Missives
Keep track of what's happened since you were last here with the newsletters and the changelog.
July 10, 2025
Changelog
This week I sent a draft paper out for review. It’s a rather longwinded sketch of how I think we could approach ethics. It’s 45 pages or so long, but it was a lot of fun to write. I suspect most people will not want quite that level of detail though, so I made an AI podcast and a semi-AI explainer. People seem to quite like the AI summary stuff. You can find it all here.
However, the whole experience has made me realise that I’ve been pretty annoyed this last year. Since June, I’ve written an article a week, and most of them are shit.
I used to write an article a month, and I used to write them basically just for me—working an idea out for myself—and so it’s no surprise that I usually quite liked those articles.
But many people reasonably complained that they were impenetrable and infrequent. So I committed to an article a week instead, and I’d try to bridge the gap—try to write articles that were a little for me and a little for everyone else.
The result is that, for the most part, they do neither. Lots of strange fragmentary ‘series’ style posts, and unfinished and incomplete thinking. All useless to me, but also not very penetrable to others.
Then I wrote this 45-page paper, and I was obsessed with it. And I love it. And I don’t care that no one will read it.
So I’m going back to that, I think. Writing articles that are me being thoughtful for me. BUT. I will look to producing new forms of content for others, because I like teaching too. Rather than do two things badly, I will do both things well.
June 30, 2025
Changelog
I forgot to schedule last week’s newsletter, but the article has been up since Friday. Apologies. I won’t send it now, I’ll just stack the two this week.
It’s not a terrible thing, because I hate sending these three or more part articles. With this week’s newsletter, you’ll get all of my moral terrain thinking-articles together.