Why I'm Writing in Public

My name is J.M. Bailey. I’m a writer and a DJ based in San Francisco.

Those two things sound unrelated. They aren’t.

DJing is the study of how energy moves through a room — how one record creates the conditions for the next one, how a crowd becomes something more than the sum of its individuals. Writing, at least the kind I do, is the same thing on a different scale. I study how culture moves. How ideas spread, mutate, and sometimes turn against the people who carry them.

My first paper, The Compression Wave, asks a simple question: why are the wealthiest, most educated, most technologically advanced populations in human history failing to reproduce? The answer turns out to be less about economics and more about evolutionary biology, prestige, and what happens when ancient psychological software runs in a completely new environment. It’s on SocArXiv if you want the full argument.

The Eighth Atheism is the philosophical companion I’m building on top of it. The premise: three completely independent traditions — Buddhist philosophy 2,500 years ago, Darwinian evolutionary biology, and quantum physics — have all arrived at the same conclusion about the nature of reality without knowing about each other. I think that convergence means something. I’m still figuring out exactly what.

Here’s the thing: I’m figuring it out in real time.

Over 27 days I’m reading one of Nagarjuna’s 27 Examinations per day, alongside Jay Garfield’s analysis and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Signal Study is where I’ll think out loud about what I’m finding — where it connects to the Compression Wave thesis, where it surprises me, where it falls apart.

This is a mind working in public.

Stick around.

— J.M.