The real way to live in the long now, I suspect, is to recognise that the vast majority of projects in human history that are shelved “until they’re ready” never, in fact, get released. This is because time and death often get in the way of polishing up your magnum opus. Therefore the reasonable thing in the long view may be to just ship the damn post/video/game/idea, because that’s the way it gets into other people’s minds and gains a life of its own beyond the confines of the draft folder. Possibly the idea, if it is good enough, will be finished by others, or even outlive you.
This is also Gwern’s answer, in the paragraph right after the one Rauno quoted. The main difference is that he rejects finish lines, opting instead for perpetual drafts, like software.
My answer is that one uses such a framework to work on projects that are too big to work on normally or too tedious. (Conscientiousness is often lacking online or in volunteer communities18 and many useful things go undone.) Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful19—if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself20. (Even experienced professionals can only write at their peak for a few hours a day—usually first thing in the morning, it seems.) Half the challenge of fighting procrastination is the pain of starting—I find when I actually get into the swing of working on even dull tasks, it’s not so bad. So this suggests a solution: never start. Merely have perpetual drafts, which one tweaks from time to time. And the rest takes care of itself.
Also I like this:
What is next? So far the pages will persist through time, and they will gradually improve over time. But a truly Long Now approach would be to make them be improved by time—make them more valuable the more time passes. …
One idea I am exploring is adding long-term predictions like the ones I make on PredictionBook.com. Many27 pages explicitly or implicitly make predictions about the future. As time passes, predictions would be validated or falsified, providing feedback on the ideas.28
For example, the Evangelion essay’s paradigm implies many things about the future movies in Rebuild of Evangelion29; The Melancholy of Kyon is an extended prediction30 of future plot developments in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya series; Haskell Summer of Code has suggestions about what makes good projects, which could be turned into predictions by applying them to predict success or failure when the next Summer of Code choices are announced. And so on.
The real way to live in the long now, I suspect, is to recognise that the vast majority of projects in human history that are shelved “until they’re ready” never, in fact, get released. This is because time and death often get in the way of polishing up your magnum opus. Therefore the reasonable thing in the long view may be to just ship the damn post/video/game/idea, because that’s the way it gets into other people’s minds and gains a life of its own beyond the confines of the draft folder. Possibly the idea, if it is good enough, will be finished by others, or even outlive you.
This is also Gwern’s answer, in the paragraph right after the one Rauno quoted. The main difference is that he rejects finish lines, opting instead for perpetual drafts, like software.
Also I like this: