---
schema: writing/v1
id: e79b6251-6530-4840-9f49-08701e3882ac
title: "Sharing the Journey"
description: "On intellectual friction and sharing our thoughts in public."
author:
  name: "Rafael F. Lemos"
  email: "contact@flemosr.com"
  url: "https://flemosr.com/"
publishedAt: 2026-08-17
draft: false
digest:
  protocol: yaml-fm/v1
  exclude: [draft]
---

# Sharing the Journey

On this site's [About page](/about/) I wrote a bit about the *journey* of seeking answers to the
*core questions*: Where are we at? Where should we be going? How do we get there?

This journey is very personal. Reality is complex, and we as individuals cannot hope to experience
more than a small fraction of it. Therefore, we have a *very* limited perspective and should expect
to be plainly wrong some of the time, no matter how hard we try to get things right.

Even when we are right, compressing complex thoughts into words is a reductive process, and we rely
on the reader's *compatible* interpretation for ideas to come across properly. This process is very
prone to error.

Even when right and communicating well, we may provoke emotional resistance. We tend to shape our
worldview in a way that favors emotional comfort. Some of us seem to be more susceptible to this
than others, but we all are to some extent. If you point out a truth that conflicts with a given
comfy worldview, this can trigger intense negative emotional responses and lead some people to
dismiss dialogue and reason completely. But these *painful truths* can point to important failures
of a given reality model, so confronting them may be vital for that person.

So in summary: we may leave a bad impression because we are wrong, because we communicated poorly,
or even because we are right about something that challenges a deeply held worldview. If we are
blessed enough to correctly address a collective misunderstanding, we should expect considerable
hostility in response.

With this in mind, exposing our journey to random people on the internet may feel unwise. But since
you are reading these words, you can guess that I think there are good reasons to share anyway.

## Giving back

I owe more to people sharing their thoughts and knowledge on the internet than I can put into words.

Those who were trying to educate others and have discussions in good faith come to mind first. But
many times, reading or hearing something makes me realize pretty fast that it is partially or
completely **wrong**, and that realization can be a valuable conclusion in itself.

A way to put this into clearer terms is that *I greatly value having access to other people's
knowledge and the friction between their views and my own*.

At the same time, I have never shared much publicly about what's on my mind. I've been contributing
to free and open-source software (FOSS) for a considerable time, but besides that, my public online
interactions have been close to zero.

I don't consider myself an extrovert, and writing to random people without the constraints of time
and space doesn't come naturally to me. I always rationalized my abstention with arguments such as
"I cannot afford the distraction right now", but over time this imbalance started to disturb me more
and more. In short, I believe that **if I value tapping into our collective intelligence, I should
help sustain it by contributing when I can**.

I'm not saying that we should all be joining all discussions and having opinions about everything.
We **must** recognize our ignorance. We should probably just say "I don't know. I haven't looked
into it" most of the time. But when we are convinced that important evidence or reasoning is missing
from public discourse, we can potentially help immensely by pointing out what we are collectively
missing.

## Raising the stakes

It is easy to be sloppy when I'm writing to myself. I don't need to pay much attention to the words
or to alternative interpretations, since *I* know what *I* mean.

When we write to others, especially to people that we don't know, we need to try to express our
point clearly enough for it to make sense to someone that has a model of reality different from
ours. And there are potential consequences emerging from the dialogue. The stakes are higher.

So we should be careful to separate opinions and hypotheses from facts. We should make room for
nuance, ensure that our degree of confidence in what we're saying is justified, and use a tone
compatible with said confidence. In other words, we need to *think harder*.

So, **when I'm talking to people that I don't know, I tend to approach the topic with a more
careful, empathetic, and humble perspective, and this improves the quality of my thinking**.

## Getting feedback

I expect to get some things wrong, communicate some things poorly, and get some things right. I can
only aim for a net positive and use feedback from others, alongside my own reasoning, to tell these
situations apart over time.

It seems obvious enough that **how other people react to our ideas can help us refine our own models
of reality**. Knowing how to handle feedback in general and distinguish signal from noise seems to
be the tricky part.

People willing to discuss in good faith can point out gaps in our reasoning or provide additional
arguments and facts that strengthen or stress-test it. This is extremely valuable.

Even people reacting emotionally in unreasonable ways or with bad intentions can convey valuable
information. Keeping this in mind seems to be a big challenge, though.

## Resonating with just some people is a feature, not a bug

When I meet someone in physical space, I normally don't get the opportunity to go deep into a
complex topic that may conflict with that person's beliefs or my own. When I do get the opportunity,
I love it, but conversations at parties and dinners tend to revolve around a topic that everyone in
the group feels comfortable talking about, steering clear of the hard questions.

I get to have deep conversations with my wife, other close family members, and a few close friends
that I'm very lucky to have. But I feel some reluctance to write to strangers about complicated
topics.

This reluctance makes a lot of sense if we think about the social environments in which humans
evolved, where social cohesion could be a matter of life and death. So it is not surprising that we
have an instinct to be cordial towards others we don't know well, and this cordiality normally
implies avoiding conflicts when possible, which kind of implies avoiding interesting discussions
unless all parties seem open to it.

The dynamics of cyberspace changed the social circumstances radically. The challenge is not to "find
people" on the web, but to find the *right* people. People that share some of our values and
objectives, or maybe that just value our particular perspective. People that we *resonate* with to
some degree, can exchange value with, and hopefully can grow together with.

**I think we find people that are intellectually compatible with us through this process of
intellectual friction: exposing our thoughts and ideas, expecting people we resonate with to come
closer and others to move away, which is totally fine**.

By "come closer", I don't mean "become friends", although that would be a best-case scenario. I mean
"keeping that person around" via some communication channel, even if one-sided.

## How to share?

I think social media platforms can be great for seeing what's going on right *now* and *discovering*
resources and people. Interacting with what others are saying and spreading what we find valuable is
important, and I'll be putting time into that.

But these platforms try to maximize *engagement*, and we need to keep this in mind. They tend to be
distracting and not the ideal settings for getting into the weeds of a complex topic, at least for
me.

I believe that the web is supposed to be as open as possible, and that having our little corner in
it without relying on managed platforms or opaque algorithms is great. I also really like the
simplicity and "personal feel" of RSS feeds, as well as having more control over the content I
consume. I think this control is getting more important as the world gets noisier. That's why I want
to use this site as my "base".

So this is what I'll be aiming for: interacting more in public online spaces and using this site to
dive deeper into some topics.