A year in the Stacks

Reflection, round-up, and plans for a glorious future

I started publishing regularly on Substack in January. Since then there have been 44 posts, 24 non-fiction and 20 fiction.

The goal was to write roughly twice as much fiction as non-fiction. That didn't happen. But 24 weeks of fiction is 24 more than any other year, so, yay.

How did it go? And what happens next?

I think I have managed to build up a small band of loyal readers.

It's hard to interpret stats on how many people read each article — how many people clicked, but got no further, and how many people clicked multiple times, and how well the algorithms identified all those distinctions — but I'd guess that at least fifty people read every article I publish¹. In any kind of measure that's a small number. But it is also at least fifty actual people. The nice thing about fifty actual people is that it's a number I can visualise. That's a room of people. It's a room of people who are happy to tune in every week and read what I write. Wow.

So — thanks to all of you. I appreciate it.

I might sometimes forget you're there, because you're very quiet. That's fine. It would be lovely if you said hello occasionally, and left a comment, and I'm told that if you engaged in the whole “like” and “share” thing that would be very useful for accelerating my inevitable fame and glory, but I understand if you want to just sit quietly. I've trained myself into the habit of giving everything I subscribe to and read a “like” and a “share” — after all, I bothered to subscribe to it, and I read it every week, so that must mean I do objectively like it, and I'm happy to do my little bit to help out the writers. Every so often someone I subscribe to writes something that I really don't like, and then obviously I don't pretend that I do like it, but that's rare... otherwise I wouldn't subscribe to them! But, Ok, I've trained myself to do that just because I know how nice it is to see some “likes” and “shares” of my own pieces.

If this happens to inspire you to start a miniature promotional campaign for this publication, here's a short summary of some of the things I've put out this year, for you to advertise (there’s also a Table of Contents, for the full set):

On the non-fiction front there were many articles about the curious world of science. I wrote about consciousness and free will, prompted partly by reading Erik Hoel's recent book on consciousness research, and also by shock at how little progress that field of “science” has made over the last thirty years. If you're wondering about the scare quotes, read the articles I wrote about the nature of science: one on Kuhn's “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, and another on Errol Morris's exuberantly vitriolic response. I wrote a set of articles defending academia, and providing some modest advice for the aspiring academic scientist. I wrote about scientific expertise — surely the most wise and nuanced treatment of the topic of “experts” you will ever read! I even wrote an absolute thought-leader masterpiece of an article about the subtle beauties of uncertainty, as celebrated in this podcast.

I also, perhaps incongruously, wrote about Salman Rushdie and the tragically ridiculous controversy of his book “The Satanic Verses”. At the end I offered my case for why that article is not incongruous here at all: “If I am concerned with fiction and literature, and with science and truth, and with the necessary conditions for those to flourish, then this is a story that floods through all of them.” The ability, the desire, and the need to uncover the truth behind what happens in the world, and to make that truth widely known, is the engine behind all of science, and all of my other articles about science. Isn't it also, in a quite different and wonderful way, one of the motivations behind literature?

Speaking of which: I also wrote some stories! They were all about scientists. There was the revenge fantasy of the professor who applied for a grant to rub out a crackpot. There was the futuristic satire of a university physics department operating in a war zone. There was the hapless team struggling to complete a grant application. There was an elastic collision between an idealistic undergraduate and a jaded lecturer. Plus, a dash to the airport, and an exam nightmare.

That was this year. Now for the next.

While I am talking directly to you loyal few, let me tell you what I am vaguely potentially kind-of thinking of writing about next year, and you can let me know if that's what you'd like to see, or if you'd prefer something else.

Obviously I have ambitions for more fiction. That's definite. Words of encouragement and suggestions and advice are all very welcome. Vicious criticism not so much, but, Ok, you say what you've got to say.

On the non-fiction front (where it is frustratingly easy to have a lot more ideas), I have a few books I want to talk about. No. That's not true. At the moment it's just one book. After almost a year of psyching myself up for it, and then two months of ploughing through it, I have now read The Power Broker, which, like me, has just celebrated its 50th anniversary. As is common among its legions of readers over the past half century I am absolutely bursting with the need to gush about it. So that will be happening.

I also want to dig into the consciousness and free will stuff from earlier in the year. I read an article about free will by Tommy Blanchard over at Cognitive Wonderland, and had a bit of a Substack Notes discussion with him about “compatabilism”, which is the idea that determinism and free will are compatible. I've always associated the term with the kind of people who think that Christianity and evolution are compatible, i.e., intellectual lightweights, but of course this is a different idea. Not that that realisation helped me to understand it². Tommy directed me to a summary article, and I had that weird feeling that sometimes comes when reading about philosophy, where on the one hand I feel tantalisingly close to an epiphanous understanding of a great thing, and on the other hand, that I’ve become trapped in a vast bubble of intellectual farts.

That made me think: why is this so difficult to understand? Even if I am not a genius, unlikely as that may be, I am a reasonably intelligent person. Shouldn't I be able to make sense of this stuff? In fact, shouldn't most people? So I'd like to forge on and try to understand what these highfalutin philosophers are saying, and report back to the real world. Wish me luck!³

Finally, in reading back over the Kuhn/Morris pieces before re-publishing them, I was reminded just how much worse the attacks on science have become. In particular post Covid, even scientists seem to be on the back foot apologising for what they do. The old and rather dry “science is a social construct” line has been re-branded as the much more potent “all science is political”. Even scientists, on those occasions when they meekly try to defend themselves, bow their heads and accept this premise. Why can't they stand up and say, loudly and clearly and proudly, that it is bullshit? I think because it is one of those pernicious slogans that is so general that of course it also encompasses bits of truth. Scientists are human and the institutions they construct are human, with all the nonsense that inevitably entails; that's the bit of truth. But science, as an approach to understanding the world and uncovering how it works, is a fantastic and wildly successful tool. The people and institutions, for all their quirks, have been wildly successful at using it. That needs to be said more often, and more loudly, and more forcefully.

So that's something else I would like to write more about. As I noted in the last in my series of articles about free will, “There is a sizeable chunk of purportedly intelligent people who will claim, on the one hand, that scientific truths are purely subjective and socially constructed, but on the other that their favourite social and political causes are obviously, naturally, and unquestionably correct. Reality is the reverse.” Perhaps more needs to be said about that.

As I say, let me know which, if any, of these you'd like to hear about. If your opinion is, “None of this blowhard rambling — just write more funny stories!” then I definitely want to hear from you!

If you prefer to not say anything, and would rather just show your appreciation by signing up for a paid subscription, that's also very welcome.

Or, you know, just keep reading.

See you next year!

1. The stats tells me it’s more, and sometimes a lot more. I prefer to err on the side of caution.

2. One of my strongest memories from the one Introductory Philosophy class that I took as an undergraduate is my tutor explaining, “When a philosopher says they don’t understand another philosopher, what they really mean is that they don’t agree.” I think of that every single time I have to admit that I don’t understand something. No-one can really be sure if I’m actually confused, or just being a badass.

3. This is partly the territory that Tommy covers, so maybe I should read his back catalogue first. I just hope that doesn’t lead me on a wild goose chase through other publications. As a modern-day Satre would surely say, “Hell is other people’s philosophy Substacks.”