sparr

Why write about a pattern without actionable followup?

A recurring topic in my writing is of the form “I have noticed a pattern connecting these seemingly disconnected things”, e.g. “X Y Z things are similar in A B C ways”. That's the whole premise, just identifying and describing the pattern, without explicitly proceeding toward any specific conclusion or actionable insight. Sometimes just that step will take hundreds to thousands of words, so I will stop even if I do already have those other steps in mind. Two of the items on my potential writing challenge topic lists have this same general shape. A friend saw that and seemed confused at the point of such a thing, hence this writing.

I have a few different goals when I write about a pattern. There are a few different implicit questions and goals and imperatives silently tacked onto the end of every such writing. When I read this sort of thing, I see these implications automatically, but apparently not everyone does. When I describe a pattern...

I am looking for agreement like “Yes, I see that pattern too” from people who have already noticed the thing. I seek confirmation that the pattern exists, and of my pattern-finding abilities. I am looking to add confidence to any of the actionable steps that might come next. I am trying to build rapport with you, my fellow pattern-noticer. I am demonstrating my competence on this front.

I am looking for disagreement like “No, you've misunderstood Y+C, it doesn't actually fit the described pattern”. My intention here is to correct my own misconceptions and mistakes (or, perhaps, yours). There is value in improving my pattern-finding abilities. I want to highlight that Y and/or C are some combination of the factors you're most aware of and the factors you care the most about, or the factors I'm least aware of, to inform our further conversation. I want to avoid making decisions about X+C based on my already knowing how to handle Y+C (or vice versa) if it turns out they aren't connected in the way I thought.

I am looking to educate, which might sound like “I didn't see that pattern before, but now I do”. I want for everyone else all of the benefits described in the previous two paragraphs. I want everyone to have a better understanding of the world, and to be better at evaluating it. I hope that this allows us or you to better collaborate, in general and especially on this specific pattern.

I am suggesting that insights and experience on one of the things might be relevant to the others, due to the pattern. “If you know know the failure modes of X, you might know some of the failure modes of Z, even if you've never tried Z”. I want feedback on that relationship, so that I and others can better apply our knowledge about Z to X and Y.

I am looking for insight into which aspects of the pattern are most important, in general and to the people around me. If 90% of the conversation is about specifically X+A vs Z+A, then I'm probably going to focus less on Y, B, and C in whatever I write or say or do next, or if I do focus on those things then it will be specifically.

I am telling you that, all else being equal, if you're approaching one of the things for the first time, that you should apply your knowledge of the other thing to that experience. “If you know that D is dangerous to X and Y, you shouldn't do D to Z until you've confirmed it breaks the pattern”. “You should assume the first step of building a Y is the same as the first step of building an X until you know otherwise”, “The biggest factor in the cost of an X is B, so you should consider B when valuing a Y”, etc. This “should” is stronger than the “suggest” in the previous paragraph; once I have pointed such a pattern out to you, you bear increased responsibility if you ignore that pattern in your decision making.

I'm sure that I have missed a few things on this list. It's hard to exhaustively enumerate my motivations for doing something that I do regularly. But that doesn't mean it's not worth trying! You can look forward to future posts in this month's writing challenge with working titles of “Why do I keep trying to make big intentional community projects happen?” and “Why do I keep writing about consent? (Rewrite)”.

We need a way to ask Maybe/No questions

There is a large gap in common vernacular English around things that look like yes/no questions but where the asker already knows that one of the two answers can't be certain in the current context. We have no way to concisely communicate that this is what we're asking, and so the person being asked is usually operating under the expectation of more certain yes or no outcomes.

This is especially true of licensed professionals who take on significant responsibility and risk when they answer questions in their field. Lawyers answering legal questions, Engineers asking safety questions, Doctors answering medical questions, etc. In typical conversation, these professionals will always expect that whatever answer they give you needs to hold up to professional scrutiny from all angles. We need a concise way to effectively convey the following sentiment:

“I know that this sounds like a yes/no question, because the ultimate answer will be yes or no. However, I am not asking you to distinguish between those two answers. I am asking you to instead distinguish between the easier of the two answers and the alternative that includes both the more difficult to determine answer and all of the uncertainty or lack of specificity in between.”

