Working Notes 09: Numbers Game
There’s an article in this, but I need to get my head around it before I can write it. On Substack, theses working notes consistently get higher views than other articles, and I suspect it’s because they’re just stripped-down off-the-cuff documentation of stray thoughts, work accomplished, lists of things I’m planning to do next.
In my mind, that gets mixed up with something Hank Green said in a recent YouTube video about education and AI, that (and I’m deeply paraphrasing here) that AI doesn’t have empathy, so it can’t put itself in the student’s shoes. It can’t share its personal experiences, or tailor what it says to match the student’s emotional needs. Then his brother John Green, in another video, was talking about how the internet has flattened us to two dimensions.
My rough thoughts on this are that the way to avoid (most) AI witch hunters, who will see AI even if you’re not using it, is to be vulnerable and human. I write because that’s where my passion is, and I don’t want to be reduced to a soundbite on TikTok. When I’ve written something, you have to engage with me longer, even if it’s for a few paragraphs or a few pages.
Writing is personal, and it’s real. I rarely leave my house, because my wife and I have build a physical environment we enjoy living in; when I do, I rarely go out of the neighborhood, because I like it here. I don’t listen to audiobooks or read on screens because holding a unique physical object (one tablet is unique; all of the books on it are that table, experientially) is part of the process.
I’m trying to rebuild my business, because my brain can’t handle the demands of long-form content. I need to get more subscribers on Patreon and Substack, and more sales on lightspress.com, so the numbers matter. Writing like this, as disjointed and messy as it seems to me, also flows in a way that doesn’t give me a headache or a panic attack. This might be the future. I don’t know. But that’s the point of Working Notes anyway, to throw ideas out into the void and be as honest as my comfort level allows.
