s interesting how much worse I am at it.

I fail at reading on my phone in pretty much the expected way: I get distracted. I read some, then I check discord, or substack, or go shop on something on Amazon, look at Feedbin, or play Sudoku… There are myriad things I can do on the phone, and when I zone out while reading I naturally reach for one of them.

In contrast, the Kindle is a single purpose device. When I zone out while reading on my Kindle, I just zone out for a bit and then either stop reading or return to reading. Very occasionally I might switch to another book, but I tend not to have multiple Kindle books on the go at once because I find it a bit irritating to do.

The laptop has the same problem as the phone. Literally right now I caught myself zoning out and reflexively swiping up to switch apps. Wouldn’t have that problem on my typewriter.

I’m not helpless in this situation. I can notice myself doing it, and suppress it. I have to do that in order to write a lot of the time - as I said, I got distracted mid sentence and tried to switch away. Instead of doing so I caught the action, inhibited it, and returned to writing. This is completely possible.

This is something that some of my early writing on magical practice and secondary anchors aims to help with. You have a desired state you want to be in, and you set up some rules to help you stay in that state and allow you to return to it when you lose it.

I think, though, it’s better to just set things up so that you don’t lose the state in the first place, and the Kindle vs phone issue is pretty illustrative of the problem.

Reading a Kindle, or a book, if I lose my focus, my attention fairly returns to the activity. If I’m reading on my phone, it tends to settle on something else. Sometimes that activity is itself one that I lose focus on and switch away from (occasionally back to my original reading), sometimes it’s something more absorbing (usually in a bad way) and I lose the thread of what I was doing entirely. Either way though, the point is that moving away from the intended activity causes one to continue to stay away from it.

In contrast, when reading a book in the absence of a source of distractions, if my attention drifts the natural thing for it to drift back to is the book. The state is a stable one - it tends to correct small perturbations.

The problem puts me in mind of one I have with certain exercises. I’m moderately hypermobile, and as a result certain activities are harder for me than they would be for people with normal joints. Plank is one, and standing on one leg is another.

I used to attribute the difficulty standing on one leg as being a “balance issue”, and in some sense it definitionally is: I’m trying to balance and failing, therefore I have a balance issue. On the other hand, classic victim of metonymy problem. It’s not a balance issue in the sense that I’ve got some abstract generalised difficulty with staying vertical. It’s a balance issue because my joints are extra wibbly, and as a result it’s harder to keep them in place.

One way to demonstrate that the culprit is ease of movement is that I can stand one one leg just fine if I tense all the right muscles extra hard. This is, to some degree, normal. Standing on one leg requires using your muscles to stabilise. I have to use them a lot before it feels stable though, and this is exhausting.

The easier something is to move, the harder you have to work to keep it in one place.

I think the same is true with reading and writing, or anything else with this shape. Using a multifunction device like a phone or a computer gives you a lot more “freedom of movement” - you can easily switch from what you’re doing to something else, and as a result it requires active effort to avoid doing so.

In contrast, single function devices lack this freedom of movement, and as a result you can free up the time and attention you would spend on staying focused. It’s easier, and it’s more pleasant.

Of course, a single function device is often not much help if my phone or laptop are nearby. If I was reading on my Kindle, or reading a physical book, or writing on my typewriter, or doing anything else that requires focus, but had my phone in my pocket, there’s a decent chance that I’d get my phone out and check it. The mere presence of the device is enough to make the situation at least moderately unstable.

I tend to solve this by blocking out devices entirely. Sometimes I do this by physically separating myself from them - leaving them in my room and going downstairs with books, pen, and paper. Sometimes I do it by lighting a candle and agreeing with myself that as long as the candle lit I will not use any devices.

These aren’t states I always want to be in of course. I like the internet, and my phone and laptop are both hugely life improving devices. But their power comes with a cost, and when I don’t want to pay that cost, explicitly separating them frees up capacity for what I want to focus on.

It doesn’t always work of course. Sometimes it turns out I genuinely don’t want to read or write, or don’t want to read or write the particular thing I’m doing. Even then I’ve often found it’s interesting and useful to see where my attention goes without an easy attractor for it, and it leads to me finding other stable states that I’d otherwise have missed.

How to find things (an intro to binary search)

2025-10-21

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-find-things-an-intro-to-binary.

As probably most of you are aware, I’m actually a software developer. I don’t talk about it here much, as this is mostly a newsletter about the rest of my interests, but I’ve been experimenting with writing about whatever I feel like writing about, and today I feel like writing about binary search.

If you’re not a programmer, don’t worry. Most of this should be highly accessible to you anyway. There will be some code later, but it’s not the main point of this article. I just think it’s worth understanding the technique either way. If you are a programmer, this will still teach you something new, because I think you’ve probably been taught binary search wrong.

Part of why I’m thinking about binary search is that it came up in a recent issue of London Centric, in the context of bike theft. This isn’t the first time it’s come up, and it’s a story that makes programmers (and mathematicians apparently) wince in pain when they hear it.

Here’s the problem: You leave your bike somewhere at 9AM. You come back at 5PM, and discover to your horror that your bike has been stolen. Fortunately, there’s a CCTV camera. You go to the police and report the issue.

“Sorry”, they say, “that would require us to watch eight hours of CCTV footage to spot the theft. Bike theft just isn’t a high enough priority to justify that kind of effort.”

At this point you might feel outraged, but depending on the sort of person you are your outrage might take a different form. On the one hand, you might be outraged that your bike has been stolen and that you’re not getting it back. If, on the other hand, you are a Cambridge professor or otherwise similarly inclined, you will be outraged at what you see as a failure of basic common sense, whip your blackboard out of your pocket, and proceed to give the police a lecture on what you believe to be one of the fundamental rights of humankind: Replacing O(n) operations with O(log(n)) ones.

Here’s the idea: OK, sure. There are eight hours in which your bike could have been stolen. That’s a lot of footage, makes sense that you don’t want to watch that.

But… you could just check the footage for 1PM. Is the bike there? If so, great. Now you know the crime was done between 1PM and 5PM. Otherwise, you know it was done between 9AM and 1PM. Either way, that’s four hours of footage to watch. Still too long, but a lot less than eight!

Let’s say the bike is still there at 1PM. Now, you check whether the bike was there at 3PM. If it was, the crime happened between 3PM at 5PM, otherwise between 1PM and 3PM. Again, now you’ve only got two hours to check…

You can repeat this process, each time cutting the time you have to check in half. Once you’re down to a few minutes where you know the bike was there at the start and wasn’t at the end, you just watch those few minutes of footage to see the crime being committed.

This strategy is called binary search. Search meaning, well, you’re looking for something, and binary meaning “relating to two”. It’s binary search because you’re searching by repeatedly reducing the size of the space you have to search by a factor of two.

You have to check seven times to get the time down from eight hours to under five minutes. If you exactly halve it each time (you probably won’t, but it works basically the same way if you’re close enough and pick nice round numbers), the amount of footage you have left is eight hours, then four hours, two hours, one hour, half an hour, 15 minutes, 7.5 minutes, 3.75 minutes.

If you instead had sixteen hours of footage to check, you would require one more step, because your first step would cut you down from sixteen hours to eight, and then you’d need the seven more steps as above.

This is what my crack about O(log(n)) operations means: The original strategy is linear - that is, every minute you add to the footage adds a minute to the time it takes you to process it.

In contrast, the binary search strategy is logarithmic. Every time you double the size of the search space, you increase the time it takes you by some fixed amount (the amount of time it takes you to check a midpoint).

For large spaces this matters a lot: If you start with eight hours, and each step takes you say 10 seconds, then it takes you a minute and ten seconds (70 seconds) to get yourself down to three minutes and 45 seconds, so the whole task takes you just under five minutes, in contrast to watching the whole eight hours. If on the other hand you started with ten minutes of footage, your binary search step cuts the space in half to five minutes, then you watch five minutes, and it only saves you just under five minutes of time watching (you could of course cut it down further - e.g. if you wanted to only watch two and a half minutes of footage, this could save you a bit over 7 minutes).

If you only had 30 seconds to watch in the first place, there’d be little point in doing any fussy midpoint finding

The point of “linear” versus “logarithmic” is not that logarithmic is faster in general, it’s that logarithmic is always going to be better for large enough problems. For small problems it might still be faster to use a linear operation.

Now, if you’re a programmer there are two things you should probably have noticed about the above explanation:

It is blindingly obvious if you’ve encountered binary search even once.
It is probably not actually an example of binary search as you’ve been taught it.

The other prompt for writing this post is that I was running a calibration interview question on a colleague who I have a very high opinion of, and at some point he tried to write a slightly custom binary search to solve a problem, and got into a little bit of a mess (I think he’d have sorted it out fine when not under time pressure) and reverted to a linear search. I, meanwhile, was surprised, because I forgot that binary searches were a thing people got wrong despite myself having previously failed an interview by getting a binary search wrong. The reason is that in the meantime I have learned the correct way to think about binary search, and forgot that almost everyone teaches it wrong. So the next part of this post is my attempt to teach it to you right.

In order to get a stereotypical example of how binary search is normally taught, I asked Claude. Here’s what it said:

Binary search is an efficient algorithm for finding a target value in a sorted array or list.

How it works:

Start by examining the middle element

If the target equals the middle element, you’re done

If the target is less than the middle element, search the left half

If the target is greater than the middle element, search the right half

Repeat this process on the chosen half until you find the target or the search space is empty

I think this is a perfectly adequate example of how binary search is normally explained, but note that this is very much not what we’ve just done in the bike theft example! We don’t have a list, nothing is sorted, we’re not looking for a specific item.

And yet, they do seem quite similar. The reason for this is that they are the same thing, but Claude’s (and everyone else’s) explanation is only describing a single specific use of binary search rather than the general phenomenon, and as a result contains a lot of distracting details that make it harder to understand and also less useful.

In order to see one of the key differences, let me tell you a story.

Suppose a thief steals your bike at 12:30 PM. Riding away madly, he is suddenly struck by an epiphany: Stealing is wrong.

Guiltily, he cycles back to where he found it, and puts your bike back and locks it up with the somehow magically still intact lock (or maybe you didn’t lock it, at which point frankly this whole saga is on you), returning it to the bike rack at 1:30PM.

Now, at 3PM, some other bastard steals your bike and cycles off with it. He is in no way burdened with a sense of conscience, and keeps it for himself.

What happens now with our binary search?

Well, we check at 1PM, and the bike’s not there. Therefore it’s stolen before 1PM. Now we check at 11 AM, bike’s there, etc. until we eventually find our bike thief at 12:30. Great! We now have a bike theft to prosecute.

As binary search is normally taught, it works on sorted arrays. In this case, that would mean that your bike has a certain stolenness that only increases over time: It can be stolen, but once it is stolen it is never unstolen. As the above example shows, this method finds a theft just fine if you lose that property and allow for the bike to be unstolen.

The next thing is that this is binary search over a continuous space. If you wanted to, you could run the binary search forever, slicing the time finer and finer. This would be dumb, so we bail out when we get to a small enough time to watch it ourselves, so it causes no problems, but the pure binary search as explained by Claude never stops here unless we get lucky and find the exact instant of the theft (as opposed to some point when the theft is in progress).

Neither of these are problems if you think of binary search in the right way, and the bike theft example is a nice illustration of what binary search is actually doing: You have two numbers (or points on a line if you prefer) which might be far apart, and are different in some way. Binary search lets you find two numbers between them that are close together and are still different from each other. That is, it lets you find two nearby points where something changes, where “nearby” means “within five minutes of each other”, and the something that changes is whether there is a bike there.

In the sorted list example, what you’re looking for is a point where the values change from less than your target to greater than or equal to your target, and your notion of “nearby” is “right next to each other”. So, in code, the standard binary search looks like this (if you can’t read the code, don’t worry about it too much, I’ll explain in a minute):

def find_target(elements, target):
    “”“
    Given a sorted list `elements`, returns the index
    of the first position where all elements after that
    point are >= target.
    “”“
    # If the first element is >= the target, all elements
    # are, so we return 0.
    if elements[0] >= target:
        return 0

If the last element is < the target, then no elements

in the array are, so we return the length meaning that

only an empty set of elements are >= the target

if elements[-1] < target: return len(elements)

Invariant: elements[low] < target

low = 0

Invariant: elements[high] >= target

high = len(elements) - 1

while low + 1 < high: # Take the midpoint mid = (lo + hi) // 2 # Assign to whichever endpoint would preserve # the invariant. if elements[mid] < target: low = mid else: high = mid

By the invariants, elements[low] < target and

elements[high] >= target

We know that at this point low + 1 == high, so

that means that high is necessarily the first

point at which elements become >= target.

return high

If you’re a programmer reading this, the main take home you should have from this code is that if you find yourself implementing binary search (which hopefully you won’t too often, but sometimes you gotta), never under any circumstances skip writing those “Invariant” comments at the top. They will save you confusion every time.

If you’re not a programmer, here’s what’s going on in it:

We’re looking for the point where the list changes from elements that are less than the target to the point where they are greater than or equal to the target. We find a pair of indices next to each other where this changes, and thus the larger of the two is necessarily the first point (because it is greater than or equal to the every element before it is less than the target).

If the target is in the list, that first point where they are greater than or equal is necessarily where the target is. Otherwise, you can tell the target is not in the list by looking at that index and checking whether it’s past the end of the list or the value at it is greater than the target.

Let’s try an example to work through it: Suppose you’ve got the list of elements 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and we’re looking for the number 7 in it. This proceeds as follows:

We start with low = 0, high = 5 (indexes start from 0, so the first element is the element at position 0).
We take the midpoint of this, which is 2 (division rounds down), so we look at the element at position 2, which is 5.
This is less than 7, so we now set low = 2.
Now, low = 2, high = 5, so mid = 3. The element at position 3 is 7, which is greater than or equal to seven, so we set high = 3.
Now, low is 2, high is 3, so lo + 1 equals high, and we stop and return that the first index greater than or equal to 7 is at position 3 (which it is, because 7 is there).

But honestly, if you’re not a programmer, this is probably the least interesting possible example of binary search, this problem just comes up in programming a lot, and it’s much more interesting to understand the general principle.

Why is it important to understand? Well, partly just because I think knowing things like this that give you an easy perspective shift on what is possible is almost always valuable, and partly because binary search is very useful.

We’ve already seen how it takes the cycle theft example from not worth it to to easy, by helping you figure out when something happened. Another place I’ve suggested in the past where understanding this principle is useful is estimating unknown quantities. I used the example of guessing the population of Paraguay. You first pick a number that’s obviously too small, and a number that’s obviously too large, and then you progressively narrow that range through binary search.

Except, that again isn’t quite the same thing! The problem there is that while you are doing the same thing (finding a pair of points where one is obviously too small and one is obviously too large), your stopping condition is no longer necessarily when the points are close. The problem is that there’s a large range of values in the middle where your answer to “Is this obviously too large or obviously too small?” is “No. Seems kinda plausible but I’m not sure.”, so you can get stuck on making progress.

One way to solve this is with the same way we did with the ordered list: Our condition for the lower bound is “obviously too small”, and for the upper bound is “not obviously too small”. I think you’ll still get stuck at some point when you find yourself asking “OK, but how obvious is obvious…?”, but you’ll do a lot better. You can then repeat this on the other side with “obviously too large”, and you get a range of values that you think are plausible.

