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Tinker Tuesday for April 8, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Can I just give some honest feedback, and you take it with a massive grain of salt because I'm just a random anon.

While I agree that most of your theories are true, I extremely disagree with the approach "here is what my theseses will be, and I'll add a bunch of case studies (anecdotes) and data that supports them".

You literally have a detailed plan, chapter by chapter, on what your book will argue. Why then collect data at all? Why bother interviewing people? You already know what you're saying, no?

But you want to add data and charts because you see them as effective weapons in persuading people.

I feel like if that's the starting point of your book, the absolute best case scenario is that it ends up being yet another airport book + ted talk. It will not be actually new, fresh, and practically influential, because you have arrived at your conclusions by normal life and passive media consumption - I'm sure you're smart/observant/analytical, but you need to actually be open to any conclusion before seeing the data and talking to the actual people.

Like this one:

Organize locally. Become involved in your community. Talk to and become friends with people you disagree with.

It sounds nice, but if you think about it...

What does that even mean? Have you seen teens lately? They're barely literate phone zombies. What does it even mean for them to "organize locally"? Organize to do what? What community? There is no community, cities are just a big pile of strangers that don't make eye contact very much.