For years, folks complained as companies like Meta shut down or never provided true API experiences. They came out in a time where everyone thought APIs were table stakes and important parts of the web and demonstrated they could ignore that and make a big business.

Now that Meta is talking about building on top of existing interoperability standards, rather than praising this new era of data portability, folks are talking about taking their ball and going home.

Do we want open standards, interoperability, and data portability or not?

It sounds to me like some folks haven’t grown past their teenage anti-establishment, anti-corporate punk phase and just want to “damn the man”. To the extent that I’d like to do the same, I’d rather structurally reduce their ability to amass power and control in the first place.

Social standards and data interoperability were always the best way to do that.

I’m glad to see the old version of the new web start to emerge. I hope we’re not too childish to embrace that and see where it takes us.

I’ve been putting off a project I set for myself a few years ago where I really work on my personal narrative about my professional work. I struggle to describe my role and it’s the source of a lot of anxiety. I just realize I should just work with my executive coach to write a new résumé.

I’m not looking for a change, but I’ve been terrified that when that time comes, I will have no ability to describe what I do. I often find myself leaving huge chunks of my job out. It’s challenging because as an early employee and officer/executive, a lot of my job feels informal or at least easy to forget about. It would be a mistake to not talk about the fact that I play a role in sales and support or representing the company externally at industry conferences as a subject matter expert. I’ve also never really talked about management or leadership in prior job searches because this is my first role where I have managed people and had a formal leadership role.

After 9+ years it’s strange to think that some day I’ll do something else. At the same time, my own anxiety has me preoccupied with being worried about what will happen when that time comes. A fresh résumé with some outside help from someone who knows what I do feels like it could be an easy relief valve to crack open.

Ok, the lasagna at The Pink Door was excellent, I only wish I was hungry enough to eat the whole menu. Solo dining can be wonderful, especially when you have a view of the water, a nice breeze, and a good book. But it’s a real bummer when you’re eating alone instead of with someone who is willing to share half the menu with you.

If you ever want to know the secret to becoming my dear friend, be the kind of person who goes to a new restaurant that’s supposed to be wonderful and order as much of the menu as possible to share. In fact, order more of the menu than is reasonable.

Hi Jason,

Funny that you should say “You can’t dance with someone who walks on the floor with the purpose of making you look bad”. I think of conversation as a dance where both people have to be willing to move back and forth, even if there is a stumble from time to time. It’s also similar to something I’ve often said about trying out new things at work. “You can play by new rules if everyone insists on playing the old game.”

Speaking of games, I’ve finished playing The Last of Us Part I this week (4th time through) and have started on Diablo IV. Gaming has become much more acceptable than it was when I was a teenager in the 80’s. Still get weird stares from a lot of people, but not as many now. Like anything else it’s a hobby and I would guess closest to reading - though more interactive. During the Covid lockdowns it was gaming that allowed me to travel to far-flung places and other worlds to escape.

This week I’d like to focus on changing some of my habits. Some work for me and others don’t. My task is to identify the cues that cause a bad habit to kick in and leverage that into a new habit. There are some where it feels like the cue is just the day. “Oh, it’s Monday night so off to the supermarket for a bag of chips.”. I’ll need to be a bit more precise if I’m going to shift things in the right direction.

Tomorrow (if not Wednesday) is going to be a hard day. As a family we made the decision yesterday that it’s time to let our 15 year-old dog Sam pass on. His health has deteriorated over the last 12 months and is accelerating. Most of the time he looks miserable and pleading. Sam came to us at 4 years-old as a second time rescue dog. We believe his first owner abused him and his second was a single male who, because of the way Sam had been treated, wasn’t able to connect to him. I can understand that. For years, Sam would not even come near me. Originally an outside dog, I found out the girls had been letting him inside during the afternoon, and then swooshing him out before I came home from work. Now, he’s as indoor as they get. I’m glad we’ve been able to give him a better life than he started with. If only everyone’s life could work out that way - getting better all the time.

Regards,

David

Hi David,

It’s funny– I fit all the trappings of a gamer as a mid-30s white guy in tech who was an absolute nerd my entire life. But, I actually stopped playing games around high school. I remember selling all of my video games to buy a guitar. It didn’t feel like a statement moving away from gaming. In the past, I’ve taken creative license in this re-telling to claim that I was making some kind of move to make myself more attractive or fit in better or something in a self-deprecating way. But honestly, I was just less and less interested in games, even as an avid Nintendo Power reader and someone who woke up to play RPGs for an hour before school, and more and more interested in music. I think it was less about rejecting being a nerd– I couldn’t shed that identity with all the money, dedication, and time in the world. I think it was more about being lonely, and gravitating toward thing that were more social. Playing guitar was something I could do with my band (I started just singing and learned guitar to add that to the mix). Playing video games, at that time, was not something easily done with friends. I wonder if I would have made different choices if I grew up when online gaming and voice chat and all of that were around.

Habit changes are so hard. I have been on a mission to be more healthy since the start of COVID, really jump-started in part from my dad’s heart attack that happened in the first year of the pandemic. I’ve found it’s easier to build new affirmative habits–“start doing this”– then to discard bad habits– “stop doing that”. It’s especially true when the new pattern I want to establish takes something from being an easy default to something that requires attention, intention, and energy. Adding “start going to volleyball” is a lot easier than “stop eating a full pizza every time something bad happens as a coping mechanism”. I hope you find some success in changing your habits. I’ve made it at least part of the way, but I’m currently in a back slide. What I’m thinking about now is how I may need to do more to do less. If it’s easier for me to start something new, maybe I need to fill my time and energy with new things to crowd out what I want to stop. If there’s no time for bad habits, I won’t do them.

Letting go of a loved one is hard. I grew up with a golden retriever/yellow lab mix Martina, from the time I was about 5 until I was about 19. She had a really tough last couple of years, but I think overall had more good than bad in that time. It was very hard to let her go. When I was 24, my partner and I got a dog together, Gracie. She’s now starting to show some real signs of aging, and it’s been really hard on us. The vet visits increase, the vet bills increase, and although she’s absolutely still having a happy life, it’s also clear that there’s less quality. She’s able to do less and is motivated to do less with the passage of time.

Sam knows he is loved, and Sam had a life that was better because you and your family were a part of it. I don’t think that’s enough, but it’s something.

Jason

Jess and I went to Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM, on I think Mallory’s recommendation, in November 2019. It was an absolutely wild and cool experience and one I thought about a lot during the pandemic. I remember thinking about how that bizarre experience may never exist again while wrapped in a bubble of fear during the early parts of the pandemic and I remember being grateful for the experience.

It’s so cool to see it continue, expand, and receiver accolades.

I haven’t read the new CREDO study, but the results are not all that surprising.

Taken from Kevin Drum’s summary:

Generally speaking, the study shows positive charter results for:

• Black and Hispanic students
• Students in poverty
• Urban students
• Schools in northeastern states
• Charter Management Organizations (CMOs)

… It’s not clear why the results line up this way. Poor urban charters are probably almost entirely Black and Hispanic, so the strong results for these groups are likely because urban charters are systemically different from suburban charters in some way. The report doesn’t speculate about what this difference might be, and I don’t have any guesses myself.