By way of a generalized example, consider the question “Is this course of action safe?”. This looks like a yes or no question, and the ultimate answer is going to be yes or no, for some specific version of the course of action and definition of “safe”, both of which might require further elaboration as part of the answer. This is often a rather difficult question for which to reach a “yes, it is safe” answer. That answer might require many additional details, research, calculations, etc, and those things might not be available easily or at all in a particular context. However, it is often a very easy question for which to reach a “no, it is not safe” answer. For those questions, it could be very useful for the asker to learn the distinction between “no” and “I don't know” / “It depends” / “Maybe”. They might be able to get a dozen answers of that variety with less effort on the other person's part than a single confident “yes” answer, and that could be a useful result.

It should be quick and easy to preface a yes/no question and indicate that you're looking for the easy answer or a maybe or depends, not the easy answer or the hard answer. Of course, the person answering can always decide to answer that way, but that's not the same as the person asking making it clear that they know up front that this is the type of answer they are expecting. We need a better way to ask this category of question. How would you approach trying to make this work more smoothly?

Lessons from Estate of Mind

I have learned a lot from fifteen years of organizing coliving intentional communities, none more so than my most recent project at Estate of Mind. Although it's not fully wrapped up yet, I think I can see all the plausible paths to the end, so this feels like a good time for at least the first iteration of writing down what I am taking away from this experience. Some of these are brand new discoveries, but most of them are things I had hints of far sooner that have more fully crystallized now.

If you are new to my posts and life, a quick summary... Estate of Mind (http://est8ofmind.com) was a 42 bedroom historic Victorian estate near Worcester MA USA, housing 15-20 full time residents and some visitors and volunteers. The community focus was on arts, makers, event hosting, and project collaboration. In the third year of the project a fire rendered the largest nicest building unusable, taking away half of our bedrooms and almost all of our function space. The community dissolved shortly thereafter. Wrapping that up is currently my full time job.

First and foremost, I am now committed to having a long financial runway for whatever I do next. The larger the project, the more important it is to be able to to be selective about people and opportunities in the early years. When I was putting four or five figures into starting a project, the possibility of it failing after a year didn't faze me. Move fast, break things, try again. Now that my personal financial investment is seven figures, and I am slowly running out of decades to try, I care more about longevity and certainty. When a project like this reaches the point of “we must accept the next income opportunity that becomes available (investor, renter, event, etc)”, it has already left the realm of safety and is probably on the way to failure. That point came about two years in at Estate of Mind. If I had this to do over again, I would commit slightly less of the total budget for the initial outlay and ongoing expenses, with a larger buffer for unexpected expenses and drops in income, to push the plausible uncertainty out a few more years.

Almost as important, I won't do this again without a solid legal plan for removing problematic participants. On the one hand, I love blue states. I want everyone to have the social safety net that comes with a progressive political atmosphere, in terms of healthcare, food security, political representation, etc. On the other hand, MA and CA are havens for professional tenants who cause a variety of problems for years with no recourse for the people stuck with them, and that's even if you ignore the tens of thousands of dollars of financial loss. I have seen this failure mode from afar many times, but this was my first time experiencing it first hand. My next project with a coliving component will be organized in a way that eliminates this possibility. That means either moving to a red state, or adopting the structural framework of either an educational or secular religious institution, although I am also investigating other options. Both of those paths are compatible with my other large scale goals of community, project collaboration, economy of scale, events, shared interests and passions, etc. I was very excited when I organized a tour of intentional communities across the US in 2024 and found a significant fraction of the longest lived ones used one of those two institutional models.

With over 50% compliance to our best attempt, the efforts here to design a large scale household chore system went better than most I've seen, but still not what I would call a success. Allowing people to choose their own chores worked well. Ditto for reserving particular chores weeks to months in advance for people who want a reliable schedule and level of commitment. We also saw positive effect from making an explicit checklist for each chore. All of those are features I would replicate next time. Where the system here fell down was not having any effective enforcement mechanism, and not having a way to prioritize or incentivize chores that were falling behind schedule. Those are where I would focus my efforts to improve in the future.

