isaaclewis

[isaaclewis]

Charlie India [2014]

Context: these are notes for a set of ideas I had way back in 2014 around building a higher-quality online community. Think a combination of Quora, Reddit, Lesswrong and Stack Overflow, focused on a high-quality "community of communities", high-quality online writing, and high-quality discussions. "Reddit for Grownups" was the snappy one-liner I had in mind. I was 24 years old when I wrote the below. Remember that all of the below was written before "cancel culture", the intellectual dark web, Gamergate, tpot, Gab, Parler, Substack, SlateStarCodex in the NYT, and all the other events of the online culture wars of the second half of the 2010s. My biggest regret in life is not building and launching an MVP for the below ideas. Written: Jan - May 2014. = = =

PROJECT: CHARLIE INDIA

1. Essays

2. Community

3. Platform

4. DAC

Essays

0. Stare into the Void

My ruling principle: serve the world.

Because I live on planet 3 of our solar system, the best way to serve the world is to serve humanity.

Everyone is constrained by their own skills and resources.

This series should be useful and inspiring to anyone in a similar position to me (young, technical).

This series of essays will lay out a product vision.

The goal of starting with a vision is to attract fanatical followers.

1. Building the Global Brain

There are numerous existential risks facing humanity.

One of these existential risks is the singularity.

Another set of existential risks arises because humanity is uncoordinated.

The global brain is both an alternative to the singularity and the means to coordinate humanity.

The global brain consists of the technologies which enable communication and collaboration, and enhance intelligence.

2. Mind Control

Social power arises from physical power, leveraged by techniques to influence/manipulate other humans. In other words, mind control (in the broadest sense).

There are three main forms of power and three power networks: condign (political/military), compensatory (economic) and conditioned (religious/ideological/cultural).

Three dynamic, self-modifying power networks emerged in medieval Europe: democracy, capitalism and science.

But these have ossified into party politics and bureaucracy, consumerist crony capitalism, and Cathedralised academic science.

The printing press enabled the original 3 networks by improving information flows. The internet can do the same. City states and online communities. Bitcoin, distributed autonomous corporation and startups. Rationalists, red pills and the global brain.

3. Free Speech and Free Thought

True free speech is an impossible condition, because not everyone can have the audience they want. Vulnerable to other forms of power.

But determining the reason for wanting free speech helps to determine what form of limited speech is desirable.

Information and communication flows have shaped the development of society and the course of history.

Free speech skewers sacred cows.

Therefore, the purpose of free speech is to ensure that true and beneficial memes spread, and that false and harmful memes are debunked.

To have free speech, you need a printing press. With the web, everyone has a printing press, but not everyone has an audience.

Your thoughts are important, so people will invest great resources in controlling what you think.

The best way to spread propaganda is to describe in detail the enemy’s propaganda, and feign being edgy and fashionable.

Looking at other cultures or past thinkers can illuminate help you see your own matrix.

The platform should ensure people’s ideas reach the right audience.

The platform should have a respect for truth and rationality baked in.

But should also account for different opinions on the foundation for rationality. (or maybe not)

4. Why Blogs?

The platform will amplify what already exists in the blogosphere.

Blogs are mistakenly seen as trivial. Blogs: personal essay sites.

Books can spread ideas that change your life. So can blogs.

Examples: Lesswrong Sequences, pg’s essays, Peter Thiel’s startup notes, Moldbug.

Existing communications platforms either turn into fashion/popularity contests (Twitter, Facebook) or are too weird or lowbrow to achieve mass appeal (Reddit, 4Chan, Lesswrong). Quora (too groupthinky), HN (too niche) maybe good middle grounds.

Many existing blogospheres consisting of small communities of people sharing and debating ideas.

The platform should amplify this existing trend.

Content marketing often more successful than social media marketing, so potential for ways to make money.

5. Additional thoughts:

5.a. Intelligent Communities

Innovation has generally increased with the concentration of the smart people.

For example, innovation clusters in history.

