For too long, I have erred on the side of writing too much.
The first reason I write is in order to find out what I think.
This often leaves my writing long and not very defensible.
However, editing the whole thing is so much extra work after I already did all the work figuring out what I think.
Sometimes it goes well if I just scrap the whole thing and concisely write my conclusion.
But typically I don’t want to spend the marginal time.
Another reason my writing is too long is because I have extra thoughts I know most people won’t find useful.
But I’ve picked up a heuristic that says it’s good to share actual thinking because sometimessome people find it surprisingly useful, so I hit publish anyway.
Nonetheless, I endeavor to write shorter.
So I think I shall experiment with cutting the bits off of comments that represent me thinking aloud, but aren’t worth the space in the local conversation.
And I will put them here, as the dregs of my cognition. I shall hopefully gather data over the next month or two and find out whether they are in fact worthwhile.
Noooooooo! I mean this in a friendly sort of sense. Not that I’m mad or indignant or anything. Just that I’m sad to see this and suspect that it is a move in the wrong direction.
This relates to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while and just never really got around to it. Now’s as good a time as any to at least get started. I started a very preliminary shortform post on it here a while ago.
Basically, think about the progression of an idea. Let’s use academia as an initial example.
At some point in the timeline, an idea is deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on.
Then the results of the experiment are published.
Then people read about the results and talk about them. And the idea.
Then other people summarize the idea and the results. In other papers. In textbooks. In meta-analyses. In the newspaper. Blog posts. Pop science books. Whatever.
Then people discuss those summaries.
Earlier on, before the idea was deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on, the idea probably went through various revisions.
And before that, the author of the idea probably chatted with some colleagues about it to see what they think.
And before that, I dunno, maybe there was a different idea that ended up being a dead end, but lead to the author pivoting to the real idea.
And before that, I dunno, there’s probably various babble-y things going on.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is some sort of lifecycle of an idea. Maybe we can think of the stages as:
Inspiration
Ideation
Refinement
Pursuit
Spread
On platforms like LessWrong, I feel like there is a sort of cultural expectation that when you publish things publicly, they are at the later stages in this lifecycle. From what I understand, things like Personal Blog Posts, Open Thread and Shortform all exist as places where people are encouraged to post about things regardless of the lifecycle stage. However, in practice, I don’t really think people feel comfortable publishing early stage stuff.
There’s certainly pros and cons at play here. Suppose there was 10x more early stage content on LessWrong. What would the consequences of this be? And would it be a net-negative, or a net-positive? It’s hard to say. Maybe it’d screw up the signal-to-noise ratio in the eyes of readers. And maybe that’d lead to a bunch of bad things. Or maybe it’d lead to a bunch of fun and productive collaboration and ideation.
What I do feel strongly about is that the early stages of this lifecycle are in fact important. Currently I suppose that they happen at coffee shops and bars. On cell phones and email clients. On Discord and Slack. Stuff like that. Between people who are already close friends or close colleagues. I get the sense that “we” can “do better” though.
editing the whole thing is so much extra work after I already did all the work figuring out what I think.
typically I don’t want to spend the marginal time.
Yeah. Similar here, only I am aware of this in advance, so I often simply write nothing, because I am a bit of perfectionist here, don’t want to publish something unfinished, and know that finishing just isn’t worth it.
I wonder whether AI editors could help us with this.
That’s a fine idea, but for a while I’d like to err on the side of my comments being “definitely shorter than they have to be” rather than “definitely longer than they have to be”.
(In general I often like to execute pendulum swings, so that I at least know that I am capable of not making the same errors forever.)
It’s fun to take the wins of one culture and apply them to the other, people are very shocked that you found some hidden value to be had (though it often isn’t competitive value / legible to the culture). And if you manage to avoid some terrible decison people speak about how wise you are to have noticed.
(Those are the best cases, often of course people are like “this is odd, I’m going to pretend I didn’t see this” and then move on.)
You may want to look into Toki Pona, a language ostensibly built around conveying meaning in the fewest, simplest possible expressions.
One can explain the most complex things despite having only 130~ words, almost like ‘programming’ the meaning into the sentence, but as the sentence necessarily gets longer and longer, one begins to wonder the necessity of encoding so much meaning.
