A kind of post I would like to read more of is “I did X, and here’s how it went.” You tend to see this most with research, but I’ve enjoyed reading them on all sorts of things. This is one of the main kinds of post I write, and I would encourage others to give it a try!
Here’s an arbitrary selection of writeups I’ve enjoyed:
After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation
Major reasons I like writeups include:
Exposure to problems that I didn’t know were important to people.
Detailed looks at how people handled problems.
They’re generally very concrete and written after the fact, which makes it harder to write something that’s neat but wrong.
When I’m thinking of doing something and find a writeup by someone who did something similar it’s fantastically useful.
When you voluntarily make something public, you do risk that people will irresponsibly beat you up over failings. I think it’s generally worth it to go ahead anyway, tell the whole story, and help build a norm of sharing things so others can learn.
“Hexing the technical interview” is hilarious but I wouldn’t really classify it as “I did X, and here’s how it went”.
(I hope.)
Yes, sorry, including that one was a joke ;)
Checkout www.lesswrong.com/tag/postmortems, it’s an experimental tag within the under-development feature.
Agreed about moar writeups (please).
I find spoken audio both too distracting and not distracting enough – too distracting to do something else but not distracting enough to prevent me from wanting to do something else.
But video, even just of the recording of a podcast, has enough extra input/stimulus to work wonderfully.
Given the above, I’ve found some videos to be wonderful ‘writeups’, many episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast being good examples of that. In particular, his episode with Daryl Davis, was a good ‘writeup’ of something like ‘what I did that (indirectly) resulted in hundreds of people quitting the Klu Klux Klan and similar organizations’.
As a university student with ties to EA (and also looking at future opportunities), the EA forum post you linked gave some useful anecdotes to think about. Thank you for sharing the list.