Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):
Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it
When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of ‘don’t like’ by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It’s possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they’re probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that’s actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.
it’s more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you’re not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it’s all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you’ve done so far in order to not appear as noise.
I really appreciate the very thoughtful nature of your continued feedback. Thanks!
I think I may attempt to include fewer examples in future posts; this post had 4, which is quite a lot.
It seems likely that my difficulty writing posts that don’t feel long/uninteresting is something systemic; I think one of the more likely candidates is aiming to include more material than most people want/require-for-understanding. Whether I’m right or not, I feel I have a very good handle on which parts of the new mindset are important. I think the problem may be adding too much detail to each of the individual points in that presentation.
It’s certainly true that the “stuff that’s actually important for good writing is harder to communicate” specifically, constructively and diplomatically.
Agreed, and unfortunately many memories are difficult to test. A few ideas that leap to mind:
Go back to my memory of Japan and thereby increase my memory for the layout of my friend’s house—make predictions and then ask him to take and send pictures.
Go back into those email archives, light up my memory, then make predictions about the games I was playing back then, such as the layout of the levels. Find the game and compare. Or make predictions about the layout of my middle school, then go visit it.
I expect that my brain is making some mistakes, but that it’s also largely accurate. The more valuable activity is often stepping into the minds of others, and in that case you ideally come away with a new and improved way of doing something, which constitutes its own evidence of the investigation being useful.
Sigh, there are many things for me to avoid with these posts. Yes, I also don’t want these posts to become narcissistic. Indeed I would hate that, and a narcissistic rant would be useless. But at the same time, there are some things that I seem to be doing very well (through no innate strengths of my own), and my goal here is to share those things with other people so that they can do them too.
For whatever my own assertion is worth, I really am just a guy, will always be, and will also continue to defend this fact. Right now I seem to have some unique insights and techniques, but that’s going to change and then I’ll just be one among many people. A bunch of really fantastic people, but one among many nonetheless (and it will be awesome).
A playful metaphor I’ve been using here is that of a foot soldier who happened to come across a +5 sword of good while wandering through the mountains. I seem able to do some pretty cool stuff, but it would be a mistake to attribute that to anything inherent about me. And most importantly, we can make more of these swords. That’s what I’m trying to do.
As for the personal examples, my own life is one I happen to have a lot of data on.
… I seem to have some unique insights and techniques[.]
You haven’t described anything unique or insightful. You just describe an effect of introspection, and of putting oneself in another’s shoes. I’m pretty sure the majority of LW’s population does these two things all the time.
Unfortunately I wasn’t very clear there—I was referring to the general ideas I’m using, the content of previous and future posts, rather than the particular topic of this post.
Since you don’t want to sound narcissistic, consider counting the number of times you use “I” “my” and “me” before posting. Also avoid the temptation to share your whole mental process and focus on conclusions and supporting evidence that moves beyond personal anecdote. Don’t defend yourself, defend your ideas.
The avoidance of ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’ is good advice, and something I’ve kept an eye out for. In this post it looks like they mostly show up when actually describing personal anecdotes, so the way to cut down on them would be to remove or reduce the anecdotes.
As for sharing the mental process, that information exists as an instruction and guide to doing this kind of thing—it’s actually fairly central to the point of the post.
Regarding the defense of ideas rather than one’s personality, it might be nice if we existed in an idealized setting in which ideas were considered on a level completely separate from the speaker. But it’s not just ideas that we’re judging, and the speaker’s personality is relative information. For example, look at your first comment, regarding the narcissistic feel to the posts. What does it matter if I were narcissistic? I could be the biggest asshole on earth and still be right. But it is relevant—we don’t want some asshole running around and putting himself above everyone else.
The point is that your personal thoughts and experiences leading up to the useful ideas actually detract from your presentation of the ideas. If we think this in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, your idea is signal and your personal experience is noise.
For example, appeals courts spend the minimum time possible on the facts before setting out and applying the law. Facts required to give context to the legal discussion are the only facts mentioned.
In short, consider what you would write if you were totally prohibited from mentioning your personal experiences at all. Sticking as close to that as possible will improve your presentation.
The point is that your personal thoughts and experiences leading up to the useful ideas actually detract from your presentation of the ideas.
Yes, I agree that can happen. But, per the the topic of this post, there are cases where personal thoughts and experiences are very relevant, namely when the topic under discussion is personal thought and experience. If one is attempting to get inside the head of another, information about the content of that head is quite topical. We would lose something if were to model every form of human expression off of the appeals courts.
