The Some Guy Post
Something to Introduce Myself to New Subscribers and Clear up my Background
In real life, I look like this but fatter.
As she is inclined to do, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber once again linked to my piece about my… I guess the term is “mystical experience” in this week’s edition of Substack Reads. I’m guessing you already know that, because about half my subscribers are now from that one piece. I hesitate to say more than I already did about the experience at risk of it becoming a “gimmick.” It’s one of those things that lives on an island in my sense of normality and is difficult to discuss naturally, although the birth of my child is only a short swim away.
I believe in God and now consider myself to be a Christian, if you are wondering.
I know it is helpful for people to read about experiences like mine, and that’s why I wrote it down. At its best the internet gives you little shiny things to collect like bits of ocean glass to sparkle up your life. I am happy if something I wrote served that function for you.
I was particularly interested in this description, however:
I have no idea who “Some Guy” is. Not a clue. But this quite lengthy piece of writing about his mystical (but be assured, not annoyingly religious) near-death experience is one of the most beautiful things I have read this year. It’s worth your time to read the whole thing.
I don’t think of myself as deliberately mysterious. There’s a very good answer to this question, though. I literally am just Some Guy.
I have no big secret identity you would find very impressive. Unless you were hardcore into blogs that college kids read in 2007 or super into horror stories on the internet several years ago, then I’m nobody particularly accomplished. Even if you had direct access to that stuff it would probably only elicit a “huh.”
Unless you count being a mid-level manager as a great accomplishment, then I’m pretty standard. I like to write and I have a few good stories, but most people do if you listen to them long enough.
Now, for the part where I’m going to partially disappoint you. The point of this substack is actually to get a company like Substack itself to build a news service I call a “Trust Assembly.” A Trust Assembly is a design I came up with to do a couple of things, but the first is to build an ultra-reliable news service that can help people coordinate on what is and isn’t true. That’s the number one thing I want to do. If I had to point to one single thing in our society that is the biggest problem, it’s that people don’t generally trust the news anymore. Beneath that, it’s the problem that depending on what you calls news, people really shouldn’t trust the news anymore.
At the same time, I realize a lot of people don’t want to read about that. So I’m doing a couple things. I’m writing biographical pieces like I did in 2007 that people will like so I can build up a readership. Other random pieces serve this same function. The rest of the time I’m posting about the Trust Assembly stuff in hopes that some of you will humor me.
At the end of the day, my hope is that either 1) substack feels enough demand signal from users that they think building something like that would be a good idea 2) I get enough followers that I can go and build it myself.
I think building this system is something I’m supposed to do, but I’m not trying to say I’ve been commanded by God to build it or anything. I’m not Noah. I think God wants me to build it in the same way he wants some people to be school teachers or doctors. We all have our talents and we’re supposed to use them for the benefit of everyone.
If you want some pieces to get started on here, then please use this as a directory.
Biographical Stories
The Deep South of the Pacific Northwest
A long piece about my hometown of Aberdeen, WA. If it seems like I have an unusual number of stories, it’s because I grew up here and there’s a sort of filtering effect that causes a lot of dysfunction to happen there. It also includes the story of my fourth grade teacher dying in the middle of class.
My Micronesian Stepfather was a White Supremacist Amateur Elvis Impersonator
The story is basically the title. Yes, he’s a real guy.
My dad thought I was gay for most of my childhood because I like math, science, and reading. This is the story of him finally confronting me about it because we got coffee one day and I pronounce caramel as “care-uh-mel.”
To Choose that Stars Redeem the Night
My best friend in high school was in a car crash. Again, because of the rain. Rain was the main antagonist of my childhood, if I really think about it.
This was previously in substack reads and hard to believe it’s been over a year. My cousin passed away and this isn’t eh story of his life. I loved him quite a lot. He had a bit of a lying problem, but he was still my best friend for a good chunk of my life.
My mother slept with my step-dad’s brother. Then he tried to strangle her. I talk about some political stuff in here but to my mind it’s not political once you accept the reality of how awful it is that we leave people to just go insane and die in the middle of the street. We should not do that because it causes really terrible things to happen.
Spontaneous Human Combustion and the Sex Colt Conspiracy
My mother got back together with my step-dad after he tried to kill her because it turned out his brother was boring and just wanted to do drugs all the time and didn’t want to murder anyone at all. Also, I meet a schizophrenic who believes that Illuminatus pedophiles are after him and then dies several years later by burning to death in a tent in the middle of a desert. Theme here is once again that maybe we shouldn’t let people who can’t really take care of themselves die in public.
I have panic attacks although much less frequently than I used to. This is one where I daydream about a sloth and then it dies, but really I was very sad about my grandmother passing away but didn’t know it.
I like to write. I have since I was a kid. I consider it more or less like my brain’s way of going to the bathroom.