This works at many scales - from small mastermind groups and clubs to civilisations.

The internal structure of the group matters: it should have a hierarchy, but it should have the right hierarchy.

No hierarchy leads to crowdpleasing, demagoguery and posturing. The wrong hierarchy leads to inferior people lording it over superior people.

Smart people deeply want to meet and work with other smart people.

The platform should encourage a culture of deep thinking, civilised debate, and open-minded skepticism.

5.b. Influencers considered harmful

Influence is the wrong model to use.

It assumes people are not rational, and ideas only spread because they are espoused by famous people and optimised for virality.

Assumes people believe things based on their relationship with who they heard it from, not truth.

Still, the platform needs to appear ‘high status’: think New York Times, the Guardian, to a lesser extent Wikipedia.

5.c. The Future of Online Communities

We’re still in the early days of the web!

If you see the web as a technology, then it’s fair to presume the possibilities will be exhausted soon.

I see ‘the website’ in the same category as ‘the novel’. The space of possible apps delivered via HTML, CSS and Javascript is still massively unexplored.

There may be decades or even centuries more of improvements to go. As long as humans exist, it’s unlikely there’ll be an overwhelmingly better format that: rectangular screen + touch/mouse/keyboard input.

Our existing online communities will seem laughably barbaric and crude to people in the future - like the social structure of an iron age hill tribe does to a functioning modern democracy.

Things like trolls, sockpuppets and human flesh search engines might seem cruel and pointless to future generations, like lynch mobs or witchhunts do to us.

Thoughts to explore

Attention as a property right

Direct control of other’s thoughts

State -> Law -> Democracy

Trade -> Money -> Capitalism

Communication -> Writing -> Science

Argument mapping is not likely to be the right approach. People committed to having good arguments won’t need it.

Real solution: let people fight for their viewpoint, in such a way that truth is the winner

Most collective intelligence solutions are too fancy.

The best technology for argument mapping is: the essay.

The best tool for understanding the universe is: the individual human mind.

The noosphere is people exchanging ideas for how to improve their own rationality and cultivate their own minds.

There is no such thing as collective intelligence, only well-organised groups. This requires dedicated, rational people, and savvy leaders.

Design thoughts: it’s all about discrete groups. Think WhatsApp vs Google Plus, or Reddit vs Quora

Appendix A:

Identify secrets: statements which are true, useful and not widely believed.

Be frighteningly ambitious: build something which could be extremely useful to an extremely large number of people.

Go deeper: revolutionise how things are done by thinking from first principles.

SECRETS

The normal prejudice of “worthy projects” is matter -> computation -> communication -> information.

E.g: hardware/robotics -> algorithms/data mining -> ‘social’ -> storage

The reality is the opposite.

Google provided an extremely simple interface to the unstructured information on the web.

Wikipedia provided a reasonably high baseline standard of information for most topics.

Twitter provided a global real-time chatroom.

Reddit provided a number of communities with a reasonably high standard of member rationality.

Quora provided a community with a very high standard of member rationality.

WISHLIST

A community of the most intelligent people.

A reference of the most trustworthy information for commonly misunderstood topics.

Resources for people who wish to improve their own thinking skills.

A compendium of topics which mainstream academia gets wrong.

- gather the smartest minds

- identify truth and misinformation

- recursively-self improving community

- facilitate collective intelligence

- amplify the nascent collective intelligence of the blogosphere

Further Thoughts (31st May)

Sections 1, 2, and 3 above still make sense, 4 is a bit of a non-sequitur.

Consumers are the wrong segment to focus on - it’s easier to encourage new behaviour via B2B (incentives are stronger).

What is the ultimate goal of the economy? Seems like it should be B2C. But maybe this is a simplistic view of human nature and what humans want.

In a liberal society you can work out for yourself what you want - often people want to contribute towards building something lasting.

So people don’t pursue their careers just to afford nicer lifestyles or build B2B companies just to support the hedonistic B2C industry.

“collective intelligence” one of the interesting ideas above.

