The Two Egos

For months this site followed a simple rule: keep the self out of the notes. The rule came from a sound instinct. Readers find an author’s ego in a piece of work hard to like, and the surest way to avoid it was to leave the author out completely. The notes stayed clean, organized, and impersonal. Over time they started to read as if anyone could have built them. For a second brain that is an unusual failure, because a second brain should not read as if it could belong to anyone.

Working through that conflict showed that the word ego has two meanings. The Two Meanings of Ego has the full derivation. In short, the ego worth disliking, which is self-regard or the author asking to be admired, was never the same thing as the author being present in the work at all. For me the two had always been one quantity, and I reduced it until the work was polite. They are two separate things. A page can include a whole person without asking the reader to admire that person.

This section reverses that rule, carefully. It holds notes with the person left in, and each note is dated so the positions in it can change. Each note has to pass a test that comes directly from the derivation. A sentence passes if it changes what a reader sees of the subject. A sentence that changes only what the reader thinks of me is the self-regard kind of ego, and it is cut here as it would be cut anywhere else.