I think the advice to primarily post to your personal blog is very good; this won’t completely tank visibility of your posts, since many people read the “community” feed, but the frontpage has a particular purpose that your posts maybe aren’t fulfilling right now (though they might in the future once you’ve had more practice writing, and writing for this community in particular).
However, I wouldn’t completely discourage you from writing about topics that the Sequences have covered before reading about those topics in the Sequences. (Sorry, I know that last sentence had a ton of negations in it, translation: if you want to write about a topic, but haven’t read the relevant portions of the Sequences yet, I’d say still do it). There are several reasons for this:
1. If you have a view on something before reading Eliezer’s thoughts on it, this can help you integrate Eliezer’s views into your own, without doing so blindly. It’s easier to learn something if you already have some related beliefs for it to latch onto (e.g., it’s easier to learn about Japanese history if you already know something about, say, anime, because there will be certain things from anime that you’ll be able to use as hooks for the new historical knowledge to latch onto).
2. If you write about something before seeing Eliezer’s thoughts, you may have a fresh take that turns out to be correct (though more often you will write something, look at Eliezer’s thoughts, and see that you fell into a trap that Eliezer already warned about. But that’s okay I think, you still learned from it).
That is to say, you can write _unencumbered_ by Eliezer’s work to some extent. It’s easier to do an Original Seeing if you haven’t already read Eliezer’s thoughts on some topic. It’s good to dare to be wrong.
However, if you do this, I would advise you to either
2. frame them as “I’m writing this before reading Eliezer’s work on the topic, in preparation for reading said work” and perhaps write a follow-up post after reading Eliezer’s relevant work. Even Eliezer did this while writing the sequences, e.g. with Gary Drescher’s work; it’s a well-respected technique in this community to write up your (preliminary) thoughts on some topic _before_ reading the relevant literature (though with the expectation that you’ll probably update after reading said literature).
But yeah, do definitely read the Sequences sooner rather than later, and expect that what you write after reading them will be more relevant to this community than what you write before reading them.
I also want to echo ESRogs’s kudos for getting feedback rather than giving up.
Also, as a datapoint, I also found the Effective Egoism post somewhat off-putting at first. A lot of stuff in that post could have used a lot more unpacking, and some of the phrasings felt clumsy or in other ways “off” (especially the “It will be the last” at the beginning). That, combined with the topic, fits with my model of the types of things this community tends to downvote. But thanks for engaging so well with my comment, and I’m glad it seems to have helped others understand the post better as well.
Anyway, good luck with your future writing, for this site and elsewhere!
I think the advice to primarily post to your personal blog is very good; this won’t completely tank visibility of your posts, since many people read the “community” feed, but the frontpage has a particular purpose that your posts maybe aren’t fulfilling right now (though they might in the future once you’ve had more practice writing, and writing for this community in particular).
However, I wouldn’t completely discourage you from writing about topics that the Sequences have covered before reading about those topics in the Sequences. (Sorry, I know that last sentence had a ton of negations in it, translation: if you want to write about a topic, but haven’t read the relevant portions of the Sequences yet, I’d say still do it). There are several reasons for this:
1. If you have a view on something before reading Eliezer’s thoughts on it, this can help you integrate Eliezer’s views into your own, without doing so blindly. It’s easier to learn something if you already have some related beliefs for it to latch onto (e.g., it’s easier to learn about Japanese history if you already know something about, say, anime, because there will be certain things from anime that you’ll be able to use as hooks for the new historical knowledge to latch onto).
2. If you write about something before seeing Eliezer’s thoughts, you may have a fresh take that turns out to be correct (though more often you will write something, look at Eliezer’s thoughts, and see that you fell into a trap that Eliezer already warned about. But that’s okay I think, you still learned from it).
That is to say, you can write _unencumbered_ by Eliezer’s work to some extent. It’s easier to do an Original Seeing if you haven’t already read Eliezer’s thoughts on some topic. It’s good to dare to be wrong.
However, if you do this, I would advise you to either
1. keep those writings private, or
2. frame them as “I’m writing this before reading Eliezer’s work on the topic, in preparation for reading said work” and perhaps write a follow-up post after reading Eliezer’s relevant work. Even Eliezer did this while writing the sequences, e.g. with Gary Drescher’s work; it’s a well-respected technique in this community to write up your (preliminary) thoughts on some topic _before_ reading the relevant literature (though with the expectation that you’ll probably update after reading said literature).
But yeah, do definitely read the Sequences sooner rather than later, and expect that what you write after reading them will be more relevant to this community than what you write before reading them.
I also want to echo ESRogs’s kudos for getting feedback rather than giving up.
Also, as a datapoint, I also found the Effective Egoism post somewhat off-putting at first. A lot of stuff in that post could have used a lot more unpacking, and some of the phrasings felt clumsy or in other ways “off” (especially the “It will be the last” at the beginning). That, combined with the topic, fits with my model of the types of things this community tends to downvote. But thanks for engaging so well with my comment, and I’m glad it seems to have helped others understand the post better as well.
Anyway, good luck with your future writing, for this site and elsewhere!