The scale of the property was nice, and we made good use of a bunch of amenities we wouldn't have had on a smaller property. This project has reinforced my feelings about economy of scale; more people pooling their resources can get far more than proportional benefits in the amenities they share. Having large indoor event/activity/craft spaces was great. Having large clear and forested outdoor spaces was great. I would do all of that again, even larger if possible.

The location may have spoiled me. Just looking for properties this big is already a strong filter. There might be just a few dozen on the market across the country at any given time, and far fewer once price becomes a factor. So, within that context, being able to walk to town amenities (post office, bank, mechanic, salon, diner, sushi, etc etc etc) was not at all on my bingo card when I was searching five years ago. These sorts of things are a given when searching for a home in a city or town, but I assumed they were not possible when looking for something big. Now that I know this particular combination of size and location exists and this one has prompted me to find other examples, it's going to be hard to consider going back to less.

Having multiple buildings and segregating people based on some lifestyle choices and needs worked pretty well, and I will almost certainly do that again. The three categories here were “has a pet”, “willing to trade noise and temperature comfort for a room in the beautiful building”, and “everyone else”. I am already planning similar divides around pets and loudness in my next project, with another potential category for families with children.

In my 20s, I was a stickler for the exact wording of contracts. There might have been five years where I didn't sign an agreement longer than a sentence that I hadn't amended. Society beat that out of me in my 30s, as longer and longer boilerplate contracts came into my life, and that bit me hard here. I've lost about two years of my life to taking bad advice from some professional agents about how everything will turn out fine if I just go with the flow and do things how everyone else does them. I won't be making that mistake again.

On more personal notes... This has been yet another experience cementing my preference to live with a romantic partner where we both have private personal space large enough to share when we choose and far enough apart to not feel overwhelmed when we need time to think. Especially with enough common amenities that we can have guests that aren't compatible with each other, socially or otherwise. I remain confident that I want to live my life surrounded by like-minded people who regularly build things and teach classes and host parties. I have a better understanding for my comfort level in risking my life savings toward a large project.

Once things are fully wrapped up here, I'll probably write something with a bit more scope and reach, covering not only these lessons but integrating them with all the things I already knew from previous projects. I might write it with the intention of reaching new coliving organizers, or perhaps as part of the planning for my next project. I'm looking forward to what comes next. I anticipate putting all this experience to good use, hopefully for the benefit of many people. Wish me luck!

Legal Situation Update

Most of my writing challenge days will be journal or article style. Since I spent most of the day in court, today you're getting an update on my legal and financial situation.

First, the big lawsuit preventing the sale of the Estate of Mind property, my home. Lee Jundanian['s LLC] is still suing me, still blocking any other sales. His best settlement offer so far is about a million dollars less than our contract price, which is about a million below the current market value of the property. I've offered about halfway between the contract price and the current market value. We're currently scheduled for trial in September, but he has moved for another delay. I have in-progress motions to kick Lisa out of the case, split the case into separate judge trial and jury trial halves, reconsider my denied motion for summary judgment.

If I get everything I claim he owes me, I'll get to sell the property to new buyers later this year at the market value, and his LLC will owe me six or seven figures. I doubt I'll ever be able to collect on that, but it might be worth putting some of the sale money toward a lawyer to pursue it. If he gets everything he claims I owe him, he'll get the property for free and I'll owe him an additional six figure amount. This seems extremely unlikely, but stranger things have happened. This is really the only outcome that might lead to me declaring bankruptcy. Assigning probabilities to all the various outcomes, my current EV from the case is to pay off my debts and come out $1.1M ahead (not counting the value of the last two years of my life), ten months from now.

So far the most insightful advice I've gotten on the merits of the trial is one person who has given me a pretty detailed breakdown of how Lee might win by making me look like an asshole to a jury, so much so that they ignore all of the legal aspects of the case. I have him dead to rights half a dozen different ways on the merits, and even if he was planning on me being an awful lawyer two years ago I'm at least slightly better at it now, so this could be his fallback plan. I've started to plan for this eventuality, but there are still so many unknowns (e.g. many of his witnesses don't even know they are on his witness list yet).