I’m more than willing to speculate.

1. Charter management organizations professionalize central office functions like school districts spread over multiple schools versus replicating administrative functions at a single site at high cost. This leads to both higher quality staff and operations and lower operational costs that allow for greater investment in student learning. Also, expansion as a CMO, in at least some states, requires a track record of success generally.
2. Northeastern states have more robust charter authorizing policies from the perspective of ensuring quality. They tend to be stricter about opening new charters and likely disproportionately have oversubscribed charters only.
3. Urban students are coming from school systems with lower absolute performance and growth is asymmetric. It’s likely that it’s easier to grow from low baselines (we see this with “most improved” on absolute scores for things like NAEP or international comparisons like PISA almost always happening in lower, absolute, performers). So improvements should be more pronounced from lower baselines.
4. The same argument for urban students applies to students in poverty and Black and Hispanic students, all being highly correlated. There’s also (in Northeastern urban charters) a reasonable likelihood of a more diverse teaching force and more direct focus on improving achievement for these specific subgroups of students (sometimes it’s a part of the process of getting a charter!).

Places like Ohio look bad because Ohio lets lots of people who have no idea how to run schools run schools with no meaningful consequences. The charters there seem to routinely go bust on financial mismanagement. Bad charter law (re: no accountability, few limits) results in bad charters.

I find discussing “charters” frustrating because the term itself lacks a universal definition. The legal structures governing charter schools vary greatly from state to state. Some of these structures are effective at producing higher quality charter schools, others, not so much. Unfortunately, each interest group involved in the charter school debate has their own agenda. As a result, their assessments of high or low-quality charter laws are often misguided. I believe charter school success should be measured by the educational outcomes they provide for students in underperforming school systems. However, the focus of groups assessing charter authorizing laws tends to be on factors like sector expansion, alternative notions of “choice” or “competition,” or even a desire to eliminate charter schools altogether.

One more thought– suburban charter schools primarily cater to students already enrolled in well-performing schools. These charter schools are established to address the specific preferences of relatively affluent parents who, for various reasons, feel that their needs are not being met by traditional neighborhood schools. For instance, in certain states (which will remain unnamed), it appears that the charter school sector exists with the purpose of segregating white students from their Black counterparts. These schools serve students who are already academically successful and, in many cases, prioritize fulfilling parental preferences that are unrelated or even contrary to educational outcomes.

I haven’t even watched the Vision Pro part of Apple’s announcement video yesterday, but this morning I cannot shake one thought.

I really hate how central our television is in our main living area. We absolutely could rearrange our household to have it be a more communal living space oriented around people and not a screen, but it would not reflect the way the members of my household live in practice today. I acknowledge that.

But I am now wondering, are we just a few years away from an experience with Apple Vision that leads to a television being largely replaced?

My living room is the best home theater I can afford, because while I’m not a fan of the casual daily television experience, I do want to turn off the lights on a Saturday night and watch Dune. Maybe some combination of Apple Vision and iPads means no one needs that television in the living room for any of our practical viewing experiences.

It is tempting to jump in now and say, “But with Apple Vision strapped to each of our faces, aren’t we even more disconnected than watching TV? Does this actually solve the problem?” To that I say that I’m unconvinced that the experience of Apple Vision won’t permit the same level of presence as shared television watching. And importantly, the fact that you can easily put it away and reorient the whole room can help adjust viewing to more of an appointment than a fallback. When the whole room is not setup to encourage falling into television, behavior change becomes just a bit easier.

Here’s a thing you should totally not do.

Manton has made an archive of the posts from App.Net (App Dot Net?) available.

Normally I’d download my own posts with something simple and fast like wget. But since I’ve been trying to write more code in Elixir, I decided to write a small script to download my posts using that.

This script is a .exs file, meaning it is not compiled, and is meant to be run as elixir adn_download.exs with one argument, your user name.

For me, it’s elixir adn_download.exs jbecker.

This will create a folder in your current directory called posts with a JSON file for each post.

I’ll probably do something to parse and make that JSON useful in Elixir later too, but for now, my Saturday-morning-avoiding-responsibilities computer time is over.

Code below in line, and also here in a gist.

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Mix.install([{:httpoison, "~> 2.0"}])

defmodule ADNDownloader do
  require HTTPoison

  @base_url "https://adn.micro.blog/"

  def get_posts(user_name) do
    url = @base_url <> "users/" <> String.at(user_name, 0) <> "/" <> user_name <> ".txt"

    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    post_urls =
      body
      |> String.split("\n")

    post_urls
    |> Enum.reject(fn post_url -> !String.match?(post_url, ~r/json$/) end)
    |> Enum.map(fn post_url -> @base_url <> post_url end)
  end

  def get_json(url) do
    %HTTPoison.Response{body: body} = HTTPoison.get!(url)

    file =
      Regex.named_captures(~r/\/(?<post>[0-9]*\.json$)/, url)
      |> Map.get("post")

    filepath = File.cwd!() <> "/posts/" <> file
    IO.puts(filepath)
    {filepath, body}
  end
end

[user_name] = System.argv()
posts = ADNDownloader.get_posts(user_name)

File.mkdir!(File.cwd!() <> "/posts")

posts
|> Enum.map(&ADNDownloader.get_json(&1)) 
|> Enum.map(fn {filename, contents} -> File.write!(filename, contents) end) 

Hi Jason,

Friday night, the TV’s on in the background, and I’m wondering where to start.

I first came across your “Letters Project” via previous participant Robb Knight. At the time I was craving conversation and if letters back-and-forth are not conversation, what are they? That seems as good a place to start as any.

As a 50+ year old (mid-early-50’s lol), I’ve been exposed to many concepts. Some resonate strongly and immediately feel right because of their ability to explain my world experiences. The importance of conversations in our life is one of those.

Just now my attention has been taken by the Ben Robert-Smith story on TV. He’s Australia’s most decorated living war-veteran who has lost a defamation case against three newspapers for claims they made that he is a war criminal. The stories are all “He’s guilty! Strip him of his medals! Take him to criminal court!”. The last I agree with as it is the only way to get beyond allegations to evidence.

The media leaves no place for conversation - no place to explore - no place to learn - no place for grey nuance.

I assume the case was thrown out of court because the newspapers had sufficient justification to make the claims they did and so, it’s not defamation. That does not equate to criminal proof. I can’t be sure of that, because it’s not being reported anywhere. Just the result for everybody to lay judgement on.

I see the same in the workplace, in families, on-line. We are not taking the time to sit in conversation. In my training as an ontological coach, we were told conversation is a dance. How much conversation is not a dance but a toe-to-toe fist-fight? The closest it gets to a dance is the gang fight in West Side Story.

I’m confident in saying we’ve forgotten how to listen, but I also think there is a big time factor in there. We don’t leave ourselves time to ask questions, to sit quietly and think, to consider what we’ve heard, or to consider our reaction to it and what that may teach us about ourselves.

