On Confidence … tags

Aside from posting blogs, I’ve been journalling for a while now. I’ve also been writing, but not posting, megalomaniacal short stories starring myself for even longer, but that’s a post for another time (set of posts - do I do series now? Sigh).

Going on more than a decade, with the consistency going up over the last five years, one particular flair I’ve stuck to … consistently, is a metadata tagging system for each of the entries. I’m unaware of where I picked this style up from, but it essentially means, for me, adding the place (physical location - like the sunny corner of my favorite Sunday morning cafe), the specific time, and any background sounds (music track or cafe noise or “Silence”) I’m writing to, aside from the date and day.

Part of me knows that it was the data geek in me -

I could come back and probably analyze where I was highly likely to be writing from, in grad school or while working after grad school.

Did I usually always write to silence? If I were to classify posts, would I notice a pattern of silence = longer posts? How does time of day impact my entries?

I’d like to think it is the overarching theme of freezing in time the context of all my entries. For the camera/photography inclined, it’s analogous to semantically modified EXIF tags for my entries.

With the posts I want to write here, I feel capturing context is important. Maybe I’m trying to hedge against the “Death of the Author”, but it’s also important for future-me to give present-me a lot of room to make mistakes, be overconfident, and, most importantly, be okay with coming back and changing my stance on the matter. Most of the time I write through a haze - trying to understand my own thoughts, assimilating complex material, deconstructing my own emotions on a topic the nuances of which I have little to no understanding about. I guess I want to record my convictions on the topics I write about (as Mufflax says, “signal my attitude towards the content”); they should stand as log entries if I ever feel like disavowing previously held beliefs or take up stances that I’ve poo-poo’d earlier.

One metadata tag I’m borrowing from gwern, who borrowed a similar tag from Mufflax’s Epistemic states is the certainty tag. Gwern uses subjective probablity markers from “Kesselman List of Estimative Words”:

1. “certain”
2. “highly likely”
3. “likely”
4. “possible”
5. “unlikely”
6. “highly unlikely”
7. “remote”
8. “impossible”

I believe I will end up using the same list, but if I know myself, I will probably want to use my own spin later on, if only to sleep better at night under the notoriously ineffective warmth of the blanket of “originality”.