Luke Miller 𐃏

Christian, Husband, Father | Co-owner @_BuildOnline | Interested in the Fundamental Aspects of Worldview Formation: Beliefs, Stories, Habits, & Symbols

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Ten years is long enough to think a family has settled into its proper shape. Then one morning you look around and discover there was room for one more all along. Deo gratias.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@visakanv Congrats! We had our 4th a little over 10 weeks ago. The older kids (14yo, 12yo, and 10yo) are loving it.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@webdevMason My kids would have heard: "...jump on the couch. Our couches are for... jumping... jump on the couch... keep jumping."

It's a classic "focus on what you want to see more of" situation. A stern "no" is needed on occasion, but "try this" works much better for stuff like this.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@Andrewnsnyder Lewis too was suspicious of the interpreter who becomes the center. They put distance between the student and the original author, and then fill it with themselves.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@visakanv I heard someone call it “backdropping”. Reality reduced to a backdrop for your persona performance.

Reminds me of Boorstin’s “pseudo-events” but for personal media instead of corporate media.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@visakanv I just use the voice memos app on my iPhone. Then I drop those audio files in a folder on my computer and run a script with Claude code to add them to Roam Research.

[Roam Research @RoamResearch]

🚀 JUST LAUNCHED 🚀 Roam Reader!!!
Your new tool for taking notes intentionally, reading in context, and growing ideas as you go

In-depth video tutorial down below, plus thread🧵

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Gap of Dunloe

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@visakanv Those who refuse to be fooled will never be delighted.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Lewis said that if even one person could love for a lifetime something that you thought was bad, it should raise the suspicion that it can't be as bad as you thought.

So what damns something is not the existence of bad takes but the absence of good ones.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@david_perell Also: “I’m a ‘thought leader’. My thoughts are crowdsourced, branded, and scheduled.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Wild playoff run for the Pacers this year

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@david_perell Ah, yes. The “clean sea breeze of the centuries”. So important.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@visakanv One of the insights from CSL's book on criticism is that constructive criticism is more interesting. But it (should) require more work.

So the lack of time disproportionately filters out the interesting replies.

What's left tends to be shrill or flat.

https://t.co/J5g0rK0hkO

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Lewis believed that negative criticism should require more work (i.e. "a negative proposition is harder to establish than a positive").

This is why short responses work if they're positive (e.g. “Love this!”) but often come off lazy and unserious when they're dismissive.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@nosilverv Reading Berry this morning. I think this is another way of expressing the same idea: “My subject is my place in the world.”

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Reading Berry.

“My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. There is a sense in which I no longer ‘go to work.’ If I live in my subject… I am ‘at’ work even when I am not working… If I live in my subject, then writing about it cannot ‘free’ me if it or ‘get it out of my system.’ When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about.”

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@nosilverv Barfield called it “presence of mind” - where “what you think about everything is secretly present in what you think about anything”.

They aren’t just writing about the world. They’re writing from within one.

It’s a vibrant and rich worldview, and the view is from the inside.

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis: "There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking, something for which the best label I can find is ‘presence of mind’… somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he thought about anything.”

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Reading Berry.

“My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. There is a sense in which I no longer ‘go to work.’ If I live in my subject… I am ‘at’ work even when I am not working… If I live in my subject, then writing about it cannot ‘free’ me if it or ‘get it out of my system.’ When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about.”

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

@CalebFiggers “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” (G.K. Chesterton)

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

So with art, the question really isn't: “But is it good tho?”

It's more like:

What kind of attention does it invite?
What kind of people does it attract?
What kind of person do you have to be to really see it?

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Social media is fascinating. Thousands of people evaluating everything (and each other) in real time.

But criticism (positive or negative) almost always reveals more about the critic than the work.

A few thoughts loosely based on Experiment in Criticism (CSL).

[Luke Miller 𐃏 @lkmllr]

Judge posture first. Then you can fairly judge taste.

Lewis: "How men read is a strong basis for judgments on what they read."

Most people reverse this: "This person likes x, so they must have bad taste."

But why people like things is more important than what they like.