That’s the conversation I crave. That’s what I hope you and I can engage with over the coming weeks.

I’ve written enough. Time for me to listen.

Best regards, David

Hi David,

I am also craving conversations, having come to the same set of conclusions as a mid-late-30s year old.

There’s little room for nuance, and so often cries for nuance are made in bad faith. One of the most difficult things about online conversation and media narratives is that they’re so often, fundamentally dishonest. The questions being asked are about framing the debate, not curiosity. Introducing complexity is genuinely seized upon by bad actors to support ideas that are not at all a part of the goal of the initial speaker.

You can’t dance with someone who walks on the floor with the purpose of making you look bad. There has to be some agreement on the basics, and so often these days our dance partners aren’t even listening to the same music we are.

I don’t think individuals have forgotten how to listen. I think this is why in person conversation and face to face interactions are so different from online interactions, especially synchronous or near synchronous, short form, broadcasted “conversations”. ¹ One of the reasons I like podcasts so much is that the human voice can generate a level of empathy and compassion for each other that is missing during online sniping. Folks I feel are abhorrent with views that cause my blood to boil become possible to hear from when they are speaking in their own voice in the room with people who disagree. There’s something about having to face other people impacted by your own argument that softens, expands, and explains to a different degree than the online world or even the written word that’s not built in conversation.

Op/Eds are not conversations, they’re screeds.

I enjoy the long form, asynchronous conversations that Letters has provided. It’s a different type of communication that feels like it was common and now, not so much.

Thanks for jumping in this month.

Jason

I like subscriptions. It doesn’t bother me as a model for buying software or media. But I’m realizing that I’m hitting subscription fatigue as there are quite a number of subscriptions I know I’d like to have that I just can’t bring myself to commit to.

There’s more to listen to, more to read, more to watch, and more to support than ever. And even if I could technically afford it, the idea of adding yet another $50 a year feels… rough.

Maybe I need to just review all of my spending, subscription-based or not, and make some choices to feel better about things. But it’s getting to be a lot.

Maybe I’m just one of the 1000 true fans far less often than I imagined.

Hi Jason,

Maybe our therapists are comparing notes!

This right here: “I miss out on entire emotions, because I’ve already rationalized.” Yep. That’s a whole way of being. And the truth is that it has a purpose and, in some cases, it’s a strategy that serves us well. A tough part of growth is realizing when it’s time to let go of strategies that worked in the past but don’t help us move into the future we want.

I’ll take full responsibility for diving into the conversational deep end without pausing for preliminaries. It’s kind of fun to do things backwards though, and I like that our last week of this letter writing month is coming to a close with introductions and light stuff.

So here’s my own paragraph of introduction:

I’m 41 and pretty excited to turn 42 next month and know (or be?) the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I’m a single mom of four kids: three teenagers (13, 15, and 16) and one 12-year-old going on 27. So that’s where a lot of my time and attention goes, and it’s wonderful and difficult and all the things, all at once. We have two enormously spoiled fat cats and live in a cozy apartment in a St. Louis suburb. We moved back to St. Louis in the middle of 2020, after being in Puerto Rico for 5 years. It was an unplanned relocation in the midst of an unexpected divorce, and since then I’ve been rebuilding my life from zero. I really miss beach life (and speaking Spanish… I’m getting rusty) and my PR community, but it’s wonderful to be near family and lifelong friends and have their support and help. I’m a freelance writer and most of what I do is take tech-speak from the dev team and translate it into readable, hopefully interesting material for the people who want to use whatever the dev team is making. I’m innately curious about pretty much everything and being a writer is a free pass on asking questions and doing research. I love reading and usually have 3-4 books going, a mix of nonfiction and sci-fi/fantasy. I also love a good memoir. I spend a lot of time thinking about the why underneath things. I grew up in a religious home and was very involved with the church until my early 30s, when I left the faith. I didn’t want to, but that whole curiosity/asking questions/looking for the why underneath things… Well, sometimes it takes you places you don’t necessarily want to go. I’m happy to be where I am now, though. Life has 100% not turned out as I expected, but I feel so grateful for what I’ve gotten to experience and who I’m getting to become as a result of those experiences. I love food and adventures and dancing and a good whiskey and trees and solitude, not necessarily in that order.

It’s been an absolute pleasure exchanging letters with you over the last few weeks. I’m going to sign off with two book recommendations (and would love to have a couple from you as well). First: Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Carse. This book is one I reread about every year. It colors the way I look at everything. Second: Systemantics (or The Systems Bible) by John Gall. As a structures/systems person, you might particularly like that one. Easy read, entertaining, pithy.

Here’s to good things ahead,

Annie

Hi Annie,

Yes, we’re moving backwards, but I reject that book recommendations are “light stuff”. I had to think about that one a bit, since I know that you’ve already tackled Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which will be my default recommendation for quite some time.

I decided to go with books that are not huge commitments and that I don’t feel had any recognition in my own circles. I think all four of these recommendations (well, it’s really three) are best read knowing very little:

• A Conspiracy of Truths by Alexandra Rowland
• The Wolf in the Whale by Jordanna Max Brodsky
• Sue Burke’s Semiosis and Interference.

Now that the serious business is attended to…

I fell into “product management” largely from a similar skillset– I was able to talk to the dev team about what everyone else wanted built and they were able to build the right thing, whereas in the past that was a struggle. In many ways, my job goes in reverse of what your role does.

I think something I didn’t quite understand when I was younger was just how much work we all have to keep putting into ourselves and how many new things we find when we keep looking for whys and let go of old strategies and pick up some new ones. It feels like the kind of thing you never really understand as a kid. Maybe it’s the time I grew up in, but so much of what society coded as a midlife crisis or a failure to launch or whatever reads so different as an adult. I don’t know where the norma came from that we are meant to be consistent rather than constantly adjusting and discovering and changing along the way. Rebuilding from zero with kids that rely on you sounds… daunting, even without the major relocation. But letting go of strategies and identities that no longer serve us to head out on our next adventure with food, dancing, good whiskey, trees, and a bit of solitude– that sounds like exactly where I’d like to go.

Well, except for the dancing.

Jason

Places I’ve been, defined as having stayed over night or having been there as a destination versus passing through or simply touching the ground.

United States

States

• Arizona
• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Florida
• Georgia
• Hawaii
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Kansas
• Kentucky
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Maryland
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Missouri
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Pennsylvania
• Rhode Island
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Washington

Territories and DC

• Washington, D.C.
• Puerto Rico
• US Virgin Islands

Countries

• Aruba
• Bahamas
• Canada
• Cuba
• Germany
• Haiti
• Hong Kong
• Israel
• Italy
• Mexico
• Spain
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• USA

To say that I am disappointed in my level of international travel would be an understatement. I wait too long, think about it too much, worry about money far too much, and have stopped myself far too often. Somethign to resolve in the future.

Dear Jason,

Yesterday I attended an event for youth who are overcoming addiction. For eight weeks, they take lessons in classical guitar and djembe drums, make art, journal, and connect with adults who share their stories of overcoming addiction. Then they put on a concert and share what they’ve learned.