The manor continues to deteriorate; even the most optimistic outlooks (including mine) don't expect it to be repairable any more. There are still some components that could be saved, like windows and fireplaces, but less of that every year. I still spend a full time job worth of effort as a caretaker of the property and an amateur lawyer. I don't have enough extra time or mental energy to get a new job after the sale falling through cost me my last one. I found an old retirement account that should cover my expenses for the next year or so; after that I'll be leaning on the friend who currently holds my mortgage.

Matthew is in jail, having pled guilty to threatening me and having my stolen stuff (not hitting me and stealing my stuff, because the Uxbridge DA prefers a sure thing). That might only last another couple of months, despite his other more serious pending charges, so I got a new restraining order based on the criminal convictions and his violation of the previous restraining order.

Lisa's restraining order against me has expired. It's still a black mark on my legal record that I'll need to do something about. I have designs on a SCOTUS case about a serious due process violation in the MA Appeals Court, but that will have to wait until I have nothing more pressing on my plate.

I still have a handful of housing court cases with Matthew and Lisa. They accuse me of being a bad landlord. I accuse them of being bad tenants and breaking and stealing my stuff. If there are no more delays, those might be headed toward resolution in August or September. Lisa's eviction case is finally over, but the judge made an exceptionally niche ruling that threw us both for a loop. I'm going to have to take her to court again if I want to pursue the first year of unpaid rent. If all our current cases wrap up later this year then I won't bother, but if any of them get stretched out by delays and appeals then I'll probably throw that onto the pile.

If I can ever sell this place, the taxes will put some extreme time constraints on the situation. It's entirely plausible that the decision that I can sell comes down to a judge taking an arbitrary number of months to rule. As soon as that hits, I'll need to list, contract, and close in short order, and then I'll have just three months to find a new place to buy or invest in. This is why you see me posting about properties every month; I need to have a list of candidates ready when the time comes.

Thanks for coming along for this ride. I hope to see you all on the other side!

What to do when my questions indicate I'm more informed than you think?

There is a recurring failure mode in my communication with people, particularly around sensitive and divisive topics. You make some statements at least partially establishing a position on the topic in question. I ask some questions about the specifics of your position or ideas. This leads you to think that I am uninformed about the topic. This is where the conversation starts to go off the rails, because the reality is often that I am so much more informed about the topic that I know about alternative positions that you don't. I need to distinguish between those positions that you aren't considering at all in order to understand which position is yours.

Perhaps some examples will be helpful.

I ask what you believe gets someone into heaven. You think this means I'm ignorant about Christianity, and that “everyone” “knows” “the” answer to this question. Instead, it's actually based on my already knowing that different sects have different beliefs on this point, and my goal is to find out which sect(s) you might align with. I ask whether some action or scenario demonstrates racism or sexism. You think this means I don't know what those words mean. It actually indicates that I know that different definitions aren't consistent with each other, and I want to narrow down and better understand your belief. I ask what model of intimate consent you subscribe to. You think this means I'm uninformed about the nature of consent. Instead, it's based on my already being well informed about a wide variety of often contradictory such models that people use to define [non]consent.

In every such case, your response gives me a strong indication that you might not be aware of the existence of those other groups who share your labels and language but disagree with you on critical aspects of your beliefs.

I have tried simply couching my questions in assurances of my existing understanding. I have tried enumerating some of the common answers as part of my question. I have tried asking these questions as soon as the uncertainty arises, or delaying them until much later in the conversation with the hope we are both able to retroactively reassess what was said when the context is provided later, and everywhere in between. I have tried never asking them at all, and simply leaving the conversation with far less knowledge of your position than you think you gave me.

I would like to be better at having these conversations. These are important topics, and we are all better off when more of us understand what's going on and can discuss and reach accords if not agreement. The outcomes of these conversations will continue to have significant impact on the social and living environments around me and that I establish and nurture in the future.

