State of the Wonderland

The End of Quarter 1 for Cognitive Wonderland

This is a different type of post than usual. I'll be sending out a normal post on Thursday, and this will just be posted to Substack and not emailed out. This is more of an "insider" post reflecting on my experience so far on Substack.

Cognitive Wonderland is now a quarter of a year old, so I'm doing a "quarterly review". I have no idea if I will do this every quarter, or if I do, if I will keep a similar format.

I've broken this into three sections: Recommendations (where I'll give a short list of stuff I've read in the last 3 months I want to highlight), Stats (the quantitative breakdown of how Cognitive Wonderland is doing), and Reflections (the qualitative breakdown and future plan for Cognitive Wonderland).

Recommendations

A few things I've come across in the past three months I want to point people to (and I'm restricting myself to one thing per arbitrarily-chosen category so this doesn't become an unwieldy long list):

Substack Publication: Predirections: I've come across and read an enormous number of Substack publications in the past few months that deserve to be mentioned. But Predirections stands out as the one that's taught me the most. It's about ecology and climate change, topics I think are deeply important and that I lack any expertise in. It's written by Jonathan Tonkin, an active (and very highly published/cited) scientist in the field. He's given me so many detailed and patient answers to my questions that I would be remiss not to mention him here.

Substack Post: Absurdist Philosophy and the Star Trek Dilemma: This post by Thaddeus Thomas is beautiful, nerdy, and communicates an important thought on selfhood: if you're scared the transporter on Star Trek is actually killing you and making a copy (because it's reconstructing you out of different matter), you similarly have to worry about being "killed" constantly. To quote the piece: "The transporter of time kills us moment by moment."

Non-Fiction Book: Being You by Anil Seth: Seth is one of the big-time researchers in the neuroscience of consciousness. This book is a helpful guide to where some of the active research and theories are now. I had previously read articles and books on Integrated Information Theory and felt like I never really "got" where the theory was coming from. Despite it not being his favored theory, Seth gives it the best motivation and explanation I've seen. Not everything in the book is so clear—ironically, I feel like I didn't quite "get" Seth's own preferred theory of consciousness. Maybe I need to wait for someone who doesn't hold that theory to write a book about it.

Fiction Book: Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks: I've been slowly making my way through The Culture novels. The Culture Series is known for its depictions of a far-future universe where one faction, "The Culture", has achieved a post-scarcity utopian society—but it is a pragmatic and therefore often flawed utopia. I can't say why these novels stand out so much and are so enjoyable to me. Despite the intricate worldbuilding and interesting themes, the books don't (for me) evoke cognitive wonder. The writing is just so good and keeps pulling me back in. Use of Weapons in particular blew me away. It builds up towards a big reveal, and the tension gets so high I thought there was no way it wouldn't disappoint, and yet… it didn't disappoint.

Comic: Mind Chunks by Pete Mandik: This is a beautiful comic poking fun at the idea of explaining consciousness "non-reductively". If you take reduction away as a move, you're left with circularity. Mandik himself is a philosopher of mind who has influenced my thinking about consciousness.

Stats

As of the three-month-anniversary of the newsletter launch (August 3), I have 1227 subscribers.

For most of my first month, I grew pretty slowly, but then suddenly in the last week or so I got traction and started growing quickly. Growth has been steady for the two months since then.

Looking at the day-over-day change in subscribers, you can get a better sense of changes in growth rate. There definitely have been periods where I have grown a bit more quickly or a bit more slowly.

What accounts for this variance? I'm sure there's more than one cause, but I think the major driver is my activity on Notes. My engagement on Notes has been inconsistent due to other things going on in life (I've been juggling parenting a baby and a toddler, full-time work, interviewing for a new job, and teaching 2 college courses), and I think the ebb and flow of growth roughly tracks my level of engagement on Notes. I also don't know how people are finding me other than Notes—I don't get a significant number of subscribers through Recommendations and I don't promote on any other social platforms, so Notes seems like the obvious culprit.

