I think it’s a nice initiative, and I’m curious to see the outputs.
Other people have built up a lot of ideas over time, or have developed a unique perspective they’ve not written up, and so have the potential to make every daily post great.
From my own attempts at shipping a lot of blogposts in a short time, I predict that this group of people will find it most useful: people who have piled up ideas, examples, thoughts, models, and who need a forcing function to shape them and share them.
Whereas I do not feel from experience that writing a lot of blogposts actually helps shaping completely new ideas, incubating models, and accreting enough pieces to get something big.
For an analogous reason, I expect most of the blogposts that come out of it to be simple stylistically (à la Classic Style). Regularly shipping without preexisting really good wordsmithing skill is not conductive to writing poetically or evocatively or really narratively in my experience.
So I guess one reason I’m curious about the results of this experiment is that I might update toward the benefits of shipping a lot of writing for what I really care about, which is building deeper models and writing beautiful prose.
while we’re registering predictions: I predict that >70% of the value will come from the general environment and maybe peer feedback, rather than help from the mentors. I might update this if writing coaches were brought on board.
I’m not quite sure what Ben/Oli have in mind (I’m not very involved with this project so far). But:
I haven’t successfully “wrote a Blogpost™” every day, during periods I didn’t have pent up ideas (I haven’t tried). But, I have done “do a lot of thinking/reading/ideating each day, and then, spend an hour writing it up explaining my thoughts to the Lightcone Team”, and this basically was successfully in provoking a lot of thoughts I hadn’t thought before, and the process of writing them up did further help crystallize them.
In my model, the problem with the bare “write and publish a lot” is that it pushes for optimizing legibility a lot. Which is good if you have already thought through stuff and need to express them cleanly, and less good if you are trying to actually come up with ideas.
The situation you describe lowers the pressure of legibility in two ways: by giving you more space during the day (this is mot writing a blogpost in an hour outside of work) and by having an audience that is much closer to you than the general online audience.
My experience is that, in trying to write, I find (to my surprise) that I have a lot of models and ideas built-up that I never realized could or should be written down, but that are worthwhile to do so. So I expect that to happen.
I think I am relatively more optimistic that, in a month devoted to writing, people will explore stylistically and be successful in those explorations. I wonder if we can take a (token) bet on something around this, to help ensure one of us updates after the event. For instance, about how many poetic or narratively-surprising posts by Inkhaven Residents get over 100 karma on LessWrong (i.e. as a proxy for “they were also good”)?
My experience is that, in trying to write, I find (to my surprise) that I have a lot of models and ideas built-up that I never realized could or should be written down, but that are worthwhile to do so. So I expect that to happen.
Might definitely be the case. When I do that, I find that I have a lot of fragments, bits and pieces, and that they don’t make a coherent whole. But might be just me.
I think I am relatively more optimistic that, in a month devoted to writing, people will explore stylistically and be successful in those explorations. I wonder if we can take a (token) bet on something around this, to help ensure one of us updates after the event. For instance, about how many poetic or narratively-surprising posts by Inkhaven Residents get over 100 karma on LessWrong (i.e. as a proxy for “they were also good”)?
I’m fine with the token bet (like $10 or something), though one controlling factor which is not present in your proposal is whether the people where already really skilled at writing poetically or narratively. My claim is that I expect it won’t help them get significantly better at these.
I think it’s a nice initiative, and I’m curious to see the outputs.
From my own attempts at shipping a lot of blogposts in a short time, I predict that this group of people will find it most useful: people who have piled up ideas, examples, thoughts, models, and who need a forcing function to shape them and share them.
Whereas I do not feel from experience that writing a lot of blogposts actually helps shaping completely new ideas, incubating models, and accreting enough pieces to get something big.
For an analogous reason, I expect most of the blogposts that come out of it to be simple stylistically (à la Classic Style). Regularly shipping without preexisting really good wordsmithing skill is not conductive to writing poetically or evocatively or really narratively in my experience.
So I guess one reason I’m curious about the results of this experiment is that I might update toward the benefits of shipping a lot of writing for what I really care about, which is building deeper models and writing beautiful prose.
while we’re registering predictions: I predict that >70% of the value will come from the general environment and maybe peer feedback, rather than help from the mentors. I might update this if writing coaches were brought on board.
I’m not quite sure what Ben/Oli have in mind (I’m not very involved with this project so far). But:
I haven’t successfully “wrote a Blogpost™” every day, during periods I didn’t have pent up ideas (I haven’t tried). But, I have done “do a lot of thinking/reading/ideating each day, and then, spend an hour writing it up explaining my thoughts to the Lightcone Team”, and this basically was successfully in provoking a lot of thoughts I hadn’t thought before, and the process of writing them up did further help crystallize them.
What you describe makes sense.
In my model, the problem with the bare “write and publish a lot” is that it pushes for optimizing legibility a lot. Which is good if you have already thought through stuff and need to express them cleanly, and less good if you are trying to actually come up with ideas.
The situation you describe lowers the pressure of legibility in two ways: by giving you more space during the day (this is mot writing a blogpost in an hour outside of work) and by having an audience that is much closer to you than the general online audience.
My experience is that, in trying to write, I find (to my surprise) that I have a lot of models and ideas built-up that I never realized could or should be written down, but that are worthwhile to do so. So I expect that to happen.
I think I am relatively more optimistic that, in a month devoted to writing, people will explore stylistically and be successful in those explorations. I wonder if we can take a (token) bet on something around this, to help ensure one of us updates after the event. For instance, about how many poetic or narratively-surprising posts by Inkhaven Residents get over 100 karma on LessWrong (i.e. as a proxy for “they were also good”)?
Might definitely be the case. When I do that, I find that I have a lot of fragments, bits and pieces, and that they don’t make a coherent whole. But might be just me.
I’m fine with the token bet (like $10 or something), though one controlling factor which is not present in your proposal is whether the people where already really skilled at writing poetically or narratively. My claim is that I expect it won’t help them get significantly better at these.