Re: idea spreading - what would be valuable is tools to ensure our collective models of the world are more accurate. = = = [Comment as of June 2023: the full story around why I did not build the above has a messy version and a simple version. The simple version is that I did not prioritise building an MVP and had an internal knot based on a conflict between "being lean" and "building a vision". The messy version is long, complicated, embarrassing to share, and involves a major falling out with two former "friends" of mine and years of dark thoughts, frustration and humiliation. A story for another time, perhaps.]

[isaaclewis]

Note: Ideas for Serious AI Projects

Context: like everyone on the planet I've been thinking a lot about GPT recently. I still harbour some smouldering but powerful ambitions to build something revolutionary in technology. The below were just some "notes to self" -- I didn't intend them to be comprehensible to other people, but someone might find them interesting.

Original creation date: 14th June 2023 = = = Two + one main directions:

AI-powered research tool

AI-augmented online communities (focus on knowledge and goals)

Combination of the above two

If I do this, better to pick one, and then expand

Try writing complex app with clean, well-organised architecture, solo, writing code with GPT

(I believe I could write a reasonably polished, decent web app in about 1 or 2 weeks of full-time, focused work)

Discord, Reddit and Twitter all have issues — time to start work on a new, high-quality community site with excellent knowledge-management features?

High-level ideas: where is GPT likely to go?

More resources

More sophisticated algorithms

More plugins

Better prompting techniques

Better integrations

Key challenges: high-level work (work that involves integrating lots of smaller tasks, like combining articles into a book, or scripts into a complex application architecture)

Converting information to knowledge (sources for information, epistemology, proofs, evidence for controversial claims, competing theories and models of the world, and so on)

Personal transformation, identifying high-level goals, why was blogosphere [1] my #1 project? Creativity, something cool people would use, perhaps an “in” to cool, adventurous circles

Previously I would have said “oh that’s second-handedness” [2], but now I realise that that’s more an example of genuine selfishness, ie, pursuing my own goals, values and needs (eg socialising with interesting people and doing cool things in my free time)

Relaxing more, solving issues, taking the load off my shoulders, empowers my creativity and courage that I know how to solve problems

Mindset: am I being “paid” [3] enough for this? What is the “market rate” for this level of energy, intellectual effort and dedication?

I’ve had a weight on my mind (or shoulders) for years — so long I didn’t even consciously notice it — feeling it lift off me is liberating. I finally feel as though I can make progress again! I can do things again! I can live again!!

Other ideas:

Using AI as a “Trojan horse” to bring in better organisation techniques (as found in The Goal, anything else?)

Relates to better knowledge management = = = [1] "Blogosphere" was a startup idea I had years ago -- broadly to build a combination of Quora, Reddit, Lesswrong & Stack Overflow, a "community of communities" for high-quality online writing. I never worked on this (for many long, complicated and messy reasons), but in my mind it was always "the one big idea that got away". Notes for the project. [2] See this. [3] By "paid" I mean: will a project that requires this level of commitment give me enough of a personal reward to be worthwhile?

[isaaclewis]

Interesting Links [June 2023]

David Chapman on academic fields as social clubs (unrolled version)

It’s easy to assume that, if there’s an academic field named after some phenomenon, the people in it are doing whatever can be done to discover things about that phenomenon, and everything known about it is taught in that field. This is rarely true.  Academic fields are social clubs operated for the benefit of insiders. Field founders want to claim as much territory as possible, so they name the field after some broad phenomenon. And then… Outwardly, an academic field claims as much territory as possible, but inside, it narrows its scope to a particular subset of phenomena, and methods of treating them, which allows it reduce the work to a safe routine of minimal-publishable-units production.

