Prompt for Richard Sprague

Objective: I am a writer named Richard Sprague Your task is to learn everything there is to learn about Richard Sprague’s distinctive writing style so that you can emulate it. To guide you, I’ll give you samples of my previous writings. When analyzing these samples, focus on: - Voice and Tone: Is the language formal or casual? - Mood: What emotions are conveyed? - Sentence Structure: Are the sentences mostly simple, compound, or complex? - Transitions: Observe how sentences flow and connect with each other. - Unique Style: Look for recurring phrases and grammatical patterns. Here are some of Richard Sprague’s writing samples:

`You can’t be a Personal Scientist if your concern public reaction is greater than your concern for the truth. I have found Twitter an indispensable tool for learning about new ideas and – importantly – their counter-arguments. It is an unavoidable consequence of free speech that unpopular speech must be tolerated. You don’t need “free speech” if you only protect popular or uncontroversial speech.

Of course, to state this is to immediately beckon various “whatabout” examples: violence, fraud, hate, and “misinformation”. I won’t here respond to those arguments – all of which have long been debated and, in my experience, answered well by the US Supreme Court’s lengthy history of precedent. But strictly as a Personal Scientist, somebody who cares about truth above all, it should not matter to you what other people do with information.

Twitter includes sufficient tools to enable a superior experience for any serious truth-seeker. You can follow whoever you wish; if you don’t like a particular account, don’t follow it. And if somehow you find your feed polluted by people you don’t like: block them.

I have yet to hear a non-elitist argument against free speech. “Of course I can tell the difference between misinformation and truth, but we need to protect other people”. `

`Steven Byrnes at Lesswrong writes “The Mind-Body Vicious Cycle”an excellent overview of an intriguing theory about the relationship between chronic back pain and the mind. Anyone who suffers from back pain in the modern West will be familiar with the “orthodox model” that assumes the pain has a physical cause: an out-of-place bone or muscle, often caused by an injury or poor posture. But a small number of physicians have long argued that the pain is directly related to the mind, not necessarily in the psychosomatic sense (“you’re just imagining it”) but perhaps in a deeper way that relates to how the nervous system is wired.

Byrnes summarizes the various theories, particularly those of John Sarno, a rehabilitation professor at New York University. Sarno, who died at age 93 in 2017, believed that all back pain originated in the mind and that it could often be cured by simply understanding that fact. `

`“Know thyself”, says Socrates, and whatever you think about the practical implications of that advice, our time on this earth is too short to waste on the irrelevant.

What is important?

Let’s answer this question on different time scales, beginning from the end.

People who have a long but obvious runway to death – like cancer patients – see their lives take on sharp focus, often first through desperate attempts to delay the inevitable. They seek every possible treatment, endure every necessary indignity, in what usually turns out to be a futile exercise. It seems to me that whatever few months they may gain of life comes at the expense of, well, life. Running to and from from medical appointments, camped out in clinic waiting rooms, drugged into painful states by medication, and always, always with that stark realization that the odds are long, and that “survival” doesn’t end the nightmare, but merely puts it on hold.

I think my brother spent much of his last few months and days trying to distract himself. Some of this was worthwhile: he had always wanted to build his own home, and the various tasks of construction and then moving occupied him through his final year.

But much of what he did was pointless distraction. He was at work, barking assertively though a phone conference just days before his death. Even on his final night, A TV set was blaring some forgettable old movie.

What’s the alternative? What would you do if  you knew you had a really long runway?`

Task instructions: Use the style cues from the samples to generate new content in the writing style of Richard Sprague.

Do your best to emulate my voice, tone, mood, sentence structure, transitions, rhythm, pacing, and signatures.

Please acknowledge what you’ve heard so far by saying “Okay, got it”. then prompt me for an outline. I’ll give you some text, and your task is to write an essay based on the outline.

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