It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that a given idea makes sense; it’s harder to fool someone else. Writing down an idea automatically engages the mechanisms we use to communicate to others, helping you hold your self-analysis to a higher standard.
I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts to look at them but I have a problem with the part of the process: if I’m writing down my thoughts, I feel Iike I need to choose an audience that I’m writing for, which brings about this weird dichotomy between … “arrogance” and … confidentiality?
If I’m writing for myself, then my writing won’t make any sense to other people. Like, I’ll write “but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment that whole evening.” This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won’t be able to follow the causal links. So instead I can write in a way that another person would understand. But then I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don’t need an explanation for and other people aren’t going to see it and might not even care about it if they did and etc etc. (Like people with personal blogs—why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?
But also, writing for yourself—with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing—brings up the issue of being too open? Like, if I’m writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts about my friend that I want to document, I’m going to write “Joe” because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven’t talked to him directly about, etc. Confidentiality! So I need to censor names. But then I’m already no longer writing for myself, but writing for an audience that I’m trying to hide information from. Which brings up all those other audience-related considerations.
Separate your problems. If you need to keep your nasty thoughts about Joe private, find ways to keep things private: an easy-ish way is to type your thoughts and put them on an encrypted flash drive. Or write them as emails to yourself in an email account set aside for that purpose. Joe’s not going to hack into your computer (I hope, and if he is you should be calling the police not reading LessWrong), so security-through-obscurity is more than enough.
I have definitely seen the benefits of dumping out my thoughts to look at them but I have a problem with the part of the process: if I’m writing down my thoughts, I feel Iike I need to choose an audience that I’m writing for, which brings about this weird dichotomy between … “arrogance” and … confidentiality?
If I’m writing for myself, then my writing won’t make any sense to other people. Like, I’ll write “but then I saw that the blue civic was there, so I decided to not leave my apartment that whole evening.” This makes perfect sense to me because the significance of the blue civic is pretty accessible in my memory right now. But another person reading it won’t be able to follow the causal links. So instead I can write in a way that another person would understand. But then I just start feeling weird explaining something that I don’t need an explanation for and other people aren’t going to see it and might not even care about it if they did and etc etc. (Like people with personal blogs—why do they assume they have readers?) Or is it a good idea to unpack those weird causal things that are non-obvious to other people each time I encounter them?
But also, writing for yourself—with the assumption that no one is going to see your writing—brings up the issue of being too open? Like, if I’m writing for myself and I have weird, sketchy thoughts about my friend that I want to document, I’m going to write “Joe” because I think of that person as Joe. But if Joe ever finds my writing, he might be horribly upset to find out that I think something bad about him that I haven’t talked to him directly about, etc. Confidentiality! So I need to censor names. But then I’m already no longer writing for myself, but writing for an audience that I’m trying to hide information from. Which brings up all those other audience-related considerations.
I suppose I have some issues. =P
Help! How should I write things?
Separate your problems. If you need to keep your nasty thoughts about Joe private, find ways to keep things private: an easy-ish way is to type your thoughts and put them on an encrypted flash drive. Or write them as emails to yourself in an email account set aside for that purpose. Joe’s not going to hack into your computer (I hope, and if he is you should be calling the police not reading LessWrong), so security-through-obscurity is more than enough.