A statement of intent

This domain was something else four days ago. I killed it on a Tuesday, and by Thursday it was this instead, which tells you roughly how much deliberation went into either decision.

The name stayed because I liked it more than the thing it was attached to. Equity is what's left over once everything owed against it is paid off. That's a useful idea to point at writing.

Most of what gets published has been leveraged to the hilt: optimised for search, hedged for reach, structured to keep you scrolling. Strip that out and see what's actually owned underneath.

Usually not much. That's fine; it's the honest number.

So this is a notebook that happens to be public. The entries will be about whatever system I've noticed I'm standing inside without having agreed to it. A habit that used to be a decision.

A default nobody set. A trade-off made years ago by someone who didn't know they were making it, who was me, and who left no notes.

I want to publish these before they're finished, which is the part I'm least sure about.

The argument for it: a conclusion handed over sealed is almost useless. You can't check it. You can't tell whether it survived contact with the obvious objection or whether the writer just never thought of it.

Writing that shows its working is more useful even when the working is bad, because at least you can see where it went wrong.

The argument against it, which I think is stronger than I'd like: publishing unfinished thinking is a very comfortable position to hold. Nothing can be checked against a standard because no standard was claimed.

Get something wrong, and it was a draft. Get something right, and it was insight. That isn't intellectual honesty, but an escape route dressed up as one.

I don't have a clean answer to that. The closest I get is that the discomfort has to be real. If publishing something half-formed feels safe, it probably isn't worth publishing. If it feels slightly exposing, that's the correct amount of exposure, and I should press send.

There's no schedule. No niche beyond what refuses to leave me alone in a given week. Entries will be short when short is honest and long when the thing genuinely takes that long, which historically has been less often than I assume while writing.

Some of what goes up here will be wrong. I'd rather find that out in public than keep it in a drafts folder, being wrong quietly, where it can't be corrected by anyone, including me.