For about two years now I've been wrestling with a meaty blog post on the paradox of tolerance and the limits of cooperation as a conclusion piece of sorts to my other posts about coexistence and social interactions. It's actually been responsible in part for my long hiatus between 2024 and 2025.

I'm getting tired of stalling on this elusive white whale, so I've decided to finally start chipping at it for good. To do so, I've started splitting it into several smaller posts because as a single unit it's too massive to fit in my monthly publishing rhythm. Plus, it would also make for a more daunting and less digestible reading experience.

This month we're starting with a first smaller chunk, which is a primer on the Prisoner's Dilemma and Tit-for-tat from Game Theory to explore some of the intricacies and compromises of cooperation (Links: Blog / Substack). I've also extracted a second chunk as a new About page for the blog on Universal Agency, which is my fundamental moral conviction and aspiration.

As a bonus, I thought it might be fun (at least for me) to quickly go over a bit of the blog's history in today's newsletter.

I first started noodling on the original idea for this paradox of tolerance post in March 2024 but only began working seriously on the draft during August 2024. Soon after, I had to take a pause on the blog in September due to a big transition in my life with a stacked schedule, which ended up devolving into a long hiatus that lasted a bit more than a year.

I was dissatisfied with that state of affairs and decided to get back in the saddle around June 2025. I thought I might as well finish this post I had already started. However, for several months I could only manage slow and inconsistent progress. I initially thought I would wait for it to be done before I started publishing again, but that only ended up being a procrastination trap.

Later in the year, I got fed up with this pace and decided to switch gears and shift to a more manageable post instead to focus on building momentum and finally break the hiatus rather than keep stalling. I finally posted again in November 2025, and this project has now been lying dormant for almost a year until I finally decided to get back to it for good. Hopefully, in a few months I'll finally be able to close this protracted chapter of the blog. But given this history, it's probably unwise to sell the bear's skin before killing it.

Alright, that's about it for now. Hopefully, I'll have gotten the penultimate chunk of this post out of my plate in November and published the final installment for the end of the year 🤞. See you then!