As part of the event, spoken word artist Tracy T-Spirit Stanton shared her story and two of her poems. Her entire performance was stellar, but one line is ringing in my head: “If you lead the body, the mind will follow.”

I put a lot of trust in my mind. I wasn’t the pretty one or the athletic one, but I was the smart one. And I held onto that identity as safety. Not too long ago my therapist said, “It’s really tough for you to be wrong about things, isn’t it?”

Um, yeah. I hate that.

One of the things that was hardest to accept about getting divorced was realizing that my own mind had been unreliable. I’d overlooked, dismissed, rationalized, and denied so many things. Clear signals. But I wasn’t ready to deal with what those signals meant, so my mind invented stories. As long as I didn’t ask too many questions, I could keep ignoring things.

But my body knew. Oh, did my body know. I had migraines regularly. I couldn’t sleep. And I developed an ovarian cyst that required major surgery. It was as if my body was taking all the emotions I wouldn’t let myself feel and truths I wouldn’t let myself face and putting them into this mass that became cancerous and could have killed me.

I had this very vivid dream a few days after surgery. I was still on pain meds, so I’m sure those were in play. In the dream, I was lost, running through the woods. It was like a maze, there was danger, and I was trying to find my way out to safety. This voice came from nowhere, right in my ear, saying: “Wake up. Wake up! WAKE UP!” I woke up startled, heart pounding, disoriented, but with this sense that something important had happened.

I still didn’t want to listen, though. So I went back to ’normal life’ and kept myself busy ignoring as much as I could. Then came quarantine. There was so much time and so little distraction. I couldn’t keep the storylines connected. One early early morning in September I was standing outside. Couldn’t sleep, as usual. Staring at the sky. Thinking, thinking, thinking. So much thinking, but so little sense. And I had this physical sensation like my brain was falling apart. I remember reaching my hands up as if I could slip them inside my skull and hold the pieces together.

That was it, finally. I’m still amazed that my body created a physical sensation to match what I was experiencing mentally and emotionally, and did so in such a powerful way that I couldn’t ignore it. I’m really grateful. And I pay a lot more attention to my body now. I also don’t get migraines anymore, so that’s cool.

I didn’t start this letter with the intention of going through my recent personal history, but it colors everything for me these days. My mind is still trying to sort things out all the time, analyze, categorize, find congruence. That’s part of who I am, and it’s not bad, but finding a balance is the work I’m doing now. Respecting and using my mind, yes. And equally respecting and trusting my body to tell me things more viscerally and immediately, and to listen when she does. The body says no, the body says yes, the body says wait, the body says be careful. Sometimes the body says run the fuck away! And sometimes the body says, “Hang out right here, because this is delightful.”

Annie

Hi Annie,

Are we going to the same therapist? I, too, find it tough to be wrong about things. I rationalize. My identity my whole life has been defined by my power to process fast and rationalize. I miss out on entire emotions, because I’ve already rationalized. I blow past signals and warning signs like the train in Back to the Future 3 heading for 88 mph or the gorge, which ever comes first.

This is why going back to playing volleyball has been so important for me. I need to spend literally hours each week playing a game that takes so much of my body and concentration that there is no “mind”. There is no thinking. There are no stories to tell, except maybe about how shitty it feels to be shanking a pass. I have to have time that I shut it down. That’s also why I have to read fiction. I need to fill my mind with a different mind.

Those are forms of rest. They quite the mind. But what I’m less good at is where you seem to have made it – listening to something else entirely. I haven’t figured out how to, in the quiet, let some other signals creep in and teach me things I need to understand about myself.

I have only started to slowly get better at this. Unfortunately, it was also due to excruciating gut pain– my appendix. After being sent home from what could only be described as completely negligent urgent care, I went into the ER a few hours later because I listened. Of course, my body was screaming, but even my doctor was a little surprised (in the best way) that I actually brought myself to the ER because things got worse. And I did so, in many ways, just in time.

The effect has been troubling. I’m far more nervous about aches and pains and changes to my body than I’ve ever been. My body has failed me in the past, but perhaps more importantly, I’ve learned not to trust my own sense of what is serious and what can be ignored. I have recalibrated, and I’m not quite sure yet if my new normal means “listening to my body” or “living with irrational anxieties in yet another area of my life”.

It sounds like you’re getting great feedback. Your body is telling you that the hard things you’ve had to do are the right ones.

We’re coming toward the end of our month, and I realized, partly my fault, we got heavy fast and never did some introductions and light stuff. So I thought I’d take this moment to pull us back a bit, reintroduce some folks to me, who may have already forgotten what I have going since the start of this project 5 months ago, and end us in a place that I hope feels like hanging onto because it’s delightful.

So here’s my run on paragraph about myself.

I’m in my mid 30s, no kids, living with my fiancée (who I’ve been with since 2010 and have been living with since 2011) and her mother. We have two dogs that are getting up there in age. I work for a tech company doing tech things for US K12 school districts after getting a master’s degree in urban education policy and working for school districts and state departments. We’ve been in Baltimore for 6.5 years now and lived in Providence for 10 years before that. I grew up on Long Island in New York. I read 30-40 science fiction/fantasy books a year (I prefer speculative fiction to SFF), play volleyball a few times a week and try to lift weights 3 times a week. I continue to struggle with being meaningfully overweight like I have been my whole life. We love to cook and eat. I am broadly interested in tax policy, urban development, and transit policy. I like to think about the world we’ve built around us how it changes our behavior and how we can build a better world, physically and politically. I’m a structures person, and I think a lot about them, whether when doing policy work or programming and data work. I tend to think of systems and structures as the geography and human behavior as water running over that terrain. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I watch a lot of cooking and educational YouTube videos. I like a great coffee and just about any Diet Coke (no, Pepsi is not ok, but I’ll suffer through it). We love to travel, having recently spent a few months in Mexico City. Elsa, my partner, was born in Mexico and is half-Mexican, half-Haitian, and trilingual. I travel a lot for work and I travel a lot for fun and I’m absolutely terrible about taking vacation.

The last few years, at least partially triggered or accelerated by the pandemic, have led to a lot of changes in my life and what I’m doing and who I feel like I am. But I have to admit, I feel like there’s a lot more coming, any moment now.

Thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and thinking,

Jason

Meta note: This one came in a bit late– I’m publishing in the order that I receive.

Hi Jason,

Forgive my tardiness and since it’s the second time in a month that I have had to say this, I have realized this is something I have to work on. That is, If I commit myself to a voluntary task, it shouldn’t be considered secondary to my other live obligations especially if it involves someone else. Talking about space, one of my favorite aspects of architecture is in fact, the spaces between the built environment and the world around it. In Indian mythology, a king received a boon that he couldn’t be killed indoors or outdoors and as we can expect, the king soon become a tyrant and one of the gods had to reincarnate himself to kill him on the threshold of the house.