Another way to solve this is that once your midpoint is non-obvious you can just try testing some other points in the range and updating your range on the basis of that. Pick randomly, or near the edges, or whatever, and narrow the range on that basis. There’s not actually anything magical about the exact midpoint - any point you try between the two ends will allow you to update the range if you get an “obviously too small” or “obviously too large” answer.

This sort of flexibility is one of the reasons why I think it’s super helpful to understand binary search as looking for changes in behaviour. It makes it much easier to reason about new variants, because you really understand what’s going on.

And in general this is one of the key purposes of understanding how things work: If you know how to make it, you know how to make something like it that works slightly differently. In the pen cap post, I talked about how “how things work is how you work with them”, and that’s important, but the other reason to understand how things work is that how things work is how other things like them work, and how things work is how you make them.

I’ve run into this principle over and over again in programming, software development, and maths. e.g. I did some algorithmic work I’m really proud of recently, and it only happened because I spent some time staring at the preliminary material going “Hmm… How on earth does that work?”, in much the same way I found out about pen caps recently. Right now I’m working on some statistics, and I think if I treated statistics the way most people do - as a set of tools to use without understanding them - the task I’m doing would be almost impossible.

I don’t think this is just for abstract subjects either. I see it a lot in other people who better at more physical skills than me: In much the same way I can just whip up a new algorithm, they can just improvise or custom build a physical object where I’d have to ad hoc adapt some existing object that was much less fit for purpose.

And, you know, often that’s fine. It’s impossible to acquire complete knowledge of everything. Some of the people I’m comparing myself to on the physical skills have literal decades of more experience in the subject, and I’m unlikely to put in the effort to acquire those. I expect that will be the same for most people on most of the specific things where I understand them in this way too. This isn’t an invitation to try to learn everything, it’s just me drawing your attention to what happens with the things you do decide to learn.

And part of that is that when you find yourself in the position of acquiring a new technique or skill, I think that if you can it’s worth taking the time to make sure you really understand it, and to find the right way of looking at it, so you can stop treating it as a narrow and well-defined thing you can do, and start treating it as a lesson in how to interact with the world in a variety of related ways.

The first is the observation that [binary search gets much faster (improved
complexity even!) if you have a good guess about where the point you're looking
for is](https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2019-04-30-13:03.html). The second
is that if what you're actually looking for is a random sample in some ordered
range, [you can do binary search incrementally to get the desired result
efficiently](https://notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2024-12-03-12:01.html).

I don't think I'd have figured out either of these without the perspective on
binary search I'm telling you about here.

How pen caps work

2025-10-16

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-pen-caps-work.

So, I recently learned how pen caps work. I think it’s neat, so I’m going to tell you about it, but I also think the experience of figuring this out illustrates some other interesting things about the world, so I’m going to tell you about that too.

First, pen caps.

Some context: I mostly write with a fountain pen. I often put it down when I’m mid-writing because I need to think something through, get distracted, and as a result I leave it out having forgotten to put the lid back on and the nib dries out. This is mildly annoying.

One time recently I had done this and thought “Oh, that’s annoying, I should have put the pen cap on”. Then I stared at the pen cap for a bit and went “Wait, hang on… how on earth does that work?”

My naive intuitive model of this is that it’s like vegetables. If you put cut vegetables in an open bowl in the fridge, they’ll dry out. If you put them in a sealed container or bag, they won’t. If anything they’ll seem damper when they come out.

The reason it works like this though is that vegetables contain a lot of water. When in dry air, that water evaporates and is released into the air. The dryer the air, the more water is released. The more humid the air, the less, until at a certain level of wetness the amount of water condensing onto the vegetable is the same or equal to the amount of water evaporating from it, and the vegetable stops getting drier. The reason why putting vegetables into a container stops them drying out too much is because they release water into the air until the air is humid enough that it reaches that point and they stop drying out further.

Something you can see from this is why it matters that the container be small. If you think about it, just putting them in a bowl in the fridge is also putting them in a sealed air tight container, it’s just a fridge sized one. Because the fridge is so large relative to the vegetables, they can never release enough water to reach the point where they stop drying out. In contrast, a small container doesn’t have much air in it, so the vegetables can easily make it humid. The smaller the container, the better this works - the ideal is a small bag you’ve pressed out all the air from.

The thing is, a pen nib doesn’t have a lot of liquid on it, and the cap is quite large. I can’t give you actual numbers so this may be wildly off, but based on how quickly a pen nib dries out in air, and how little ink is lost when you do that, I’d be astonished if it could reach equilibrium before the pen nib is just thoroughly dried out. Also if you take the lid off and on again a lot, you’d be let the humid air out of the cap, restarting the whole process, which doesn’t track my experience that cycling putting the cap on and taking it off again doesn’t result in the pen drying out.

So: Intuitive theory that the way pen caps work is just keeping the nib in a closed environment, seemingly false.

My second theory was that the cap was structured so that the nib was actually pressing against metal on the inside, so there was little to no air contact causing the evaporation. I did some fiddling with putting the pen away and it’s a little hard to tell for sure, but the shape of the pen cap doesn’t seem to support this: The nib is straight, while the cap on my pen is curved. Also the cap is much longer than the part of the pen above the seal.

At this point I performed the ultimate experiment: I looked up the answer. As one would expect from the internet, there is an an entire website dedicated to fountain pen design, and after a bit of googling I found both it and this specific page on fountain pen cap mechanics and physics.

The key bit of this page is:

In summary:

Inserting a pen into a cap as well as removing the cap from the pen causes pumping action

taking the cap off → suction, some vacuum is caused inside the cap

putting it on → compression of air inside the cap

That is: It’s not just, or even necessarily primarily, that putting a cap on the pen keeps it dry. Taking a cap off a pen makes it wet again, because it draws out the ink from the reservoir through suction .

This is an easy experiment to perform, so I did: I waited for my pen to get dry, put the cap on, and immediately took it off. The pen was still a little dry but had become wet enough to be usable for writing again. Claim validated.

At this point, my mind was absolutely blown. This is not a mechanism that it would ever have occurred to me was in use here. It makes complete sense in retrospect, but it simply wasn’t on my radar as a possibility.

An additional wrinkle: Some subsequent experimentation caused me to conclude that it wasn’t just this that was going on, and my earlier theory that it was like vegetables actually does hold some water. I investigated the other pen I use on the regular, a uni-ball eye, and by shining a flashlight down it, the way the cap is designed very clearly has a tiny near-airtight well at the end that the nib goes into. The nib isn’t in contact with the lid, but it is enclosed in a very small space, which means that it’s much easier for it to reach equilibrium with the air. This also has an air tight cap, and it’s harder to make a rollerball dry out, but some experimentation with it made it clear that there’s still some of the same effect going on and the nib has much more ink on it when the cap is put on and removed.

Once I had spotted this, I experimented with running the fountain pen nib down the inside of the lid, and realised that there is a slight ridge around where the actual nib will reach, so there’s clearly an extra air tight seal happening there, putting the nib in a much smaller area.

Speculating, I think this is particularly important for long term nib usage: If I keep the fountain pen closed for hours or days, especially if it’s in a bag, more ink will come out of it as it moves (if you shake a fountain pen vigorously, ink will fly out, so presumably moderate shaking also causes moderate flow), and so reaching equilibrium with the air in the cap quickly helps prevent that drying out.

This detail aside, for short term usage of the pen cap, what clearly dominates is the suction effect of the cap.

Why am I telling you about this?

Well because it turns out that pen caps’ mechanics are fascinating, and if you didn’t find this information incredibly interesting I really don’t know what to tell you. I’m probably not going to go out and become a pen cap enthusiast, but I’m really delighted to have learned this fact and wanted to share the delight.

It’s also incredibly useful to know about for when the pen does dry out, because it’s far more effective as a means of fixing that than anything else I was doing before I knew this, and hopefully some of you will find that useful too. Although, according to the fountain pen mechanics site, don’t do this too often as it may cause your pen to drip by filling up the feed too much.

But I also think this interesting for a couple of more generalisable reasons.

The first is that it’s an interesting encounter with reality having a surprising amount of detail. Pens seem… if not simple, at least not something that you have to think about the complexity of that much. I know how pens work, in much the same way that I know how bicycles or toilets work - I couldn’t build one, but I could sketch out enough of the details of how they work and express the bounds on my ignorance that I’m not going to embarrass myself too badly when I try to explain them.

But we’ve been using pens for thousands of years, and fountain pens for at least hundreds of years, and that’s a lot of time for the design to evolve, and for us to figure out how to solve problems with previous designs, and looking at the modern version of them you might not even realise that they’re solving those problems because you’ve never really noticed you had them in the first place.

The second thing is that it illustrates a principle that I don’t have a very pithy name for, but is something like… how things work is how you work with them.

You may not realise that you have those problems, but you still have those problems, and if you use things wrong they will not solve those problems for you. The ideal device is designed so that you never have to think about that, and even in non-ideal cases you can often get away with not thinking about it, but there will inevitably come times where knowing how it works will make life better for you - because it’s broken, or because you want to do something unusual with it, or even just because you want it to work better.

Most things though are not ideal, because we cannot build perfect systems, and as a result you will use them wrong if you don’t have some understanding of what they do. A trivial example of this is dishwashers. A lot of people seem to treat dishwashers as magic “put dishes in, clean things come out”, and as a result stack dishes in them like an insane person in a way that obviously cannot possibly work if you think for a second about how a dishwasher cleans things through the straightforward mechanical application of water to them, because the flow of water to the dish is blocked.

I’ve run into this a lot with software too. For a lot of previous companies I ended up as the local expert in git, because unlike everyone else I’d bothered to acquire a rudimentary working knowledge of how git worked, so things like “Yes, the remote branch and the local branch are different things and can diverge” were not mysteries to me. I think these days enough general git knowledge has diffused into the population of programmers that this happens less, but maybe I’ve just stopped paying attention.

The same thing happens in Hypothesis. A lot of it is designed to just magically work, which is great up until the point where it doesn’t. Users don’t need to care about how shrinking works, until suddenly their generated test cases are horribly complicated because they wrote their code “wrong”, and now they need to know how it works.

The process by which I found out how this worked is also interesting, because I think it’s quite illustrative of how discovering how things work in general goes.

I had a problem which I cared about (my pen nibs were drying out). I knew the solution (I should put the cap on more reliably), but then I asked “Why does that work…?”

I didn’t need to know why this worked, but I was curious, and being curious about silly and basic things is important.

I generated an explanation, but the explanation felt wrong. I was analogising from a similar situation I understood, but the more I thought about the analogy the more it didn’t hold up. Following that sense of wrongness until you get to a point where the pieces fit together is important. It’s very easy to get to wrong explanations, it’s important to check them.

And then I looked up the answer. Doing science is all very well, and it’s important to be able to do it well enough to notice problems and understand other people’s explanations, but in this case I just wanted to know the answer and other people clearly know how fountain pens work so I may as well draw on that expert knowledge.

And now I’m telling you about it, because sharing stories is how we learn from each other.

COVID is doing the rounds again

2025-10-09

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/covid-is-doing-the-rounds-again.

This post is mostly a small PSA and some related thoughts and information people might find useful. Please be aware that I am in no way an expert on this subject, so take all of this as at most medium confidence.

Specifically the PSA is this: I don’t know if you’ve noticed the same thing, but it seems to me that an unusually large number of people I know are getting COVID at the moment. I’ve noticed this with friends in the UK, US, and Europe.

The UK case data doesn’t support there being a huge wave on at the moment (though cases are significantly elevated, and it’s possible this data is on a bit of a lag), so it’s possible this is something of an illusion, but the same case data also suggests that a big wave began around this time in October last year, so it’s also plausible we’re just at the start of a wave. Either way, I’m personally considering COVID higher risk than usual at the moment, and think you probably should too. [Update from the future: Turns out, I was writing this literally at the point where the UK case data peaked, and it’s dropped right down again, so looks like there was a small wave rather than a big one. I think the rest of the post stands as it wasn’t dependent on there being a wave, but the risk was modestly lower than I believed it to be.]

That being said, I’m personally not at particularly high risk of getting COVID right now, because I’m one of the lots of people who have just had it. It sucked. COVID is no longer, for me at least, the massive fear it was in 2020, but I’ve had it at least three confirmed times, and they’re all shortlisted for some of the most unpleasant viral illnesses I’ve had. I’m pretty sure I’ve had flu at once which was worse than COVID, but I would not like to repeat any of these experiences.

It’s tempting to just write it off as “just another viral illness these days”, and I think it’s not necessarily egregiously wrong to do that (I remain confused about long COVID and how to reason about the risks of this), but it is a very unpleasant viral illness for many people who get it.

Not everyone has it this bad of course - many people have COVID and it just feels like a minor cold - but this is part of the problem, because it makes it much easier to spread. Even if you feel fine, that doesn’t mean the people who catch it from you will.

Given this, it’s worth treating it accordingly as something that it’s worth putting in a bit of effort to avoid getting it or passing it on. Also, it’s coming into winter, so there’s a bunch of other viruses about to peak, and almost everything that helps with COVID helps with those too.

I’m not going to be super alarmist here. I don’t think you should obviously drop everything to avoid COVID, and even if I thought that, I think anyone who would follow that advice already is. But here are the things I think it’s clearly worth doing.

If it is easy and safe for you to get a COVID vaccine, I think you should. Even with my recent bout of COVID I intend to, though I’m waiting a few weeks. Same applies for flu vaccine even though this post is about COVID, because flu also sucks and most of the same general principles apply.
4
I’ve historically been on the fence about this, because I react very badly to COVID vaccines, but I think I’ve decided it’s worth it. We’ll see if I still think that after this vaccine.
You should have a supply of masks, ideally good masks (more on this in a moment).
You should have at least a small supply of at home COVID tests.
5
This might also be true of flu tests. I’m not sure. Flu tests are a lot more expensive and harder to find, so I think the tradeoff is less clearly good, but I’m leaning towards wanting to take flu tests myself.

And I wish people would follow the following norms at a minimum when interacting with people outside your household:

If you are going somewhere while obviously sick, warn people in advance to give them the option to avoid you. I know it’s winter and everyone is a bit sniffly and the like, I’m not going to tell you the exact threshold that makes sense for “obviously sick”, you’ll have to use your judgement, but if you’re coughing and sneezing a lot you’re obviously sick. Also, if when you say this if someone asks you not to go, please handle it gracefully.
If you are obviously sick, wear a mask when interacting with people as much as possible, and try to maintain personal distance, etc. Even at lower levels of sickness it’s polite to offer to mask up, though people will usually say no.
7
I’m not confident whether this is true or not, but I think this is less necessary outside. Certainly if outside and at a reasonable distance from people I will often remove mask in cases where I’d mask indoors. Not if I know I have COVID though.
8
I’m somewhat on the fence of how proactively one should mask in borderline cases when interacting with non immunocompromised people.
All else being equal, prefer to stay in well ventilated spaces while ill. Outside is ideal, but you can also e.g. open windows and doors, prefer large rooms to small rooms, etc. You may not be able to achieve this reliably, hence “all else being equal”.
If you develop new illness symptoms, please test for COVID. I’m not sure what the current best time for testing is. If you’re like me and are somewhere where tests are cheap (and have an income where they still count as cheap), test for a couple days. If you’re somewhere where tests are expensive, my guess is waiting at least 24 hours after symptom onset will get you a more reliable result.
9
There are caveats and circumstances where you don’t need to do this. I tested for COVID yesterday out of an overabundance of caution because I was visiting some people and had a bit of a sore throat, but this really was an overabundance of caution given that I’ve literally just had COVID.
If you test positive for COVID, try to minimise interactions with people. If you have to interact with people, absolutely wear a mask no questions, try to keep it outside, and if you have to go inside try to maintain personal distance.
Only treat yourself as free from COVID 24 hours after your first negative test. Ideally test again at that point, cost and test availability permitting.