I appreciate personal anecdote. Sometimes I think anecdotes are the most valuable parts of an essay. It all depends on the style and the preferences of the audience. I don’t criticize HPMOR on the grounds that it focuses too much on Harry and not enough on rationality concepts...
I have asked him to “move beyond” not “eliminate”. Personal anecdote obviously has its place; but it doesn’t dominate on lesswrong, nor should it. As for HPMOR: different form, different purpose. (Though I do occasionally yearn for a bit more conceptualizing there too, - but that’s just personal preference and not grounds for criticism) Frank genuinely seems to want—and need—to improve his posts: my comments are blunt but not unfair.
So to summarize your comment: You use personal examples because you have a lot of data on yourself, and you think you are an excellent example because you seem to be performing very well in some areas.
What are those areas? The examples in this post seem unrelated to any particular strengths of yours.
...you think you are an excellent example because you seem to be performing very well in some areas.
In this post I just used personal examples because I had them, and also because I’ve probably done this somewhat more than average.
The good performance I’m seeing is my larger reason for posting at all. This post is meant both to point out a generally useful phenomenon and to prepare for other material. The other material contains the primary causes of the benefits I’m seeing.
As for what those benefits are, they’re listed in more detail here.
Why do you think you need to prepare your readers for other material? What are you preparing them for? (Or are you preparing yourself?)
Also, could you give me a shorter summary of those benefits? The material you linked me to had four paragraphs of talking about how you interact with other people in a very general way before even attempting your point.
One of the most helpful tools I can think of for the upcoming strategy is to put one’s self into other people’s minds and experiences, and the posts on that strategy are partly built for doing that. I wanted to explain to people why that extra material is there (and that it’s not just a case of needless and unreflected-upon over-elaboration), and also to give an idea of how that material might best be used.
The material you linked me to had four paragraphs of talking about how you interact with other people in a very general way before even attempting your point.
Those paragraphs primarily exist to give a sense of my personality and a suggestion for the best way to consider the benefits. It might be nice if we considered ideas separate from their speaker, but it’s often very relevant information. This comment talks more about this.
For a shorter summary of the benefits, you could check out this post, 4th paragraph, beginning with “If you haven’t read the first two posts”.
If your goal in pursuing writing advice is to increase your audience then my advice: View yourself as an editor not a writer. Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).
Write your next post and when you feel it’s ready, then run a word count on it. Rewrite the post to reduce the count by 50%. Post both versions and see what happens.
Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that is my biggest problem. It actually seems related to the way I talk as well—I often recall over-informing in person.
The most recent post is something of a different style, hopefully shorter and easier to read. I look forward to getting feedback.
On my first draft of something significant, I don’t even worry about style—I concentrate on getting my actual content down on paper in some kind of sensible form. I don’t worry about the style because I have more than enough problems getting the content right.
In this first draft, I think about structure. What ONE thing am I trying to say? What are the 2-5 sub-points of that one thing? Do these sub-points have any sub-points? Make a tree structure, and if you can’t identify the trunk, go away until you can.
Then I go back and fix it. Because the content is now in roughly the right place, the second run-through is much easier. But normally that helpful first draft is full of areas where the logical flow can be improved, and the English can be tightened up. I think you’re missing this stage out entirely as when looking at your post I can find plenty to do. Here’s what five minutes of such attention does to your first para.
“When I was 12 I started an email correspondence with a cousin, and we joked and talked about the things going on in our lives. This went on for years. One day, several years in, I read through the archives. It saturated my mind with the details of my life back then. I had the surreal feeling of having traveled back in time—almost becoming again the person I was years ago, with all my old feelings, hopes and concerns.”
Keep at it—there’s plenty enough there for the polishing to be worthwhile.
The mind I’ve probably gained the most by exploring is Eliezer’s, both because so much of his thinking is available online, and because out of many useful habits and qualities I didn’t have, he seemed to have those qualities to the greatest extent. I’m not referring to the explicit points he’s made in his writing (though I’ve gained by those as well), but the overall way he thinks and feels about the world.
