About Scatterbrain

Hi, there. As of March 2025, this is my new blog.

I haven't blogged before, but have always enjoyed writing for myself. I've increasingly noticed an urge to write more, but haven't tested my writing in public before. I think this means I haven't really tested my writing at all! I'm going to try to write here whenever I can.

Part of my desire to participate in the Substack ecosystem is also because it is increasingly my favourite social medium. As I've grown less and less interested in X, I've spent more and more time here. I think Substack is for me what Facebook has been for a fortunate few (but never for me): longform social media. Sign me up.

I also like that Substack is simple. Messing around with my own website, it's too tempting to customise everything. To create funky styling and features like I'm some kind of Gwern or Andy Matuschak, but — alas — I am not. And all that front-end fiddling is just a distraction from writing. I'd rather focus on writing for a while. Maybe when (or if) I have a more established writing practice, I will set aside more time for design.

So, what will this blog be about? I bit of everything, I expect. I've called it "scatterbrain" for a few reasons:

• First, I'm fascinated by brains and minds. This will come across sooner or later.

• Second, we're all scatterbrained.

  • Attention: For many of us, attention is daily shattered and scattered. It's easy to be overwhelmed by the flood of information to which we all have around-the-clock access (or, rather, which has access to us).

  • Complexity: The modern world is highly-complex, delicately-interacting, and changes at a dizzying pace. Even if our media environment were more salutary, understanding the world is still an immense task. Spare a thought for all those international relations experts who must now grapple with AI hardware supply chains, or all those art theorists who must grapple with the aesthetic merits of TikTok videos, or all those economists who have to now integrate algorithmic stablecoins with traditional monetary policy.

  • Collective Intelligence: Even in so far as our information economy is healthy, our information media are increasingly fragmented. Where someone may once have found the best journalism in a local newspaper or a small number of focal national and international publications in the bygone era of print news, I'm increasingly finding the best journalism is only-online, some of it even here on Substack. As such, our collective intelligence (our shared scatterbrain) is changing in interesting ways.

• Third, I'm scatterbrained.

  • I'm an epistemic and cognitive mess! I'm by turns inattentive, confused, misinformed, uncalibrated, mixed up, and distracted. I'm increasingly overwhelmed by the world's problems, and the world's complexity. This is the downside of scatteredness.

  • I am fascinated by almost everything! I am sure that, in the fullness of time, I will touch on philosophy, psychology, science of various kinds, AI, art and aesthetics, literature, history, politics, and more. And I may write about myself and my life too. I'm also interested in connections between disparate topics, in interdisciplinary integration, in consilience. This is the upside of scatteredness.

  • Sometimes I enjoy my scatteredness; sometimes I curse it! This blog will sometimes be an exercise in expression, sometimes an exercise in clarity. It may be personal, polemical, instructional, parenthetical, or pointless. However it turns out, I hope it will bring someone else some value or satisfaction.

• (And a bonus: "Scatterbrain" is the title of a great Radiohead song which captures some of the queasiness I feel so often these days, which may leak from my writing.)

Thanks, enjoy.