In short: Give people the option to not get infected by you, do your best to make sure that you don’t infect them whether it’s COVID or not, but try extra hard to not infect people with COVID.

These are, I think, extremely relaxed norms - in particular, they don’t tell you not to see people when sick, they try to take into account the fact that you have other priorities and constraints. They don’t tell you should be masking whenever possible. All they do if you don’t currently have COVID is ask you to take some relatively basic steps to try not to get other people sick if you have to interact with them.

But they are significantly stricter than most people follow. I mostly regard this as a failure of our society to figure out how to have good shared norms in general and around this in particular, though in the most extreme cases I do also think this is a failure of individual people to have any sense or decency - e.g. don’t turn up unmasked and without warning to your office job where you can easily work from home or an easily skippable social gathering while spluttering and coughing and not having tested for COVID.

A brief aside for companies

If you run any sort of office, you should make sure that it’s well stocked with COVID tests and good masks. It’s stupid not to.

Offices are great ways of passing on COVID, and as a result the expected cost of having COVID in your office is at the very least several person-days of lost work, potentially much more. Individuals often don’t get around to testing for one reason or another (out of tests, tests are expensive, forgot and now they’re at work…), and making it easy for them to do the thing that helps everyone and saves you money is a no brainer.

You should also have some sort of COVID policy about using these tests. I don’t know what the optimal policy here is, but I think that e.g. asking people to comply with the norms I suggested above in tandem with the free masks and tests is probably sufficient, or at least a very good start.

Not nearly as much as I feel like I should.

Here are what I think of as basic mask facts:

Any mask is better than no mask, but at the low end not by much. If all you have is a cloth or surgical mask, you might as well wear it, but you should try to have better masks than that.
You should ideally use FFP3 (UK) or N99 (US) masks. FFP2 or N95 are probably good enough. I am currently using these ones, which I actually thought were N99 but oops on review are actually N95. For more durable masks, I have heard good things about the Cambridge Mask company, but have no information about them beyond that.
Ideally use masks that have straps behind your head rather than your ears. If your mask has straps that go round your ears, a mask clip to make them go around the back of your head will make them more comfortable and more effective.
If you are trying to avoid getting sick, you should use a valved mask (because it doesn’t lose its seal when you breathe out). If you’re trying to avoid other people getting sick, you should use an unvalved mask (because the point of the valve is that the air coming out is not getting filtered). If you don’t know whether your mask is valved, it’s probably unvalved. The valve is a big lump of plastic on the front. A valved mask probably still protects others - almost certainly better than no mask, probably better than a bad cloth mask or a surgical mask - so if you’re sick and all you have is a valved mask you should probably still wear it.
11
I’m not super confident in this claim, but it does seem to be what the research supports. I previously believed they weren’t helpful for source control, then someone suggested in proof reading this article that they might actually be harmful, so I got Claude to do some research for me and followed its links, and as a result changed my mind on this.
Wear your mask covering your nose. I really feel like I shouldn’t have to say this, but I feel like a good quarter of the people I see wearing a mask in public don’t.

Here’s a timeline of my recent COVID experience. If you get it, yours will obviously not be exactly the same as mine, but people seem to have found it helpful to hear.

Saturday: Had a little bit of a sore throat in the morning. Nothing bad, but the sort of thing that feels like you might be about to get ill. By Saturday evening, I had a really quite bad sore throat and was starting to feel feverish though not actually running a fever.

Sunday: Was feeling pretty awful in the morning. Tested for COVID and got a bright, thick, red positive line, suggesting that I would probably be testing positive. Over roughly the next 24 hours I got a moderate fever (i.e. a bit over 38C, but it sure didn’t feel moderate).

Monday: By the afternoon I was feeling... not great but sortof OK? But at this point respiratory symptoms started and I started sneezing and developing a really nasty cough.

Tuesday: I was coughing a lot, and my throat was starting to get pretty raw, and was generally very tired but otherwise not too bad.

Wednesday: Coughing less, still quite weak and tired but feeling mostly fine otherwise. My throat was super raw at this point though, and probably the most unpleasant thing was the agony of eating anything remotely acidic.

Thursday: Same

Friday: Finally tested negative and was feeling surprisingly human. Still coughing but worst of the cough was already gone.

At this point I thought I’d got off very lightly, so like an idiot I over-exerted myself over the next couple of days. Went for a long walk on Sunday and felt exhausted and shivery on the Monday, had a super busy day on Tuesday and then an international flight home on Wednesday (I had been stuck in the US - I’d meant to fly back the previous Tuesday when I was still very full of COVID).

I then spent the next week absolutely wrecked. Some of this was definitely jet lag, and some of it was general travel crash, but that’s not enough to explain it. I was constantly exhausted, sleeping huge amounts, and barely functional while I was awake. Fortunately this only lasted a week, but it was really unpleasant.

It’s now a week past that and I’m… mostly fine. My health is never particularly great, and I’ve got a litany of minor complaints, but I don’t know if any of these are related to the COVID. Certainly the terrible fatigue seems entirely gone.

I am not a doctor, but here’s some stuff that helped me, maybe it will help you too.

In the first 36 hours I was sweating buckets, and it was really useful to have ORS salts. I used dioralyte, which is generally good.

If you’re in the UK, check whether your ORS contains artificial sweeteners. If it does, it’s probably not very useful (ORS requires sugar to be useful, but the UK sugar tax means that people are swapping out sugar for artificial sweeteners in lots of products, including ones where they really shouldn’t). You can also easily make classic WHO recommended ORS, which is 8tsp of sugar, 1tsp of salt, 1 litre of water. Boil some of the water first so that the salt and sugar dissolve, and then either let it cool or top it up with cool water.

I’m a big believer in gargling with mouthwash and using saline nasal sprays while ill in order to reduce the amount of virus in the upper respiratory system. It might even work! Certainly I was doing this while ill and the upper respiratory symptoms cleared up remarkable quickly, but that’s only weak evidence.

Strepsils were life saving during this time, what with the cough and the sore throat.

I personally mostly didn’t need much in the way of medication while this was going on. I think I took some ibuprofen occasionally for headaches, but there was nothing particularly severe. Other people I know who have had it recently have had worse fevers, so I’d want to have both ibuprofen and paracetamol on hand to manage that, but I personally didn’t need it.

And, of course, it’s important to have easy to eat food to hand, because you want to minimise interactions with others and also will have zero energy yourself to do any cooking.

Through a mix of precautions and luck, I managed not to pass on COVID to anyone that I know of. There are a few cases where I might have passed it on to strangers without knowing, but I was careful to minimise those, and they in general had far less exposure than anyone I knew I’d interacted with, who all managed to escape. I still think I was lucky, but I stacked the dice in my favour so this was the most likely outcome. I do think it’s straightforwardly lucky that I didn’t manage to pass COVID on to my aunt (who I was staying with for the first fourish days of this). We did our best to minimise contact, and it worked, but our best was only so good.

I think there is one thing I obviously did wrong and I do feel a bit bad about it: I should have tested Saturday afternoon. I’d tested Friday night, and I didn’t feel particularly bad in the morning, so it’s reasonable that I didn’t test Saturday morning, but on Saturday afternoon I had a window where I was starting to feel worse (developing an obvious sore throat) and could easily have tested before seeing some friends and didn’t.

I think (I’m not sure) I also didn’t adequately warn the friends I was visiting after that that I was starting to get sick. I don’t think we’d have done a single thing differently if I had warned them, but I still should have warned them.

I took one Uber trip while COVID positive and didn’t tell the driver I had COVID. I did tell him I was sick, and I masked up and opened my window and he opened his window so there was a lot of airflow, and I judge that this is probably still safer than a typical day of driving people around right now. I probably still should have told him, but I’ve had bad experiences with Uber drivers being dicks, and I didn’t want the hassle. I still feel a bit bad about it but if I’m honest I probably would do the same again in future.

I mention all of these things, because I think there’s a recurring theme that I run into a lot that if you give someone COVID you shouldn’t feel bad about it. I think this is clearly wrong.

I don’t think you need to be wracked with mortal guilt over it unless you did something so stupid as to cross over into evil (if you go unmasked to visit your immunocompromised but otherwise healthy grandpa in an unventilated room while knowing you have COVID and not warning anyone, I actually do think you should feel wracked with mortal guilt about this. This is thankfully a hypothetical example for me, but I’m sure it’s a real example somewhere), but when you cause a bad thing to happen, intentionally or otherwise, I do think it is important to pause and reflect on whether your actions were appropriate.

Sometimes the answer is that they were! If I had given my aunt COVID, I would feel bad (mostly for her sake), but I wouldn’t feel guilty, because I honestly don’t know what I could have done differently.

In contrast, for the Saturday testing: That was stupid. I was being a bit careless and lazy. It’s very far from unforgivable (if that was the standard for unforgivable, I guess we’re all going to hell), but it’s worth feeling a bit guilty about and resolving to do better in future. This is true even though I got away with it and did not give the friends I was visiting COVID.

Part of why I’ve tried to articulate what I think are reasonable COVID norms is to provide a baseline for this: I think that if you’re following these norms, under normal circumstances (e.g. not interacting with immunocompromised people) if you give someone COVID, that sucks, bad luck. It’s worth thinking about whether you did something wrong, but you probably didn’t do anything terribly wrong.

If, on the other hand, you give someone COVID and easily implementable steps from my suggested norms could have significantly reduced the risk of that… that probably is, at least partly, your fault, and you should maybe think about changing your behaviour to do less of that. Even better, you can change your ways before that happens.

The harder part is of course that you should also be encouraging other people to change their ways, and it’s hard to instil an appropriate sense of guilt in a productive manner. It’s very easy to do this in an unproductive manner by shouting at people, which mostly involves the other party getting defensive and entrenching in their existing position. It’s also easy to cause some people to be wracked with guilt wildly disproportionate to their actions. That doesn’t help much either.

I think the most effective lines are something like “I’d feel more comfortable if…” or “Under circumstances like these I’ve been trying to…”, where you make it clear that there are specific behavioural norms that you yourself have adopted. I don’t know how well this works, but it’s probably a good start.

When I try to rehearse such conversations in my mind I tend to get pretty snippy pretty quickly though, because I imagine the other party going “oh that sounds like far too much hassle”, at which point I respond with “well, if your convenience is worth giving other people COVID…”, at which point it all snowballs from there. I don’t know. Probably these go fine more often than I think, but this sort of aversion is part of why norm change is hard.

Probably the best time to have these conversations is when nobody has violated these norms recently. Rather than say “You gave people COVID, so you should have…”, get ahead of the problem and say “Winter is coming, and as a result I would like us to be extra careful about not giving people infectious diseases including COVID, and here are some things I know help…”

In general, I’m very disappointed in how little norms have changed post COVID. You’d have thought a giant global pandemic was enough to get people to change their behaviour a bit, but instead it politicised and polarised with no ability for anyone who disagreed with each other to have a reasonable conversation, and then we collectively seem to have agreed it was a terrible time best forgotten and as a result have learned nothing from it.

But maybe now that the dust is settled a bit we have another opportunity to try to do better. Do better ourselves, and try to have constructive conversations about what to do wherever we can. Norm change is hard, but it’s impossible if we don’t at least try to make it happen.

Yes you can hum while holding your nose

2025-09-19

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/yes-you-can-hum-while-holding-your.

Please excuse me, I’m about to start the most absurdly specific disagreement about a deeply unimportant subject, both because I thought the topic was interesting, and because the original claim annoyed me in several equally specific ways.

In 50 things I wonder, []{.mention-wrap attrs=“{”name”:“Stephen Long”,“id”:251842242,“type”:“user”,“url”:null,“photo_url”:“https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/ce93bfec-06f3-411c-babc-50260b370e37_2048x1365.jpeg”,“uuid”:“43c6027f-b976-4a92-b570-93d2c2df01a9”}” component-name=“MentionToDOM”}, wonders about the following thing:

I wonder why you can’t hold your nose and hum at the same time. We don’t hum through our noses, surely?

Stephen, sorry for the fact that I’m going to spend much of the rest of this post complaining about you. I liked your post otherwise, this one stupid thing just set me off.

The problem is that it’s an interesting observation, with an expression of curiosity about it, coupled with a total lack of basic empirical investigation of the question.

Long story short, here’s a video of me humming while holding my nose:

::: {.native-video-embed attrs=“{”mediaUploadId”:“2a5d8dee-b217-4464-94f5-fa097bc01406”,“duration”:null}” component-name=“VideoPlaceholder”} :::

It’s not that hard! It’s a slightly different sound, and a slightly different action, but it’s still clearly just a humming variant.

Anyway, now for the long story.

The first thing I did when reading this claim is of course that I tried it, and was genuinely surprised. Indeed, when I held my nose I stopped being able to hum. Weird!

Then I turned to the second part:

We don’t hum through our noses, surely?

OK. So what’s going on with the nose?

So I started humming again and put a finger just under my nose. There was a very clear constant outflow of breath. OK, great. Guess we do hum through our nose.

But… do we have to?

Let’s assume there has to be an outflow of breath somewhere to make the humming noise. That makes sense. The way we make noise with our mouths is by vibrating moving air.

So… let’s try breathing out through my mouth while holding my nose and otherwise trying to hum?

Yup, turns out that works fine. You can see the slightly confused look on my face in the video as I mentally switch gears to do that, but once you orient to what you need to do, it’s straightforward. It took me a bit of experimentation, but eventually I even figured out how to do it with my nose open.

I wonder what it means to wonder something if it does not result in you trying the two most obvious experiments that would lead you to resolving it?

Anyway, me being a catty little bitch aside, I think there’s something more interesting going on here.

The first is: Kudos to Stephen, I had indeed literally never noticed this phenomenon before. I’ve hummed a lot, just by virtue of being a 42 year old human and humming being a normal human activity. I’d never noticed this before. I’ve even spent several weeks without the ability to breathe through my nose post surgery and didn’t notice it then! So it’s a good, interesting, observation.

But… There is, what feels to me like, a disappointing lack of curiosity required to encounter such an easily empirically investigable fact, acknowledge it as interesting, and then go “huh, weird” and move on without doing any of the investigation. I don’t think it actually is a lack of curiosity, I think this is what me being good at empirical investigation feels like, but I nevertheless feel disappointed when seeing this and not the immediately seeing the follow on “So then I investigated…”

I’m completely sympathetic if there are reasons you didn’t investigate of course. For example if an interesting thing comes up while you’re extremely busy with something important, of course you’re not going to prioritise it. I’ve also been known to refuse to investigate certain things because I’m morally certain the answer will not make me happy. And of course, there are plenty of seemingly innocuous facts whose investigation will lead you down a giant rabbit hole if you follow it.

I’m also at least somewhat sympathetic to not being interested in this fact. Certainly I have limited control over which facts I find boring and which facts result in years long obsessions.

My objection is not to not investigating, it’s to not having the reflexive desire to investigate interesting things.

