Working Notes: Current Working Notes These notes are the contents of a whiteboard in Tinderbox that I'm using to map out my (more . . .)

The Material World: The world that I was taught to work in as a scientist was purely a material one. There is direct (more . . .)

Models and Truth: William James, "Pragmatism": "True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify," "Truth happens to an idea. (more . . .)

About this site

Essays

Current Working Notes

My personal website is at ODBlog . I write about decision theory at my site On Deciding . . . Better . This site is a hyperlinked set of essays using Tinderbox.

Syndication available

My original idea for this site never went anywhere. On the one hand, I wanted to create organized content and on the other I had a time ordered scrolling weblog. The hierarchical content was pushing me to write basic encyclopedic entries that the weblog seemed to comment on.

Then some postings about using Tinderbox as a whiteboard gave me an idea of how to write short journalistic entries that I could collect and edit into longer pieces, slowly building something larger. On the net, the larger document becomes a hypertext document. On my computer, I've got a whiteboard with the pieces on it.

The reason the whiteboard seems to work is that I can see the titles of all of the components at once in a map view. Outline views, whether a conventional outline or a mapped outline don't easily allow me to look as broadly.

It looks for a while I'll try exploring my current big idea and see where it takes me. I assume that my reading will strongly interact with the writing here.

Copyright 2003 by James J. Vornov