I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.
I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.