The other thing that was interesting about this is that the basic skill of trying to figure out how to do something differently is worth practicing. I thought this was easy to figure out, and it probably is for most people, but I don’t know that even three years ago I would have had the reflexive next step of going from observing that I breathed through my nose while humming to thinking about how to do it differently.

I’ve been doing a lot of Pilates over those years. One aspect of that is that my Pilates teacher deliberately does something to mess with us. Here, let me show you: Clasp your hands together, lacing your fingers.

OK. Now, whichever hand has the little finger on the outside, move it up one, so the other hand now had the little finger on the outside.

Probably feels weird, right?

A lot of what I’ve been learning and relearning in Pilates is not the literal physical motions, but also the specific process of taking feedback on a motion I’m doing wrong and realising I don’t even know how to find the muscles that my teacher is asking me to use. This involves rummaging around in my head for a bit until I find where… not exactly where the muscle is, but where the way my mind relates to the muscle.

This always starts from looking at what you’re doing and figuring out how to do it differently, and that seems like an important skill to develop.

This humming trick is, I think, a surprisingly good exercise for developing it, because of how clear the feedback loop is. It either works, or it doesn’t, you can very directly experience why it’s not working when it doesn’t, and after a bit of experimentation, something that first seemed impossible becomes easy.

I wonder how well the experience of doing that generalises.

This, too, is a genuinely interesting empirical question. I’m probably not going to investigate this immediately, because it’s rather a lot more work than I’ve got available to spend on this problem right now, but I would like to invite you to try to learn to hum with your nose closed and tell me how you find it. You might learn something interesting doing it, and I’d enjoy hearing about your experiences.

More importantly though, I would like to invite you to adopt the sort of reflexive attitude I’m pointing at here: If you spot something interesting, ask why it’s like that. If something doesn’t work, experiment a bit and see if you can make it work.

The world is full of weird little details, and it’s worth being curious about them.

How to say what you're good at

2025-09-12

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-say-what-youre-good-at.

On discord recently, someone was asking for advice on how to write their annual performance review. This is a task I’ve done… never, actually, so obviously I’m extremely well qualified to weigh in and advise on it.

The thing about this task that most people I know struggle with is writing positive things about themselves in their review. Sometimes this is because they cringe at the idea of bragging, but often it’s just that they don’t actually know what they’re good at.

This isn’t just a problem for annual performance reviews. It’s also a problem when writing CVs, speaker bios, etc. It’s just genuinely hard to write down a simple and clear account of your strengths.

And, of course, ideally you would know yourself and be able to self assess, because self knowledge is good for you even if you don’t currently have to report on it for any specific reason.

As with many hard things, I think part of this is just that nobody has ever told you how to do it. So, here’s one way to do it.

Probably the best piece of advice I have on this comes from Sasha Chapin:

[…] talent doesn’t feel like you’re amazing. It feels like the difficulties that trouble others are mysteriously absent in your case. Don’t ask yourself where your true gifts lie. Ask what other people seem weirdly bad at.

A related thing it feels like is that people are weirdly lazy - you wish they’d do this particular thing. It’s not like it’s hard, people, just put in some effort.

When writing, particularly when writing a first draft or just generating some ideas, I find that it’s often helpful to think in terms of “mental autocompletion”. You’re starting from some point, and then just letting the words flow naturally from there.

The problem is, sometimes you don’t have a completion that feels true, and as a result you will struggle with mental autocompletion. That doesn’t mean you can’t write, but it does mean that writing it will not feel natural.

If you’re trying to write a self-assessment and are starting from something like “I am good at…” and struggling, then this is probably because, as Sasha points out, being good at things doesn’t feel like being good at things. As a result, nothing you put there is going to feel like it fits. This is a form of writers block, but as with a lot of writers block, the real problem isn’t that you’ve got a block that stops you continuing from where you are, the problem is that you’re trying to write the wrong thing.

Instead, you should consider starting not from what you’re good at, but from complaining about your coworkers (or other peers who are relevant in context). Some good starting points are:

Why are they so bad at…?
Why don’t they just…?
Why do they need me to… (instead of doing it/figuring it out for themselves)?

It’s worth considering both the general and the specific. If you can complain about all your coworkers, then you’ve probably got a pretty good pattern, but it might be helpful to start with specific ones, especially specific ones who you otherwise respect and consider to be at about your level.

Your mileage may vary on whether this works, but for me personally I find it’s really helpful to just rant out loud about this, in a very over the top chewing the scenery sort of way. Bring some real “Those fools! I’ll show them! I’ll show them all!” energy to it, or whatever allows you to be somewhat comedically over the top. For example, another variation on this is to wail in distress at how oppressed you are by those around you and their terrible ways, wailing with the demeanour of a cat that was meant to have been fed three minutes ago.

This won’t get you material that you can include in your performance review directly of course (especially if you’ve managed to go suitably over the top), but it gives you a good starting point: Once you’ve identified what everyone else is bad at, you can start asking the question: Are they? Or am I just good at it?

From there, you can start to turn this first draft material into a dryer self assessment. Ideally it should be fairly plain and matter of fact - don’t go too corporate bullshit. You’re not here to leverage synergies in order to energise a dynamic commitment to shareholder value. You just want to tell people that you’re good at fixing things, or mentoring, or helping people think clearly, or whatever it is it turns out you’re good at.

For this, let me tell you another form of autocompletion and paying attention to your feelings that is really helpful for overcoming writer’s block once you know the general shape of what you want to write but are struggling to actually write it.

It’s a very simple process:

Dump your notes into Claude or ChatGPT and tell it what you want to write.
Copy its output to a separate document.
Stare at what it wrote for a bit.
Let the hate flow through you.
Delete whatever drivel it wrote and write something better, because you can definitely improve on that.
3
It’s certainly possible that some of what it wrote will be OK, and you don’t actually have to delete all of it, but I really strongly encourage you not to edit what it wrote into something usable, but instead to write your own thing, borrowing as little or as much from it as you feel you need/want to.

At the end of this process, you should have something you can submit for your annual review, or whatever else you needed to self assess for.

Have you tried not having the problem?

2025-09-07

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/have-you-tried-not-having-the-problem.

“Doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this.”

“Well, don’t do that then.”

I’m writing this post from an airport hotel, which is oddly a novel location for me. I don’t normally stay at airport hotels.

I’m flying over to the USA for work tomorrow. My flight is at 9:30 in the morning, which is a perfectly reasonable time of the morning until you factor in that you need to be at the airport two hours before that, and travel time to the airport is highly variable, and… etc. So all told, I was planning to leave the house at 5:30 tomorrow morning. I’m not very good at moving quickly in the mornings, so that means getting up at 4:30.

This is, I feel confident in saying, a less than reasonable time of the morning. When I mentioned this plan to Dave he said “Ah, so you’re leaving Sunday night.” and, well, he’s got a point.

I’d already optimised it as far as I could go - e.g. I was taking a taxi to the airport rather than public transport. Maybe that taxi could have picked me up half an hour later, but the travel time to Heathrow is so variable that I’d have been trading that half hour of sleep for a high chance of significant anxiety.

Anyway, you know the punchline already: that was a stupid plan and now I’m staying at a perfectly adequate hotel tonight and will have a relatively relaxed short walk to my flight in the morning.

The prompt for this was a call with dad earlier when we were talking about the plan and he mentioned that this is what they did on their last flight and it made such a difference for them. As soon as he suggested it, I realised that it was so obviously a better idea that I changed my plans accordingly.

The funny thing is, it’s not really even more expensive. I did in the end get both a cab and the hotel because there’s a tube strike on, but for an unhurried trip in the evening I would have happily taken the extra hour to come here on public transport, and the combined cost of public transport and the hotel is about the same as what I would have paid for the cab. I don’t think expense is why I would have ruled it out, it’s more like a greyed out option. It’s a thing people who aren’t like me do, so it didn’t appear on the option list at all, but as soon as it was suggested it immediately became the obviously best option.

The funny thing is, this isn’t even the first time I’ve had this exact structure of problem resolution this year. I had to have my car MOTed earlier this year, and they asked me to drop it off by 8AM on the day. I am, as you might infer from my grumbling about the airport plan, not a morning person, and I didn’t wanna. It wasn’t nearly as onerous as the airport timing, but it was still going to be annoying.

Then about two days before, I had a thought, called up the mechanic, and said “Hey, would it be possible for me to drop the car off the evening before instead?” “Oh yeah, sure, no problem.” Turns out, many things that seem unpleasant to do in the morning can just be done the evening before.

This will seem like a non sequitur, but bear with me for a moment: One of my favourite books is a book about photocopiers.

Specifically, “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job” by Julian Orr. It is about Julian Orr’s time studying photocopier repair technicians at Xerox Parc - sitting in on their conversations, following around work, and generally learning what it is like to be a photocopier repair technician.

At some point in the book, he talks about the distinction between solving and dissolving a problem. A problem is dissolved if it is made to go away without solving it - either because the problem “fixed itself” (e.g. you turned the machine off and on again and now it works) or because you no longer care about it (e.g. because you decided that some part is cursed and just replace it without knowing why it’s cursed).

“Solving” the problem in my case is finding the most efficient route to the airport in the morning (take a cab, then make a choice about what cab company to use, when to leave, etc.), but you can also just dissolve the problem by not doing that and going to the airport the night before.

My ha ha only serious catch phrase is “Have you tried solving the problem?”. That’s a solve approach, but you can also try the dissolve approach of “Have you tried arranging things so you don’t have the problem?”

In some sense this distinction is fake of course. “I need to travel to the airport in the morning” was never the problem to solve. The problem to solve is that I need to be on a particular flight tomorrow morning. In that sense, the hotel stay is simply another equally valid solution to the problem.

But in the moment it doesn’t feel that way. You have a specific problem in front of you (getting to the airport in the morning), and stepping back and going “Actually, why am I trying to solve this problem in the first place?” feels like a fundamentally different move. It’s very easy to get tunnel visioned into treating the particular subproblem you’re on as the problem.

It’s definitely a failure mode I’m prone to, and as a result I don’t necessarily have a good solution to this, but I suspect part of it is starting to reflexively notice yourself thinking “This sucks, but I gotta, because…”, looking at that “because” and asking yourself “Actually, do I?”

How I clean my kitchen at the end of the day

2025-05-16

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-i-clean-my-kitchen-at-the-end.

This is a guide on how to clean my kitchen. I wrote it up because I was writing it in my head while cleaning my kitchen and found that helpful. It was originally a set of notes to self really, but when I posted it on the notebook blog people found it interesting and helpful, so I thought I’d promote it to the newsletter.

It’s not actually currently accurate, as for reasons I’m not currently the one in charge of cleaning the kitchen, but it was accurate when I wrote it and I expect it to be accurate again in the future.

So. This is how I clean the kitchen when it’s my responsibility to do so. Previously, this was at the end of almost every day, now it’s only occasional, but I expect it will go back to being a routine again in future.

Many of the specifics of this are only useful if you share a kitchen with me, and thus have the exact same sets of problems, constraints, and affordances. And if you do share a kitchen with me, this post isn’t really intended for you as it would be massively passive aggressive for me to write a whole essay telling you how to clean the kitchen. Instead, if you share a kitchen with me, I refer you to the large poster with helpfully big letters and clear easy to understand instructions that I have posted on the kitchen wall.

Anyway, there are some things you should understand before embarking on cleaning the kitchen:

The first is that it will take about an hour. It might take a bit less. If it’s a really big dinner or a lot of debris has built up over the course of the day it might take more. But it will probably take about an hour, and trying to speed that up massively is going to mostly stress you out without saving a huge amount of time. You should probably just let it take an hour. You can resent that, or you can just put up with it, and you’ll have a better time in that hour if you do the latter.

You can spend the time in contemplation, maybe with the aid of some music, or a noise track. Much like the shower is a great time for thinking, so can cleaning the kitchen be. Maybe you can write an essay (possibly about how to clean the kitchen) in your head. Maybe you can just treat it as meditative, or lightly daydream. If you can’t face the idea of spending an hour alone with your thoughts right now (which is fine, it can happen), you can put on a video or an audiobook if you want.

Whatever you’re doing though, assume it will take an hour, so make sure to start at least an hour before bedtime.

The second thing to understand is that there is no such thing as “clean”, there is only “clean enough”. You are not attempting perfection, you are attempting to achieve a consistent standard of cleaning. You get to decide what that standard is, but it should be roughly centred around making sure the kitchen is ready for use tomorrow, with the only leftover tasks for the morning being to put away clean dishes. This is not a standard of clean that is sufficient to keep the kitchen spotless, but combined with a deep clean every week or two is sufficient to keep on top of things.

The third thing to understand is that it doesn’t matter if you’re too tired to clean the kitchen. The kitchen still needs to be cleaned, and if you don’t do it then tomorrow will go much worse. If you get part way through the process and you really can’t continue, you can stop, but you’ll probably be fine, because the process is on your side.

The fourth thing to remember is that the process really is on your side. It’s there to help keep momentum up, make it feel achievable to do more, and minimise the amount of decision making you have to do, so you can mostly just autopilot the entire experience, and it’s there so that if you do give up midway through (you probably won’t), you’ve done the right things first, and so that you won’t at any point have to go “Oh fuck, I didn’t do that thing, I can’t be bothered to do that now...”.

Anyway, here is the process.

The process consists of a rolling series of goals. You should always do the highest priority one.

The goals are, in order:

There should be no full bins. There is a recycling bin, a waste bin, and a food scraps bin, and if at any point (including the start) of the process one fills up, you should stop whatever you are doing and empty it. If it’s obvious at some point that it’s going to fill up later, you can prioritise filling it up and then emptying it, but this isn’t required.

The dishwasher should be running. Once the bins are empty, all actions should be directed towards getting things in the dishwasher and getting it running. If it’s currently got clean dishes in it, first empty it, then load it, then run it. Having the dishwasher running means that there will be clean dishes tomorrow

Surfaces outside the kitchen should be cleared. That means the dining room and living room table need to have everything taken off them and the tables need to be wiped down.

From here, it’s a process of narrowing the area that still needs to be cleaned over time, one surface at a time.

My kitchen has two counters. Let’s call them sinkside and kettleside. The next goal is to get the kettleside counter cleaned and wiped down. This is partly to narrow the cleaning area, and partly because you’ll need the space to put extra drying up. This involves moving all the dirty dishes to the sinkside counter and putting away any ingredients that have been left out. Once it’s clear, lay some cloths down to put extra drying up on it.

The sinkside counter has two halves, left of stove and right of stove. The next goal is clean the surface left of stove, corralling all remaining dirty dishes onto the stove top and right of stove area.

The next goal is hand wash the dishes that didn’t go in the dishwasher. Some of these are things that can’t go in the dishwasher, some of them are things that could go in the dishwasher but it was too full. Either way they get hand washed. Be sure to do it properly. These will be left to dry, you’re not going to manually dry them up.

Now get the right of stove counter completely clean. This usually is just wiping it down after all the washing has been done, but might also e.g. involve throwing out any recycling that has accumulated there.

At this point if you’re genuinely exhausted and it’s late, you may stop, but ideally you would not.

If you can face it, clean the stove top. Don’t do a proper deep clean of it, that’s not your job, but do get the worst of debris and the like off it.

Now, clean the sink. Throw out any food caught in the food traps, give it a general wipe down.

Finally, sweep the floor. This doesn’t have to be super thorough, just get the most obvious debris off the floor.