Phrack Magazine article "World News" [2012]

It all comes down to knowledge. Knowledge cannot be obtained by believe. Believe is a really bad substitute for actually knowing. And what is the hacker community other than first and foremost the quest for knowledge that you found out yourself by critically questioning everything put in front of you. What you do with that knowledge is a question everyone has to answer himself. But if we stop to learn, experiment and play, we stop being hackers and become part of the masses. It is a sign of the times when only very few hackers speak IPv6, leave alone use it. When you see more fuzzers written than lines of code actually read, because coding up a simple trash-generator is so much easier than actually understanding what the code does and then precisely exploiting it. The quest for knowledge defines us, not money or fame. Let's keep it up!

The Modern Marauder [2005]

'Hacking' is not a modern game, it is a human instinct to test the rules that bind our world together. The basic driving instinct to see how things work and make them better. ... With this in mind, consider your origin... Contemplate on where you come from... And now... Forget it. We exist within our own would, a gray world where we all exist as equals with an equal goal. What is this goal you might ask? Knowledge. The one basic motive that drives any marauder is a need to feed. As the marauders of old, we also need to feed ourselves. Nourish our minds, and once all of our resources are gone we will move on. After all the secrets are discovered and all of the laws are written we will move on to the next fertile place. Now with this in mind: I suggest you think... Do you learn so that you can hack... Or do you hack so that you can learn...?

[isaaclewis]

Quote: The Hacker's Manifesto

A comment on Hacker News led me to 0xf.at, from there to hackthissite.org, and eventually to the challenges at overthewire.org. All three sites give you some kind of system (usually a website, in the case of the first two, or a Linux machine, in the case of the third) and challenge you to break in. A lot of fun and a good way to learn things like Linux, web security, forensics, and so on.

(The web challenges posed no obstacles -- mostly trying to figure out some '90s era Javascript or running SQL injection on a PHP script. Some of OTW's challenges, on the other hand, involved things like using gdb to identify the system calls in a compiled C program and finding the memory locations that contained the relevant password string.

[if the above is gobbledygook to you, clicking through to one of the first two sites above and trying to tackle one of the beginner challenges might be a good way to learn the basics of the incomprehensible machines that surround us. This should help you get started and Google can help if you get stuck.])

All in all, a good way to learn new things -- the original commenter said that he found "hackits" to be the most effective way to keep a class of rowdy teenagers focused on learning the fundamentals of CS and programming.

Anyway... while playing with the above I found myself reading some of the back issues of Phrack magazine, including the classic Hacker's Manifesto from 1986 (!) (context). Text below:

= = =

Another one got caught today, it's all over the papers.  "Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal," "Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering"…

        Damn kids.  They're all alike.

        But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950's technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?  Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?

        I am a hacker, enter my world…

        Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…

        Damn underachievers.  They're all alike.

        I'm in junior high or high school.  I've listened to teachers explain for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction.  I understand it.  "No, Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work.  I did it in my head…"

        Damn kid.  Probably copied it.  They're all alike.

        I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me…

                Or feels threatened by me…

                Or thinks I'm a smart ass…

                Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here…

        Damn kid.  All he does is play games.  They're all alike.

        And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found.

        "This is it... this is where I belong…"

        I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all…

        Damn kid.  Tying up the phone line again.  They're all alike...

        You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.  We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic.  The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

        This is our world now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.

You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

        Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.

My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

        I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto.  You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all... after all, we're all alike.

                               +++The Mentor+++

= = =

Curious, no? I think a friend and I read this in a .txt file when we were both about 13 (I was almost never allowed to use the internet at home ... he was already all over torrents and such things in the early '00s, and I used to hang out at his house where we could play with the computer unsupervised. Oh yep, I've just remembered, he was the person in our school who discovered The Anarchist Cookbook as well.)

Looking back on this: I can still relate to the mentality and to the overall vibe of the above, though not necessarily with the political ideas. I don't think the political ideas are fundamental, though. I think the essence of the mindset (and vibe) is this:

I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me…                 Or feels threatened by me…                 Or thinks I'm a smart ass…                 Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here…

Which suggests that the political beliefs and ideology are simply expressions of frustrated active minds trying to navigate the (largely) conformist, bureaucratic system they grew up in. Wanting to deal directly with physical reality, versus being forced to deal with an artificial structure created by the whims of others.