The other main driver is whatever the most recent article I published was. You can see near the end of the plot my growth dropped substantially for the week I released Thinking in Distributions. I’m not concerned about this—I’m not going to avoid certain topics or only write on things that seem to drive growth, the whole point here is I write what I’m interested in.

While free subscribers have been growing quickly, my paid subscriber count remains low. As of writing, I have 9 active paying subscribers (and I am extremely grateful to those 9!). This is below 1% of my overall subscribers. That's a really low percentage from what I understand from other Substacks—I've heard others that keep all their content free have ~3%. I'm not particularly worried about this since I'm relatively new and I expect paid subscribers lag free ones because it takes some time with a publication before people decide to support it. Increasing my base of free subscribers is much more important at this point. That said, getting significant numbers of paid subscribers is an additional hurdle I would need to overcome if this was to become more than a hobby—which brings us to some reflections.

Reflections

Looking Back

My intention starting on Substack was to force myself to articulate thoughts so I can continue learning and growing. That's succeeded wildly. I've had to articulate thoughts that before were just vague jumbles in my head, helping me clarify my own thoughts. I learn a lot from each post since the amount of research and deep diving I do to produce articles goes well beyond what ends up in the articles themselves. The anxiety of saying something stupid on the internet is an amazing motivator to learn.

When I started, I had assumed maybe I would get a small group of loyal followers and hopefully find a sort of online tribe. There certainly is a group of folks here on Substack that feel like community to me, and it grows weekly. I've even recently started having video chats with some. All of these relationships are special because their foundation is what we write about—and therefore what we care deeply about.

Beyond that, things on Substack haven't just been a success, they've far exceeded what I thought was plausible in my most optimistic thinking. If you had told me before I started on Substack that in the first three months I would publish a new article faithfully every week, get over a thousand subscribers, and even make a bit of money, I would have been ecstatic. I am ecstatic thinking about all that.

The wider audience and quick growth isn't something I expected. If this growth continues, there's a plausible path to making this more than just a blog I do as a hobby (as valuable as that is). At a certain threshold, it might make sense to take the paid subscriber thing more seriously, and if Cognitive Wonderland starts making real money I can devote more time to it—creating more of a community, collaborations, more and better writing, more time to research interesting ideas for articles. It also could become a launching pad for other related projects—books, most likely (self-published or traditional? Who knows, but both become easier if I have an audience).

This comes at a time when I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my professional life. I'm not going to quit my day job to work on Cognitive Wonderland, but I can make professional decisions that open up more flexibility so in the future I can naturally devote more time to it. The bigger Cognitive Wonderland grows, the more opportunities will open up, and I want to be in a position to take advantage of them. For now, I just need to keep it growing.

Looking Forward

What does the next quarter bring? Content-wise, I plan to continue doing what I'm doing: writing what I'm interested in and publishing once a week. I haven't touched on consciousness as much as I had assumed I would when I started, and I imagine that will be a common theme in the near future.

I do want to at least put in a little work to help the growth of the newsletter. As I mentioned, I suspect most of my growth is through Notes. That's great because posting on Notes is low-effort and fun, it's not something I force myself to do. But there's a lot of other small things I can do: I haven't mentioned Cognitive Wonder on my personal website, on Twitter, or to friends and family (except my wife). I should probably do those things. I've also started experimenting with some collaborations (more on that soon!). Beyond that, I don't have the capacity to spend significantly more time regularly doing self-promotion with how busy my life is. With the limited capacity I have, I want to keep the focus on the writing. 

And that's it! I'm excited for the next quarter of Cognitive Wonderland. It's hard to overemphasize how much I appreciate this experience so far. I get out of bed at 4 every morning to write, excited to spend time thinking about the topics that interest me most. I get to share these thoughts with the world—and the world seems to care. Thank you all for reading, it means everything to me.