Now, do a final inspection. Take a quick look around, see if there’s anything unusual that needs sorting, or that you’ve missed. Usually there won’t be as if it were common there’d be something in the process, but it’s always worth checking whether you’ve missed something.

And, finally, done. Good job.

Having a process like this really helps, because it lets you maintain momentum, see clear and visible progress as you go, and prioritise in a way that makes sure the most important tasks all get done.

Behaving as if you were trying to succeed

2025-05-06

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/behaving-as-if-you-were-trying-to.

In a flat I shared a while back, for some reason we owned a wooden meat tenderising mallet (Disgusting object. Can’t recommend). One of my flatmates was the main person who used it, so I assume it was hers, but it lived with all of the other kitchen utensils.

One day I discovered it had been put away still covered in bits of raw chicken. I politely expressed some disapproval of this fact. She, in turn, seemed vaguely baffled by this objection.

I don’t remember her exact words, but it was something to the tune of “I did wash it! But it’s hard to clean.”

I, in turn, expressed the sentiment that if something is hard to clean then that means you clean it more thoroughly, or don’t use it, but that putting things away with raw meat stuck to them was not among the acceptable set of outcomes.

She did rewash it, but I’m not sure my point really stuck.

I’ve thought about this example over and over again since then, in various shared living situations, because I’ve run into a surprising number of people who are bad at washing up in a particular way: It’s not that they’re incompetent at the basic mechanical actions of washing up, but that they don’t check if the thing they’ve washed up is clean afterwards, and as a result a substantial fraction of things they wash up still have food stuck to them. It’s usually not as bad as the raw chicken incident, but it’s bad enough that I don’t consider the things they washed up to be clean enough to put away without double checking.

As a result, I typically ended up rewashing stuff they’ve washed, which means they’ve put in a bunch of work for literally zero effect, and made me more annoyed at them than I would be if they hadn’t done anything at all.

Similarly, back when I used to work in more end-user-facing software with an actual web interface and such, I used to deploy this really exciting magical code review technique that reliably found problems with people’s pull requests: I checked out the branch, launched the web application, and tried actually using the feature. Often it had obvious problems.

This has become something of a bugbear of mine in general: People doing things as if the thing itself was the point, rather than a tool you are using to achieve a specific outcome, and not thinking about whether their actions will actually in any way help them achieve their goal. The result of this is often that they put in about 90% of the effort required to do it properly, and get 0% of the actual benefit because what they did didn’t actually work.

The easiest way to fix this is to check whether what you did worked after doing it. Initially, this will slow you down a bit and add delays, but as you get good at it you will basically internalise the process and it doesn’t slow you down much.

I do, however, suspect that in many of these cases the actual thing you need to do to fix this is to actually care about the end result rather than just wanting to avoid being blamed for not doing the thing and hoping nobody will notice. You need to accept that actions you take have actual impact in the world and are not just something you are doing for the sake of it.

This is also important because there are many examples where you can’t really check if it worked.

For example, I still semi-often see people wearing face masks in public. I rarely do these days, but consider this a completely reasonable choice. Unless, that is, you’re wearing your facemask pulled down so it doesn’t cover your nose. In which case what on earth are you doing? How have you made it to 2025 without looking up basic mask usage?

But you’re never going to figure out that you did this wrong by checking. What are you going to check? Did I get a virus Y/N? That’s an incredibly noisy signal, and tracing it back to the specific error you made is going to be almost impossible. The only way to get this right is to actually care about getting things right and then take whatever action is appropriate for achieving this.

In contrast, throughout the entire pandemic it felt like people were ignoring this. The reason people wear masks badly was reflected throughout their behaviour in the entire pandemic: They treated the point as adherence to the rule, and the pandemic as a social phenomenon, rather than thinking about actions as existing in a real physical world containing real things such as viruses that your actions interact with in meaningful ways. The mask acts, not as a tool, but as a talisman.

If you want to do things that actually work, and to avoid a whole bunch of wasted effort spent on things that don’t work, you need to let go of this talisman-type thinking and treat your actions as things with actual practical content. You need to care about whether they work, and you need to pay attention to the world and learn from it when they don’t.

Even with the best of intentions, you won’t always succeed. Certainly I don’t. Sometimes you’ll rush and forget to check something. Sometimes you’ll check something insufficiently carefully. Sometimes you’ll check something and misinterpret it, or otherwise make a stupid error. Sometimes you just won’t have the key piece of information you needed and won’t find it out until it’s too late.

This is fine. An attitude of caring to succeed is never going to get you to perfection, and I’m not asking you or anyone else to be perfect, but I am asking you to do better, and when you are failing, try to figure out why and fix that.

This post is a fairly lightly edited version of something I previously posted on my notebook that I decided was good enough that I wanted to promote to newsletter. If you’re feeling starved of my writing (sorry I’ve not been writing anything here recently), go check out the notebook, where I’ve been writing almost every day recently. It’s of highly variable quality and about a much more random collection of topics than here.

Setting up my new blogging engine

2024-11-29

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/setting-up-my-new-blogging-engine.

Work in progress

Here is today’s newsletter as it is intended to be read. If, for whatever reason, you’d prefer to read this as actual text rather than embedded images, there is a mostly faithful transcript with slightly fewer typos and more footnotes below.

So I have a typewriter now I’m a typewriter person. I’m very sorry.

I have been experimenting with having longish breaks from electronic devices recently and it has generally been great, but one of the big problems with it is that I can’t write. I can journal, because journalling is handwritten, but there is a fundamentally different character of thought to the typed and handwritten word. It is not literally impossible for me to write an essay by hand but it is hard enough that I will basically never bother.

A little while back it occurred to me that the obvious solution to this problem would be to own a typewriter. I briefly considered it and looked on ebay for one but wasn’t very inspired by anything I saw. I expected it would just be a large sum of money for a badly maintained object that didn’t actually work. So I set the idea aside and didn’t think about it much further. Fortunately though I did mention the thought to Lisa.

Earlier today they [Dave and Lisa] were out for a walk and popped into one of the better local charity shops. While there they spotted a lovely vintage typewriter. Dave commented on it and Lisa mentioned that she thought I wanted one. Some WhatsApp messages later, I owned a typewriter.

It ’ s great. I love it. It also doesn’t exactly satisfy my intended use case because it’s actually a totally different experience again from either handwriting or writing on the computer. Something that (in retrospect unsurprisingly) is halfway between the two.

For example I can’r go back and edit text. I said above that Dave and Lisa had bought this for me today but that isn’t actually true. It was yesterday. I’m writing this the next day because we had to buy new ribbon for it. WE GOT IT ON oops shift lock. We got it on Amazon next day delivery. We also looked up the manual online and watched YouTube videos of how to operate it. The whole experience has been a really interesting blend of the old and the new.

Another way this is more like handwriting is just how intensely physical experience using it is. The force with which I hit the key is the force with which the hammer hits the page. If I don’t press the key hard enough then the letter doesn’t show up properly. I have to press back spacer and try again. The result is much slower and, frankly, physically exhausting. It has taken me maybe half an hour to type the above… what? 300 words? [Actually 421]. I normally type at 60-100 words per minute. That 1 is a lower case L by the way. This is such a ridiculous experience and it’s genuinely great.

Another aspect of the experience is just how incredibly mechanical an object this is. You can see how all of the bits fit together. They don’t, as it turns out, make ribbons for this typewriter any more, what with it being from some time in the 30s or earlier. I thought the ribbon I bought would be compatible, and it was, but it came on spools that were not. So we cut it out of its spools and rewound it onto the old spools. We then had to manually rethread the new ribbon onto the ypewriter (of course. What other way to do it could there be?) and then spend some time figuring out how we’d fitted it wrong. It was very satisfying.

I’ve just had to start a new page I can’t see what I’ve previously written. It reminds me of a complaint that my grandmother had back in the… late 80s? Early 90s? We had bought her an electric typewriter, or rather an early word processor, and she complained that what she had written kept disappearing. It had scrolled off the top of the tiny screen. This is both like and unlike my current experience. The words are gone but I know they are still there, because fundamentally this is not a word processor. It is a machine for putting ink on a piece of paper.

It is an intensely Real object, in a way few things that I own are. I have no idea why there is that large gap there! I probably just literally didn’t physically push the carriage return far enough. The real is very inconvenient sometimes. I understand why Albert Borgmann prefers Things to Devices but I think it is clear to me at this point just how much better a computer is at producing text. Maybe that is the commoditisation of text, but such are the tradeoffs we make.

But also… I have been absorbed solidly in writing for an hour. That doesn’t happen in front of the computer, which is fundamentally designed to distract.

When we were setting up this typewriter, Dave mentioned that it made him appreciate the steampunk aesthetic more. I get it. But at the same time, I think this is different, because so much of the appeal is tied up in the experience of how genuinely inconvenient an object this is. It is the actual hard mechanical details that are required to make it work.

I started to explain C Thi Nguyen’s notion of generic porn to him at that point, but we got distracted by the mechanical details of typewriter ribbon placement, so I’ll explain it to you now. Generic Porn is “Representations of a thing consumed for enjoyment, without the usual costs and consequences of that thing”. Whatever this is, steampunk is porn of it.

Not that I’m claiming moral superiority you understand. I may be doing the real thing, but I’m just a tourist. I expect to visit regularly, and will get a lot out of it, but at this point my back is aching and my hands are tired, and I think I shall return to my real keyboard now.

> a representation is used as generic porn when it is engaged with for the sake
> of a gratifying reaction, freed from the usual costs and consequences of
> engaging with the represented content.

Meditations on taste

2024-11-22

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/meditations-on-taste.

Allow me, if I may, to introduce you to a novel meditative practice. It is, of course, drawing on a variety of existing traditions, and is in most ways quite mundane, but I think it is very likely a meditation that the specific details of which have never been performed until I invented it recently. Or maybe they have, I don’t know. Meditators are weird.

The meditation starts off in a relatively classic mode: Find yourself a comfortable seating position. I use a meditation cushion and a fairly relaxed cross-legged position (certainly not a full lotus on the ground), but sitting on a comfy chair is of course acceptable. You won’t be able to do this particular meditation lying down.

Now, having found your meditation position, take your glass of Cynar and take a sip.

Ah, yes, sorry. I should have mentioned. You’ll need a glass of Cynar for this.

If you want to replicate my practice perfectly you’ll need the 70 proof version:

But I’d expect normal Cynar will work just as well. Probably most Amaros are approximately equivalent for these purposes, although you’d ideally want one with a proper bitter finish to it, and the Cynar 70 proof is at a nice middle ground of drinkable and challenging.

I recommend a small glass (probably a single shot’s worth), served over ice. You can certainly drink it without the ice, but I’m not sure at this point in your spiritual development you are ready for Cynar without ice.

For those unfamiliar, Cynar is an artichoke-based herbal liqueur. I was introduced to it years ago by a Swiss friend who described it as “This absolute nonsense drink mostly drunk by Italian grandmothers. I really want cocktail bars to pick it up as the next hot spirit just because that would be funny”. It only took a handful of years before they did. Cynar was big for a while. Maybe it still is, but I’m less connected to the cocktail scene these days.

I once gave my friend Mike a sip of my Cynar. He blinked a couple of times, looked confused, and said “That’s really interesting”. “Would you like some more?” I asked. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard Mike say “no” quite so emphatically before or since.

Anyway, where were we. Ah, yes, meditating.

Sit down on your meditation cushion, couch, or other convenient location. Maybe close your eyes, maybe just let them go out of focus for a bit.

Now, sip your Cynar… mindfully.

Hold it in your mouth, try to keep the whole of your attention on the sensation of it. Move it around your tongue, notice how the tastes change as you move it around. Those nice, tidy, maps of where your tastebuds are on your tongue are a bit fake, but they’re not totally fake and you can absolutely tell where on your tongue bitterness is most intense when you’re drinking Cynar. You can also find the sweet receptors. In general, take the opportunity to truly attend to and experience the Cynar, with as little distraction as possible.

You can, eventually, swallow this sip of Cynar of course. Pay attention to how the taste changes as you swallow it. You’ll get a lot more of the bitterness. It’s probably the most intense part of the sip. It’s not exactly enjoyable, but it works well as a complement and contrast to the rest of the flavours.

Keep the Cynar in the focus of your attention. Every time you notice your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to it. You don’t have to maintain it as your meditation object until you finish (I confess I haven’t, and am still drinking it as I write this), but it wouldn’t be a bad idea. If you don’t, I recommend continuing to drink each sip of it mindfully.

Why do this practice? Well, I wanted to find out what it was like. And I figure if David Chapman can drink piss without even using Tantra, Cynar with basic mindfulness is probably a more achievable goal for most people.

Also, pleasingly, it turns out I actually genuinely do like Cynar. I wasn’t sure this was going to be the case.

It’s not that the entire experience of drinking it is fully pleasant - there’s an intensity to the bitterness of the finish each time you swallow that is just on the edge of unpleasant, and there’s a bit of an alcohol burn to it that you naturally get from drinking a 40% ABV spirit. But most of the flavours are neutral to pleasant, and those that are not are both interesting and complementary.

This isn’t often the case for me when I do mindful eating practices, and as a result I typically avoid them (I don’t meditate much at all, truth be told). One reason is, it turns out, that I’m often wrong about what I like, and there’s something genuinely unpleasant about discovering that you don’t like a thing you thought you liked.

Prior to drinking the Cynar this evening, I’d eaten a couple of these mindfully:

I’d previously thought of these as very nice sweets. Arguably they even are. But when I tried eating them mindfully, they tasted… dissonant. Fake. The “nice candy” flavour dissolved into three different flavours - sugar, acidity, and a simple fruit flavour, none of which integrated or complemented each other all that well. Better than my home made orange sweets certainly, but a not dissimilar experience.

In contrast, the Cynar flavours all blend well together. There’s a relatively continuous spectrum of flavours from the sweetness of the sugar to the bitterness of the wormwood that makes it feel like a well integrated flavour. Harmony, not dissonance.

After writing the above, I decided to try this again with a banana. It turns out I… maybe don’t like bananas? The primary flavour is OK, but at the end there is a lingering sickly flavour that I don’t like.

It’s possible that bananas are fine when I don’t try to eat them mindfully, but I’m not sure. Back in the 90s, my brother ruined the game Planescape Torment for me by teaching me to hear the random looping background noise of someone shouting “Boop boop bada boop”. I could never unhear it, and the game became markedly more annoying to play as a result. It’s like learning to notice bad keming in fonts - your experience of the world will forever be slightly more annoying.

Perhaps relatedly, I’ve learned recently that I’m remarkably sensitive to a particular flavour that I associate with overripe fruit - I find papaya repulsive as opposed to the normal opinion of it as merely bland. I get a lot of this flavour from passionfruit too, a fruit that people allege to be nice.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like fruit, or even tropical fruit. Mango is great. Prickly pear is pretty good though not very interesting. I’m more of a berry man, personally, but I appreciate a wide range of fruit. I think. It’s just that some specific fruit flavours are very much not for me.

And, sadly, it turns out this might include bananas. It’s a different overripe fruit flavour, but it’s definitely the flavour I associate with overripe bananas. This banana was a bit ripe but not especially so, and now I’m going to have to go make myself some tea to wash away the flavour. Hopefully I won’t discover that I secretly dislike chamomile.

