Once again, the vomitout proved more difficult than I thought.  As I said on Tuesday, some of that came from new sources creeping into the work.  That’s not at all a bad thing, but one of the massive challenges of this project is reining in the scope.  Each of the 7 Problems could be a book in itself (or more! cf. Marx or Freud or Kant) so the challenge is to 1) say something interesting about each one and 2) not get bogged down.  It’s easy in these vomitouts to kind of skate over the material at what we might call the “Wikipedia” level of detail.  Nothing wrong with that except that people can just go look at Wikipedia.

Also, once again, the material was completely relevant to current events.  The talk about muckers this week jibed 100% with new (and newly senseless) mass attacks.  The talk about debt and debt forgiveness jibed 80% with our environment of trade wars and “nationalism”.

So that’s heartening in the sense that the project continues to seem very relevant.  If individuals applying a “self-improvement” narrative to themselves can improve our overall human performance on these seven hard problems, my work will have all been worthwhile.

A couple of comments and “likes” this week, as well, which is very heartening to me.  Please keep commenting!  I’m basically doing all this blogging in order to hear from you.