Morbidity aside, I found that loophole interesting since it begs the question at what point does indoors become outdoors. Most architecture makes it quite distinct so the space that blurs the boundaries always fascinates me. Air-conditioning in America often makes such a design impossible but in South India especially in traditional homes, a central courtyard around which a house is built is very common and it works much better than air conditioning in a much warmer climate. Here is an example (there are plenty of examples in the “more like this” under the image). I bet this is very similar to homes in Mexico which is one of the reasons I am hoping to do an extended trip down there like you did. A close second is a public square. It can range from the grand St. Marks’ in Venice to a small plaza outside a movie theater adjoining a Starbucks and an Atlanta Bread Company in Dunwoody, GA where my friends and I hung out all the time.

Moving on to the other topic you raised about our ability to solve problems, my experience of spending nearly half of my life in India actually makes me more hopeful about America. A few months ago, my brother and I were talking about life in India in context of my dad living there after my mom passed away. He’s not exactly a fan of the West and would like to move back whereas me on the other hand, can never think of that possibility but both of us could agree that a civic sense is something that India lacked. I can elaborate that it’s largely a lack of trust in public institutions. The oppressed classes feel it more strongly and that has led to a sense of quiet resentment among the general Indian people which at times erupts in horrific inter-religion or inter-caste riots (literally). Living in America makes me feel more hopeful and even though latest events against democracy, it’s still a country rooted in strong institutional trust, a high sense of civic sense, and participatory democracy. People, in fact, give a shit.

But of course, as you say, in the sense of tragedy of commons, it hasn’t quite worked off late to tackle the large problems that society faces like climate change, healthcare, or even gun control. But I find the root causes are in the amplification of a small minority of “shitposters” even the good-meaning ones who often trivialize talking about solutions. I sometimes come across as argumentative and am expected to “take a chill pill” but that’s mostly because people don’t want to feel uncomfortable and be questioned. And if their beliefs are questioned, they often retreat into a shell of not airing their opinions instead of being open to change. I would say, forget change but even if the historically dominant classes could muster up empathy and recognizing why others are angry, we can make progress.

Anyway, I think between the two of us, we are preaching to the choir but thanks to your experiment of making these letters public, hopefully others can read and ponder without assuming that they are being called on. Thanks once again for doing this and save for my tardiness, I hope this exchange has been meaningful to you. I certainly have learned a lot.

Pratik Mhatré

Hi Pratik,

Elsa and I often joke about how much we love a courtyard. It’s a shame that America spread out with single family homes, but made them all boxes designed like a fortress to the outdoors. All of our knowledge of passive heating and cooling (and siting) left completely by the way side for efficiency. I love the city, and I think most of our homes should be in cities, and the American suburban form seems like all of the efficiency in building with none of the efficiency of living in a city. Cities manage to be beautiful and efficient, but our single family home seem to have chosen, at best, efficiency without beauty— neither form, nor function.

I do love the old courtyards when you can find them in Mexico, whether in older homes now subdivide or incorporated into multi-family apartment structures. The airflow and light alone seem worth it, but so is the blending of indoor and outdoor. A lot of Mexico City is clearly designed for year round comfortable weather, and quite often the indoor-outdoor distinction is more of a veil than a wall.

I find your take on our ability to solve problems at least somewhat comforting. I think it’s hard for Americans to forget about some of the “easy” stuff, that even when it doesn’t work great, is universally expected to work here. I’m thinking the postal service, water and sewage treatment, waste management, and electricity. Even places like schools and libraries, for all that we’re experiencing what feels like an unprecedented erosion in support, are still understood to be present and function well. I do think we give a shit, and most of us expect all of these things to function. We just can’t seem to agree about the why.

There’s a fine balance I think we all have to play when it comes to pushing folks on their beliefs. On the one hand, silently letting small things go by create the underlying conditions for changing what are acceptable beliefs. When someone posts about how they needed to vote via provisional ballot (that was accepted and counted) because of some small issue at a polling place and how that causes erosion of trust in the voting system, how do I respond? On the one hand, in a rational space where we have shared understandings and beliefs, I can have an intellectual conversation about how small inconveniences and errors can cause people to question the efficacy of a bureaucracy. On the other hand, that’s not what this person is saying. And even if that’s what someone is literally saying, that’s not what our current conditions cause others to hear. How important is it to be the voice to say, “Hold on a second, this is very normal, there’s a process, you did vote, your vote was counted, this is everything working in the careful, cautious, correct way that we want. This isn’t a moment to lose trust, this is a moment to understand how these systems function exactly the way you’d want to build trust?” No one likes having to be that person every time. And yet. And yet. And yet.

Where I grew up, casual racism is rampant, and despite having long had large populations of immigrants, mostly from groups that were shit on just like the current wave of immigrants until 70ish years ago (primarily Irish, Italian, and Jewish), anti-immigrant sentiment is rampant. The current, disgusting incarnation of the GOP is rampant. When I go home to my parents, or when I see comments from people I grew up with, I am assaulted with casual opinions that are all just opening a small door to the truly terrible thoughts. The casual prejudice, which we spent so much time in school discussing as one of societies great ills, is everywhere. I can’t help but to challenge it often.

But there is a point at which I can no longer be heard if that is all that I am. There is only so much labor and work I can put into that fight without burning myself out and burning out what tenuous relational currency I had to be heard in the first place. It’s tough to draw the line. I know that for folks like that to truly change their minds, for them to change, they’ll need to be questioned, over and over again by people they trust for decades so that they start to think, “Maybe something is not quite right here.” You have to chip away at beliefs, making the fissures and cracks for self-doubt to creep in.

Keep chipping away.

Jason

Hi again Jason,

I love that Ira Glass quote. It brought to mind another, much less eloquent quote which I repeat to myself and my kids often: “Sucking at something is the first step at being sorta good at it.” Pretty sure that’s Jake from Adventure Time bringing the wisdom as usual. Along those same lines, and echoing your thoughts on quitting, is the idea that maybe sucking at something isn’t a sign you need to get better at it. Maybe you just suck at this thing, whatever it is, and that’s okay. Some things, for example, I’d like to quit but can’t: receiving what seems like 100 school emails a week, handling car maintenance, doing taxes. That sort of thing. A while back I decided there are some things in life that don’t deserve or need my level best, and I could be okay with being mediocre at those things.

It’s been freeing. It forced me to make a distinction between what I care enough about to try to master, and what I’m dabbling in without any need for mastery, and what is a necessity to be completed.

In terms of parenting, I realized that I spend a lot of effort working on keeping things clean and organized, making sure we have necessities, cooking meals, etc. I also realized that, while all that’s wonderful, it’s not as important to me as laughing with my kids, or being around when they want to talk, or having the energy to help them sort through drama or difficulties. Sometimes, having the energy and good grace to listen to middle school drama or get outside and throw a baseball means I’m not doing laundry or cooking dinner. Of course, it’s always been okay to make those kind of trade-offs, but for me it took some effort to get clear on why that is okay. It’s okay because everything could matter, but not everything does matter. It’s okay because what steals time, and energy, and opportunity most of the time isn’t an emergency. It’s just the stuff in that mediocre middle. The scope creep of life is something I have to actively manage.

