Suburban Mantuan
On being curious and creating out loud
Should we learn in public or in private?
Should we share our work publicly? Or should we only share our work with a restricted audience? Or else, should we keep everything to ourselves?
I have been ruminating on this question for some time. The fact that this is my first post here, despite setting up this site over a year ago, is good evidence of the inertia that this dilemma can create.
As with most things, the answer to this problem is specific to each of us and there is no absolute rule. On balance, I have concluded that I personally would be far better off sharing some of my creative outputs in the public domain.Â
In this first post, I would like to explain the reasoning behind that decision…
Being curious and creating out loud
I am framing my approach to sharing knowledge as ‘being curious and creating out loud’. The logic that underlies this framework is as follows:
Growing through feedback and support. When I create in private, I work alone and unseen. In some ways, this privacy provides security. But that same privacy also shields me from critical feedback and makes it more difficult to bounce ideas off other people, collaborate, or hear opposing views.Â
Failing and learning faster. Not only is creating in private less dynamic (and often less fun), but it also runs the risk of leaving work unchecked and letting important ideas grow on shaky foundations. By creating out loud, I aim to fail (and, therefore, learn) faster.
Cognitive diversity. Teams typically outperform individuals. Similarly, I reckon that receiving feedback and support from a broad range of peers should enable me to generate better and more differentiated output. Might such constructive feedback also kindle a virtuous cycle that provokes further creativity? Let’s find out - please use the reply button to respond this and any other posts on this blog. I will be delighted to learn from your thoughts and critiques.
Expanding my network. By being curious and creating content out loud, I hope to present opportunities for others to engage with me. My reasoning is that, by doing this ‘out loud’, I am far more likely to connect with and learn from others who have shared interests or differing views.
Creating accountability. I create in private all the time, but without an incentive to generate a finished product, these creations often languish in lost folders, half-finished. Life is busy and full of wonder, so it’s easy to be drawn away and preoccupied by other priorities.Â
Audience. By contrast, in creating out loud, I am making myself more accountable. The clear, time-stamped record of my activities (or lack thereof) should motivate me to produce completed work at more regular intervals.Â
Quality. Being curious is a way of satiating ignorance with knowledge. My hope is that being curious and creating out loud should incentivise me to produce higher quality work. What I write could be read by anyone now or at any point in the future, so I am much more motivated to gain a sound understanding of the subjects I cover. Just as being able to explain a subject to another person is strong evidence of learning, being able to publish a piece here is strong evidence that I have explored and synthesised the primary materials or underlying datasets for the topic at hand. Only the highest quality output is likely to withstand the test of time.Â
Clarity. Creating out loud also forces me to produce work that is succinct and clear. As my frameworks, heuristics, and mental models improve, so should the overall quality and clarity of my work.
Building a portfolio of work. A good outcome of creating out loud would be to produce a portfolio of multi-disciplinary work online.Â
Documenting creativity and curiosity. This body of work should be valuable not only for my own reference, but should also serve as a testament to my enthusiasm for lifelong creativity, and curiosity. As the circle of knowledge grows, so does the circumference of ignorance. I hope that the ability to see my progress over time will in and of itself be rewarding and revealing.
Participating in knowledge. In general, 1% of users of any given internet community create 99% of the content. The remaining 99% of users simply lurk (and, I suppose, create 1% of content). By creating out loud, I am forcing myself to become a more active participant in the ongoing creation of our collective human knowledge.
Responding to a sense of urgency. Life is short, but humanity and our collective human knowledge continue to expand at a breathtaking rate. Because of this, I feel a sense of urgency to push out my ideas. Particularly in light of recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, it is not clear how much more time there is left to claim credibly any content as my own creation. The future is unknowable, but it seems highly probable that ever more proficient artificial intelligences will continue to appear. If that is the case, it significantly increases the importance of the short term to the exclusion of all other timescales.
What to expect
This site is both a sand-box for my mission of curiosity and creativity and an attempt to draw together the creative outputs from different parts of my life: writing; art; and sounds.
I hope that the content shared here will be broad, interdisciplinary, and engaging. But, despite having a voracious appetite for information, my ignorance remains glaring, so I cannot guarantee that posts will meet these expectations.
My aim is to post once a week (on Thursday mornings, starting this week). Topics I intend to explore in upcoming posts range from classical literature to food systems, corporate governance, circularity, anthropology, data visualisation and demographics. On the site, you will also find a ‘bookshelf’ that I will keep updated with my current reading and top recommendations.
I hope you enjoy what you find here in the future. I would love to hear any thoughts or feedback you have for me along the way, so please do reply and start a conversation with me.
Postscript: What is a Suburban Mantuan?
This postscript section is more tongue-in-cheek and will perhaps only amuse a subset of readers.
Why the name ‘Suburban Mantuan’? Although not intended as a form of anonymity or even pseudonymity (my name is still embedded into the site’s domain name after all), the term does serve as a weak form of pseudonym. It gently places some separation between ‘the author’ and the finished creative product.
But what does it mean? Well, nothing really. It was a product of my younger self’s imagination, but it still resonates with me, so I have kept it. But if we are willing to be whimsical, we can perhaps derive a meaning…
‘Mantuan’ is a fairly obscure geographical term, most often used as an epithet for the Roman poet Virgil (who was a native of Mantua in Italy). ‘Suburban’, meanwhile, is in one sense literal - a nod to my own origins on the outskirts of a capital city - but also serves as a modifier to the Virgilian reference. Poetically, Virgil was both urban and rural - he composed epic verses (urban) and ecologic verses (rural). Apocryphally too, Virgil hailed from a small rural village, but ended up in the emperor’s household in Rome, the urban epicentre of the ancient Mediterranean. ‘Suburban Mantuan’, then, riffs on this idea. Where the authentic urban Mantuan sang of epic civilisation and the autochthonous rural Mantuan composed pastoral idyll, perhaps a suburban Mantuan muses on a more liminal space and time - inbetweenness and peripheralities, sub-urbane but supra-rustic.
In my mind, therefore, a ‘Suburban Mantuan’ is a liminal figure. Someone who wanders at the edge of thresholds, exploring paths less travelled, and journeying between known quantities to places further beyond.