I'm not sure how to better approach these situations. I know that the most common solution is to just not have these conversations in the first place (“Never discuss politics or religion in polite company.”). I would really like to be able to help others and myself make better decisions about all sorts of things, especially when they seem to want to engage on the subject. So I come to you, internet hive mind, crowd o' wisdom, my peeps... What do?

The internet peaked in 2008

The year is 2008. You don't know it yet, but the internet will never again be as accessible, searchable, interoperable, or durable as it is right now. Profit motive, the tragedy of the commons, and malicious self interest are beginning to conspire to erode all of the best parts of the online world, and it will only get worse from here. Here are some of the highlights of your regular online experience that the people being born today won't even realize were taken from them:

You open up your RSS reader and see a chronological list of updates from every website, blog, etc that you are subscribed to. You can sort and filter to the topic categories you've created. You can jump back to the last time you read, to make sure you didn't miss anything on the feeds that are important to you. When you visit a new site or page, if it has a regular flow of new content then it almost certainly publishes a RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

You buy a copy of a multiplayer online video game. It either includes a dedicated server application or has a server built into the client. You can play against your friends without accessing the publisher's servers or paying any recurring fees. You can play without an internet connection if you're on the same home network. You can still play online even when the developer and publisher go out of business in the future.

You open your favorite instant messaging client, one of half a dozen independent options (Adium, Pidgin, Trillian, Miranda, Kopete, etc), any of which can connect to almost every major messaging network (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Facebook Chat, etc). In that single window you see all of your contacts from every network, with the same contact on multiple networks merged for you to choose between. Your friend Sam is online/reachable on four networks; do you want to use the one that supports images or typing updates or voice chat or encryption? Your friend Pat is offline across the board, but left a status message saying where they were going.

You see something cool and want to share it with a friend. You copy the URL and message it to them. They can almost certainly view the thing without creating an account or logging in somewhere. You scroll back a year or a decade in your chat with them and the links back then probably still work.

You make a post on a social media/network platform with a link to some other platform, and the content from that other platform is automatically previewed or embedded in your post. Your friends can watch your Youtube video directly on your post in their Facebook feed. You don't need to screenshot a tweet to get its contents to appear on another site.

You search for something on Google. The first page has a single relevant text-only ad, and ten results that are virtually guaranteed to be the best available resources for your chosen topic.

You search for restaurants near your home that offer delivery, and that's exactly what you find, with their menus and prices listed directly on their website.

You launch a program that you installed five years ago, and it still has all the same functionality it had before. All the servers it interacts with still support the same protocols. All the file formats it can read and write are still compatible with other newer programs.

You take some time to chat with people who share your niche interest. There's a single IRC channel and one web forum where almost all of them congregate. The content of at least one, possibly both, are indexed by major search engines, and you don't have to create an account to read past discussions.

You launch Google Chrome, excited for another open source entry into the browser war and the diminishing dominance of Internet Explorer. You have no idea how short lived the impending era of vaguely balanced browser market share will be before the pendulum swings right back to a single browser controlling the market.

You're a somewhat technical computer user, but you have a niche question that only a few other people would know the answer to. Luckily for you, Stack Overflow launched recently, and is already rapidly becoming the single best resource the world has ever seen for this scenario. You post your question and get helpful answers from well qualified people in short order.

You use a minor internet and email provider, perhaps a local ISP or through your work, or even hosted on your own. Your emails reliably reach users on all other major and minor email providers, without automatically being classified as spam.

You use Google Reader, Yahoo Pipes, iGoogle, Meebo, Delicious, or other such web-only apps, with no idea that they will simply disappear some time soon.

Over the next ten to twenty years, these experiences will become fading memories. Mentioning them will make you sound more and more alien to younger people. Some of them will leave the Overton window entirely and even arguing for them on their merits will start to sound unreasonable. We won't just forget these experiences existed; we'll stop imagining that such things are even possible. Maybe if we're very lucky some of them will eventually be reinvented from first principles. Thankfully, it's still 2008, and you don't need to worry about any of that. Party on.

