About

Welcome, and thanks for stopping by!

The View from Afar is a blog in which I post a smattering of ideas, reflections, philosophical musings, book reviews, poems, and other miscellaneous writing.

Short Q&A:

Q: Who are you?
A: I'm Alexander. You can find more about me on my personal website.

Q: What's in the name?
A: "The view from afar" is the name of an imagined blog I dreamed up back when I was in my early teens. It represents the process of taking a step back from from the first-person perspective in which you spend most of your life; "zooming out", so to speak; and looking at the world again from a much different and often unexpected vantage point.

Q: Why do you make your writing public?
A: As a motivation to write more often, to have handy links to send people, and so curious people can read it and disagree with me.

Q: How did you make this site?
A: See this document for some of my design philosophy and source structure.

Q: You mentioned that you wanted people to critique your ideas. Where should we do this?
A: A form is coming soon! For now, email me at chinalexan at gmail dot com with any thoughts, no matter what they are.

Q: Why don't you spend more time polishing your writing?
A: I wish I could! There are two main obstacles:
- I am a hopeless perfectionist, and nothing is ever "good enough." If I ever open the door to polishing something, said thing is never getting done, guaranteed.
- Re-drafting is one of the more time-consuming parts of writing. At this point, I think I think it's better to focus on just writing more things.

Q: For some strange reason, I like reading your stuff and would like to read more of it. What should I do?
A: Thanks! I have a mailing list here, though I give no guarantees on temporal consistency of communication.

About the blog:

The written word is an amazing tool. It's one of the best inventions of the past four thousand millennia, to be sure. The superpower it gives us is temporal coherence of thought; with writing, you get to spread out your ideas across time, where future you is freed to critique the ideas of past you. This not only enables long-term information storage, but it also enables dialogue with the self. In this sense, writing is as much of a tool for thinking as it is for communication.

When it comes to ideas, reflections, and philosophical writings, my philosophy is simple; write often, write wrongly (often), and expose ideas, especially the ones you most believe, to vigorous criticism by both yourself and others. Ideas are antifragile. They need exposure to become stronger. Trying to refute a good idea is paradoxically one of the best things you can do to make it better.

This blog is not static, and at no point do I expect it to be "complete" or "polished." As a perfectionist, this is a mistake I've made many times in my life, and it invariably leads to not getting things done. Again and again I've found that when it comes to producing things, it's a much better strategy to prioritize quantity over quality. The goal of the blog is first and foremost a thinking tool, a way to develop ideas that stand up to inspection both from myself and others. To any claims of quality, accuracy, or originality - I hereby renounce you!

When an idea has been brewing in my mind for a little while, it often finds itself on paper. This is a process that occurs in bursts and starts; I do little proofreading or editing after-the-fact. Perhaps this will come later, if I ever decide to publish something. The ones that I think are worth elaborating on are called "sketches" - they come in PDF form for your convenience. The ones that I jot down quickly can be found in "idea garden"; essentially a mega-doc for half-formed ideas and a collection of hooks for ideas I'd like to continue exploring. The hope is that they will grow, with time.

I am a big believer in epistemic humility. I don't think there should be a single belief you hold that you have no possibility of changing. This is as true for the ideas in this blog as it is for anything else. To that end, please do not conflate the tone of my writing being matter-of-fact with the ideas themselves being matters of fact. Much of the time my writing is exploratory; it elaborates on ideas I believe to be true. If you disagree, you should tell me why, and I may very well change them.

I try to write my ideas, like any good philosopher, as if I know them to be true. To this, I say (and I hope you remember it whenever you are reading my writing, or anyone else's, for that matter): do not mistake confidence in writing style for accuracy of thought! Keep your mind open, but don't lose your critical eye.

This site is also a repository for more creative writing, like poems. I've been experimenting more with poetry recently. Please feel free to let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Alexander