Wednesday, January 26, 2022

News: 26 January 2022

Over the last month, I wanted to get work done on the Bible project and MSLN book. But some things came up and I found it hard to get into a good workflow for those projects. I did do some good work for the MSLN book one day.

I did get some thinking done about the Bible project. I realized there was a significant "bug" in my process so far (which I had left off at the beginning of Exodus). I missed a couple of important dimensions to the question of how to ask who God is, the question I've been pursuing in the first pass of the Bible project. So now I realize I need to think of some way to make sure I have a good set of sensitivities before going forward. I don't want to get to the end of Revelation and realize "I should have been looking for X the whole time." It might happen but I want to do what I can to prevent it.

I thought about trying to come up with a philosophical account of what goes into who a person is. That's not an easy task, at least it doesn't seem so at first. Another approach is to go through Genesis and try really hard to think of different dimensions to who God is as I go through it. Then take a break. Then go back and do it again. Until I'm not getting anything new. Perhaps I will pursue a mixture of the two approaches.

Unrelatedly, I also thought of a way to improve my overall project (a better plan of action for the Bible project).

It's tricky managing this project because I don't think there's a formula for how to work. Should I push ahead? If I were really good at that, I might miss some of these improvements in "how" I do things. (I might get so far in I can't change to accommodate them.) I might excel at "that" I do them but have a worse final product. But if I don't ever push ahead and get things done, no final product will result.

Some of the time this last month I was working on computer maintenance. It's an interesting perspective to compare ideas to computer programs. Also, thinking about analogies between computer security and "mental security" (an analog of "mental health" or "mental strength"). I was struck by how when I looked in my virtual private server's logs, there were a lot of login attempts by bots that were just trying to see what would work (guessing passwords randomly). (This is typical for VPSes.) By analogy, things try to gain access to your mind and control you, like advertisements or attacks from the spiritual world. They are low-level and pervasive like the bots. And there's something cheap and dumb about them, like bots guessing passwords randomly -- "seeing whatever works".

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