PS: Each individual aspect of online technology described here actually peaked at slightly different times, ranging from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. I chose 2008 in this article as roughly the peak within that range, to accommodate a few specific landmark dates, and as a symbolic nod to the people born then becoming adults now. While you could make some of the same arguments about 2002 or 2012, the overall pattern wouldn't be nearly as strong.

Doing chores is a normal part of living alone and it gets easier together.

Almost everyone does chores in their living environment or compensates someone else for doing them. This is a perfectly normal aspect of being a functional adult. Maybe if you live alone and have low standards you don't do many, but you still have to at least occasionally do some laundry, take out some trash, shovel some snow, etc. Maybe if you live with one other person you split the chores, or one of you does most of the them and the other pays most of the bills, and hopefully you both consider that a worthwhile trade. If both people in a couple have jobs and split the bills, most of the people I regularly interact with understand that it's unreasonable to expect one of them (probably the woman) to do all of the housework. These all seem to be well understood concepts in our society. No one is confused when these scenarios are assumed background for a conversation or piece of fiction or proposed policy. Everyone understands when divergence from these norms is assumed to be problematic.

Somehow, all of that goes out the window when discussing living with larger groups of people. Most people hear about an expectation that they do their share of the household chores in a coliving environment and respond with things like “I can't work a job AND do work at home” or “I'm not signing up for a second job” or “Are you going to pay me for all of that work?”. Somehow, those same 2-5 hours a week that they would have spent on laundry, dishes, trash, snow, lawn, sweeping, etc living alone becomes “not my job” as soon as they live with other people. Oddly, they see this as somehow fundamentally distinct from the same statement made by a man who moves in with a woman, which scenario they would strenuously object to. Further, this isn't just self interest; many people still feel this way when discussing other people in the same situation. There's something about the larger group that fundamentally changes people's understanding of household responsibilities.

The situation is even worse, from my perspective, because I advocate for the economies of scale in coliving. When a bunch of people pool their resources, including their labor, everything should, and usually does, get easier. Mowing a single big yard takes less time than mowing a bunch of smaller yards. Cooking dinner and washing dishes for 20 people is significantly easier than doing it ten times for two people. This pattern continues across almost all chores. So, when someone rejects the idea of coliving chores, not only are they breaking a norm that exists even in smaller groups or for individuals, they are also somehow making it sound like more hardship despite it being less work than it would be otherwise.

It gets worse again when you consider the benefits gained by consolidating the resources behind those chores. Hopefully, they've made a good decision about the environment they want to live in. They'll enjoy that big yard more than they would a tiny yard. They'll enjoy those group dinners more than they would eating alone. They'll enjoy a larger home theater, a bigger garage, and so on across all the other experiences and amenities they'll be able to take part in that they wouldn't otherwise. So, now they aren't just complaining about doing the same work they'd be doing living alone, or even about doing less work than living alone, but they're complaining about doing less work for more benefit!

How does someone get from “Spending 30min/wk doing dishes from eating alone is necessary” to “Spending 20min/wk doing dishes from dinners shared with my friends is unacceptable”? I have never been able to wrap my head around this in a charitable way. I am hopeful that someone reading this might be able to offer some insights that will better inform my future engagements on this topic. Since I don't plan to stop founding intentional communities, I expect this will continue to be an important recurring conversation in my life.

PS: For reference, the last large scale chore system I developed for a ~20 person household required each person to do three chores per week, with about 1/3 of the available slots being cooking communal meals and maintaining our most active kitchen, and the other 2/3 covering everything else. One version of those chore descriptions is still visible online here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1797qiZ5iODelLS6oZm41gwEhtlMcttHfrG6CYM0c7Q4/preview

Accurate Confidence is a Trainable Measurable Skill

Without looking it up, who was born first, Mother Teresa or Ronald Reagan? Spoiler alert, they were born six months part, so very few people will know enough historical trivia to get this right other than by luck. It would be a coin flip for me. Everyone seems to be comfortable with the idea that you can seek out and learn more historical facts and other trivia, increasing your chances of getting questions like this correct. Now... How confident are you that your answer is correct? Very few people seem to be aware that you can learn to be better at this second question. Many people even deny that it is possible for one person to improve that skill or for someone to be better at it than someone else, let alone to measure it.