You can only point to the Tao, you can’t describe it or name it directly. Information is much the same way, I think.
For too long, I have erred on the side of writing too much.
The first reason I write is in order to find out what I think.
This often leaves my writing long and not very defensible.
However, editing the whole thing is so much extra work after I already did all the work figuring out what I think.
Sometimes it goes well if I just scrap the whole thing and concisely write my conclusion.
But typically I don’t want to spend the marginal time.
Another reason my writing is too long is because I have extra thoughts I know most people won’t find useful.
But I’ve picked up a heuristic that says it’s good to share actual thinking because sometimes some people find it surprisingly useful, so I hit publish anyway.
Nonetheless, I endeavor to write shorter.
So I think I shall experiment with cutting the bits off of comments that represent me thinking aloud, but aren’t worth the space in the local conversation.
And I will put them here, as the dregs of my cognition. I shall hopefully gather data over the next month or two and find out whether they are in fact worthwhile.
Noooooooo! I mean this in a friendly sort of sense. Not that I’m mad or indignant or anything. Just that I’m sad to see this and suspect that it is a move in the wrong direction.
This relates to something I’ve been wanting to write about for a while and just never really got around to it. Now’s as good a time as any to at least get started. I started a very preliminary shortform post on it here a while ago.
Basically, think about the progression of an idea. Let’s use academia as an initial example.
At some point in the timeline, an idea is deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on.
Then the results of the experiment are published.
Then people read about the results and talk about them. And the idea.
Then other people summarize the idea and the results. In other papers. In textbooks. In meta-analyses. In the newspaper. Blog posts. Pop science books. Whatever.
Then people discuss those summaries.
Earlier on, before the idea was deemed good enough to pursue an experiment on, the idea probably went through various revisions.
And before that, the author of the idea probably chatted with some colleagues about it to see what they think.
And before that, I dunno, maybe there was a different idea that ended up being a dead end, but lead to the author pivoting to the real idea.
And before that, I dunno, there’s probably various babble-y things going on.
What I’m trying to get at is that there is some sort of lifecycle of an idea. Maybe we can think of the stages as:
Inspiration
Ideation
Refinement
Pursuit
Spread
On platforms like LessWrong, I feel like there is a sort of cultural expectation that when you publish things publicly, they are at the later stages in this lifecycle. From what I understand, things like Personal Blog Posts, Open Thread and Shortform all exist as places where people are encouraged to post about things regardless of the lifecycle stage. However, in practice, I don’t really think people feel comfortable publishing early stage stuff.
There’s certainly pros and cons at play here. Suppose there was 10x more early stage content on LessWrong. What would the consequences of this be? And would it be a net-negative, or a net-positive? It’s hard to say. Maybe it’d screw up the signal-to-noise ratio in the eyes of readers. And maybe that’d lead to a bunch of bad things. Or maybe it’d lead to a bunch of fun and productive collaboration and ideation.
What I do feel strongly about is that the early stages of this lifecycle are in fact important. Currently I suppose that they happen at coffee shops and bars. On cell phones and email clients. On Discord and Slack. Stuff like that. Between people who are already close friends or close colleagues. I get the sense that “we” can “do better” though.
Yeah. Similar here, only I am aware of this in advance, so I often simply write nothing, because I am a bit of perfectionist here, don’t want to publish something unfinished, and know that finishing just isn’t worth it.
I wonder whether AI editors could help us with this.
Have you considered using footnotes for that?
That’s a fine idea, but for a while I’d like to err on the side of my comments being “definitely shorter than they have to be” rather than “definitely longer than they have to be”.
(In general I often like to execute pendulum swings, so that I at least know that I am capable of not making the same errors forever.)
I don’t want to double the comment count I submit to Recent Discussion, so I’ll just update this comment with the things I’ve cut.
12/06/2023 Comment on Originality vs. Correctness
You may want to look into Toki Pona, a language ostensibly built around conveying meaning in the fewest, simplest possible expressions.
One can explain the most complex things despite having only 130~ words, almost like ‘programming’ the meaning into the sentence, but as the sentence necessarily gets longer and longer, one begins to wonder the necessity of encoding so much meaning.
You can only point to the Tao, you can’t describe it or name it directly. Information is much the same way, I think.