Speculation: there are some sociological, anthropological and cultural-historical* questions regarding the connections between the hacker culture of the '70s, '80s and early '90s, the early web culture of the late '90s and early '00s (typified by things like Napster, Mozilla, culture jamming and the like), and the culture of the second startup boom, beginning in the late '00s and continuing (in some form) until now.

*(Really {cultural,intellectual,ideological}-historical.)

In the case of the latter, I believe there was a fundamental cultural clash between entities like YCombinator, which (originally!) had fairly deep roots in the rebellious, piratical, outsider culture of the early internet -- and the more careerist, establishment, insider culture of the types of people who began to dominate the world of technology from the early '10s.

The latter group brought capital, connections, and masterful perception-management abilities. By the mid '10s, with their overall ascendancy achieved likely sometime between 2014 and 2016, they appeared to have suppressed and/or sidelined the rebellious types and their fundamentally unregulated* culture. *(See here: http://phrack.org/issues/69/16.html -- "Unregulated knowledge is pornography". That was the slogan of wargames.unix.se, an early hacking wargames community, and could be the slogan of various emerging groups I see in the world today.)

Or perhaps not. Maybe it was simply structural and economic issues that led to the cultural shifts in the startup world during the last decade.

(By economic issues I don't primarily mean things like the debate over wealth inequality, or government monetary policy -- though those things had a huge influence -- but more the prevalence of different funding models and corporate forms, and their effect on the agents who operate within those structures. The tension between bootstrapping and VC-funding is just the tip of the iceberg. Control of capital seems to lead to control of culture, and vice versa. There's a very deep -- and quite terrifying -- question to be investigated regarding which of the two had the most influence, but that is best left for another time. Still: whoever controls the capital controls the technology. Whoever controls the technology controls the world. The stakes are high!) At any rate, the world of technology appears to be a witnessing a nascent movement -- small, but growing -- back towards a more rebellious, free-spirited, system-breaking culture. This will be interesting to watch.

[isaaclewis]

Reply to a Facebook post

(Context: the original post was a discussion of a quote by Henry Poincare. "The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful." The OP held that this quote represented a "Platonist mindset", i.e., the idea that we pursue knowledge as an end-in-itself and not for any practical purpose. [If you read this as pursuing knowledge solely as an end-itself, and deliberately eschewing all practical purposes, then this is a bad idea for those who value the advance of industrial civilisation.] Someone else agreed and added "nature is not beautiful, it is messy". The below was my reply.)

Nature contains order, symmetry, organisation, patterns, structure. It follows laws and the laws create regularities. Grasping the recurring patterns in the world is pleasing to the mind, for a similar reason that grasping the patterns in a piece of music, or the shape of a beautiful building or car, is pleasing.

= = = = =

This post bugged me a lot; I thought about it a bit and I think I know why.

Anyone who is deeply immersed in their work (truly valuable work that they aim to do with a superlative degree of quality), at the times when they are immersed in their work, feels like *they are doing the work for its own sake*, and not for the benefit of others. The true craftsman wants to deeply understand his ideal user, but that is because his craft has to be closely fit to the needs of the (ideal) user, and not because he is doing the work for the sake of others.

People who are deeply immersed in truth-seeking work (like science) do so for the joy of discovery. E O Wilson (who, incidentally, Harry Binswanger knocked for his work on "sociobiology") described the "Ionian Enchantment" -- the discovery that the disparate phenomena in the world can be explained as the product of a small number of fundamental factors interacting. When Peikoff talks about cognitive "integration", he's clearly talking about something very similar. Maslow describes "intellectual peak experiences" encountered by those who make fundamental discoveries, and many others who do original work describe, in different forms, the experience of mentally rearranging elements into harmonious wholes, of identifying patterns, of successfully forming *gestalts*. All of this indicates a deep link between truth-seeking and aesthetic experiences.

