day 1 camino

· 3 min read

First official day of walking the Camino. Just over 5 hours of walking total, which in my mind seemed quite easy, but with the added weight, it’s becomes moderately challenging.

I think I will carry the bag for the next two stages of the walk (around 6-7 hours of walking) but the last day (40km) to Santiago, I will probably send it ahead (but we’ll see!).

Today I did try to walk and talk, which resulted in an incoherent ramble about what is occupying my thoughts these days — it doesn’t help that I’m slightly out of breath whilst doing this, with heavy breathing into my microphone.

My key takeaways from today (that which I didn’t explore in the video)

  • Writing is the most information dense way of transmitting information. Much faster, easier to form logical structures of thought, you can backtrack/delete. Actually putting words to thoughts is difficult, but also helps accelerate your understanding. People who extemporaneously speak about a topic AND actually explain it well — that’s a marker you have really deep knowledge about a topic
  • I think 40 year old me will appreciate this little archive I’ve made. A snapshot in time

One thing I wanted to do was articulate the topics I want to think about on this walk. Maybe that will make it clearer when I actually vlog.

  1. Principle of optimism
  2. Different between rational and anti rational memes
  3. Why did some civilisations make no progress and others did (static vs dynamic societies)
  4. Why relativism is a bad philosophy- not only scientifically, but in morality, cultures and even art- we can have objective beauty!
  5. The mistaken concept of ‘Space ship earth’ and that resources are not actually limited.
  6. What wealth is (the conventional definition) versus what Deutsch talks about - wealth being the set of transformations we can make- wealth is the knowledge to turn a kilogram of sand into a semiconductor
  7. Why wealth is an obviously good thing and NOT zero sum- we can make everyone on earth more wealthy, and we have done that this past century- the majority of the world is well fed, housed, free of war. Thinking of the people that used to walk this Camino in the past- life is so much better now, and it’s only improving… (that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed- that is blind optimism, but so long as we have the ability to criticise bad ideas and correct mistakes, we have a chance)
  8. The importance of preserving the institutions of error correction- there are a lot of bad ideas and memes out there- I think we need to falsify them. I feel like human progress depends on being able to keep the institutions of criticism alive. The Royal Society- Nullius in verba- take no one’s word for it
  9. The importance of self education, rejection of authority, the fun principle, non coercion in learning . Basically a theory of education
  10. Friendships as an adult
  11. Dating and relationships
  12. The value of art- in that it allows you to access places you couldn’t have otherwise.

There’s this meme of 25-30 something year old men becoming obsessed with a topic (like WW2). I think I’m becoming mildly obsessed with amateur physics and theory of knowledge.

Vlogging is very different from ‘blogging’/writing. I have a lot of respect for people who do this and actually make it interesting/novel/watchable.

Port Marin