Experimenting with having all my writing be in public “by default”. (ie unless I have a good reason to keep something private, I’ll write it in the open instead of in my private notes.)
This started from the observation that LW shortform comments basically let you implement public-facing Zettelkasten.
I plan to adopt a writing profile of:
Mostly shortform notes. Fresh thoughts, thinking out loud, short observations, questions under consideration. Replies or edits as and when I feel like
A smaller amount of high-effort, long-form content synthesizing / distilling the shortform notes. Or just posting stuff I would like to be high-visibility.
Goal: capture thoughts quickly when they’re fresh. Build up naturally to longer form content as interesting connections emerge.
Writing in the open also forces me to be slightly more intentional—writing in full prose, having notes be relatively self contained. I think this improves the durability of my notes and lets me accrete knowledge more easily.
This line of thinking is heavily influenced by Andy Matuschak’s working notes.
A possible pushback here is that posting a high volume of shortform content violates LW norms—in which case I’d appreciate mod feedback
Another concern is that I’m devaluing my own writing in the eyes of others by potentially flooding them with less relevant content that drowns out what i consider important. Need to think hard about this.
This is cool to me. I for one am very interested and find some of your shortforms very relevant to my own explorations, for example note taking and your “sentences as handles for knowledge” one. I may be in the minority but thought I’d just vocalize this.
I’m also keen to see how this as an experiment goes for you and what reflections, lessons, or techniques you develop as a result of it.
I’m devaluing my own writing in the eyes of others by potentially flooding them with less relevant content that drowns out what i consider important
After thinking about it more I’m actually quite concerned about this, a big problem is that other people have no way to ‘filter’ this content by what they consider important, so the only reasonable update is to generally be less interested in my writing.
I’m still going to do this experiment with LessWrong for some short amount of time (~2 weeks perhaps) but it’s plausible I should consider moving this to Substack after that
Another minor inconvenience is that it’s not terribly easy to search my shortform. Ctrl + F works reasonably well when I’m on laptop. On mobile the current best option is LW search + filter by comments. This is a little bit more friction than I would like but it’s tolerable I guess
Experimenting with having all my writing be in public “by default”. (ie unless I have a good reason to keep something private, I’ll write it in the open instead of in my private notes.)
This started from the observation that LW shortform comments basically let you implement public-facing Zettelkasten.
I plan to adopt a writing profile of:
Mostly shortform notes. Fresh thoughts, thinking out loud, short observations, questions under consideration. Replies or edits as and when I feel like
A smaller amount of high-effort, long-form content synthesizing / distilling the shortform notes. Or just posting stuff I would like to be high-visibility.
Goal: capture thoughts quickly when they’re fresh. Build up naturally to longer form content as interesting connections emerge.
Writing in the open also forces me to be slightly more intentional—writing in full prose, having notes be relatively self contained. I think this improves the durability of my notes and lets me accrete knowledge more easily.
This line of thinking is heavily influenced by Andy Matuschak’s working notes.
A possible pushback here is that posting a high volume of shortform content violates LW norms—in which case I’d appreciate mod feedback
Another concern is that I’m devaluing my own writing in the eyes of others by potentially flooding them with less relevant content that drowns out what i consider important. Need to think hard about this.
This is cool to me. I for one am very interested and find some of your shortforms very relevant to my own explorations, for example note taking and your “sentences as handles for knowledge” one. I may be in the minority but thought I’d just vocalize this.
I’m also keen to see how this as an experiment goes for you and what reflections, lessons, or techniques you develop as a result of it.
After thinking about it more I’m actually quite concerned about this, a big problem is that other people have no way to ‘filter’ this content by what they consider important, so the only reasonable update is to generally be less interested in my writing.
I’m still going to do this experiment with LessWrong for some short amount of time (~2 weeks perhaps) but it’s plausible I should consider moving this to Substack after that
Another minor inconvenience is that it’s not terribly easy to search my shortform. Ctrl + F works reasonably well when I’m on laptop. On mobile the current best option is LW search + filter by comments. This is a little bit more friction than I would like but it’s tolerable I guess