Turns out managing it is mostly about managing my own curiosity and being realistic about my actual capacity.

The next line of that Wordsworth poem is “getting and spending / we lay waste our powers” and it’s a line that rings in my head so often. The frictionless life, as you mentioned, is maybe not the best life. We need friction to give us pause, to force us to take a breath, to make a choice. This or that. What gets my attention? There will always be more options than time, and which option is right for me, right now, is deeply personal. One way I make those choices is by thinking about how I can optimize for delight. What delights me? Delight is a clear-cut emotion for me, which is helpful. If I’m delighted, I know it. “Should” has no place in delight. There’s no halfway with delighted. It’s on or off. So that’s easy to identify, and I don’t need to analyze the Why of delight, only the How: How do I make more time, space, and energy for This Delightful Thing?

Annie

Hi Annie,

Jake is a wise friend.

…everything could matter, but not everything does matter.

This captures it all, doesn’t it. It’s funny how much we live with other people’s expectations about things that matter. Because everything could matter, other people, our parents, our friends, society, whatever, all get to yell at us about the things that matter to them. It’s not just that everything could matter, it’s that everything does matter to someone, and those people are telling us all the time. Realizing that not all of those things also need to matter to me has been a huge project of my adult life. That’s probably not what people see, but it is a guilt I carried, and still carry.

Optimizing for delight is a great heuristic. I spent time in 2022 trying to have fun, in many ways in search of the same thing. One of the surprising things about fun is how much it is about getting completely out of my head and fully invested into a moment. There’s no “mind” in my fun. Even when I’m reading a book that’s causing me to laugh or cry, it’s not my mind analyzing an experience or thinking about it. It is my body being taken completely into another world and experience its heartbreaks and joys.

I have to admit, so far, 2023 hasn’t been that much fun. I’ve let a lot of things stress me that should, and a lot of things stress me that probably shouldn’t. I’m doing less well at maintaining routine and a lot less well at making time and space for the things that provide delight. I’ve spent a lot of time this year “giving myself a pass”, but I’ve got to find the motivation soon to stop that– it’s become and excuse to not do the things that I know make me happy and are good for me.

This was a good reminder for me. I have some work travel coming up, then a short period of time before some fun travel. I’m going to work on reclaiming some time for delight in my routine.

Jason

It hasn’t been this bad in a while, but my day ended like 15 minutes ago because that was the limit on how long my eyes could handle my scleral lenses today.

All in all, they are magic. I’m not sure what I’d do if I lived before they were available.

It’s moments like these I think about the complexity of accessibility and disability. By just about any estimation, including my own experiences, I think labeling myself as having a disability feels absurd. And yet, in many ways I can only fully participate in daily life through what might be deemed a medical assistive device.

Everything is a spectrum.

A solid case against localism for transit. The parallels to education are strong.

The ideal role for elected leaders is to set overall funding levels and then just let the professionals work. If the professionals are failing, it’s fine to replace them with other professionals, chosen based on past successes in the same field…it’s critical to understand that localism subtracts from civilian democratic control of the state, through its elevation of petty voices. And if subdividing territory into local fiefs doesn’t work, the alternative is to subdivide it thematically and let subject-matter experts handle planning.

This month I’ll be corresponding with @annie

Hi Jason,

First - apologies for the past-due letter. Good intensions and best-laid plans and busy weekends. At any rate, here we are now.

My best friend Jennifer and I used to exchange letters over the times we lived in separate places. She moved to Kentucky, then I moved to Puerto Rico, and now we’re both back in St. Louis. We meet for walks and coffee and in-person conversation now, which is its own delight. But there’s something special about receiving a written letter, whether digital inbox or physical mailbox, and words you can absorb at your own pace.

Moving at my own pace is something I’m learning how to do, and slowly, and it’s clumsy. This stage of learning feels less like learning and more like an exercise in whacking my head against the metaphorical wall. But I’ve been in this particular stage enough times to recognize it now. I call it the slog, which I’m fairly sure is not a real word. The SLOG, that mid-point when the excitement of newness and beginning has worn off and you’re not yet making enough headway to trust your progress. This is often the point when - particularly with creative endeavors - I think it’s a good idea to start over. All over. Something must be wrong with the plan. Otherwise, I’d be making visible progress, moving steadily forward, and feeling confident. Right?

What silly expectations I have for myself. Writing them down or saying them out loud, or pausing in any other way and looking, really looking, at what I am expecting of myself brings me up short. All too often it’s not reasoned or reasonable, not even human. I’m expecting something more (perfection?) and something less (emotional neutrality?) than human. But here I am, as I have always been, quite human. 100%, last check.

And that’s the point I am revisiting, the lesson or skill I am learning, one step through the slot at a time. To let myself be fully human and move at my own wide and varied and slow and stumbling pace, to accept the missteps and flailing as part of the dance. Failing isn’t an aberration; it’s a necessary part of any process that involves growth. Knowing this doesn’t always make me feel better, but why do I need to feel good about things all the time? I don’t, as it turns out. The slog does not require me to go forth with shouts of joy. It only requires that I keep going. Doable. (And, also, it’s okay to stop and rest a bit, too.) There’s trust needed to slow down. To move carefully. To breathe deep, to rest, to get there when I get there. Trust in myself. Trust is at the heart of so much of this, maybe all of it. Do I trust myself to focus on what matters, to choose what’s important, to notice, to not miss things, to be okay? The answer I’m finding isn’t a simple yes. It’s more like: I might not it right. I might very well miss things, even important things. And I will be okay.

I often feel a sense of urgency over nothing and everything. Perhaps that’s just a feature of life in the 21st century. The ‘world is too much with us.’ We know too much and don’t know how to handle it. It’s also a residual feature of some of my own experiences in the last few years. It’s kind of an arrogant feeling, as if the well-being of the world or some portion of it depends on me. I’m all for taking responsibility, but that’s a stretch. What if I let my hands be as small as they are? What if I let my reach be short, extending only as far as my arms can actually reach? What if I expected no more of myself than to wake up each morning and do the small tasks that are mine? The world doesn’t end - or it does! - but either way, it’s always been a bigger ball than I can juggle. There’s peace in accepting my own limitations.

I’ve not asked about you, only talked through my own meandering thoughts, but I’m curious, and grateful to be part of this experiment.

Take care, Annie

Hi Annie,

I am reminded of this Ira Glass quote:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

This, of course, applies to skills as well, where we often reach a stage where it becomes clear what’s possible, but our bodies or minds cannot achieve it yet. Yet is such a powerful, difficult word. There’s so much between now and yet, and that chasm is often left uncrossed.

