Have you ever been asked -
or, let's be realistic, told -
what your "North Star" is?
What the fuck does that even mean?

My name's Jesse Alford,
and you're reading Issue 5 of Nonlinear.Garden,
a newsletter about technology, cognition, and humanity.

I love metaphor. I love precise, beautiful metaphor.
I love sloppy, broad metaphor.
I love bizarre, overly-specific metaphor.

I love them differently, though.
My love for the North Star metaphor is in its error,
and the power of that error to reveal other mistakes.

Happy New Year!

I'm Jesse Alford, and you're reading Nonlinear Garden. Last issue, I described Problem Zero - "what should I be working on right now?" Problem Zero feels to me like my most important idea. I've been using it conversationally for years. One of the surprising things about Problem Zero is how hard it is to keep solved, and how difficult it is to get anywhere without a the ability to produce stable solutions.

In this issue, we're going to get into some more detail about my personal first-recourse approach to stabilizing solutions to Problem Zero - slicing.

Hello, and happy New Year!
I'm Jesse Alford,
and you're reading
Nonlinear Garden,
a newsletter about humans
and our relationship to technology.

What should I be working on, right now?

I call this question "Problem Zero."
You can't make progress on your number-one problem
without a stable solution to your number-zero problem.

Problem Zero is different from Problem One.
When Problem One gets solved,
Problem Two gets a promotion!
When Problem Zero gets solved,
ordering or recognizing other problems
is entirely within the context of that solution.

Systems are mental constructs. They're defined by boundaries. The boundary of the system, the boundary of things we declare to be parts of the system, the boundaries of the concepts we use to construct, communicate, and reason about the system.

The words "system" and "boundary" can be misleading, like the word "process." As if nature contains conceptual abstractions.

Abstractions happen in cognition. Nowhere else.

But did you notice the choice, there, to place cognition outside of nature? Is that where it belongs? How would we know? Questioning and evaluating boundaries can press this question relentlessly.

Hello!

I'm Jesse Alford, and you're reading the very first issue of nonlinear.garden.

It's hard to act on what you know. Even when it's all you know. I know, marrow-deep, that rapid iteration is necessary for this kind of thing. The draft of a first issue that this actual first issue is replacing was nonetheless approaching book scale. The conceptual density was overwhelming.

The path to sending you something I'm proud of seemed to only grow longer as I tried to walk down it.