I agree with those two components of the voice and add a third, because I think the understanding component is necessarily different than the capability to clearly explain said understanding. Communicating thoughts into expressible (aka communicable) formats such as speech, writing, videos, music etc. is at times very non-trivial or downright rather difficult. Understanding and explaining do seem to reinforce each other, though.
It sounds like you don’t feel safe freely and openly expressing yourself, developing your voice, etc. And/or, do you feel you need different types of people to express different parts of yourself in a way that actually gets at those different parts, i.e. you might not even remember or think of mentioning one part, framing something in a certain way, except around people who draw such out of you? I will note that writing publicly is a great way to get people of all walks of life to interact with your work, to draw different parts of you out into legible consciousness. Writing publicly impacts me in that way, at least.
“I plan to write a blog, but currently it only exists in my imagination (and I procrastinate a lot), and it will probably just be a collection of random things with no unifying topic other than “this is what interests me”
I would be happy to read what you may write if you post something, you are welcome to PM me if you’d like some editing or proofreading assistance for a post too. I think writing about things that interest you is pretty much what most people who write publicly on a regular basis do, even those who get paid for it (why would they take a job that is completely uninteresting to them?; exception to my statement does include content writers for business sites, advertisers, and other forms of writing that are more purely commercial or coerced via payment or status-seeking in some way). I know it’s what I do, I don’t write about what’s uninteresting to me, unless it’s required as part of a business or educational thing.
All of what I’ve written on LessWrong has been a collection of random things that interest me :) Noticing a commonality to writings or deciding to deliberately write about something in common will likely come later.
Agree about the distinction between expressing yourself and being understood. You can speak freely and yet be constantly misunderstood… and it may feel liberating at first, but then it just feels lonely. Yes, communication deepens understanding, also also provides a social reward for self-exploration.
Do I feel free to express myself openly? This is complicated, because on one hand I do have some insecurity about being open, but on the other hand, in those cases when I express some partial things openly, the typical outcome is that people either don’t care or completely misunderstand. (Like trying to talk about rationality, when everyone is interested in scoring points for their tribe.) I wish I could talk to people around me the same way I can at a Less Wrong meetup, because the meetup mood is maybe 80% of what I want. Or I wish there were more rationalists around me, so there would be a chance for a subset of “rationalist and cares about the same topics I do”. When I share something I wrote, the typical reactions are (1) silence, (2) “oh yes, I agree with <a strawman of what I wrote>”. Recently I reviewed posts I have shared on social networks: the more meaningful they were, the fewer reactions they got.
So I guess the thing I am afraid of is that I will spend lot of energy and time expressing myself, and the result will be mostly silence. Not exactly scary, but demotivating nonetheless.
Here is the first blog article, and I have a few more planned, but I am currently low on free time. The plan is a sequence on writing computer games (this takes a lot of time, because each article will come with an example project), also one article on non-standard integers (already half-written, but also needs illustrations) which may or may not be an introduction into a math sequence, and some book summaries (again takes lots of time, need to read the books first). Uh, now I see I chose topics that require lot of time; but that reflects who I am (I don’t like expressing opinions on things I know little about, and I am not good at writing essays).
Being constantly misunderstood would definitely be frustrating. I suspect that the liberation of speaking freely is quite nice, and maybe an addition feeling pops in to reinforce that / make the whole endeavour feel better even if one’s works are misunderstood: the power of writing to cohere thoughts, develop ideas, and increase one’s legibility of one’s own self and one’s own understanding of the world and things in it they choose to focus on.
I like when people comment on what I write, and enjoy the discussions, because even if they misunderstood what I wrote, the ensuing discussions provide a way to shorten the inferential distance between involved parties and further explore + develop my own thoughts, plus turn me on to ideas or ways of thinking, framings, etc. that I hadn’t yet considered or didn’t know about.
If no one interacts with what I write, I still gain a lot from the writing I do, so I find the activity worthwhile even if it definitely can consume a significant amount of energy and time. Without writing and developing my voice, cohering thoughts, building ideas, etc., my life would be worse. My goal is to build, and writing lets me do that in important and significant ways even if no one interacts with my works.
I do feel the frustration around not connecting with others around oneself in ways one would want though, despite having a good amount of friends I can talk with about all things under the sun (including rationalists stuff), connecting as deeply as I’d like can sometimes be difficult, though admittedly I don’t think I struggle with this as much as I used to because of building a close friends group and wider circle of friends with whom I can have open and deep conversations about most anything. Are there ways you could build a community to share what you write with? Develop existing friendships to have that capacity for deep and open communication? etc.?
If I have misunderstood, talked past, not listened adequately, etc. to anything in your post, I explicitly would be happy to continue the discussion and try to close any inferential distances until more understanding is achieved.
I read your post! I can’t comment about the technical side of it since I’m not familiar with Java enough to do so, but I liked the structure of your post including the historical context for why you chose what approaches you did and how said context plus modern factors shaped the stack you built / used. Turning that into a sequence on how one might write or create video games would be fascinating, let me know how that goes :)
I agree with those two components of the voice and add a third, because I think the understanding component is necessarily different than the capability to clearly explain said understanding. Communicating thoughts into expressible (aka communicable) formats such as speech, writing, videos, music etc. is at times very non-trivial or downright rather difficult. Understanding and explaining do seem to reinforce each other, though.