There are a few well known ways to demonstrate the existence of this skill and to measure it. A useful search term is “confidence calibration”, which will lead you to various tests and assessments. An acquaintance of mine previously compiled a list of such exercises at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LdFbx9oqtKAAwtKF3/list-of-probability-calibration-exercises.

One popular version (“confidence rating”) asks you a series of questions with fill in the blank or multiple choice answers, then for each question how confident you are of your answer. For a fill in the blank question the confidence range might be 0-100%, while for a multiple choice or binary question the floor is usually equal to choosing an answer at random (e.g. 25% for 4 answers). If you have well calibrated confidence, the results might tell you that when you were 70% confident your answers were right 68% of the time. If you have poorly calibrated confidence, that result might be 50% or 90%.

Another version (“confidence interval”) will set a particular target confidence (e.g. 80%) and ask you a series of questions with numerical answers (dates, weights, counts, etc). Instead of a single answer you give a range that you are 80% confident the answer falls in. At the end, if the true answer was in your range about 80% of the time, that's a good outcome, but if the true answer was in your range 50% or 95% of the time then there's a lot of room for improvement.

When someone without practice evaluating their level of confidence takes a confidence interval test targeting 90% success, they will usually succeed 30-60% of the time. When they take a confidence rating test, their confidence will correlate to their actual success rate similarly poorly. In my experience, a single demonstration of this outcome, alongside the results of someone with more calibrated confidence, will often suffice to convince them that there is something to this idea.

This skill extends beyond trivial examples and tests. It applies to far more impactful scenarios like planning professional projects, scheduling travel, buying stocks, signing a contract, negotiating a lawsuit settlement, etc. If you recognize this skill in yourself, it will allow you to make more effective decisions toward your goals. If you recognize this skill in others, it will better inform your reliance on their predictions and claims. Denying that this skill exists, or that you and other people can get or be better at it, will lead to less optimal outcomes in so many ways.

My goal in writing this post is to be able to link to it in the future when I encounter one of those people who don't believe this skill exists. Maybe at least a few of the people who aren't willing to take such a test themselves will instead be willing to have the nature of such tests explained to them, and a few of those will understand it enough to realize their mistake. Perhaps some of them will be interested enough in improving this skill that they will do some of the exercises and tests in the compiled list linked above.

June 2026 Writing Challenge

Sixteen years ago, my then-primary-partner now-best-ex was (and seemingly still is) a prolific writer of journal entries and short thought pieces. They used the website 750words.com to keep track of writing streaks and such, and I decided to join them for a month. The experience was somewhat formative for me, and led to me writing a lot more longer pieces over the intervening years. More recently, Inkhaven (http://inkhaven.blog) has sprung up as a yearly residency for writers, mostly in the rationalist sphere of influence, where everyone has to write a long form post every day for a month.

These two things, combined with many smaller influences, have motivated me to try for another solid month of writing. To celebrate my 44th birthday, I'll be writing and posting something long every day for the month of June 2026. I have a list of about twenty specific ideas so far, including topics like my coliving projects, interpersonal communication, court tactics, polyamory, and makerspaces. I'll probably include a few legal drafts as well since I've spit out a few of those every month for the last couple of years. Hopefully I'll have enough new ideas along the way to fill the rest of the month.

I'm hoping for a few different outcomes from this experience. I want to get back into the habit of writing long form posts. I want to expose people new to my social circles to my thoughts in a way I haven't really done in the last decade or so; I think the last time I knew a lot of people who were reading and responding to a lot of my long form posts was when I lived in Boston over a decade ago. I want to compare my old writings and see how I have changed, especially on a few of the days where I intend to explicitly revisit topics I already wrote about once or twice in the past. I want to distract myself from only ever doing legal drafting, which can be soul crushing work.

