Sunday Writing Club

Abstinence Affectionate Austerity Charity Courage Endurance Generosity Gravity High-Mindedness Honesty Humility Independence Kindness Moderation Patience Piety Prudence Resignation Sanity Self-Control Seriousness Sincerity Straight-Forwardness Tranquillity Trustworthiness Wisdom ...

In my 20's I thought my life would unfold in a straight line. Go to college, get a job, get married, have kids, retire, die. Each step nicely building upon the one before it until you're burned up into ash and the whole cycle repeats itself. 20 years of living later and I realize how deeply naive this view of life was. The idea of linearity assumes the idea of completion. After college you're done learning. After you get a job you've figured out what your profession is. Rinse and repeat. ...

My favorite album of all time is A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. This is the perfect album to listen to on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and I've done this for the past 20 years. A small moment of reflection after a busy week. The album was recorded on December 9th, 1964 at the studio of Rudy Van Gelder at Englewood Cliffs in New Jersey. Gelder had a busy week recording two sessions a day leading up to the Love Supreme session. Coltrane's sessions started late - around 7pm - to save...

There are five things that I am working on to teach my daughter. Character I want her to have a strong internal system that guides her how to act. The Greeks talked about every action guided by the 4 cardinal virtues: wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage. I don't think you can improve much on that list. I want her to have a deep sense of caring about others. I want her to want to produce the best outcomes for the most amount of people. Optimism I want to teach her how to be an optimi...

Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit is an argument for being more objective and less personal in our decision making. In the first few chapters Parfit constructs a concept of morality that asks two questions: How likely are you to sacrifice your happiness for the happiness of someone else? How likely are you to sacrifice your present happiness for your happiness in the future? Later in the book he describes a theory of personal identity that asks two questions: How connected are you to s...

This year my donations have been inspired by the Effective Altruism movement and the utilitarian philosophies of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit. Very simply, I want to give in ways that minimize suffering in the world. I want to donate to organizations that work on global poverty and health because I believe a marginal dollar will do more in Africa than in the US (potentially 100x more). For Global Health I will donate to Givewell which does charity research and passes donations on to the orga...

Recently I started looking for a new backup system. I wanted a system that was: Cloud based Cross-platform Open Source Didn't use Amazon AWS The best system I discovered was the open source tool Borg coupled with an account on Rsync.net (which has been around since 2001). This system is somewhat tricky to get set up so what follows are the steps I took to get everything working: First you need to get a borg specific account from Rsync.net which is currently at this link: https://rsync.net...

I remember the exact moment I decided to deactivate all my social media accounts. I was at the bookstore with my daughter. I was scrolling through Instagram while she was flipping through a book. Suddenly I realized that social media was taking me out of the present moment with her. I was going to miss key moments by liking the posts of people I hardly knew. I decided to make a change. I deactivated all my accounts: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Strava. Today is my 1 year anniversary o...

I am currently on a solo weekend trip with my daughter who is 5 years old. We've been doing about 3 solo weekend trips per year since she was 2 years old. 12 trips so far. I wonder how many more solo trips we have left in her lifetime? Let's assume we're able to keep having one trip a year until she's 13. That doesn't seem like a lot but with school activities, vacation time, visiting family that is a flight away that seems like a reasonable average. What about after she's 13? It seem...

Inventing super-intelligent AI will be the biggest event in the future of humanity. It's unclear when super-intelligent AI will appear. Many experts say super-intelligent AI will arrive in 2050 but a more conservative estimate is 2100. AI is already having a big impact on human activity. One example is Facebook's content selection algorithms in the 2016 elections. Facebook makes money when someone clicks on content, people with extreme views are more likely to click on extreme forms of cont...

A few years ago I read Peter Singer's essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality. The basic premise is: Suffering in the world is bad We have a moral imperative to prevent suffering in the world Therefore, we should give all of our money to effective charities until the next dollar we donate would cause us more suffering than it would prevent for someone else. Peter Singer is a proponent of utilitarianism which is an ethical system that bases the rightness and wrongness of an action on the net b...

There are many things you can do on a Sunday morning. I am going to write. I am writing to hold myself accountable for learning something every week. I am writing to ensure there's a specific time and place for me to reflect. I am writing to understand who I am. We are formed through our moments of quiet introspection. The rules I've set for Sunday Writing Club are simple and no fuss. 1) Write every Sunday 2) For 1 hour 3) Post anonymously (no ego) That's it! Join me for #sundaywritin...