Something I have learnt from this series of posts and the comments on them (including mine):
Most people have no real idea what it is that separates good writing from bad, except that we know it when we see it
When we read your posts, most of us get a vague sense of them being long/uninteresting. But the specific criticisms of your writing are virtually all instances of a bias (availability?) where we try to quantify our vague sense of ‘don’t like’ by grabbing something salient out of the post, such as your use of pronouns or the inclusion of unnecessarily specific details. It’s possible that any or all of those things are actually problems, but they’re probably not the sole cause. Most writing advice on the web is also like this. The stuff that’s actually important for good writing is much harder to communicate.
it’s more likely that the actual cause of your posts feeling long/uninteresting is a more systemic issue. My best guess is that you’re not sure which parts of your new improved mindset are actually important, and which were incidental to the instrumental gains, so you feel like it’s all relevant and it all needs to be communicated, when in fact either only a subset is relevant, or else the insights build on each other in a non-obvious way so that they need to be communicated in a much more precise order than you’ve done so far in order to not appear as noise.
I really appreciate the very thoughtful nature of your continued feedback. Thanks!
I think I may attempt to include fewer examples in future posts; this post had 4, which is quite a lot.
It seems likely that my difficulty writing posts that don’t feel long/uninteresting is something systemic; I think one of the more likely candidates is aiming to include more material than most people want/require-for-understanding. Whether I’m right or not, I feel I have a very good handle on which parts of the new mindset are important. I think the problem may be adding too much detail to each of the individual points in that presentation.
It’s certainly true that the “stuff that’s actually important for good writing is harder to communicate” specifically, constructively and diplomatically.
Um … do you have any way to test how much of the detail was just confabulated by your brain to fill in gaps? Brains do that.
Agreed, and unfortunately many memories are difficult to test. A few ideas that leap to mind:
Go back to my memory of Japan and thereby increase my memory for the layout of my friend’s house—make predictions and then ask him to take and send pictures.
Go back into those email archives, light up my memory, then make predictions about the games I was playing back then, such as the layout of the levels. Find the game and compare. Or make predictions about the layout of my middle school, then go visit it.
I expect that my brain is making some mistakes, but that it’s also largely accurate. The more valuable activity is often stepping into the minds of others, and in that case you ideally come away with a new and improved way of doing something, which constitutes its own evidence of the investigation being useful.
I’m afraid this is all starting to seem pretty narcissistic. Less autobiography, more signal please.
Sigh, there are many things for me to avoid with these posts. Yes, I also don’t want these posts to become narcissistic. Indeed I would hate that, and a narcissistic rant would be useless. But at the same time, there are some things that I seem to be doing very well (through no innate strengths of my own), and my goal here is to share those things with other people so that they can do them too.
For whatever my own assertion is worth, I really am just a guy, will always be, and will also continue to defend this fact. Right now I seem to have some unique insights and techniques, but that’s going to change and then I’ll just be one among many people. A bunch of really fantastic people, but one among many nonetheless (and it will be awesome).
A playful metaphor I’ve been using here is that of a foot soldier who happened to come across a +5 sword of good while wandering through the mountains. I seem able to do some pretty cool stuff, but it would be a mistake to attribute that to anything inherent about me. And most importantly, we can make more of these swords. That’s what I’m trying to do.
As for the personal examples, my own life is one I happen to have a lot of data on.
You haven’t described anything unique or insightful. You just describe an effect of introspection, and of putting oneself in another’s shoes. I’m pretty sure the majority of LW’s population does these two things all the time.
Unfortunately I wasn’t very clear there—I was referring to the general ideas I’m using, the content of previous and future posts, rather than the particular topic of this post.
Since you don’t want to sound narcissistic, consider counting the number of times you use “I” “my” and “me” before posting. Also avoid the temptation to share your whole mental process and focus on conclusions and supporting evidence that moves beyond personal anecdote. Don’t defend yourself, defend your ideas.
The avoidance of ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’ is good advice, and something I’ve kept an eye out for. In this post it looks like they mostly show up when actually describing personal anecdotes, so the way to cut down on them would be to remove or reduce the anecdotes.
As for sharing the mental process, that information exists as an instruction and guide to doing this kind of thing—it’s actually fairly central to the point of the post.
Regarding the defense of ideas rather than one’s personality, it might be nice if we existed in an idealized setting in which ideas were considered on a level completely separate from the speaker. But it’s not just ideas that we’re judging, and the speaker’s personality is relative information. For example, look at your first comment, regarding the narcissistic feel to the posts. What does it matter if I were narcissistic? I could be the biggest asshole on earth and still be right. But it is relevant—we don’t want some asshole running around and putting himself above everyone else.