What’s especially infuriating about this whole experience is that I knew I didn’t like mindful eating. I’ve done this before and I disliked it. Right now I don’t know if I dislike it or not. Certainly I’m infuriated by it. But one of the reasons I’m infuriated by it is it turns out I was wrong about why I disliked it. Or, perhaps more likely, my internal experiences have changed in a way that makes the old reasons no longer relevant.

I’m happy to report that chamomile is fine by the way.

I’ve previously described my problems with mindful eating as it being too intense. The basic experience of focusing on the sensation overwhelms me, even with relatively simple flavours and textures. That doesn’t seem to be true any more.

I think part of that is that I’ve got better at handling intensity. I fixed most of my anxiety a few years back and it’s entirely possible that mindful eating has been fine ever since and I’ve only just noticed. More likely, some of the things I’ve done subsequently on emotional release have both increased my sense of safety and also given me a better baseline for how much I can handle. Maybe it’s something else, I don’t know.

In “Already Free”, Bruce Tift contrasts buddhist meditation with psychotherapy, and portrays them as usefully complementary disciplines. One of the things he highlights as a strength of meditative practices is that they allow you to experience your emotions and the world as just sensory data. They are things that are happening that you can observe non-judgementally, and evaluate your ability to handle them in and of themselves rather than reacting blindly to them. I think my newfound experience with intensity is something like that - it’s not necessarily that things are less intense (although I think they must be a bit), but that I’m more able to acknowledge that something is intense but that I can handle it.

Under this theory, it could be simply a natural consequence of meditative practice that I’m now better able to handle the experience of mindful eating. This would be an excellent theory except that, contrary to what you might reasonably assume from this post, I don’t actually meditate.

Another theory of course is that intensity is much easier to handle when slightly drunk, but I don’t think that theory holds water either - I had the candy before I had anything to drink and it was still fine, and most of the experience of meditating on the Cynar would have been before the alcohol hit.

Doing some experiments I think I have, somewhere along the way, picked up a skill of being able to directly experience sensation as just that. It’s an experience that I’m having, but one that I can choose how to respond to. e.g. at some point a few years ago I figured out where the mental levers were to go “Oh, that’s interesting” and attend to sensations of pain. They become much more manageable when you do, and you become more easily able to assess whether there’s anything to actually worry about. It doesn’t work for everything - for example I can’t do this to headaches - but it works for many things.

Whatever the reason, apparently my belief that I can’t handle the intensity of attending to my experience is false - maybe it was always false and I got something wrong, or maybe I just learned how at some point and didn’t update my beliefs.

Ironically, the reason I’m finding out that I don’t like things I thought I liked is that I’m trying to learn to enjoy things.

A longstanding theoretical goal of my program is to experience more positive emotions. I wouldn’t say it’s been a wild success. I’ve learned many interesting things and improved many of of my experiences of the world. Certainly some positive emotions have become easier to access, and many negative ones have become lessened or more functional. But I wouldn’t exactly say I’m bubbling over with joy.

For various reasons I thought it would be a good time to have another run at it, and mindfully attending to specific experiences and finding out what about them I like seemed like a good starting point. If I can figure out what exactly it is I already enjoy, it’s a simple matter of creativity to seek out more of that. So I thought I would investigate the character of experience and see what I actually like about it.

And apparently when it comes to flavours… not much so far. Oh well. I guess that figuring out what you don’t like still helps you find things you like by process of elimination.

Also, more optimistically, it turns out that my self-image of the sorts of things I like isn’t completely wrong, and I do genuinely like Cynar. It’s really interesting.

Thanks for being a paid subscriber! I may not be entirely clear on what I like, but I do like you. ❤️

I’d like to include something more as a thank you, but it’s 11PM on a Friday night and I’d like to click send, so here’s a recent spell I was using while I did the initial experiments that lead to this post:

Candle Mode

This requires a dedicated object, which is a large candle that you have somewhere standard. You could, in theory, use any candle for this, it doesn’t have to be the same one, but I think having it serve a standard function helps.

Candle Mode works very simply: You light the candle, and you commit to not using any devices until you’ve blown the candle out. All activities are fair game, you are not required to be in any way productive, but however you slack off you’re required to do it in a device free manner.

Any time you want to go back to using a device, you’re absolutely allowed to do this. You just have to blow the candle out first.

This combines well with Negative Pomodoros and is actually extracted from something I tended to do around them, but neither logically requires the other.

How to read more books

2024-11-15

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-read-more-books.

My looking for new projects post was highly successful, which fortunately means that I’ve been busy lately, which unfortunately means that I’ve had much less free time, hence the lack of writing. I’m trying to claw some time back to write because I miss it, so here we are.

It’s a recurring complaint on the parts of the internet that I frequent that people no longer have the capacity to read books. I’ve seen two complaints recently that particularly got my back up. They were, in summary:

“I can’t read books because Capitalism sucks the joy out of everything non-productive, thus preventing me from enjoying reading.”
“I can’t read books because my phone has rewired my brain to require constant stimulus from short-form content.”

I have long and involved criticisms of these claims, but here’s the short succinct one: No they haven’t. Stop making excuses.

The reason you can tell these are excuses is that they blame a small specific problem on a bigger and vaguer one. They get you off the hook for the problem by making it dependent on something you can’t possibly solve. Therefore you can’t solve this problem, therefore you don’t have an obligation to solve this problem, therefore you don’t have to feel bad.

The problem is, it’s a transparent lie, and you know at some level that it’s a transparent lie, so it doesn’t actually stop you from feeling bad, it just gets you more stuck in a state of feeling bad.

The book I’ve been reading recently is Untangling: How You Can Transform What’s Impossibly Stuck by Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell. It’s OK. I neither strongly recommend nor disrecommend it - it’s a pretty good book about parts work and an OK book about Focusing and a typical self-help annoying style. It does have some decent ideas though.

This sort of internal conflict between the part making the excuse and the part that knows full well that it’s an excuse and feels bad about not doing the thing is what they refer to as a “tangle”. They describe a way of working with tangles that involves identifying the parts and helping heal them.

You can certainly do that if you want to, but “I can’t read because I first need to resolve all my emotional conflicts that stop me from reading” is another excuse formed by reducing a specific problem to a much larger problem.

Here’s a general purpose spell for you:

Yes you can

Suppose you’ve got some thing that you think you can’t do. Set a pomodoro and try doing the thing for the duration of that pomodoro. Observe what happens and where it goes wrong.

If it doesn’t go wrong, great. Turns out you can do the thing.

More likely, it does go wrong. You don’t tend to believe you can’t do things without any evidence.

Now you ~~feel bad about the fact that you failed to do it and treat this as evidence that you were right about everything and the task is impossible~~ treat the thing that happened as a specific problem that it’s on you to solve or dissolve.

For example, suppose you try to read and you find yourself scrolling Twitter on your phone instead. Turn your phone off and put it in another room. That’s solving the problem.

Suppose, now, that you try to read and you find yourself just incredibly painfully bored. Pick a better book. That’s dissolving the problem.

When you’ve made it to the end of the pomodoro, take notes on how you achieved that. Codify it as a set of instructions for how to do the thing - i.e. a spell.

Once you’ve done that, ask yourself: Would I like to do this again? Not necessarily right now (although right now is an option if you’d like to). If not, what would help make it more appealing? Tinker with it until it seems more appealing.

Now, when in future you find yourself thinking you can’t do the thing, remind yourself that you’ve got a spell for that. If that sounds appealing, do it. If not, well, try “Yes you can” again…

One of the things you may find is that your single very specific problem actually wasn’t specific enough, and it’s actually several overlapping problems, and different spells will emerge this way. For example, here are two very different spells that will help you read more:

Negative Pomodoro

A traditional pomodoro is where you set a timer and focus on a single task that you are required to work on for the duration of that timer. A negative pomodoro is the opposite of that: You set a timer and have a list of things you’re not allowed to do for the duration of that timer. Everything else is fair game. If at any point you find yourself violating the rules, congratulate yourself for noticing and stop doing the thing until the timer runs out.

Here is the specific version of negative pomodoro that I use that results in my reading more:

I pick a room. This is typically my study, which has a writing desk and a bunch of bookshelves in it. I’ve read maybe 50% of books on the shelves. I make sure there are no devices in the room.

I set my 45 minute sand timer.

The rules for the duration of the timer are now:

I may not use devices - no checking the internet, etc.
I’m supposed to be in the designated room. I’m allowed to leave (e.g. for bathroom breaks), but if I do my goal is to return to this room in a timely manner.
I’m allowed to interact with other people in the house if they need me, but I shouldn’t deliberately seek it out or linger overlong on it.
6
It’s quite important that negative pomodoros don’t need to be uninterrupted time)

What usually happens is that I spend the time in a mix of reading, journalling, tidying, and resting with no particular goal.

Sometimes I’ll have a particular book in mind that I want to read during this period, but more often what I’ll do is I’ll browse through my library of books, read a chapter or two from a book, and then put it back on the shelf. Often this will be books that I’ve already read and want to remind myself of some details of.

Sometimes this will be sufficiently interesting that I’ll just end up spending the whole time reading a single book. That’s great but isn’t the success criterion. The only success criterion is that I obey the rules of the pomodoro.

One of the best things about this is by deliberately inducing a lightly understimulated state without the normal tools I’d reach for, many things that I would normally consider a bit aversive become actively appealing. It reframes journalling, reading, even meditating, as things I get to do, not things I have to do.

In contrast, here’s a spell for reading a specific book:

Relax and read

Find yourself a comfy place and way to lie down and read. For me, this is a giant beanbag with next to the radiator, with a chair to prop my feet up on, but depending on your particular needs other positions may be better. The key feature is that it should be super comfy and, ideally, slightly hard to get up from.

Again, leave devices in another room. Bring a book that you genuinely want to read with you.

Now, lie down and read.

If you find your attention wandering, close your eyes. Keep them closed for as long as you like. When you’re ready to read some more, open them again and read.

When you get to the end of a chapter, or some other natural breakpoint, ask yourself if you want to keep reading or stop now. Both answers are fine. If you want to stop then you’ve read enough for now.

When you feel inclined to stop reading at any other point, close your eyes and have a bit of a rest. Then have a think about whether you genuinely want to stop now or if you can make it to the next breakpoint. Again, both answers are fine.

When you get to the end, ask yourself if you actually enjoyed the book, and whether it’s something you want to keep reading. If the answer is no, probably you should pick another book next time.

These two spells don’t cover every possible way to improve your reading, but they both work pretty well, and cover a large class of the problems.

And yet, full disclosure, I go through long periods of time where I’m failing to read. When I’m actually motivated to read, these spells help me read more. When I’m not motivated to read, I’m also not motivated to perform these spells.

The real problem is not, I think, that reading is particularly hard for you. The above spells are good, but they will only help you read more if you actually do them, and I think typically if you were capable of doing them reliably you’d probably already be reading more.

If you’re currently genuinely trying and failing to read, this might not be true, but my guess is that most people with this sort of complaint aren’t actually even trying. This is because of the tangle again. You’re up against some sort of conflict, probably some sort of internal resistance to the idea that makes you keep avoiding reading.

This is, again, a thing you could solve by doing therapy to it, working with the felt sense of resistance, identify the part, give it your attention, etc. Perfectly reasonable things to do. I don’t recommend it as a problem solving strategy though. I think you just need normal boring behaviourism.

I like BJ Fogg’s book “Tiny Habits” about how to construct habits. Sometimes I even use it, which already puts it in the top 5% of books about habit formation.

His basic model is that a habit comprises of three things Prompt, Ability, and Motivation. Something prompts you to do the habit, you can do the habit, you want to do the habit: Bam, you’ve got a habit.

If you’re doing spell design well, you should already be on top of Ability and Motivation, so the real thing you need to fix is the Prompt.

I tried writing a spell for getting a good Prompt for a spell, but I realised that I perhaps don’t understand the constraints well enough to do a good job of that right now, so it kept coming up half-arsed. But for me, the prompts I’m currently working with for these spells are:

In the morning, while I drink my morning coffee and before I start work, I schedule a negative pomodoro.
When I don’t have a lot of energy and catch myself doing vaguely drifty internet activities, I step away from the computer and do some Relax and Read.

I’ve also thought about explicitly scheduling Relax and Read as an end of work activity to properly transition out of work mindset, but I’ve not actually tried that yet.

I don’t yet confidently know that these prompts are enough. They seem to be working OK for me so far, but no guarantees they’ll survive a depressive episode.

This is mostly a post about books, but really it’s a post about not making excuses.

I don’t like making excuses, but they’re really easy to generate and hard to notice.

No, sorry, that’s an excuse.

Excuses are generally really obvious, so they’re actually easy to notice. The problem is that they’re only easy to notice if you’re trying, and the fact that you’re making excuses to yourself is a pretty strong sign that you don’t want to notice the excuse, because the excuse is a way of not feeling bad about yourself.

It does this partly by making the problem not your fault because you get to blame it on someone else, but I don’t think that part really works. You know that part is a lie, and it doesn’t stop you feeling bad.

But what it does do is stop you investigating further.

Maybe the reason you’re not reading is that you just aren’t that interested in reading any more. Maybe this self image you’ve built up of yourself as an intellectual, someone who is very invested in knowledge and thus very invested in reading, just isn’t true. Maybe, actually, your highest desire for the rest of your life is that you waste it all on tiktok and video games.

Personally, I don’t think that’s true. I think if, at some level, you want to read, or build, or exercise, then probably your best life does involve those in some way.

But sometimes it won’t. Sometimes you’ll discover that actually you hate the thing and you’ve always hated the thing and you only did it to impress people or because you were bored and this entire foundational feature of your identity crumbles under you and you’ll have to find something new to replace it that better suits you.

And as long as you’re not reading and have some excuse that stops you reading, you’ll probably never find this out. You only find out whether you really want something through repeated contact with the reality of it. If you can avoid that contact, you can avoid that reality.

Being wrong about yourself in this way is survivable, mostly. The version of yourself you thought you were turns out to have been dead all along, but you yourself will survive and move on, changed.

But that possibility sure seems scary, doesn’t it?

This means that the real thing that you need to stop making excuses and to change the behaviours that you’re making excuses for is courage. Courage to try things and see if they work, and courage to find out who exactly you are.

It will be hard, but I believe in you.

Thanks for being a paid subscriber!

Recently I’ve been experimenting a lot with using Claude for various things, including getting it to read books for me (that I’ve already read) to produce interesting transformations of them, including new spells. I’ve also been getting it to generate spells for me more broadly.

Here’s one that it produced recently that I quite liked (lightly edited for quality, and to give it a better name).

Touch Glass

This is a simple spell for breaking out of a stuck state.

(If necessary) take off your headphones
Identify the closest window
Walk over to it
Touch the glass
Say out loud three things you see outside, along with a brief description of them.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath

You may now continue on with your day.

Using what you're given

2024-09-25

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/using-what-youre-given.

Recently my parents sent out a WhatsApp message to our family group with the following picture:

These all needed to be turned into juice.

I volunteered some help, and the next day, H (my daughter) and I went up to help. I manned the knives, and H helped turn the cranks on their manual apple grinding and pressing tools. This was, all told, a reasonably pleasant way to spend the day. Also it produced apple juice, which is OK if you like that sort of thing.

Shared physical tasks like this are quite a pleasant way to spend time in company. I’ve talked about this before, with the example of podding peas. You’ve all got a task, and you can talk or not as you wish, and this enables a very pleasant pace of conversation in a way that you often don’t get when your primary purpose is conversation.

