Welcome
This is the first post on a new version of my site, redesigned in the spirit of Edward Tufte11 See Tufte CSS for the canonical web translation of his typographic ideas. — wide margins, sidenotes, content first.
Sidenotes live in the margin and don’t break the reading flow. They are for things you want the reader to glance at, but not be forced through.
I wanted a place that was less of a CV-shaped homepage and more of a notebook — somewhere I can put down half-formed ideas without them needing to be a paper, a thread, or a talk. Most of what I think about — resource-rational cognition, intrinsic motivation, where values come from — moves slowly. Slow ideas deserve a slow medium.
Why this format
Two reasons.
First, margins as thinking space. In academic writing we hide caveats and asides behind footnotes that nobody reads. Sidenotes pull them up to where the eye is.22 The earliest example I keep coming back to: Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information, where the marginalia carry as much weight as the main text.
Second, figures as first-class citizens. The page width here is wide enough that a figure does not need to interrupt the flow.
This is roughly the visual grammar I want for future posts: text in the main column, asides and small images in the margin, larger figures spanning the full width when they earn it.
What’s coming
Probably a mix of:
- Reading notes. I read a lot of papers; most of the value is lost if I don’t write down what I took away.
- Half-baked ideas. Things that aren’t paper-shaped yet but I want to think out loud about.
- Pointers. Other people’s writing I want to remember and recommend.
If something here is useful — or wrong — please reach out.