Hello there, friend!

This week is again essay-free and I can’t promise that will change for the next 4 weeks (though I’ll try), but I did put more work into the dig-ups at least.

I’m still struggling with figuring out how to synergize this less-constrained conversational writing with writing for my thesis, but maybe I’m starting to get an idea. If it works, the essays would get easier.

Wish me luck!

Last week’s dig-ups

Personal metawork

• It's extremely helpful to be able to easily create flashcards from any note that's in your system. In Logseq, you just add "#card" and voila. However, the number of cards can start growing fast, which can lead to you dropping your spaced repetition habit, as it did to me. It's thus super helpful to be able to add the cards into smaller collections and to learn how to do that, I revisited this great guide on Logseq flashcards In Logseq, this happens by simply tagging the card with some link (can also be inherited from a parent block). Then, we just need to use the command "" to get a collection of only the cards tagged with that link.

• I use Logseq for writing the newsletter, but when I paste the markdown text into my newsletter tool (Beehiiv) it's pasted with all the markdown signs I don't want. I used to remove it manually, but ChatGPT is able to rewrite text with any formatting you want. The prompt I used is:

  • I want you to rewrite the text below without markdown commands and signs, except those for hyperlinks (i.e. when there are single square brackets followed by a link in regular brackets) and turning markdown cursive and bold into a pasteable format

Collective metawork

• Dave Snowden, author of the Cynefin framework and the OG of sense-making explains the Assess-Adapt-Exapt-Transcend framework for managing in complexity and chaos (

  • In the assess stage, we need to determine if we're really in a crisis. If we are, we impose draconian measures to preserve our options and switch into a more manageable position

  • In the adapt stage, we centralize coordination and distribute decision making. For each of our hypotheses about how to react, we run safe-to-fail experiments.

  • If we're not able to get enough coherent hypotheses, we need to do 3 things in the exapt stage:

    • build dense informal networks for decision-making

    • map what we now at the right level of granularity

    • build wide sensor networks for situational assessment

  • Only then can we move into transcend – it's key to understand that transformation is only ever an emergent property of other things we do

Entrepreneurship

• Steven Pressfield and Rich Roll: follow your real calling in spite of all doubts, keep busting your ass pursuing it, and you'll be granted what you need. 

  • Pressfield is great at weaving in airy-fairiness with practical advice, and as I'm looking ahead, thinking whether to focus my entrepreneurial ambitions on something I'm already good at (Notion and personal metawork) or something I find meaningful and inspiring, but the impostor syndrome looms large (organization coaching for self-management and wisdom), this really landed for me

• Alex Hormozi: find more ways to measure your progress to keep yourself going

Philosophy & Sense-making

• I've finally managed to dive a bit into Zombies in Western culture: a twenty-first century crisis, co-authored by John Vervaeke. The authors claim that Zombie Apocalypse is the myth of our time, and use the symbolism of both Zombies and the Four Horsemen to explain the meaning crisis.

  • First of all, zombies and the apocalypse are in a participatory agent-arena relationship, they co-create each other: it's simultaneously because we became like zombies that the world became apocalyptic, and because the world became apocalyptic that we turned into zombies.

  • Zombies are a symbolic perversion of the myth of resurrection, reflecting primarily a collapse of our religious Worldview (also symbolized by Death). But a Worldview is simultaneously a model of the world and a model for acting in the world, it's what makes us feel "at home" in the world, so without it, we're homeless (like zombies) and lost. We haven't yet found a new Worldview, but our longing for it can be seen in the proliferation of both zombie and superhero stories (see below).

  • This domicide (death of home) leads to the loss of the sense of meaning on the individual level (Famine as starvation for meaning), loss of connection and belonging on the group level (Pestilence as loneliness) and the erosion of trust in public institutions on the societal level (War as division)

• Unlike Eliezer Yudkowski, Max Tegmark has a much more solution-oriented approach to stressing the dangers of AI development. Humanity really needs to step up, but it is possible to beat Moloch

  • Moloch is essentially the "god of unhealthy competition" as Liv Boeree says, the systemic force that drives people to do things that eventually lead to a worse situation for everyone (even themselves). A great conversation on Moloch between Liv Boeree and Daniel Schmachtenberger is here and the OG Moloch article by Scott Alexander here. The article contains the description of Moloch’s primary creations – Multipolar traps:

• Staying on the topic of Moloch, Jordan Hall and John Vervaeke started a series of talks on the future of governance (this first one is mostly a situational assessment, I hope to properly take notes later) and Jordan also wrote a thread on Moloch vs. Metatron

• Iain McGilchrist might say that Moloch vs. Metatron frame is the difference between how the left and right hemispheres view the world. Forced to give a one-sentence solution, he says We need to resacralize our values to re-learn how to hold the tension between opposites, rather than trying to resolve it.

  • I really like the metaphor of the string of a bow or a lyre, which only works WHILE it's pulled in opposite directions – as soon as the tension disappears, there's no music. A similar metaphor is that of our stereoscopic vision, where we need two different perspectives to perceive depth. Both of these point to something more dynamic than just synthesis – that would still be a resolution of tension. Instead, we need to keep the different perspectives in a constant dialogue.

Reflection

• I have a hypothesis that if I burn my brain writing for too long one day, I’m not able to recover during one night only and my focus on the following day suffers. I’ll keep watching this.

• I usually write the dig-ups on the day when I’m writing the newsletter, but maybe it would be easier to write each part immediately on the day when I came across it. But then again, it’s nice to batch things together and focus on just one main task each day.

And that’s it! Let me know what resonated and I’ll see you here next time (weird phrase for a newsletter, how would you end it?)

May Metatron be with you

Chris