Some idiot on Twitter has been using this sort of thing to argue that we should abandon washing machines, which are apparently exploitative, and go back to handwashing our clothes communally because it would create this sort of shared environment. This is obviously a bad idea. Washing machines are great, and only a complete tool would think otherwise.

But gardens aren’t a bad source of such tasks. I certainly wouldn’t want to rely on one for my food (supermarkets are also great), and a younger me would be shocked to hear me say this, but I am starting to get the appeal.

But that’s not what this piece is about really. It’s about abundance.

This specific experience that mum and dad were dealing with of “help! We’ve got too many apples!” is something I call “forced abundance” - when you’ve got a huge amount of a good thing forced upon you whether you like it or not.

It’s very much not just apples, this is what gardens do. When I asked to use the apple picture, dad sent me this:

For me though the thing I always associate it with is berry season. If you’re used to fresh berries coming from the supermarket, you’re probably used to consuming them in fairly restrained quantities. They’re not necessarily exorbitantly expensive, but they’re expensive enough that you notice the price.

But in berry season with my parents’ garden, dessert every day is a giant bowl of berries that would probably set you back £50 or more at the supermarket. By the end of it it’s almost, but not quite, enough for you to be sick of berries.

I think if you price in labour and such it’s not obviously economically a huge saving to have a berry garden. Picking is time consuming but not especially onerous, but there’s a lot of labour that goes into maintenance before that. I’m not here to sell you on the value of berry gardening. What I’m pointing at is the unusualness of the experience: If your source of food is “on demand” like a supermarket, you’ll rarely experience a glut like this, because (within the limits of your ability to afford it) the amount you receive is entirely up to you.

Although many things like this still end up making sense. e.g. I made the decision to buy a car when I moved out of London. It’s actually not obvious that in the nearly two years since then that I’ve spent less on my car than I would have if I’d just used rental cars and taxis for every single trip. But this neglects the fact that there’s a huge convenience overhead to that. If I hadn’t had the car I wouldn’t have taken most of those trips, even if I could have.

Similarly, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you splurging £50 on fresh berries to have the experience, but I bet you don’t.

If you do want the berry experience though, the solution is to buy frozen berries. They’re better for cooking (I like to stew them), but you can also just eat them straight after they’ve thawed a little bit.

And, for the most part, this is probably good. It’s certainly convenient. “Oh no I have too many berries” is certainly a nice problem to have, but it’s undeniably an inconvenient one. Too many apples even more so - apples take up a lot of space. Most of the time, people are busy and don’t want to deal with this, and that’s legit.

But there is, I think, something missing as a result. Having the world throw things at you and force you to catch them is the source of a lot of creativity and, if the things are positive ones, enjoyment. It’s a gift from the world, and it’s on you to recieve it.

This feels like an important part of the human experience that, by its nature, is hard to deliberately seek out - you can only create the conditions for it to happen on its own, and be open to it when it arrives.

One upshot of forced abundance is also that it leads you to discover things that you would otherwise never have thought of, because it presents you with practical problems to solve that lead you to discover new, and general, things. For example, there’s a great recipe I invented back in 2020, largely as a result of forced abundance coming, oddly, from a mix of the pandemic and Brexit:

The apple cashew thing

Ingredients

As many apples as you want to use up

A roughly equal weight of raw cashews

About 1/3rd of that weight in raisins (or other dried mixed fruit)

Oil

Salt, allspice, honey, all to taste.

Steps

Coat the cashews in just enough oil to lubricate them (don’t use too much! They’ll get super oily if you do), add salt to taste, mix thoroughly, and bake at 180C for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop the apples as finely as you can be bothered. Toss them with some allspice.

Take the cashews out of the oven, add the raisins and apple to them, mix thoroughly with a suitable amount of honey.

Raise the oven to 210C and bake for another half hour or so, stirring occasionally, until the apple is thoroughly cooked.

This recipe resulted from an excess of apples from fruit and veg boxes, and a bunch of cashews and raisins that were past their best before date because I’d bought them in bulk as part of stockpiling for Brexit. It’s also very good, and I’d probably never have figured it out otherwise. Certainly it doesn’t seem to be a thing that anyone other than me and a few people who have tried the recipe after I told them about it make. It’s something invented purely out of a circumstance of forced abundance in which I had to figure out how to use a bunch of ingredients I didn’t normally use that much of.

I think it also highlights some of the ways in which forced abundance is kinda fake.

[]{.mention-wrap attrs=“{”name”:“Matt Bateman”,“id”:12328751,“type”:“user”,“url”:null,“photo_url”:“https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/fc3d1ddf-0ebf-4520-9e55-08cc85304c76_381x383.jpeg”,“uuid”:“3c214e37-ef6f-48c2-9d7b-fd4c1a943ea4”}” component-name=“MentionToDOM”} has a great frame he uses called the demotivational interview:

My favorite form of practical reasoning “advice” is what I call Demotivational Interviewing. It looks like:

person 1: Ugh I have to go to the dentist

person 2: Good news, you don’t have to, you can let your teeth rot

[…]

This sounds sardonic how I put it but it isn’t really. Basically: state the reasonable worst case consequence of not doing what you are avoiding or dreading, in a matter of fact enough way that you can actually consider choosing that consequence. Then choose one way or the other.

Good news! You don’t have to use up all these apples, you can just let them rot.

Really, nothing actually forced me to use up these ingredients. Sure, I was making this in the height of the pandemic, but it’s not like we were actually short on food at that point. There was a brief window of panic and I think we were mostly out of it by the time I invented this. I wasn’t trying to figure out basic sustenance, I just had some ingredients that I thought it would be a shame to let go to waste.

I think this is something where gardening for yourself really amps up the emotional investment. Yes, you can let those apples rot, or those berries, or those tomatoes… but you sunk all that work into it. It’s personal in a way that money isn’t. Of course, that money would be very personal if you didn’t have enough of it, but even in the middle of my PhD like I was then my food budget wasn’t particularly tight. I certainly could have afforded to throw these away, but I didn’t want to. It would have seemed like a shame.

If I were more resource constrained, it wouldn’t have been an emotional thing, it would have been a straightforward necessity. So forced abundance, naturally, is relative to your actual level of scarcity.

But even when things aren’t actually scarce and you can absolutely afford the worst case scenario of letting something go to waste, you can choose not to, to treat things as if they matter more than they do.

I had another experience like this recently which was, in comparison, with oranges.

Here’s another recipe I make:

Stewed rhubarb with orange and ginger

Ingredients

6 sticks of rhubarb

3 oranges

1 tbsp frozen chopped ginger
11
Look obviously I’m lying here and don’t really measure the ginger out. What do you take me for? But it’s about 1 tbsp.

1 cup sugar

1 cup water

Preparation

Chop up the rhubarb into small pieces.

Peel the oranges and chop them up coarsely.

Put everything in a big pot on a low heat and let simmer for an hour, stirring occasionally, until everything has mostly broken up.

Decant and let cool (I think this is much nicer cold from the fridge than warm, although it’s not bad warm either).

Unlike the apple cashew thing this is a very normal recipe. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

This isn’t a forced abundance recipe per se, although it is a little bit in that I like rhubarb and it’s very seasonal, so when it arrives in the shops for the first time I buy a lot of rhubarb, bring it home, and then go “oh shit, what do I do with all this rhubarb?” and stewing it is the easy default. I’ve gradually tinkered my stewed rhubarb recipe over time to arrive at this one and it’s now something I deliberately set out to make, but the starting point was definitely a very high rhubarb to ideas ratio.

Seasonality is a bit like a mini version of forced abundance - it’s not that you have an unreasonably large amount of food to eat, but you do have an unreasonably short amount of time to do it in.

But the relevant recent experience is that I got to the end of making it, looked at the orange peels, and thought to myself: You know, candied orange peel is delicious, and it would be a shame to let those go to waste…

Anyway, that’s how I ended up making candied orange peel. It turned out OK. The recipe I used clearly didn’t have enough sugar, so after boiling it in sugar water for an hour I topped it up and put it on for another boil, and the result was still decent but not great. But then I got to the end of it, and thought “Hmm but now I have an awful lot of orange flavoured sugar water. It would be a shame to let that go to waste…”

Of course, what I actually then did with it was forget to turn off the stove and leave it boiling away while Lisa and I both went and watched an episode of Decameron. I came back to find it had boiled down significantly. “Oh well”, I thought, “I’ll deal with that in the morning” and I covered it and left it.

…and came back in the morning to discover that what I’d left overnight was less “syrup” and more “melted sugar”, so I had functionally glued a boiled sweet to my pan.

Which is, long story short, how I ended up spending the morning making orange candies. This involved a lot of trial and error of figuring out how to hand shape them, with the candies getting progressively less like boiled sweets and more like fudge as the sugar repeatedly got cooled and then reheated. I then covered them in ascorbic acid (vitamin C) to keep them separate and add a bit more of a zing. The result… well I like them. H likes them too, but she’s at an age where she’d probably like anything with that much sugar in. Dave and Lisa… do not. Even I’ll admit they’re not exactly a winner of a recipe. I had fun making them though. It was an interesting experience that I’d not had before, and a good exercise of creativity. But also next time I think I’ll use the leftover sugar syrup to make a cake or something.

But this is a good example of what I mean by forced abundance being a bit fake. Of course I didn’t need to use up those orange peels. I could have just thrown them away. I have done so dozens of times before. But this time I decided they were important.

A phrase that keeps bouncing around in my head is “life is made of found things”. I associate this idea with the book “Trickster Makes This World” by Lewis Hyde (although the phrase itself is, I think, mine), which talks a lot about how creativity is often a sort of responsiveness to the world, building things out of what we find in it.

Traditionally, every time I try to write about this book, I fail to say what I’m trying to say and abandon the post, so I won’t dwell on that now, but it’s a good book. I recommend it. All I mean to say by bringing it up is that an important source of creativity is taking what you find in the world and asking “What can I do with this?”, without necessarily attaching it to any sort of predefined goal.

Bernard Suits in his book “The Grasshopper” talks about the philosophy of games, and about their relationship to utopia. He thinks that in a utopia we’ll do nothing but play games. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is idiotic or tautological, but currently I think maybe it’s just missing something crucial.

Game-playing in Suits’ sense involves taking on some goal voluntarily, but I think it matters why you take it on. In a game, you take it on solely for the benefit of getting to play the game, and I don’t think that’s enough. It’s hard to thrive without the sense that, at least some of the time, what you’re doing is important.

I think it doesn’t have to be important in some grand global sense though. I think you can just decide that it matters, and it can be as simple as saying: This turned up here. It’s a gift. It would be a shame not to make use of it.

Thanks for being a paid subscriber! Here are some footnotes for you. I don’t really have much else to say beyond that today, this piece feels pretty complete to me as is.

Losing yourself in an audiobook

2024-08-29

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/losing-yourself-in-an-audiobook.

I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks recently, so on the principle that anything worth doing is worth paying attention to, I thought I’d write a bit about what that’s like.

Partly, this is interesting because I’ve previously failed to get into audiobooks at all, but in the last couple of months they’ve become a big part of my life. This isn’t entirely a positive, although I think where it’s negative it’s more a symptom than a cause of of problems.

This post is mostly paid, but before we get into the more personal sections, here’s a spell for you:

Bedtime Story

When trying to fall asleep, if you’re struggling to calm down, or have a thought loop going on, put on an audiobook to listen to and listen to it for as long as you want.

A good choice of audiobook for this is:

Fiction. Probably some choices of nonfiction work well for this too, but I’ve not explored this much yet.

A familiar story - Ideally one I’ve actually read before, but if not a familiar and unchallenging genre.

Familiar narrator.
1
Ideally a male narrator. It’s not a hard requirement, but deeper voices seem to be better.

Not that good. Royal Road /Kindle Unlimited level quality is often ideal. This matters less when you’re rereading than when you’re reading something for the first time.

“Basic” narration. Radio plays, books with sound effects, etc. are very bad for this. e.g. I was listening to the Peter Whimsey radio plays

Put the audiobook on on a timer for half an hour, and then lie in bed with your eyes closed and maybe a sleep mask on. If you don’t fall asleep before the timer finishes, just extend it.
2
This won’t work reliably if you, like me, are using Audible by the way, because the Audible timer is the most ungodly buggy piece of software I’ve ever used. I genuinely don’t understand the level of incompetence it exhibits. It’s a timer! This is not a hard software engineering problem.

If you wake up in the middle of the night, just put the audiobook back on.

Because I side sleep, especially while trying to fall asleep, I’ll typically use a single earbud from my airpods while doing this, and swap it between ears if I shift about, but use whatever sleep setup works for you for this. If you’re sleeping alone you can even use it on speaker mode.

This has significantly improved my sleep reliability. It’s much better for falling asleep to than reading a book, because you’re able to drift off while it’s still going on, while with actual reading you need to maintain focus.

I’m possibly slightly too dependent on it, which is one of the downsides, I’m going to talk about in the paid sections, but that’s still a lot better than struggling to sleep, and even on nights where I can’t sleep I’m a lot less frustrated because I’ve got a good (or, at least, enjoyable) book to listen to while I fail to sleep.

The biggest thing that stopped me from getting into audiobooks is that I read much much faster than speaking speed, and I don’t like having to pay full attention to audio as a result. It feels frustrating compared to actual reading. I’ll zone out, lose my place, etc. Getting into audiobooks required learning to be fine with this.

The easiest way for me to do that was to listen to material I’ve already read, because that way even if I zone out and skip a whole chapter because I’m focusing on other things, I’ll still more or less know what happened in that chapter, so it’s fine.

Eventually, with experience, it gets to the point where it’s fine just because… well, it is. In much the same way that you can pick up a book that’s later in a series without really remembering what happened in the previous books, you can pick up a book midway through without really remembering what’s happened previously. Worst case scenario, you can just page back a couple of chapters. As long as you’re comfortable with rereading, you can be comfortable with forgetting or missing bits.

Particularly if I’m using an audiobook to fall asleep to, I’ll often listen to the same chapter multiple times, because whatever chapter I’m on when I wake up is probably at least two or three chapters ahead of where I remember being when I fall asleep.

It’s not, it turns out, like I’m a particularly detailed reader even when I’m reading fiction normally. e.g. I often skip detailed descriptions of what’s going on and mostly read the narrative. As a result, when listening to audiobooks I often actually get more detail even when I’m zoning in and out. Certainly different detail.

The result is that this need for attending to the audiobook and its associated frustrations are largely just solved by giving yourself permission to not pay that close attention.

This is also, I think, why they’re so good to fall asleep to: They can absorb all of your attention, or none of your attention, and any amount in between. When you need to bring your attention off something, they’re there, and when your attention naturally drifts off them into sleep, that’s fine.

One thing that often happens to me is that I bounce off stories. It’s not that I think they’re bad particularly, but they just fail to grab me, and at some point I get distracted from them and go read something else.

This seems to happen much less with audiobooks, and I think it’s because they change the default action. With reading, by default you stop reading. With an audiobook, by default you continue listening.

This also combines well with the different relationship to attention. A worse audiobook just ends up consuming less of my attention rather than causing me to stop reading it. This is both good and bad of course, but it does give me the ability to enjoy things I might otherwise not.

It also seems to be a good mechanism for picking up some of a hard subject by osmosis. e.g. the Very Short Introduction series seems to be really quite good for audiobooks, and I “read” “Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction” on audiobook as part of trying to decide whether I should to make an attempt to read Heidegger.