The point is that your personal thoughts and experiences leading up to the useful ideas actually detract from your presentation of the ideas. If we think this in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, your idea is signal and your personal experience is noise.
For example, appeals courts spend the minimum time possible on the facts before setting out and applying the law. Facts required to give context to the legal discussion are the only facts mentioned.
In short, consider what you would write if you were totally prohibited from mentioning your personal experiences at all. Sticking as close to that as possible will improve your presentation.
Yes, I agree that can happen. But, per the the topic of this post, there are cases where personal thoughts and experiences are very relevant, namely when the topic under discussion is personal thought and experience. If one is attempting to get inside the head of another, information about the content of that head is quite topical. We would lose something if were to model every form of human expression off of the appeals courts.
I appreciate personal anecdote. Sometimes I think anecdotes are the most valuable parts of an essay. It all depends on the style and the preferences of the audience. I don’t criticize HPMOR on the grounds that it focuses too much on Harry and not enough on rationality concepts...
I have asked him to “move beyond” not “eliminate”. Personal anecdote obviously has its place; but it doesn’t dominate on lesswrong, nor should it. As for HPMOR: different form, different purpose. (Though I do occasionally yearn for a bit more conceptualizing there too, - but that’s just personal preference and not grounds for criticism) Frank genuinely seems to want—and need—to improve his posts: my comments are blunt but not unfair.
So to summarize your comment: You use personal examples because you have a lot of data on yourself, and you think you are an excellent example because you seem to be performing very well in some areas.
What are those areas? The examples in this post seem unrelated to any particular strengths of yours.
In this post I just used personal examples because I had them, and also because I’ve probably done this somewhat more than average.
The good performance I’m seeing is my larger reason for posting at all. This post is meant both to point out a generally useful phenomenon and to prepare for other material. The other material contains the primary causes of the benefits I’m seeing.
As for what those benefits are, they’re listed in more detail here.
Why do you think you need to prepare your readers for other material? What are you preparing them for? (Or are you preparing yourself?)
Also, could you give me a shorter summary of those benefits? The material you linked me to had four paragraphs of talking about how you interact with other people in a very general way before even attempting your point.
One of the most helpful tools I can think of for the upcoming strategy is to put one’s self into other people’s minds and experiences, and the posts on that strategy are partly built for doing that. I wanted to explain to people why that extra material is there (and that it’s not just a case of needless and unreflected-upon over-elaboration), and also to give an idea of how that material might best be used.
Those paragraphs primarily exist to give a sense of my personality and a suggestion for the best way to consider the benefits. It might be nice if we considered ideas separate from their speaker, but it’s often very relevant information. This comment talks more about this.
For a shorter summary of the benefits, you could check out this post, 4th paragraph, beginning with “If you haven’t read the first two posts”.
If your goal in pursuing writing advice is to increase your audience then my advice: View yourself as an editor not a writer. Your weakness as a writer (IMHO) is verbosity and generality (the two are often related).
Write your next post and when you feel it’s ready, then run a word count on it. Rewrite the post to reduce the count by 50%. Post both versions and see what happens.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I think that is my biggest problem. It actually seems related to the way I talk as well—I often recall over-informing in person.
The most recent post is something of a different style, hopefully shorter and easier to read. I look forward to getting feedback.
That is a vast improvement over some of your other posts. Good work.
Here’s what I tend to do.
On my first draft of something significant, I don’t even worry about style—I concentrate on getting my actual content down on paper in some kind of sensible form. I don’t worry about the style because I have more than enough problems getting the content right.
In this first draft, I think about structure. What ONE thing am I trying to say? What are the 2-5 sub-points of that one thing? Do these sub-points have any sub-points? Make a tree structure, and if you can’t identify the trunk, go away until you can.
Then I go back and fix it. Because the content is now in roughly the right place, the second run-through is much easier. But normally that helpful first draft is full of areas where the logical flow can be improved, and the English can be tightened up. I think you’re missing this stage out entirely as when looking at your post I can find plenty to do. Here’s what five minutes of such attention does to your first para.
“When I was 12 I started an email correspondence with a cousin, and we joked and talked about the things going on in our lives. This went on for years. One day, several years in, I read through the archives. It saturated my mind with the details of my life back then. I had the surreal feeling of having traveled back in time—almost becoming again the person I was years ago, with all my old feelings, hopes and concerns.”
Keep at it—there’s plenty enough there for the polishing to be worthwhile.
Well, as Eliezer said
Interesting, I hadn’t remembered him saying that.