I suspect (and this is my interpretation of what he’s said) that Alexander’s productivity would actually go down if he quit his day job. A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration. Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing. They are certainly taking away from posting as frequently—he’s been posting much more frequently now on Substack—but pressure to write daily posts might take away from work on longer high quality posts.
A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration.
I don’t get the impression that too much is inspired by his psychiatric work. This is partly based on my being a reader of his posts on and off over the years, and also on a brief skim of recent posts (biographies of presidents, AI safety, pregnancy interventions). But even if that source of inspiration was lost, it’d presumably be replaced by other sources of inspiration, and his writing is broad enough where at best that’d be a large net gain and at worst it’d be a small net loss.
Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing.
That’s a really interesting point. Maybe I’m wrong then. Maybe I don’t understand the subtleties of what makes for good writing. But even so, writing is only one thing. I expect that with more time people like Scott would come up with other cool things to pursue in addition to writing.
I suspect (and this is my interpretation of what he’s said) that Alexander’s productivity would actually go down if he quit his day job. A lot of his blogging is inspired by his psychiatric work, so he would lose that source of inspiration. Also, a lot of his best works (eg. Meditations on Moloch) were written while he was a medical school resident, working 60 hours a week outside of blogging, so it’s not clear to me that the hours of working are really taking away from his best writing. They are certainly taking away from posting as frequently—he’s been posting much more frequently now on Substack—but pressure to write daily posts might take away from work on longer high quality posts.
I don’t get the impression that too much is inspired by his psychiatric work. This is partly based on my being a reader of his posts on and off over the years, and also on a brief skim of recent posts (biographies of presidents, AI safety, pregnancy interventions). But even if that source of inspiration was lost, it’d presumably be replaced by other sources of inspiration, and his writing is broad enough where at best that’d be a large net gain and at worst it’d be a small net loss.
That’s a really interesting point. Maybe I’m wrong then. Maybe I don’t understand the subtleties of what makes for good writing. But even so, writing is only one thing. I expect that with more time people like Scott would come up with other cool things to pursue in addition to writing.