I think the thing I’ve held onto with similar journeys lately is that it’s ok for yet to become later or never. Sometimes between the start and the yet I realize something isn’t that important to me or maybe I no longer want it at all. I can be caught up in needing to finish what I started– it was years before I was willing to put down a book I started even if it was terrible– but I’ve started to feel like I don’t have time to waste on things that aren’t moving me. There are times we have no choice but to go slow, to slog, to cross the chasm to that future point where we can do the thing. It’s good to practice taking things to completion so that when you have to dig down into yourself and push through you still believe it’s possible. “I have done this before. This is how it goes. We survive this. We will again.” But it’s also ok to say, “Maybe if it’s this hard, maybe the right answer is not now.”

I have been bobbing up and down through cycles of burnout since I’ve been working at the same start up for 9 years. There are periods filled with not trusting myself, feeling like I need to start over, and then energy, growth, pride, and reward. The exhaustion-elation rollercoaster is to be endured, built into the risk-reward of something this challenging. It helps to have a partner I can trust and who can trust me back. In the best times, we’re at different phases on the cycle and can support one another. In bad times, we’re synchronized, or some challenge erodes and weakens that trust and then things get dark for a bit.

I think about how “the world is too much with us” all the time. My work, building operational and administrative software, is all about making processes more efficient and effective but also fast. So much of what I touch would have taken an eternity, relatively speaking, 30 or 40 years ago. It was slower and harder 20 years ago too. The easier part feels good, the always on always, immediate part of faster I sometimes question. Our expectations for responsiveness and information and change keep getting faster, and while on the micro level I have the same demands, I wonder if on a macro level that just… breaks things.

A lot of what is changing all around us is about removing friction. We’re so used to friction being a bad thing that we’ve forgotten that friction has been a signal, a control, a limiting factor. Friction is a guard against impulsivity. The right guard? The best guard? The intended guard? Perhaps not. But remove it, and our impulses win just a little more often, just as our frustration also abates just a little bit.

I’m going to spend sometime this week, inspired by this letter, to think about what I want to rededicate to, knowing I’m in the slog, and what I want to let go of, listening to the friction and frustration and lack as a signal.

Jason

Sometimes you have something that somebody else needs more than you do, and you can afford to spare it, and the easiest thing in the world is just to give it to them. In that moment, to have what you can give them is, itself, a gift, a thing to be thankful for. In my lifetime this society has seemed ever more fanatically opposed to that possibility, and ever more committed to the idea that of all the things a vulnerable person might legitimately need, help—simple material help—is never one of them.

– Albert Burneko, Jordan Neely Just Needed Some Help

Cruelty becomes a virtue in a world that emphasizes individualism over empathy.

Brown’s Introduction to CS class is now in Python and does quite a bit of data analysis, and I have to admit, as good as Intro to Object Oriented Programming was (clearly, as it was my only formal CS class), I definitely would have been a concentrator if this were my introductory course.

I have already been deeply nerd-sniped reading just a few parts of A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing. And given where I ended up as a fake developer, I can’t help but agree with, admire, and salivate over this vision for introductory computer science.

I just missed it all by being there 2005-2009 (2010 if you include my master’s).

Hi Jason,

You were really lucky to have benefited from a liberal arts education. If I had to do my education all over again, that’s exactly what I would do. Although there are a few options to pursue the less-trodden upon path in India, the “smarter” i.e., the kids who excel in school, are expected to pursue a STEM degree. I rebelled a bit and instead chose architecture which my parents justified in their head because it was a scientific art degree and also, the fact that I was the 21st living potential architect in my extended family. So hardly a rebellion. But at least that education exposed me to history, elements of design, society & culture, vernacular context, etc something I would’ve have learned in an Indian engineering college.

But even then I think I made a mistake of choosing a college based on the potential of the faculty rather than the potential of my peers. I should have understood better the importance of how peer norms and peer expectations drive your motivation and expose you to things that you didn’t even know that you didn’t know (sorry, Rumsfeld). But I think I managed to make amends when deciding to pursue my graduate education in the U.S. I choose Public Administration & Public Policy. You can imagine the puzzled looks on the faces of my Indian acquaintances until I realized I could stop trying to explain by simply saying, “With this degree, I may work at the World Bank or the United Nations”. This is partly true only because no one had any idea what exactly those two organizations do in their day-to-day functioning.

This brings me to your question of “what are some of the foundational ideas that guide your thinking on education”. If I had to put it in one term, I would say, critical thinking. The ability to understand the question before you even try to come up with a solution and how constraints in our thinking (as Simon called it, bounded rationality) affect what we do and what we decide to do. One of the best classes I took in grad school was Logic in Public Policy and believe it or not, it was one of my first formal courses in philosophy and how it affects our decision-making especially in the world of policies. Discovering the various fallacies and argument styles may have caused some of my friends to hate me when I called on their BS but it also let me read everything with fresh eyes. The work of John Rawls’ and his Theory of Justice (Fair and Just) has informed my thinking ever since and has helped tremendously in understanding issues of equity that often my STEM friends have trouble wrapping their heads around.

I totally relate with the uncertainty that you experience when you read or learn more but I’ve always found much truth in Will Durant’s quote - “education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”. And THAT is exactly what separates us. Admitting that we do not know everything and are also uncertain about the things we know is I think, the essence of education. That feeling, I believe, keeps us learning for a lifetime and there’s no such thing as “I have completed my education”. Some consider this snobby but strangely, it keeps me humble knowing that there is much to learn out there. We can only be more certain but never 100% certain so I’m often bemused by people who are always absolutely certain. and don’t experience self-doubt. Perhaps working at a university where this belief is ground into you may have helped (nurture v nature) but after many years of reflection, I’m at peace with how this feels.

I may have been all over the place in this letter but I wanted to write back before it got too late as we wind down the month.

Cheers, Pratik

Hi Pratik,

Isn’t it amazing how that Rumsfeld quote is so dang useful from such a horrible man? I swear, it comes up constantly in my life.

The Veil of Ignorance remains a powerful way to see the world for me, and I’m sure even more so for you having experienced life in India and the US. I have found it particular powerful as someone privileged to be born here with typical American blindness that comes with it to consider this as part of my own conception of justice.

The unknowable used to haunt more more. I do agree, of course, with the “progressive discovery of our own ignorance” and I have no problem with the academic standby of “it depends” that gets so skewered. Lately though, I’ve been more terrified by the “known”. It feels like all around us we face challenges that are very much known with solutions that are very much known and a social-political-cultural context that cannot act in the collective interest.

I’m curious given your varied experiences with public policy and experience in a large, growing country outside of the west with a very different state apparatus– where do you lie on our ability to solve problems? This is an odd way to phrase it, but it’s a big question. What I mean, for example, is where do your impulses go on participatory, small “d” democracy, local governance, etc versus centralization, technocracy, professionalization, etc. It feels like this is a core tension in US education, the localist of local control democracy in many cases, but it’s also a core tension facing us with climate change, global war, tackling poverty, healthcare, and more. I think a lot about how we’ve managed to build a system that seems almost uniquely poorly suited to address the problems of the day, while understanding the history and context and successes that led us here.

I’d also like to know about a space you love. As someone who studied architecture, what is a home, a building, a public square, any where that grabs you? What makes it feel special?

Jason

Nilay Patel’s Welcome to hell, Elon is already a classic. Perhaps the most cited line is,

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation….

