Hi David, is the notes on virtues sequence still ongoing?
I like the idea of the Society of the Free and Easy, but the fact that the program began to dwindle after a while does give me pause from a ‘will it work for me?’ perspective.
I’ve been in a long pause on adding to the sequence, although I’ve been quietly updating some of the existing pages behind-the-scenes. I hope to pick up the pace again at some point.
As for the floundering of SotF&E… I still think it’s a good model, but getting something like that off the ground is hard work and requires that a lot of things go right. For one thing, it takes a critical mass of people who believe in the promise of it enough to put in the work; it’s not something people can absorb passively. It’s hard to find enough people who are willing both to stretch out of their comfort zones and to take time out of their already busy days to dedicate to an unproven eccentric project like this. When the early-covid isolation/quarantine stuff hit it really took the wind out of the sails of social projects like SotF&E, and I haven’t felt confident enough to try to restart it.
I hope you do too. One of my aims this year is to try ‘intentional virtue training’, and your sequence has been an impetus, although I’ve only skimmed certain parts so I intend to read them more thoroughly later. I’m not sure whether I should try Ben Franklin’s approach or SotF&E’s; the former strikes me as somewhat harsher, but I have a hunch (empirically unsupported aside from my own confounder-laden upbringing) that the harshness is a feature not a bug for a certain sort of person, including me, so I’m leaning towards that.
Hi David, is the notes on virtues sequence still ongoing?
I like the idea of the Society of the Free and Easy, but the fact that the program began to dwindle after a while does give me pause from a ‘will it work for me?’ perspective.
I’ve been in a long pause on adding to the sequence, although I’ve been quietly updating some of the existing pages behind-the-scenes. I hope to pick up the pace again at some point.
As for the floundering of SotF&E… I still think it’s a good model, but getting something like that off the ground is hard work and requires that a lot of things go right. For one thing, it takes a critical mass of people who believe in the promise of it enough to put in the work; it’s not something people can absorb passively. It’s hard to find enough people who are willing both to stretch out of their comfort zones and to take time out of their already busy days to dedicate to an unproven eccentric project like this. When the early-covid isolation/quarantine stuff hit it really took the wind out of the sails of social projects like SotF&E, and I haven’t felt confident enough to try to restart it.
I hope you do too. One of my aims this year is to try ‘intentional virtue training’, and your sequence has been an impetus, although I’ve only skimmed certain parts so I intend to read them more thoroughly later. I’m not sure whether I should try Ben Franklin’s approach or SotF&E’s; the former strikes me as somewhat harsher, but I have a hunch (empirically unsupported aside from my own confounder-laden upbringing) that the harshness is a feature not a bug for a certain sort of person, including me, so I’m leaning towards that.