# Future Authoring, part 1

I recently have fallen into a Jordan Peterson love affair, and stumbled upon [this course he created](https://selfauthoring.com/future-authoring.html), which seems quite relevant to me articulating my goals for this project. I found [a free version](https://pastebin.com/BiFE2fUX) and have [answered the first part of it in not-bold here](/notes/future-authoring) and am taking his advice to wait until a night or two of sleep before doing the second part. Let me put time on my calendar tomorrow afternoon to tackle it.

It went really well! A lot of it was personal stuff about my life, but readers of my stream-of-consciousness style in this journal are not strangers to that. It feels relevant at times to talk about my life in this journal and this is one of those times. I am a bit worried it may bite me in the butt at some point down the line but that's just fear talking. I don't have any concrete worries here.

## Crusade Discovery 

### Well and thoroughly pickled

In particular I think I made a shockingly large amount of progress on articulating my crusade this morning. And the way I came to it is really a function of a week well sculpted. (I love this phrase, by the way, calendar sculpting. A quick google search makes it seem like I have indeed inventing this phrase. I wonder if it'll catch on.) 

For example, starting my week of thinking about how communication works for my "essay about essays" with Nicky Case lead me to Douglas Hofstader's "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" which was *exactly* what I needed to read right now, as well as re-reading Seymour Papert's "Gears of my Childhood", also exactly what I need to read right now. (Watching Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle last week also played a big part on my thinking this week.) 

Then Wednesday diving even deeper into how the brain works, how people learn, why they'd want to learn to code, etc with my coggle brain mapping was amazing. Really helped me spread out my thoughts in space and get clearer about them and how they relate and build upon each other. 

Thursday my brain was on fire reading through the Dynamicland zine the first way through. I've only made it 4 pages in the second way through and have written ~3.5k words already. I was able yesterday to really *live* in the future and imagine what it would be like, without hating or "making wrong" the present. I was able to bask in the possibility while also being grateful for reality. The thing about truly living in the future, while accepting the present, is that you can do it all the time, and it's only when you live with things as core components of your life that you are able to imagine the next step, how to build on top of them, how they interact together, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th level causes. I was even ambitious enough to explain to both my grandma and then my mom about my vision for the future and how it relates to tools and humans and augmentation, etc. They both got it to some degree and were excited that I was excited and I learned more for explaining these thoughts to lay people. 

I also had a great conversation with my buddy Jonathan Leung yesterday where he was excited for me for "not making the present wrong" because he noticed it was something for me to work on when we did our podcast many months ago. We thought about Elon as a crusader and what his crusade is (averting existential threats) and how that compares with Juan Benets crusade (decentralization).

Additionally, yesterday was largely inspired by *How to Measure Anything*, my new favorite book which is really going to make a scientist out of me and helped me understand the distinction of mesaurement and how it is truly what science is: reduction in uncertainty.

As the zine says (quoting someone), the idea is to immerse myself if brilliant thoughts get pickled by all these ideas, which will in turn lead me to having my own ideas. 

### Ariculating Crusade

I think here's what's profound about the ideas I had yesterday and today:

0) Tools, or technology, includes ideas, ananlogies, physical machines, virtual software. Anything that allows someone to do or think things, either at all or easier, than without the tool.

1) Humans subsume our tools into ourselves, becoming what we were before plus our new tool. The result is a cohesive whole. Removing the tool reduces the human to what they were before the tool, akin to removing a person's arms.

2) We know a great deal about how the mind works, how our bodies work, how emotions and happiness works, as well as what doesn't work. We can take all of this knowledge and bring it to bear on the problem of desigining proper tools for humans.

*Pause!* How does this relate to programming language tools? Well programming langauges are *tools for designing tools*. Wow. Has there ever been such a tool? Ok, well writing is a tool for desigining tools. The notion of tool is a tool. Ok, so there are plenty. Programming is a tool for desigining tools *that can also desigin itself*. That's pretty neat: you can't make a pencil with a pencil. You can't make a typewritter with a typewritter. But you can make software tools with software tools.

However it doesn't feel like *the bootstrapibility of programming languages* is why I'm so passionate about improving programming tools. Let's flip the question on its head: am I more passionate about building better tools for programming than, say, science? Or better dinner table conversations? Or more logical thinking? Nope. I'm really excited about each of those problems. Maybe the dinner table one a bit less emotionally but not that much less. The only reason I was so excited about programming tools was that 1) they were problems I had, 2) they were problems my students had, 3) I knew how to code and would have fun solving them. I'm really excited about all tools for thought and how to really embed them inside of people so that people can *be* augmented, not just be augmented. 

Wait is that my crusade? *Be* augmented. The metaphor is that we are already the bionic man. We already have technology in our brains. We might as well optimize this software as best we can. And make the technology outside our brains optimal as well because that technology *exists inside our brains too*, just not phsyically. The metaphor for that is 1) my arm isn't "inside my body", but it's clearly me and 2) same goes for my clothes.

## Rest of today

I'm going to go workout with Sarah at a barre class now and then grab lunch. The idea this afternoon is to try my hand at another draft of my plan. I think I've got a good head on my shoulders about it this time. 

However, I think I'll probably want to come back to it after I finish the future authoring and get through my Bret Victor deep dive. Really, my plan seems like it might be done in time for the new year.

Author: Steve Krouse