But I think most people still think of moderation as being about the “bad stuff”. Nilay doesn’t fall into this trap,

They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff.

But I think “incentivize the good stuff” doesn’t quite pull out the full breadth of content moderation.

In a way, content moderation is about creating a community people want to be a part of. And that’s all well and good, but a critical part of accomplishing this goal is helping people find a community people want to be a part of. Social networks are not one community, they are a multiplicity of overlapping communities.

What I’m getting at here, of course, is that a key part of content moderation is content discovery. All the work to make sure good stuff is flourishing on your platform doesn’t help if users can’t find it.

What makes algorithmic timelines, searching, tagging, reposting, likes, quote-posting, and more critical is that these are the tools of content moderation to make it easier to find and participate in communities I want to be a part of. Bootstrapping community is incredibly difficult, and there’s a reason why Facebook API access got shut off real fast as people bootstrapped their networks across other social web services and why data portability is a powerful anti-trust tool.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of folks behind tools like Mastodon (and even Micro.blog) are terrified of providing tools that let individuals bootstrap a community. Discovery is weak across most of these platforms, at least partially because discovery has the potential to become a vector for abuse. But discovery is as critical a part of content moderation as any other tool. And just like users need to be able to report abuse and have tools for blocking and muting, users need tools to facilitate discovery that are up to the task.

I’m all for more, smaller, fractured communities on the web. I just hope I can find the ones that would welcome me and that I would welcome being a member of.

Hi Jason,

I must apologize for my tardiness as my second letter is being written almost two weeks after my first one. A new job can definitely lay waste to your carefully laid personal plans. More on that in a bit. Currently, I’m writing this from New Orleans where I’m visiting for a conference.

I have followed your Mexico trip (stay?) posts and can imagine it was a wonderful experience. The best way to experience a new place is to immerse yourself in it and make it part of your daily life even if it’s for a short while. I think even the locals then start accepting your presence and opening up unlike a tourist who is just passing by.

Professionally speaking, I stumbled into education and definitely hadn’t planned on working in it. I come from a family of teachers though and my now-late mom thought it even further by having her own preschool that literally started in our living room and soon expanded to three different locations with 450 kids at its height. Being around teachers and seeing the early childhood education firsthand, for a while after my Masters, I even contemplated moving back to India and “expanding” her school to a full primary and secondary institution with an emphasis on “how to learn” rather than “what you should learn”. But setting up an educational business in India is not easy considering the bureaucratic hurdles, the greasing of palms (yup), and raising capital just to buy land.

Anyhoo, I guess those thoughts never left me as I found using my graduate degree in working in education research. Initially, on the data side and then working in the policy and academic research. I share your concern about deteriorating conditions surrounding education but I wouldn’t call it a crisis of confidence as I still feel that education is your best chance at improving your life outcomes, regardless of the personal anecdotes that people often cite against it. However, I do believe that how you learn TO learn is pivotal instead of just going through the motions of focusing on test scores and assessments. While I was raised in a very STEM-or-nothing environment, I have come to appreciate the long-term benefits of a liberal arts education. The role of critical thinking and reasoning skills has never been more important, I believe, in differentiating between what kind of education or degree you received and from where.

I would love to expand more on these thoughts in our letters. Now I regret not saving the blog posts I had written nearly 20 years ago during the time I was thinking of moving back to India to set up that school.

Pratik

Hi Pratik,

I was the beneficiary of a liberal arts education, which took me from a chemistry degree (and pretty close to a Judaic Studies degree) to a master’s in urban education policy. I still think that learning how to learn was one of the most important skills I developed in college. And by attending a school with an Open Curriculum, I think I also learned how to pull together connections across fields and domains in a pretty unique way. While serving as a student representative on a college committee, we often discussed that the “inter-curricular”– the connections students made between the courses they took– was actually often the most important.

While I believe in all that, and I see entirely how it improved my own life, I am also uncertain how much of that view is an elite view, from an elite, competitive school, where I was a strong fit for their philosophy. I find it difficult to generalize from my experiences, which tends to push me much stronger toward the program evaluation/econometric side of education research. I just don’t trust myself, but I’m reasonably willing to trust (primarily, but not solely) quantitative research (with all of its flaws). I find that in the data, I can see more clearly the lines of someone’s argument, the strength of their case, and the obvious weaknesses. Maybe some of my nihilism is feeling like studying social systems has only generated certainty in my uncertainty.

I miss being connected to a university. I never did that final degree– it just always made absolutely no financial sense and felt too risky to do for the love of it– but for a long time I was still connected to academia. I stayed and worked in the same state, in the same city as my university, roughly a mile and a half away, when I went to work for the state department. I came back and worked at an education research center that was apart of my university through a multi-year fellowship after that first state department job. For a long time, I felt like I was doing the work that people with PhDs did who didn’t get a coveted tenure track offer. But those jobs were only the first 5 or so years of my career. For the last 9, I’ve worked with school districts but at a technology startup. And while it’s a wonderful fit, incredibly rewarding, and, I think, more impactful than just about anything I did prior, I miss having that connection to the academic world.

I am the classic dweeb that could have circled back around and gone through my undergraduate years 10 times with 10 completely different course of study and still I’d ask for an 11th shot.

I’m curious what are some of the foundational ideas that guide your thinking on education. Are there books/texts/scholars/philosophies that have shaped your future thinking? For myself, I constantly come back to a few things. I think about the long conversations we had in the one pedagogy course I took about E.D. Hirsch and Ted Sizer– who had it right and are their ideas even in opposition? I think a lot about the famous Harvard lecture course, Justice, which was released on iTunes U in… maybe 2007? 2008? I’m pretty sure I listened to it on my original iPod Nano walking around Brown’s campus. There was an education policy and history class I took that marched through the major movements in America, from Horace Mann to today, but primarily focused on the major Supreme Court cases that have shaped education in the US. I think a lot about Paul Manna’s books on federalism in Education as well. Oh and Daniel Koretz on assessments.

Jason

Most of the time I would say that my number one travel tip is to have two of everything¹ so that one set is packed at all times.

But honestly, the best tip is that everywhere has convenience stores. Underwear is cheap and can be hand washed.

Pack what cannot be replaced first; don’t stress about the rest.

I have been thinking a lot about the Tennessee legislature, and the thing I keep circling back to is this post by Kevin Drum on Calvinball.

There are lots of different rules that are fine in theory, but there’s no excuse for changing them just because the opposing party wins an election. That’s what we’re complaining about.

It feels to me like the left is constantly being told they’re ridiculous when trying to hold anyone accountable to rules, standards, or even consistency in ideology, then stuck defending themselves against the same attacks. Sometimes there really is a double standard, and the left is stuck being held accountable for the things they believe in by a right that doesn’t actually believe the same things and won’t hold themselves to that standard. But mostly it’s just Calvinball, where the only thing that determines the rules of the game is who they benefit here, today.

It’s a one-way high speed rail train to the destruction of legitimacy. It’s among the scariest structural failings of our whole system of government.