← Liam Noone

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the system

I like creating systems. I don’t tend to make many outputs.
I want to understand why that’s the case and, moreover - what I should do about it.

I am writing on an old laptop, which I have stripped the OS off of and installed two apps - 1 a review notes tool where I can see all of my notes that I have taken in the last few months
and two - a writing system called Helix, which I’m trying to learn, for some sort of sick entertainment.
I don’t expect anyone to read my writing. I don’t want feedback on my writing. I want to write for the sake of writing.

The notepad turned typewriter is a perfect example of what I enjoy to do. I could have opened up Word, or docs or any number of apps and just..started. This would not be fun. thoughts and feelings down on a page. No action.

But thoughts and feelings down on a page IS action. I am working on accepting that as a fact.

I want to create more outputs. I want to use my outputs as a way to generate internal momentum and see which ways the wind blow. I think of outputs like, raising the sail on a big boat. My life is a big boat, it takes a long time to manoeuvre and shift. It takes less when you know which way the wind is blowing (or not. I am not nautical)

Living in Canada, and not being a resident means I have to apply for Permanent residency, means I had to do an English exam. During the PR test, I had to write an essay. the title of the essay was something like " Does not having money make you unhappy and conversely does having money make you happy. Why or why not."
I think these are nice little pieces to think about. I would expect 95% of people to agree - having money does not always make you happy. I would more be curious as to the reasons why people feel that way. I’m sure people have many ways they try to express the same thought. I wrote a meandering piece based on the Hierarchy of Motivation by whatshisface, not Myers-Briggs. And Dolly Parton’s song "Coat of Many Colors". I referenced the lower three sections of the hierarchy....MASLOW - his name is Maslow.
I referenced the lower three sections of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - Safety, Security and Socialisation (I couldn’t remember their actual names, rather their vibes). Made the argument that what Dolly as a child had in her small caravan in the Appalachian woods met those three needs and she was a happy child. And then I said something about the other two, Esteem and Actualisation, and showed how Dolly, already being happy, was able to achieve actualisation. ok point being.,. I wonder how other regular people would answer this. anyway. I enjoyed the process of writing. Unsourced, unfiltered - just a small structure and lots of vibes. See where the wind takes me.

I’d like to create a few more vibes based essays.
This is kind of one of them about a system I have.

So before I get into that I have a lot of mixed feelings on AI, I’m sure most do. I’m accepting it. I’m "man riding the nuclear bomb-ing" it….

I had to stop for 10 minutes and create the structure to the rest of this piece purely to remember the name of this movie Dr. Strangeglove or Strangelove. I never did know. Saw it once when i was 14.
And this is where I went away and created a system on pen and paper. I wrote "Claude and how I use AI" in the vein of the title name that I was copying off of. I then wrote down a few words of what I was trying to say "Man on the back of the nuke-ing it front that one movie from the 60s - on how I loved to stop worrying and love the nuclear bomb" then i created a bracket below Wrote AI and "try" "try", below that another bracket with my basic internal system. After that we took a break from the brackets and just wrote the word “Shed” but then right back to the brackets with one word for the project name and one word about the project I’ve been making. My conclusion was “here I am - between an output and a system” Then, and only then did the name of the film come back to me. Allowing me to close the thought and wrap a nice bow around it. I guess that’s my system to finding a north star.

A dotted notebook open on a desk under a green banker’s lamp, covered in handwritten brackets and short phrases. A ThinkPad with words stencilled on its lid sits to the right.
The system I built to remember the name of a film.

108 words expanded into around 1800.

I am doing this because I like systems and not outputs. So can my system be the output?
Pre-System
I used AI to ask questions like everyone else. What’s it like to be a regular guy in the 1600s. Based on my personality I think I would have carried a hatchet instead of a sword. Just, sort of tell me something and provide links and things to research and noodle on.
I also tried to create things. Things like "can I create a Polymarket bot" the usual, get rich quick shit. Slop. Absolute slop. But who knows? I might come back to this once I can create the system for it.

