Is decisioncrime the new thoughtcrime?
It seemed to him that it was only now, when he had begun to be able to formulate his thoughts, that he had taken the decisive step.
This above is the part of 1984 when Winston Smith begins again to reenter thohght.
Decisioncrime
I find myself –like many others Im sure– deciding less, by outsourcing them to a SlopBot. I must have written almost these very words many times already here, but now I have a new word for the phenomenon of not being allowed to decide.
Winston lived (lives?) in a fictional woprld where writing is banned. Orwell ’s contemporary Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 a very similar book about books being outlawed , but I realize also that often writing is thinkijg .
Speaking Fast and Slow
But a tangent, I realize as Ive been writing more both not only longform for fun, but shortform because as of the covid pandemic, everything is chat, is my conversational speech suffering?
Just like social media has been chipping away at our attention spans way before LLMs, shortform chat over slack or teams has been perhaps slowing down our speed of speech? Maybe. Just writing out loud 😆.
What should be slow (natural)?
I was just writing [1] about a natural pace of work, or just reminding myself about it.
Here conversation is an interesting example. What I had learned – picked up – from Jason Fried’s work, and 6pagers of Amazon, writing well can save time otherwise burned in chatter.
But small talk and long talk are meaningful too. But in different forms perhaps.
These days whenevrr I get on a zoom call with coworkers that spirals away from work talk into banter, I immediately start feeling like Im wasting time. Because its over zoom. I much prefer bantering arter hours. But guess what in remote work land there are no after hours.