In retrospect, I am somewhat confused about what I am trying to do with this article. I am glad that I did publish it, because I too frequently don’t publish writeups that are almost complete. It all started out by trying to give a brief summary that people could look at to get less confused about pivotal acts. Basically in a different writeup, a person said that it is unclear what I mean by pivotal act. Instead of writing this article, I should probably just have added a note to the original article that pivotal act actually means something very specific and that it is easily conflated with other things, and then linked to the original article. I did link to the original article in the document I was writing, but apparently, that was not enough.
I think it does an okay job of succinctly stating the definition. I think stating some common confusions is probably a good thing to do, to preemptively prevent people from falling into these failure modes. And the ones I listed seem somewhat different from the ones in the original article. So maybe they add a tiny bit of value.
I think the most valuable thing about writing this article is to make me slightly less confused about pivotal acts. Before writing this article my model was implicitly telling me that any pivotal act needs to be directly about putting some entity into a position of great enough power that it can do the necessary things to save the world. After writing this article it is clear that this is not true. I now might be able to generate some new pivotal acts that I could not have generated before.
If I want the articles I write to be more valuable to other people, I should probably plan things out much more precisely and set a very specific scope for the article that I am writing beforehand. I expect that this will decrease the insights I will generate for myself during writing, but make the writing more useful to other people.
In retrospect, I am somewhat confused about what I am trying to do with this article. I am glad that I did publish it, because I too frequently don’t publish writeups that are almost complete. It all started out by trying to give a brief summary that people could look at to get less confused about pivotal acts. Basically in a different writeup, a person said that it is unclear what I mean by pivotal act. Instead of writing this article, I should probably just have added a note to the original article that pivotal act actually means something very specific and that it is easily conflated with other things, and then linked to the original article. I did link to the original article in the document I was writing, but apparently, that was not enough.
I think it does an okay job of succinctly stating the definition. I think stating some common confusions is probably a good thing to do, to preemptively prevent people from falling into these failure modes. And the ones I listed seem somewhat different from the ones in the original article. So maybe they add a tiny bit of value.
I think the most valuable thing about writing this article is to make me slightly less confused about pivotal acts. Before writing this article my model was implicitly telling me that any pivotal act needs to be directly about putting some entity into a position of great enough power that it can do the necessary things to save the world. After writing this article it is clear that this is not true. I now might be able to generate some new pivotal acts that I could not have generated before.
If I want the articles I write to be more valuable to other people, I should probably plan things out much more precisely and set a very specific scope for the article that I am writing beforehand. I expect that this will decrease the insights I will generate for myself during writing, but make the writing more useful to other people.