Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

WINTER. VICTORIES.

It’s winter in Kiev. It’s 27F. It’s noticeably dark early again. I’ve hung up the leather jacket, switched to the wool coat and layers. The shops have heavily discounted what remains of fall, and those without winter stock are empty. They’ve skipped the ‘autumn’ coat season here and gone right to winter-wear. The music playlists have returned to normal – more synth and rock suitable for clubs, less pop suitable for cafes. Slavic men look GOOD in continental urban winter men’s wear – rather than our american faux-outdoorsman-look that hides our bulging american bellies. Winter wear is elegant here and varied. You can’t find mens’ shoes that aren’t insulated.

On my part, my body must have known, because I gained 3.5 kilos in the past two months, and it’s time to stop storing up fat for the winter already. 🙂 I also realized that I am subconsciously afraid of another winter here, because last winter, between the US government trying to kill me, the financial catastrophe it put me into, the hostile takeover of my previous company, the revolution putting my new business at risk, Putin’s invasion of these beautiful people, and being sick for 12 weeks in the late winter and spring, that there is a left over bit of trauma in there I haven’t been able to expunge.

Meanwhile I still managed to fight off the government, settle the take-over amicably, get the men out of the country, nearly complete the product, open the intellectual attack on libertine Rothbardians, drop the winter weight, write some pretty solid philosophy.

Liberty just requires truth telling. Never surrender. Give no quarter. Show no mercy. If necessary, kill them all and let god sort it out. 😉

Cheers.

(Dog in the house. I love dogs. But I am dying. Every time. Allergies. yack. Guess I am going out today.)

So weird. Some weeks I just squirrel away on some problem and other weeks I can’t stop the tidal wave – I have to sprint just to capture what I can. No control over it at all. Just happens.

One thing that has become so obvious of late, is that hypotheses seem to be purely intuitive in origin, and mere accidents of whatever else you were thinking before hand. And the only possible solution is to place no confidence in them at all, other than to just attack them from every possible angle: what explanatory power does this idea provide? And how can I refute it?

The second thing that’s even more clear to me now, is that writers must carefully limit their stimulation to the subject at hand so that free association is not polluted by conflicting subjects: allow yourself to have pure ‘dreams’ (waking free associations).

The third is that intellectual productivity is largely constituted in the sheer number of hours you focus on a problem to the exclusion of all others: specialization.

I mean, intelligence does buy you velocity, but only in initial free association. Just working at free association on a singular subject trains your neural network so that the previous associations are conducted without cost, and the next association is now available to you for the prior cost.

(Thought was having a bad allergy day. Now it seems like I have caught some kind of nasty flu. kicking my a___. But thank god for laptops and the internet. Watching bad television as a child was so awful by comparison.)