This is equally true for people (like me) who work in more tangible fields. The joy of building something new is more closely tied to the excitement of anticipating the effects the new creation will have in reality, but it also stems from the mental activity of invention and creativity: of taking a high-level objective, breaking it down into lower-level pieces, rearranging the pieces, understanding sub-problems and solving them, repeating the process at lower and higher levels, etc.

People gain many different values from their work. It's difficult to tell a priori whether or not a given person is doing their work for the "right" reasons, or if they're just struggling to express overpowering emotions. Anyway, this is why I tend to avoid certain philosophical groups these days, and just try to explore reality directly, myself, without intermediating commentary. The fundamental ideas (reason, reality, etc) are rock-solid; the debates around those ideas caused me endless confusion for years, until I checked out and went my own way.

[isaaclewis]

What is this for?

This blog is intended to be a space where I can post half-formed ideas. I have reams and reams of notes in my Evernote (along with other writings scattered across a few blogs, forums and online communities) going back years.

Most are not publishable in the sense that I'd want to advertise them to the whole world; but most are still publishable in the more limited sense that I see no need to keep them private, and I'm happy to have them available in a public place for anyone who is curious.

I have procrastinated on "serious writing" (or at least "serious public writing") for years, so maybe this experiment will help me get into a more regular rhythm of writing, releasing and reworking* and enable me to build up momentum to tackle more serious writing projects.

*(see here: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/08/19/the-calculus-of-grit/)

It still feels slightly scary, like exposing pieces of my naked soul for the sight of the whole world.

=== To kick things off, here is an excerpt from one of my recent Evernotes, titled simply: "Writing 7th June 2023".

Context: I write many such philosophical notes-to-self; some of my more recent notes have been "pre-publishable" as I get back into an ambitious frame of mind and begin mapping out my future goals and objectives. This one is a set of integrated observations regarding several topics of interest.

===

Writing 7th June 2023

Rationality is the key. The people who have caused me the most grievous problems in my life were not, are not, rational. They did not actually know; they operated by gut instinct and intuition. *In certain domains*, their instincts may have been correct more often than not. But they could not validate them, could not prove them, could not distinguish cases where they led to truth, and cases where they led to falsehood.

Rationality is virtue. Virtue is strength. True strength integrates mental and physical strength; it is intelligence applied to action. Rationality, the systematic connection of one’s mind to reality, is the root of productivity, the reorganisation of the physical universe to create beneficial structures. Productivity, so understood, is the root of all success, wealth, and the progress of civilisation. If thought, production, and wealth are properly defined, then irrational beings cannot think, produce, or make use of wealth. Their minds are not connected to reality, they cannot create beneficial structures, and they cannot make use of these structures when they are brought into existence.

Properly understood, there is no breach between technological and intellectual work. Engineering is applied research; research is abstract engineering. This holds as true for research in the humanities as in the physical sciences. The humanities, properly understand, as the rational study of man and society, produce the knowledge that is integral to the creation of beneficial structures.

This insight was not clear to me eight years ago, and this was the root of my struggles. Had these insights been clear, my path forwards would have been clear. With these insights in mind, I could very quickly evaluate any system or structure, and determine whether it served my rational values. I could have explored the entire planet to find rational systems that would have served my immediate needs (reliable income, personal freedom, and the foundation for personal sovereignty and the realisation of my highest ambitions).

=== One small note & observation: I made one minor change to this before publishing it. In my private notes, the phrase "the people who have caused me the most grievous problems" was instead a different, shorter phrase, which revealed too much "shadow energy".

But the edited version is in fact closer to my actual thinking: my stated beliefs now more closely track my actual beliefs. My private notes do not necessarily reveal my "hidden, true self" -- not in this case, or in general. Writing things up for public consumption necessitates at least some reflection; experiencing a "sensed awareness" of the potential eyes on these words leads to a sharper awareness of the incongruences between my private and public personas, my inner and outer worlds.

Or, more simply. My private notes don't necessarily "reveal the truth"; the anticipation of hitting "publish" pushes me to pull out any lingering "lies-to-self".