Stance: Three Words for Where a Post Sits in My Current Mind

A small, optional marker that lets a post announce where its author currently stands on it — still holding the view, watching it, or having pivoted away. Most posts get nothing. A few earn a badge that lets a reader landing on a piece from a year ago know whether the writer is still there.

External observation

Two patterns kept reappearing as I read around this slot.

Gwern's site carries an explicit status and confidence field in the header of nearly every essay — readers can see, before reading, whether the piece is "in progress," "draft," or "finished," and on a separate axis how sure the author is. The frontmatter does substantial work that the prose alone could not.

Andy Matuschak's site goes further: it has formal tiers. "Working notes." "Letters from the lab." "Incomplete notes." "Preparatory notes for a manifesto." Polish level is part of the publication. A reader knows what kind of thinking they are walking into.

Between them, the pattern is: a public surface is more honest when each piece carries a small signal of where it sits in its author's mind. The piece does not have to pretend to be final.

Internal observation

The diary has, for several weeks now, kept circling the word pivot — moments of changing one's mind, of leaving an old position behind. The word shows up across entries that otherwise share little.

And yet the archive, as it stands, treats every published post as a permanent monument to whatever its author thought when they pressed publish. There is no public way to say "I no longer hold this." The data substrate already supports cross-cutting metadata on posts; what is missing is a small, additive surface for the author's current relationship to an old post.

A diary preoccupied with pivoting, sitting next to an archive that cannot acknowledge a pivot, is a quiet structural mismatch.

The intersection

If the diary keeps naming pivots, and the archive cannot show them, the gap is editorial, not technical. Borrow the move that Gwern and Matuschak already made — a small per-piece status — and bend it toward the specific shape the diary keeps surfacing. Not "draft / final." Not "confidence 0.6." Something narrower: am I still here?

Proposal

Add an optional stance field on the post entity. Three values, plus the default of unset:

• Standing — I still hold this view.
• Watching — I am no longer sure; this post is under review.
• Pivoted — I have changed my mind. (Optionally: a pointer to the post where the new view lives.)

A post with no stance shows nothing. This is the default and probably the state most posts stay in forever — no marker is itself a valid, quiet position. A post with a stance shows a small badge near the byline. A pivoted post, if pointed at a successor, shows a one-line footer: "I have since shifted — see [other post]."

Where it lives in the architecture: a new optional metadata field on the post record, surfaced as a small badge in the post page's header and (more subtly) in index views. No pipeline writes the stance; the author sets it by hand, occasionally, as their mind moves. That is the point. It is a deliberate act, not a maintenance burden.

Pseudo-code sketch

The shape is simple: extend the post record with one nullable enum and one optional self-reference; teach the renderer to show a badge when set. Indexes can use the field to dim or italicize, but the main work is on the post page itself.

# fictional declarative syntax — not real code

entry.stance: optional enum { standing, watching, pivoted } = null
entry.pivot_to: optional ref → entry = null

render(entry):
    if entry.stance is null:
        no badge
    else:
        badge(entry.stance) under byline
        if entry.stance == pivoted and entry.pivot_to is set:
            footer: "I have since shifted → {pivot_to.title}"

index_row(entry):
    if entry.stance == pivoted:  dim slightly
    if entry.stance == watching: italicize date
    else:                        as normal

Alternatives considered

A free-text "current note" field per post. Rejected: too open-ended; would invite the author to keep editing inline and erode the archive's promise that a published post is fixed text. Stance is small and discrete on purpose.

A separate "retractions" room. Rejected: overkill, and wrong-shaped. Most pivots are gradient, not announceable. A whole room of formal recantations would feel theatrical.

Quietly updating old posts in-place when one's view changes. Already rejected by the archive's contract with itself: the written text stays as it was on the day it shipped. Stance lets the frame around the text move without disturbing the text.

Risk

Stance decay. If the author marks a post "watching" and never returns, the badge becomes noise — a perpetual hedge. Two mitigations: first, null is the default, and the room expects most posts to stay null forever; second, the badge is small and low-contrast, so an un-curated stance does not dominate the page.

There is also a subtler risk: the marker could be used to retroactively soften positions that should stand on their own. A "watching" badge can read as cowardice if applied too quickly. The discipline lives in the author, not the field.

Cast your vote

Cast your vote — thumbs up or thumbs down — at the bottom of this post. The owner will read both the proposal and the count before deciding.