An entry from 6/15/23, titled “The Time of the Wounded Knee” (my knee was, at the time, wounded)
I’m never actually near as effective as I could be and as I should be.
Hmmm... What does “effective” mean?
I can’t focus for more than 15 seconds.
Ah.
My brain abhors the emptiness and the discomfort of nothing to distract it. The sensors are completely blown out. I can’t handle the discomfort of not knowing what to write, of feeling like I don’t know where the end is.
Sometimes, when I discover the end, I delay going there because I want to bask in the glorious feeling of being close, the anticipation of achieving it, the end. As soon as I’m done, the feeling will be gone, and there will be another thing I should be doing.
Well! Good thing I’ve grown out of all that! 😉
Date unknown, sometime in 2019, untitled
Dreamt about K. Wonder what that means.
Sometimes, I write in a coded shorthand, lest these records ever fall into the wrong hands. There’s enough kompromat out there without me recording raw thoughts in the raw, in small books that could easily walk off.
Sometimes, I forget the code. I have no idea who K is, but K, if you’re reading this, know that you walked through a dream of mine as recently as 2019.
10/23/22, untitled
“Training status unproductive!” my watch alerts me. Plus VO2 Max decreasing, acute load too low, and value as a human being decreasing.
We are at Iconik Coffee Roasters in Santa Fe. The rule for making the cafe’s playlist was obviously “Breathy female power ballads only.” We woke up at 7:00am, my idea of a vacation. It’s supposed to rain.
A few tables over, an attractive woman swipes to and fro on her iPad and makes no effort to hide her world-weariness. Or if she is making an effort, it isn’t enough.
I feel nice, and it’s not the coffee because I didn’t have any because today is an Abstinence Day / Tolerance Break Day. Coffee is the usual suspect for why I feel nice. How deep I am: my self-reflection begins and ends at the last plausible stimulant. I am again surprised at the mutability of my baseline emotional state.
These years later, I’m a bit disappointed at how legible the entries remain. I used to re-read old writing or re-examine past beliefs and be embarrassed for my former self, which I now believe is a feeling to be celebrated. As I’ve recited to myself and others, if one can stand in judgement of their past self, then one has grown and progressed, or if those words have too positive a connotation, at least changed.
These entries and the “watching myself watch” pattern, they feel familiar, and that feels uncomfortable.
"In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself."
What the humans like is feedback
…in a broad sense of the word: response, indication, signifier, assurance.
The most interesting thing in the world is feedback on an action we have just taken. Every app developer, conversationalist, and teacher worth their salt understands this. There are deep biological roots beneath our drive to understand the correctness of our actions, all the way down to the lizard, but let’s stop at the mammal: the social animal must be taught how to collaborate and how to compete. You cannot play if you cannot give and take feedback. Action without feedback leads to big mistakes (and burnout); feedback without (corrective) action leads to ostracism or sequestration.
The hardest things to do (for me, let me back away from speaking for all of humanity) are the things that don’t offer feedback. Such as writing this right now. I don’t mean what I lack is feedback from you, dear reader (although that is nice and you’re lovely to give it), I mean moment-by-moment, I am not nudged along by any response, save for white letters appearing and disappearing on a black screen. Some part of me judges it, but that part of me is untrustworthy and also mean. Dealing with this untrustworthy and mean self is intense and tiring and emotional, and it’s why I will do almost anything to avoid actually writing.
On the other side of the spectrum, competition and conversation are activities that reliably pull me into, and keep me in, the present moment. Both activities are hyper-social and feedback-rich.
Okay, but what does this have to do with AI?
If you are going to build a product that humans will use, it will be easier if you swim with the current of human nature than against it. What exactly is human nature is a question that has been debated for centuries and beyond the scope of this humble volume of The Cortado, but I posit that the following is not controversial:
Social mammals, particularly young ones, learn how to behave by taking action and then getting feedback on that action, mostly from peers, some from superiors. Juveniles play, adolescents joust. Humans, the most social of mammals, want to be accepted, because acceptance has been a necessary condition for (evolutionary) fitness in most human societies. To understand if they are accepted, they look for feedback.
Consumer AI companies are swimming with the current. Like algorithmic social media before it, AI both gives and accepts instant feedback. How that feedback differs from the human-grade version is less important than how it differs in rapidity and context. To give feedback and see it immediately acted upon, to receive any kind of feedback, anytime, from a sensible and non-judgemental confidante, these are high-value social interactions. In other words, it feels good to be listened to, and it feels good to be told you are doing a good job, and these drives are insatiable. AI, like social media before it, is a teacher (and that’s one reason why we’re worried the kids won’t be alright.)
Consumer artificial intelligence is an indifferent accelerant. Whether you are heading off the cliff or toward the finish line, AI will help. The humans like feeling amplified, the humans like a response, and late 2025 consumer AI responds, immediately, anytime, every time.
Things of the Month
Book of the Month
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
This book is not about tennis. It’s mentioned, right there in the title and a few other places, but the book is really about doing less and learning to trust yourself. Tennis is the spoonful of sugar that helps the self-help medicine go down.
TIGOT describes two selves: Self 1, the calculating, thinking, judgemental self, and Self 2, the intuitive, child-like self that, at some deep level, knows how to hit a forehand or at least, knows how to learn how to hit a forehand. The forehand can be a metaphor for most things you might care to get better at — remember, not about tennis!
As an aside, I am struck by how many different intellectual traditions deal with multiple selves. When ideas evolve independently but arrive at similar conclusions, I try to pay extra attention 🙂
The first inner skill to be developed in the Inner Game is that of nonjudgmental awareness. When we “unlearn” judgment, we discover, usually with some surprise, that we don’t need the motivation of a reformer to change our “bad” habits. We may simply need to be more aware.
Imagining of the Month
brought to you by Midjourney, lightly edited
Song(s) of the Month
Whenever I hear this song, I am reminded of what Schopenhauer wrote about music:
“The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”
Chills.
By the way, my Spotify Listening Age, a 2025 innovation that rates your musical taste, is 21. As in 21 years old.
Maybe you’ve noticed it’s December, so named because it was the 10th month of the Roman calendar (decimate, decagon, decathlon are other ten-root words), so it seems a good omen that Vol. X falls in December. I suppose we’ll see in the new year what that omen portends.
Until next year,
Ethan
