Today’s random pick of 3 of my 12 favorite problems:
- How do we save the world? How do we figure out what that even means?
- How do I care for my soul amidst systems that constantly repress it?
- How do I fully embrace being “good enough” while still striving to be better? How do I continue striving in the face of resistance without becoming jaded?
How interesting that these 3 were chosen today. I immediately felt a connection between 12 and 1+2. I’ve been thinking about 1 a lot because climate change, the harms that humans inflict upon each other and the earth, Israel and Palestine, mass violence. 12 is very connected to 2 in that caring for my soul involves embracing good enough. But settling for good enough isn’t what I want long term because having the impact that I want to have (FP7).
FP1 is really about utopia. Which makes it fitting that I chose to read an article from Elle Griffin’s The Elysian because the focus of her writing is about creating a more beautiful future with Utopian ideas.
When I subscribed to Elle’s newsletter today, I happened across Astral Codex Ten by Scott Alexander and was intrigued by his tagline P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary. I loved how his use of Bayes’ rule immediately signaled andd attracted a certain kind of reader. It made me think about having a similar sort of tagline.
As I looked through my 12 FPs again (and also because of this exercise of picking 3 randomly), I wondered about the extent of connection between them such that they could be distilled to one thing. Elle writes about utopia.
I thought about whether I could write about utopia too. But Elle (and others) are already doing it. I thought about the message from Write of Passage—write an essay that only you can write. And messages from earlier WoP Cohorts—the idea of a personal monopoly—my unique intersection of skills, personality, and interests. I do think about utopia in terms of creating a more beautiful world. Because of my lived experiences, I think about in terms of mental health, motherhood, friendship. Because of my profession, I think about it through data.
Maybe my Substack tagline could be something like: “Bridging the gap between n=1 and n→∞“. It would convey the statistician in me but also emphasize something that I’ve been wrestling with lately. Though I am a statistician, the power of individual experience is so profoundly powerful. I feel like individual experience is as often dismissed as biased as it is uplifted for being the epitome of truth. Because when we think about n>1 we start to lose sight of the personal. But the power of n→∞ is the understanding of phenomena on a more wide-scale scope in an amount of time that is actually manageable—as opposed to deeply understanding the individual n=1 for millions.
But there is some tension. Each one of those n=1’s is someone. With a story to tell that is as important as anyone else’s.
No one buys books
Elle’s goal in this article was to communicate the likely unsustainable nature of the publishing industry. She’s all for Substack and related platforms that allow authors to be more independent and more directly connect with readers (instead of a publisher as an intermediary). Most memorable points:
- Bestsellers are rare.
In my essay “Writing books isn’t a good idea” I wrote that, in 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies. That’s still the vibe.
- Publishers focus on celebrity books (which, while successful, flop often too), franchises (like James Patterson), and their backlist (old classics like LotR and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar)
- Publishers like when authors are already established (have an established audience, have resources like an editor, marketer) so that they don’t have to spend as much money on marketing. The big thing they pay for is an advance to authors, which for most authors is the only real money they’ll see for their book. (Advance = advance payment before the book is actually published, a promise to the author and a reflection of the publisher’s hope in the book’s success)
- Publishers have been trying to get more useful data from Amazon to figure out their strategy. Amazon could likely take over publishing if they really wanted to.
- A Netflix-like all-access subscription service for books would put the publishing industry out of business. While services like Kindle Unlimited and Scribd kind of come close, they haven’t made the biggest breakthrough because publishers prohibit their top authors from being on those services.
How did this article connect to my FPs for today?
- Saving the world…to me part of this is everyone not fearing to express themselves and having others who will listen. Publishing books hold the promise of exclusivity—only some succeed. But do you need to have a book published by a publisher to have your voice heard the way you want it to? For most people, probably no.
- Caring for one’s soul amidst systems that repress it: this question seems to relate to the valuing of publishing a book. Why do some people dream of writing a book? Because they want their voice to be heard, and publishing a book is uplifted as a pinnacle of success. Unshackling ourselves from these expectations can do a lot for caring for our souls.
- But even if books receded and platforms like Substack became the norm for publishing, the equivalent of the goal of publishing a book would be the equivalent of getting 1000s of subscribers.