Alan Jacobs

In Times of Tribulation, Prophecy Books Multiply:

“We are looking for books that not only try to decipher what the Bible is describing, but also how we live now,” says Kim Bangs, editorial director at Chosen Books, an imprint of Baker Publishing. Bangs attributes a greater interest in the End Times to social media, where crises happening around the world are shared. “When you see in real time what the Bible says will happen in the End Times, you start to pay attention and ask questions,” she says. “We seem to be closer to the end than ever before.” 

I’m gonna go way out on a limb and say we are unquestionably closer to the end than ever before. 

Rep. Liz Cheney:

Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. 

Squirrel wars escalating. I am injured but I persist.

Joel Lehman and Kenneth O. Stanley (2011): 

Most ambitious objectives do not illuminate a path to themselves. That is, the gradient of improvement induced by ambitious objectives tends to lead not to the objective itself but instead to dead-end local optima. Indirectly supporting this hypothesis, great discoveries often are not the result of objective-driven search. For example, the major inspiration for both evolutionary computation and genetic programming, natural evolution, innovates through an open-ended process that lacks a final objective. Similarly, large-scale cultural evolutionary processes, such as the evolution of technology, mathematics, and art, lack a unified fixed goal. In addition, direct evidence for this hypothesis is presented from a recently-introduced search algorithm called novelty search. Though ignorant of the ultimate objective of search, in many instances novelty search has counter-intuitively outperformed searching directly for the objective, including a wide variety of randomly-generated problems introduced in an experiment in this chapter. Thus a new understanding is beginning to emerge that suggests that searching for a fixed objective, which is the reigning paradigm in evolutionary computation and even machine learning as a whole, may ultimately limit what can be achieved. Yet the liberating implication of this hypothesis argued in this paper is that by embracing search processes that are not driven by explicit objectives, the breadth and depth of what is reachable through evolutionary methods such as genetic programming may be greatly expanded. 

Late in their essay, Lehman and Stanley illustrate their point by describing the navigation of mazes: If you’re going to make your way from the periphery of a maze to the center, you have to be willing to spend a good bit of time moving away from your goal. A determination to go directly towards your goal will “lead not to the objective itself but instead to dead-end local optima.” 

(I got to this by following some links from Samuel Arbseman’s newsletter.) 

I think this insight has implications far beyond machine learning, and even beyond what Lehman and Stanley call “large-scale cultural evolutionary processes.” It’s true of ordinary human lives as well. When we define our personal goals too narrowly or too rigidly, we render ourselves unable to reach them — or to reach them only to discover that they weren’t our real goals after all. 

There’s a wonderful moment in Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain when Merton — a new convert to Catholicism — is whining and vacillating about what he should be: a teacher, a priest, a writer, a monk, something else altogether maybe, a labor activist or a farm laborer. And his friend Robert Lax tells him that what he should want to be is a saint. It’s a marvelous goal not only because all Christians are called to be saints but also because there’s a liberating vagueness to the pursuit of sainthood. In his great essay on “Membership” C. S. Lewis comments that “the worldlings are so monotonously alike compared with the almost fantastic variety of the saints,” and it’s true: there are so many ways to be a saint, and you can never know which of them you’ll be called to take. 

I think these thoughts may have some implications for secular vocations as well. 

My “productivity system” is … a calendar. That’s it, that’s all I got.

… is a calendar. In some seasons of my life it’s a physical calendar, in others a digital one (I’m a huge fan of Fantastical, because it unifies my events and reminders in a single app). Basically I have a task list plus blocked-out periods on my calendar to work on specific projects. For instance, this week I’ve blocked out 8-11:30am every day to work on my biography of Paradise Lost. Also, for both events and reminders I use the Notes and URL fields to add information that will help me remember what specifically I need to focus on. (When I’m using a paper calendar, I jot down such details on sticky notes.)  

And that’s it. That’s my “productivity system.” It is very simple and very powerful. 

When Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (later to be known as Lewis Carroll) was a child, his father was the rector of the Church of St. Peter, Croft-on-Tees, North Yorkshire, so young Charles created The Rectory Magazine — a sample of which you see above. 

Art Chantry