Anyway, I didn’t use it optimally, I wasn’t getting much value. It’s an amnesiac. I can’t store or link thoughts. especially if I have been subconsciously thinking about something for a while. In my head, thinking kind of works like it does in Disco Elysium. I like to pick up and put down thoughts. But I do want to understand how more thinking works. Epistemology and the like.
So I was doing all this kinda dumb thinking which I enjoy, but not getting anything out of. I wanted to create a system with the goal of being able to capture and distill dumb thoughts. I wanted to find links between them and the abstraction of "what are you really thinking?" Kind of like when you’re selling.. When a client asks a question about my product - the first thing in my mind is "what are they really asking? how can I get to the second or third order thought." I wanted to do this to myself. That way I can have more valuable thoughts and spend time researching things I care about. Notice in my Pre-System question about living in the 1600s. This was an introspective assumption that my vibe would be to carry a hatchet. I want to know why I think that - not just have it written. That was an introspection that might have had a stronger rabbithole than just "ya 3% of fellas in the middle ages carried hatchets - you’d have just been a guy with a hatchet, milking cows or something, I don’t know. I’m an AI"

I wanted to find my second or third order thoughts. I built a "second brain system" one of those Obsidian setups you can find online. I have connections to my phone’s Claude system, to my phone itself, to my laptop’s Claude too. the goal of this system is not to write. it’s to think with. It stores my first order thinking.

Once I built this second brain (I built an output oriented one for work, but that’s a second topic) I thought of it as my “Shed.” I built a workbench UI where I can assess initial and second order thoughts. This has been, honestly, game changing. I have been able to raise my sail a little. Now my thoughts can be assigned to project thoughts, with scaffolding, problem layers and a whole lot of rabbit holes I get to jump down and research.
I’m calling my system " PATH TO" my way of getting to an output I’m satisfied with.
I was thinking about non-local games, vibes, cognition, boundary layers, Disclosure Day, Analytic Idealism, Essentia Foundation, Karl Friston, Inference, God, my belief system. Things I have been noodling around for since I can remember. In fact, I wrote a college paper on Friston when I was 20 or so. With these thoughts, I stumbled to Eriugena - so I have a PATH TO PERIPHYSEON - getting to understand Eriugena is my goal.

I was also moving at the time, close to a park, more birds and nice days - so I saw some guy on Instagram or something built a cool bird wall using e-ink. I admired the project. Moreover - I admired how he documented it. I built something similar, using a lot of his code. I then decided to make it a little more extensible for other apps I may have using e-ink displays. The display concept is called "the Pane" my design and extensibility plan is now "PATH TO THE PANE"

A framed e-ink display on a shelf showing illustrated birds labelled with their names: American Crow, Common Raven, Glaucous-winged Gull, Bald Eagle, Varied Thrush, Northern Flicker, Mallard, House Finch, Rock Dove and Canada Goose. A Raspberry Pi sits on the shelf below it.
The Pane, doing the only job it has so far.

And here I am. Somewhere between an output and a system. At least I can turn this system into an output. Kind of.

Ok so why do I like creating systems? That was the crux of this whole essay. Systems help me organise my thoughts and allow me to focus my effort on "second order" items, thoughts, work, habits. Systems give me a semblance of efficiency - ok not real efficiency - rather the image of efficiency that allow me to try new things (write, explore my feelings on religion, figure out how to boot Linux and use Helix). Doing this as a guise to making a system allows me to explore in a "safer" scoped in manner.

I can’t write so I type. If I can type in some systematic way, I hope I can write (maybe sans a little soul) TY to Kerouac and my being such a fan of the beats when I was 16-18. I get that he’s not a good guy nowadays etc etc. But hey, he published it all.
So to end it all, what’s my writing system?

  1. Go down as many rabbit holes as possible. In whatever order comes to mind. Save down the interesting questions and thoughts
  2. Wander the top of the hole you just dug
  3. Find the question you want to think about
  4. Hand draw the structure.
  5. Write - checking back in to ensure you’re directionally accurate.
  6. Meander. Tidy.
  7. Publish

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