Writing this post as rationality case study
[Before I begin: If you don’t like this post, please let me know why. Even just few words like boring/off-topic/poorly-written may give me something to work with.]
I wish to share a late struggle I have with rationality, because I think that it touches some interesting points. But more importantly—because I think that it is important to think about rationality in the context of concrete day-to-day decisions. This post is going to be messy and have no specific “point” or definite conclusion—like real life decisions.
Like many, I am attracted to content creation. I like to think about stuff and share my insights and patterns of thoughts, and like the idea that one day I will be able to spread them far and wide. To begin moving in that direction, I lately published two posts. The first was ignored, and the second heavily downvoted. Then I stopped to think.
Why do I want that really? The immediate flattering answer is that I value good ideas and view their creation as the highest public service. The less flattering answer is that I like prestige and want more of it. The interesting answer is that the will to create content is not that different from the will to have children: The memes that ended up inhabiting my brain are those who successfully spread themselves across society—often by convincing their host that meme-spreading is a good idea. It mean that I should expect exactly what I see—that the will to spread memes will be wide-spread, and therefore highly competitive. That people put extraordinary effort into writing books with very small success rates, when the positive black swans are just not big enough to justify it (if money was the sole consideration).
I first thought about it as a bias for content-creation, and wanted to write a post about that, but I probably don’t endorse this framing anymore. Let’s say that I buy that analysis—does it really mean that I shouldn’t pursue that goal? It seem less respectable now, for sure. It seem less likely to maximize my happiness or my contribution to society, but it doesn’t make me not want it. Is it a terminal value of mine, or just a tool that I refuse to put down when I see it don’t work? How would I tell? Does the distinction even make sense given that I’m not an ideal agent?
When did all those thoughts come up anyway? When I saw the downvotes and wanted to shy away. Downvotes which I pretty much expected, and which should therefore not have cause a significant update. Motivated reasoning my way out of difficult situation. So… what? What should I do when I find an argument convincing, but know that it was generated by flawed motivations?
Now I think those where all the wrong questions, or maybe the right questions in the wrong time—big, and abstract, and all inside my brain. It will make sense to ask whether my goal is worth extraordinary effort, and how extraordinary exactly it would have to be—after I make some ordinary effort. No point to worry about it after I was merely trying to try, and found out that trying is hard...
I think most people are motivated by prestige to a significant degree, and they can produce valuable content anyway.
My advice for writing good posts in the future would be: if you have something to say,[1] write it down as simply as possible. One sentence. At most two. Once you have that, you can make it longer to communicate it. (And then proofread for grammar.) But if you can’t write it as 1-2 sentences, the reason is probably that you don’t really know what you’re saying, and then you shouldn’t publish the result.
Also, maybe you don’t have anything to say! The universe isn’t fair, you’re not just going to have insights when you would like to write. That’s not how it works. You need to actually start with an insight.
Thanks Refael!
Also, I have an object-level idea for how to improve my writing—by beginning to read others with more attention to their style and why it work or doesn’t work, rather than only to its content.
Definitely read more than you write, and pay attention to WHY you like or dislike various aspects of others’ writing, and try to infer why they’re popular or not. But there’s a trap in thinking that it’s mostly about style, worse than (but similar to) the trap that a lot of rationalists fall into that it’s entirely about content.
In truth, both matter, but content is the base and style is just the coating. I think for this post (and the reason I downvoted (I wish I could mild-downvote, only if it won’t bring it below 5 or so total)), you do have the start of interesting content, but you went meta too quickly, and didn’t attempt to distill any discoveries or learnings from your exploration.
My immediate mental response was that I value this post, but it doesn’t fit with the mood of lesswrong. Which is kind of sad because this seems practical. But this is heavily biased by how upvotes are divvied out, since I typically read highly-upvoted posts.
I thought this was clear to me, but then I thought some more and I no longer think it’s straightforward. It pattern matched against
high value vs low probability
personalities are inbuilt biases in human strategy
But deductions from them seem of spurious use.
I agree that it’s a good idea to give things a try to collect data before making longer term plans. Since you’re explicitly exploring rather than exploiting, I suggest trying low-effort wacky ideas in many different directions (eg. Not on lesswrong)
While I sort of dismissed the big questions about my motivations in the end, I do think that they are interesting and important, and if anyone have thoughts about them, I would like to read them.
I think this is a trap a lot of blog-posters and similar fall into. You’re not motivated by writing itself being fun, you’re motivated by the desire for attention. The former you can control, the latter you cannot.
The boring answer would be “keep writing, 10% of the posts get 90% of the views, maybe you’ll get lucky next time”. This is kind of true but also kind of gambler’s fallacy.
If I were you, I’d decide on a specific number of further posts to write and if nothing gets any traction, I’d simply stop and move on to something else. I don’t know if that’s possible for you, maybe your addiction is more debilitating. But those are my 2c.
I’m not sure if it is on purpose or just going along with the spirit of the post, but your comment seem to me more insulting than it have to be in order to deliver your explicit message. “The desire for attention” is not how I think about it, but it may very well be the case. If the reference to addiction is based serious and based on the data I have—please let me know.