I don't know what standards I will hold the posts to, in terms of length or depth or time of day. Sometimes I end up writing 3000 words on a topic, and sometimes it's just 500. I don't think I want to feel compelled to expand 500 words to 750 or 1000 just to meet a target (basically how I wrote papers in high school and college). Maybe this will become clear to me in the first few days of this endeavor.

If you want to follow along, I'll be cross posting to https://sparr.substack.com, https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/, https://paper.wf/@sparr, https://facebook.com/sparr0, https://glosso.ink/u/sparr, and https://reddit.com/u/sparr, and I'll be posting links to one of those on https://twitter.com/sparr0, https://mastodon.social/@sparr, https://threads.com/@sparr0, and https://bsky.app/profile/sparr.bsky.social.

Post-Lawsuit Plans

For the last couple of years I have been in a perpetual state of “maybe everything wraps up next month”, with no money to put toward future plans, so I haven't been able to make any commitments or even confidently say where I would be when. That is starting to change now, with bigger junctures approaching in the various outstanding legal cases, including a trial date for the lawsuit preventing sale of my property. Today I'm making some predictions about likely outcomes and how things could shake out in the next year or two.

A. 10% chance I win my motion for summary judgment and can start to sell the property between April and June at market value. B. 10% chance I lose at trial and am forced to sell immediately in October at much less than market value. C. 70% chance I win at trial and can start to sell the property in October at market value. D. 10% chance I win at trial but the previous buyer continues to prevent a sale, such as through an appeal.

Outcome B is the worst plausible outcome. Their best settlement offer was about $500k, which would not be enough to settle my outstanding debts related to the property and events since the fire. If the court forces me to sell to them at that price, I would pay off as much as I could, keep 5-10% of the money, and use that to settle back in the Bay Area where I can get a job in tech again. Then it would take a year to pay off debts, and I could start from scratch on bigger plans.

Outcome D is the wild card, and would put me back in the state of having no idea when things will wrap up. However, my case load has recently dropped below one appearance per week, and that trend will likely continue, so by the time this outcome arrives I should have a reliable enough schedule and enough available mental capacity to go back to work regardless. I'd spend a few years working to pay people back before I could do anything big again.

Outcomes A and C are the exciting ones. As soon as I have a judgment lifting the Lis Pendens on the property, I can connect with other interested buyers and move quickly toward a contract and sale. Now that I've split the property into three separate parcels, each sale should be simpler and faster, and the parts worth more than the whole. I expect to close on those sales two to four months later.

If that comes to pass, then I will have a few months of notice that the sales will close between June 2026 and February 2027. I will make arrangements to pay off all of my debts, and take care of that in the days immediately following the first sale. I will have 45 days after the sales to identify the properties I am going to pursue next, and 180 days to buy one of them in order to defer a six figure capital gains tax.

That's not a lot of time to find and contract and close on the sorts of properties I'm pursuing. This is why I am constantly on the lookout for properties, keeping a list of likely candidates, discussing pros and cons, etc. I publish my best leads on the CoDwell Discord, and the most interesting ones to various social media platforms.

As soon as that ~9 month window opens (from case outcome to the end of the tax window), I need to get a lot of balls rolling all at once. Here's a prototype todo list for the first few months of that window, a lot of things I've done in the past but that have been on hold for a while now:

• Revive my CoDwell project.
• Reach out to everyone I know who has ever expressed interest in coliving or makerspaces or permaculture or anything adjacent to my project goals, as potential organizers, owners, investors, residents, participants, ...
• Start arranging trips to visit candidate properties like I did for the OR and MA properties in the past.
• Fill out dozens of govt and nonprofit grant and loan applications, especially USDA RD programs.
• Reach out to dozens of banks and other lenders to start moving toward financing for larger properties.

There will also be opportunities with less time and financial weight behind them. I'm starting to make plans for various events and trips and projects in mid to late 2026 and into 2027. It will be good to see people I haven't seen in far too long, polish some of the rust off various skills and hobbies, build some art, meet new people, etc.

As awful as the last two years have been, I am excited to see likely light at the end of the tunnel. If you'd like to talk about any of this, help me plan, point out problems with my expectations, etc, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, watch this space for updates as things progress.