Anti-Majestic Cosmic Horseshit
This one is the reason you’re here but in case this draws any new eyeballs, I was very depressed and sad after a break up and saw God by a canal. Yes, it’s weird. It probably changed my whole life, though. I stopped being bitter and angry afterward —except by force of habit because I didn’t want to let that stuff go even after I stopped feeling it— and started to realized how many of the things I didn’t like in my life were my own fault.
Trust Assembly Pieces
I wrote this as a comedy explainer of what a Trust Assembly is meant to accomplish. Basically honest news and good governance. This is one of those things where I’m really proud of it and zero people other than me like it, which is true of most of my stuff outside my biographical pieces.
How to Make an Information Super weapon
This is a very long piece about how a Trust Assembly could be used to make an ultra-reliable news service. Basically, let people follow people they believe in, hold everyone accountable, add reputation scoring to track success over time, throw in money to create positive incentives. This would feel a lot simpler to the front end user than it would to the architect who has to build all of this.
The Basic Things that Make Civilization Work are Good Actually
I lay out a lot of content moderation schemes here to balance “I should be able to speak my conscience” and “I like to shout racial slurs at strangers on the internet.”
Attention Epilepsy and Freedom of Speech on the Internet
Can we please stop pretending that mob justice is a really great idea?
Science Fiction Stories
I like to imagine people who make me feel inadequate, so that’s what I did here. A folklorist goes to Mars and feels inadequate.
A story about the future of Earth when a mankind wholly dependent on AI has to contend with it no longer being a trustworthy or reliable part of their everyday life. I need to finish this out before the year is over.
Random Essays
How to Become Insufferably Ambidextrous
I can write with both hands at the same time, in theory. Switching between left hand and right hand is easy. It’s one of those things you have to work at constantly but I can slip back into it okay. Also, it seems like if you play the piano you are pretty good at this as a side-effect.
I’m more or less a boring panpsychist, meaning I think everything is alive and has experience but in a very boring way that doesn’t have a lot of consequences. Like, my guess is that once you know this, fully deal with all the implications of it, you’ll not really do that much differently than you do today. For instance, I don’t think unless something has memory or the ability to communicate, that you really have to think of it as a moral entity. So grass isn’t screaming or crying at you when you go for a walk, for instance. Anyway, my guess is there is something like infernal experience and I explain what I think that means in this piece.
A Piece of the Thing is the Whole of the Thing
I speculate that what AI models do is basically find the “ness” inside of various patterns and we should go and create lots of data on purpose to build AI models to do human-shaped things.
We’re All a Dumbass to Someone
This is more or less my politics. I’ve been wrong before. You’ve been wrong before. I try to remember that as I think about things.
A heuristic for how I gauge what AI models will be valuable for the future. Lots of Data, Lots of Structure, Not Intuitive will basically feel like magic.
What Does it Feel Like to Be ChatGPT?
As a boring panpsychist I do think ChatGPT is quite interesting and is getting somewhat close to being a moral agent.
I was a journalist for 20 years back in the day when it was ethical and about its objective watchdog role to protect democracy. I left when newsroom conversations became about how to entertain people who don’t read. I have been in PR where at least I made a living good enough to put my kids into expensive colleges. I love that PR has an ethics code and most PRSA chapters now have ethic chairs on their board. I am that person for our local board, doing my part to inoculate against disinformation and misinformation (and yes there is a difference.) I am applauding your efforts!
The canal essay was...next level. Deeply appreciate your sharing. Shared w/a friend (neither of us is religious, fwiw) who said "one of the best things I've read all year". Yeah, for me too, buddy.
I believe most/all of us have something like this inside/available to us. But so few access it...thank Panem et Circenses and all that, right?
Pirsig took a different path through adversity and arrived at a deep integration in his 'travels'. It's the biggest gift you can get -- and it's 'free' (but you have to do the work to make it to Christmas, so to speak.)
Good luck with Trust Assembly. Sounds like Ground News. Sounds like what (Camus? Orwell?) wanted in the 50s for print newspapers -- and independent meta-paper that tracked opinions and leanings and omissions/commissions. People gonna want their Blue Rage Rag or Red Rage Rag at some point, but having a truly independent barometer of what's out there is harder. I'd put the Intel Community's curated work....dead last. (Sorry; a bit of red rage leaked in there....)
I've thought this was a 'media' problem for a long while but just recently realized I've been wrong. It's not the media that's broken ( it is, of course...) but our ability to critically think in a non-stationary environment where 99% of the time we have to trust others rather than directly/independently verify. If anything, the root deficit is in our education (wherever/however one gets that...)
Observation, open communication, adaptive thinking, and group trust come first. With, dare i say it (yes I do) a guiding faith of some kind. With those, one can protect oneself from many evils.