It sounds like you don’t feel safe freely and openly expressing yourself, developing your voice, etc. And/or, do you feel you need different types of people to express different parts of yourself in a way that actually gets at those different parts, i.e. you might not even remember or think of mentioning one part, framing something in a certain way, except around people who draw such out of you? I will note that writing publicly is a great way to get people of all walks of life to interact with your work, to draw different parts of you out into legible consciousness. Writing publicly impacts me in that way, at least.
What is your fear heuristic and how audacious are you?
“I plan to write a blog, but currently it only exists in my imagination (and I procrastinate a lot), and it will probably just be a collection of random things with no unifying topic other than “this is what interests me”
I would be happy to read what you may write if you post something, you are welcome to PM me if you’d like some editing or proofreading assistance for a post too. I think writing about things that interest you is pretty much what most people who write publicly on a regular basis do, even those who get paid for it (why would they take a job that is completely uninteresting to them?; exception to my statement does include content writers for business sites, advertisers, and other forms of writing that are more purely commercial or coerced via payment or status-seeking in some way). I know it’s what I do, I don’t write about what’s uninteresting to me, unless it’s required as part of a business or educational thing.
All of what I’ve written on LessWrong has been a collection of random things that interest me :) Noticing a commonality to writings or deciding to deliberately write about something in common will likely come later.
Agree about the distinction between expressing yourself and being understood. You can speak freely and yet be constantly misunderstood… and it may feel liberating at first, but then it just feels lonely. Yes, communication deepens understanding, also also provides a social reward for self-exploration.
Do I feel free to express myself openly? This is complicated, because on one hand I do have some insecurity about being open, but on the other hand, in those cases when I express some partial things openly, the typical outcome is that people either don’t care or completely misunderstand. (Like trying to talk about rationality, when everyone is interested in scoring points for their tribe.) I wish I could talk to people around me the same way I can at a Less Wrong meetup, because the meetup mood is maybe 80% of what I want. Or I wish there were more rationalists around me, so there would be a chance for a subset of “rationalist and cares about the same topics I do”. When I share something I wrote, the typical reactions are (1) silence, (2) “oh yes, I agree with <a strawman of what I wrote>”. Recently I reviewed posts I have shared on social networks: the more meaningful they were, the fewer reactions they got.
So I guess the thing I am afraid of is that I will spend lot of energy and time expressing myself, and the result will be mostly silence. Not exactly scary, but demotivating nonetheless.
Here is the first blog article, and I have a few more planned, but I am currently low on free time. The plan is a sequence on writing computer games (this takes a lot of time, because each article will come with an example project), also one article on non-standard integers (already half-written, but also needs illustrations) which may or may not be an introduction into a math sequence, and some book summaries (again takes lots of time, need to read the books first). Uh, now I see I chose topics that require lot of time; but that reflects who I am (I don’t like expressing opinions on things I know little about, and I am not good at writing essays).
Being constantly misunderstood would definitely be frustrating. I suspect that the liberation of speaking freely is quite nice, and maybe an addition feeling pops in to reinforce that / make the whole endeavour feel better even if one’s works are misunderstood: the power of writing to cohere thoughts, develop ideas, and increase one’s legibility of one’s own self and one’s own understanding of the world and things in it they choose to focus on.
I like when people comment on what I write, and enjoy the discussions, because even if they misunderstood what I wrote, the ensuing discussions provide a way to shorten the inferential distance between involved parties and further explore + develop my own thoughts, plus turn me on to ideas or ways of thinking, framings, etc. that I hadn’t yet considered or didn’t know about.
If no one interacts with what I write, I still gain a lot from the writing I do, so I find the activity worthwhile even if it definitely can consume a significant amount of energy and time. Without writing and developing my voice, cohering thoughts, building ideas, etc., my life would be worse. My goal is to build, and writing lets me do that in important and significant ways even if no one interacts with my works.
I do feel the frustration around not connecting with others around oneself in ways one would want though, despite having a good amount of friends I can talk with about all things under the sun (including rationalists stuff), connecting as deeply as I’d like can sometimes be difficult, though admittedly I don’t think I struggle with this as much as I used to because of building a close friends group and wider circle of friends with whom I can have open and deep conversations about most anything. Are there ways you could build a community to share what you write with? Develop existing friendships to have that capacity for deep and open communication? etc.?
If I have misunderstood, talked past, not listened adequately, etc. to anything in your post, I explicitly would be happy to continue the discussion and try to close any inferential distances until more understanding is achieved.
I read your post! I can’t comment about the technical side of it since I’m not familiar with Java enough to do so, but I liked the structure of your post including the historical context for why you chose what approaches you did and how said context plus modern factors shaped the stack you built / used. Turning that into a sequence on how one might write or create video games would be fascinating, let me know how that goes :)
Most importantly, to procrastinate less with the writing, so that there is more than 1 article. :D