At the same time, there are a number of ways that an audiobook can annoy you in a way that a conventional book will not. The easiest one is the narrator. If they’ve got an annoying voice, the audiobook is an absolute non-starter.

But you also notice more subtle things, like where they place emphasis on words, particular regional pronunciation, and so on. Sometimes this is interesting. For example, I have apparently gone through life into my 40s without realising that Americans pronounce “shone” incorrectly.

But it also makes the language style of the author much more apparent, in a way that can be very irritating, particularly given my tendency to listen to books that are not actually that good.

For example: I’ve recently been listening to the Divine Apostasy series by AF Kay. Can’t particularly recommend, but there’s a lot of it and I’ve previously read most of it before deciding not to continue, and that made it a good choice for sleep reading. Something I had not picked up on in my reading was the incredible density of the words “He said”, “She said” in the author’s writing style. It’s ubiquitous in most of the narrative, in a way that feels really unusual. When reading my eyes would just immediately skip over that and not notice.

I’m currently listening to “The Perfect Run” by Maxime J. Durand, and there’s something really weird about how he uses tenses. One way it shows up is the use of “having” as a connective in run-on sentences, and slightly odd use of tense. e.g. a line that just went by is “Thankfully, Ryan managed to dodge the initial volley, reaching his car.” The connective isn’t exactly wrong, but the construction feels a bit foreign, and appears constantly. I never noticed it while reading rather than listening.

And, at the same time, the fact that you’re listening to the sound of the language more slowly is a significant upside when the writing is really good. I’ve also listened to a lot of Terry Pratchett and Dorothy Sayers, and the quality of the writing genuinely stands out a lot more when it’s well read.

I’ve definitely got to the point where I enjoy the medium in its own right, and I think if I read a book I’ll likely also want to listen to it as an audiobook later, and I will get new and different things out of it by doing so.

I do worry that they might supplant the “reading a book” part though, and I would definitely lose out by only listening to audiobooks.

I think one of the big difficulties we face in modern society is that it’s very easy to substitute a good thing with an easier thing. That easier substitute may not even be strictly worse, but it certainly isn’t uniformly better.

Something I’ve noticed is that since starting listening to audiobooks, my reading has largely dried up. I don’t think that’s wholly causal - it’s not just that audiobooks are substituting for reading (though they are, especially my trashy fiction reading, which I don’t mind them substituting), but that I’ve been having a bad time and that’s both impairing my ability and willingness to read and also increasing my desire to listen to audiobooks.

But I do think that I’d possibly have solved this problem if I didn’t have the much more convenient audiobook format to fall back on.

Another problem I’ve been having with the new audiobook habit is that it makes it a lot easier to drift:

Drifting is like… evil flow. It absorbs the totality of your being in the same way, but you’re left feeling entirely unnourished by it. Flow is what happens when you’re able to absorb yourself entirely in the achievement of some end. Drifting is what happens when absorbing yourself entirely is the end, a way to dissociate from the world. Drifting is eating the lotus.

The thing that makes audiobooks a good sleep aid also makes it very easy to enter into this evil flow, because they basically create a sump that any attention you don’t want to spend on reality to flow into. It’s very easy to listen to an audiobook “while doing other things” and then suddenly realise you don’t really know where the last couple of hours went.

There’s a concept of an “aesthetic slot” I really like from the book “Why it’s OK to love bad movies” (which I’m a huge fan of). The idea is that there are points in your life that you can put an aesthetic experience into, your aesthetic slots. You can e.g. go see a movie in the cinema at a point when you’re full of energy and enthusiasm about the movie, and that’s one type of aesthetic slot, but you’ve also got points in your life where e.g. you’re tired after a long day, or you’re washing the dishes or cooking dinner, etc. and you could still watch something then.

The point of the concept in the original context is that not all movies fit into all slots. You might want to watch some classy art house movie when you’ve got attention available for it and are prepared to make a big event of it, but when you’re washing the dishes and only paying half attention to it the latest MCU nonsense is probably a better fit for that slot.

As a devoted bad book reader I’ve found this concept very helpful for a while, and not just to justify my terrible taste. It’s genuinely helpful when e.g. I’m “struggling to read” to think about what would be the right book for me right now rather than just reading the book I feel like.

But something the current audiobook experiment is definitely making me notice is that actually maybe it’s not good to fill every aesthetic slot. Maybe rather than listening to an audiobook while I wash the dishes or go for a walk, I should use the time to think or just generally be alone with myself in whatever way I choose.

I think one of the problems is that having this sort of attention sump makes it very easy to smother anxiety, and that’s bad.

Something I notice right now when I take off my headphones and attempt to just be in the world without any sort of external stimulus right now is that my anxiety levels are way up. Not about anything specific, the underlying cause is probably something mostly physical, but a general heightened sentence of agitation.

It’s not much fun, and it naturally makes me reach for an audiobook as a sort of soothe for it. This can, of course, be a completely reasonable thing to do. It’s part of why they work well for going to sleep.

But at the same time… during the day it’s not actually that helpful. It’s not like listening to the audiobook actually addresses the underlying problem, it just gives me somewhere else to direct my attention so I don’t notice it.

It feels like it’s the psychological equivalent of snuggling up in a nice warm blanky. It’s not that you shouldn’t do this, but you can’t wander around in one all the time - it gets in the way of things you want to get done practically.

Because the thing that replacing anxiety with audiobooks does isn’t that it removes the impairment caused by the anxiety, it just leaves me impaired and makes it less unpleasant. Yes I can, in theory, work while listening to an audiobook. Sometimes I even do - it’s better than not doing any work at all - but it’s a hell of an impairment.

Another habit I’ve got into recently which isn’t always bad but is maybe diagnostic is cryptic Sudokus. I think some amount of this is good, and it’s e.g. better to wake up to playing a Sudoku than to scrolling Twitter.

And, sometimes, I do both at once, listening to an audiobook while playing Sudoku. And it’s interesting to notice that sometimes when doing this I have to turn the audiobook off (not just ignore it) in order to be able to think through some tricky problem. It’s particularly interesting because of how invisible this is to me until I really hit the limits of my cognition, but I think clearly that tax on thinking is being paid even when I’m not noticing it.

This is particularly interesting with Sudoku because although I do use verbal reasoning for it it’s not a particularly verbal activity. Obviously listening to an audiobook gets in the way of writing. Less obviously it gets in the way of coding, and certainly I can multitask coding and listening to an audiobook, but I’m clearly paying this sort of sudoku-equivalent intelligence tax when doing it.

As the line goes, everything in moderation, but this is a class of things that is very hard to get a good handle on. Audiobooks are clearly helping me solve problems, and it’s good that I’m solving those problems, but I think perhaps they’re helping me cover up problems that I should be solving.

I’m increasingly interested in discomfort tolerance as a general skill, and I think the problem with having access to a very easy way to increase your comfort levels makes it harder to practice discomfort tolerance. If I’m sitting there being anxious and I could do something hard and unpleasant like engaging with the anxiety (or even something only moderately unpleasant but higher effort like going for a walk, doing some breathing practice, etc) or I could immediately turn it off by putting on an audiobook and listen to someone make numbers go up, it requires a level of self-discipline that in the moment I’m not necessarily going to manage to exhibit.

This is particularly true because a lot of the time actually this is a completely reasonable thing to do. If I’m genuinely wiped out, or if I need to sleep, or there’s nothing really done to be done about the anxiety, it’s perfectly reasonable to do something to mask it, in much the same way that you can take a painkiller for a headache without addressing the underlying cause of the headache. It’s also perfectly reasonable to listen to an audiobook just because I want to enjoy listening to an audiobook.

But I do think it’s worth noticing when these habits end up becoming hiding places, and trying to find a happy medium where we can use them, we can enjoy them, but we don’t over rely on them in ways that end up making the problem worse.

Looking for new projects

2024-08-19

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/looking-for-new-projects.

Hello. This post isn’t really an essay, it’s an ad, but it’s an ad for me, so fairly on brand for this newsletter. I’m also going to use it to talk about a bunch of stuff I don’t normally talk about here, so hopefully it will be interesting even if you don’t care about the ad part.

Short version: As you probably know I’m actually a software developer. I’m currently looking for new technical projects. If you work in software in some way, and you have any projects you think you’d find me useful on, please get in touch at david@drmaciver.com, or book a free call with me to talk about it.

Brief background: I’m an experienced software developer and consultant. I most recently worked at Anthropic, on a mix of model evaluations and data sources. Before that, I did a variety of consulting, and did independent R&D developing cutting edge open source software testing tools, including Hypothesis (which, if you’re using Python, even if you don’t use it directly, many libraries you depend on probably do). Before that I worked at Google, and before that a variety of startups.

I am looking for short to medium term (say, a few days to three months) software contracting and consulting projects. I’m also open to offers of employment if I think there’s a great fit, but it’s not primarily what I’m looking for, as I have a slow-burn project of my own working on synthetic training data for LLMs that I want to keep working on, and am looking to extend my runway.

Think of me as a Solver for hire. If you’ve got a specific hard problem that you need help with, you can bring me in and let me bulldoze through it.

It’s fine if this problem isn’t well defined yet - I’m also happy to help with initial problem definition.

Here are what I think of as some good model projects:

Broad mandate troubleshooter - coming onto a software project with a general mandate of “make this project better”. This would require cooperation from the people already on the project, and would involve a mix of development work, process suggestions, and pairing with people to help them out.
“Pair programmer for hire” if you want someone to provide a consult on some technical work you’re doing. For example, I’ve previously helped a client debug a Python C extension they were trying to write that kept crashing.
4
This wasn’t actually very lucrative for me as I solved their problem in half an hour, but I’m interested in more extended engagements of this form.
Either of the above with a specific focus on improving your software testing, or with using Hypothesis or other property-based testing libraries better.
Bringing me on in the early days of a project and helping do problem definition, set technical directions, and generally help figure out what is needed for it to succeed.
Well-defined technical problems where you need a high quality solution to something you don’t know how to solve. For example, a previous project I’ve worked on that turned out very well involved taking two data sources and trying to find a best fit alignment of them that replaced the overwhelming majority of a labour intensive manual process of fitting the two together.
Bounded R&D, possibly leading to a project of the above form or possibly leading to a report on what I’ve discovered and making suggestions for what to do next. Good examples of this would be investigating how LLMs could be useful in the context of an existing problem or product, or using off-the-shelf solver technologies to solve complex planning problems that occur in your software.
If you have software that handles some complex format that you find yourself regularly needing or wanting to include minimal reproducing examples in order to report or understand bugs in it, I’m very open to helping you integrate shrinkray into your work flow and doing paid development work to improve it for your use case.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, just a set of ideas for the sorts of things I can help with.

I think the things that distinguish me most from other highly competent staff-level software engineers are:

I am one of the world experts on property-based testing, and the world expert in test-case reduction. I wrote Hypothesis, and shrink ray, both of which are the leading tools of their kind. If you don’t know what these are, I’ll explain in a moment, but the relevant facts are that I build very good tooling for developers that is both extremely usable and improves the state of the art’s capabilities. These areas also correspond to quite broadly useful skills, and in general I am very good at turning ideas that have been developed in research prototypes and turning them into practical usable tools.
5
I think it’s fair to say that I’m the world expert on this - my opinion is that it’s either me or John Regehr, and John’s opinion is that between the two of us it’s probably me. I do think that if you want a test-case reducer, mine’s the best, but part of that is that I built on John’s work.
I’ve worked at Anthropic, and have a good sense of LLMs from that. I’m very far from a machine learning expert, but I know a fair bit about the practical engineering side of interacting with LLMs, and if you need help on that (or, more specifically, synthetic training data or LLM evaluations), I’m extremely qualified to help.
I am the sort of person who writes this newsletter, with all the strengths and attitudes that implies. I care a lot about problem solving, helping people improve, communication, and how we can produce high quality work. I’ve consulted and coached on issues related to process, helping developers acquire soft skills, software quality, etc and even where I’m not directly consulting on these issues it still heavily informs everything about how I work.

The main things I would like to avoid are:

Very small amounts of work. e.g. I’ve previously offered once a week coaching sessions, and I no longer do because it turns out to be too disruptive to my schedule and my ability to work on other things. I’m happy to do as little as a day at a time of work, but my ideal project length is anywhere between a week to a few months.
Work that is primarily process-focused rather than technical. I’m very happy to do some of this as part of a larger project, but if I’m involved in a software project in some way I want my primary focus to be writing software.
Projects that I consider unethical. I don’t have an exhaustive list of these, but for example I am not interested in working on gambling, military, or surveillance applications.
6
There’s a complex second-order question here where because I develop open source tools, people in these industries absolutely do use my work. I consider this mostly OK. If you work in one of these industries and want to fund something open source and generally useful and don’t require me to publicly state that you funded the work, I’m willing to consider it.

In general if you’re not sure if any of these apply to your project, by all means err on the side of asking, the worst that will happen is that I’ll politely decline.

Property-based testing is a type of testing that uses generated data to test your software, so it covers a much broader range of scenarios than traditional example based tests. The property-based testing library I wrote, Hypothesis, is probably the most advanced property-based testing library in the world, largely because of my focus on user experience and my developing an entirely new core approach in order to fix many of the things people previously found annoying or difficult about property-based testing.

My work on Hypothesis also gave me very strong opinions on how to design good libraries for usability, with clear error messages and APIs that are easy to use and hard to get wrong. If you have some tool or library that is hard to use well and you want to improve that, I’m very able to help with this.

Property-based testing style approaches have also proven promising for evaluating LLMs. I’ve done some preliminary open source work on this, although I’m not currently actively working on that angle.

This background also means I have a lot of general purpose knowledge on how to generate diverse, high quality, data for any application, not just software testing. e.g. I’ve got an ongoing project to generate high quality synthetic data for training LLMs. This is currently a bit work in progress and would be easier to do with someone to partner with, but is my current plan for medium-term profitability.

If you’re interested in using synthetic data for evaluating or training LLMs specifically, please get in touch, but also if you’ve got some other use case for data generation I’d be interested in talking about it.

The other half of my technical specialisation is test-case reduction, which is about automatically taking test cases (documents, structured objects, etc) which trigger a bug (or exhibit some other interesting property) and automatically transforming them into minimal reproducible example of that bug. I learned a lot about this in the course of Hypothesis, and took the lessons from that and developed shrinkray, which is probably the most powerful general purpose test-case reducer around - it has the best approach to parallelism, and supports a much wider variety of formats out of the box than the alternatives.

If you need anything related to test-case reduction, I’d definitely be delighted to talk to you, but I think another way of looking at this is that I’m good at black-box optimisation problems with a heavy heuristic component and where it’s more important to get something good-enough fast. Test-case reduction just happens to be a particular example of this that I’ve spent a lot of time on, but if you’ve got a problem of roughly that shape that isn’t test-case reduction, I’m keen to broaden my horizons.

On top of this I also just have a relatively large eclectic toolkit of computer science interests and technical knowledge, so if you’ve got some hard to crack problem there’s a decent chance I know an interesting tool that might help to solve it.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please drop me an email at david@drmaciver.com or book a free call with me to have a no-strings-attached chat about it. You don’t need to have a really concrete idea of a project or way to bring me on. If you’re at all interested, even if it’s for something very different than the sort of things I’ve outlined here, I’m happy to chat to you speculatively and see if we can figure out a way to work together.