Followed back everyone who followed me on Keybase and everyone in the “suggested” list, plus some more random people. Wrote everyone. Got a few responses back! None of those have led anywhere, though.

Out of people I wrote to, some will try to get something out of me eventually. Which is great, because that’s how you get mutually beneficial transactions. Even better if they want to recommend me to someone else, as illustrated by a random quote from [wherever]:

[...] I realized the person I was speaking with could benefit from a contact of mine who could help the brand reach its target audience.

It was mutually beneficial, but when I expressed interest in connecting them, his reaction was, “What’s in it for you? Are you a consultant? What fees are you making from this?”

My answer was simple: It was valuable for me to have a strong relationship with both sides of the introduction, and connecting the two was the best way to do that.

Translation: “I wanted to get status by recommending you to that other person I know”. Please do.

Okay, enough of this. Next: onboarded our new hire Marko Dimjašević. He is way more careful and disciplined than I currently am, which is a) completely appropriate given that he’s a software verification and formal methods expert and I’m kinda not, and b) it’s also great for Monadfix and me personally because now I have to not look bad. It’s like wearing an invisible tie.

Watched another Peterson talk, see “Jordan Peterson: Who Dares Say He Believes in God?” for the details. Overall I can really recommend watching things for the sole purpose of generating prompts to think about. It’s, like, several stars out of five.

Abandoned the habit of not eating after 7pm because I was struggling with cheese-related theodicy: “if God exists and is good, why am I not allowed to eat a bit of cheese with my evening tea?”. Henceforth I shall be allowed to eat whenever – but if I’m hungry, it has to be a proper meal. And if I can’t make a proper meal out of eight curd snacks, well, tough luck. Also, cookies are still verboten because I’m trying to figure out whether all food stereotypes (“tasty things are bad for you” basically) are secretly true.

Hummus → spaghetti → glass noodles → vegetables → hummus was getting tiresome, so I bought some rice. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel here, I don’t know what I’m going to do if that turns out to be still not varied enough. Just kidding, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to suffer.

Finally, got inspired by the following highly inspirational quote and told somebody that they did something cool. Non-sarcastically even!

“Rationalists obviously don’t *actually* take ideas seriously. Like, take the Gratitude Journal. This is the one peer-reviewed intervention that *actually increases your subjective well being*, and costs barely anything. And no one I know has even seriously tried it. Do literally *none* of these people care about their own happiness?”

“Huh. Do *you* keep a gratitude journal?”

“Lol. No, obviously.”

— Some Guy at the Effective Altruism Summit of 2012