The Name
I know the origin of “Jack” in “Jack of all trades, master of none” likely isn’t the a card, but rather a name. I did like the idea though, that the Jack in the deck of cards shows a lot of progression, but is certainly not the best, so being a jack of all trades means being quite good at lots of things.
Now, I’m not very good at anything. I do however have a broad interest in a buch of different stuff, so I’m ok at a lot of things. Certainly not a Jack, but I have a card on many topics. I settled on a four. I’ve achieved a low level mastery of many things. Maybe not most things, so the “All” in the name is exaggerating, but I think “Four Of Some Trades” is stretching the connection.
The Aim
We did some professional learning at school recently about “writing to learn” as opposed to “learning to write”. As soon as I heard it, I knew that I was fully on board and that it meshed with other ideas that I have. I started getting up early each day to do around 30 minutes of writing before anyone else got up. That worked for about a month, then Murphy was born. The idea of this website is that publishing what I write will make me more motivated to improve and edit my writing, rather than just blurting it out which is what I normally do.
Topics I’ve written about recently include: effective altruism, welfare, economics broadly, GDP, cell division, proteins, challenge trials, paleogenomics, the actual mechanism of neurotransmission, regions of the brain, birth skills and degrowth.
My number one goal is to learn more about topics I find interesting in a way that will mean I have the knowledge rather than just finding it interesting then forgetting it. A way to get there (a sub-goal if you will) is to explain something in a way that a switched on 16 year old would understand. For example, the neurotransmission post goes to the level of “how do the neurotransmitters actually get ‘released’ from the axon terminal into the synapse” but not into the role SNARE proteins play in this process.
I also have intentions to publish other things I write, with topics/segments such as “letters to a senator”, news consumption and political involvement, TTRPGs, environmentalism, minimalism, thoughtactions, book opinions/things I learnt, drugs, cycle touring and whatever else comes up.
I think it’s going to be maximum effort to migrate everything over from cceurope.weebly.com, so I probably won’t do that.
Four Of All Trades 