It sounds like you don’t keep an idea book or dairy or anything similar. I’m totally on board with the idea that lowering the bar for publishing posts could actually increase average quality, but another thing you could try to get yourself out of the catch-22 is to keep something like that—if you know you’re writing for yourself, maybe the monkey in the brain would not be so tempted to think it’s pointless if you don’t publish. (Keeping it in a handwritten notebook or something could help tell the monkey that you’re not making a blog post draft, since it would not be easy to copy/paste into LW.)
This could also help inspire more ideas for blog posts.
There is a relevant factor here to consider. When writing for yourself, you need to force yourself less to make things explicit. Things only need to make sense to you. You can often leave some concepts fuzzy, than if you were to write, such that another person can understand the writing.
This has the advantage that you can cover more ground in the same amount of time.
It has the disadvantage, in my model, writing forcing you to make things explicit is one of its major benefits. Making things explicit makes it easier to spot holes in your models.
I do have a bit of an idea book. On LW and Bear Blog I keep some ideas in the drafts.
Still, oddly enough, I have a really hard time bringing myself to use it if I am not planning on it being something that I publish. My monkey is weird.
I have basically the same attitude towards writing, and found it really helpful over the years to write with a mind to publish, even if all I was doing was rambling and posting on Facebook to a somewhat limited audience. In fact, for a while my Facebook feed was full of long, rambling posts of me just working out ideas in writing and trying to find ways to express ideas.
Lowering the bar to what you will write and publish if you have this impulse I think is key, though doing that on LW can be a little hard because of downvotes and critical comments, so depending on how you respond to those finding a space where you feel you can just write what you want without consequence first can be really freeing to get things going. For me that was Facebook, but I could imagine it being LW short form, Twitter, or something else.
I’m just getting started with it, but I’m finding my LessWrong Shortform section a fantastic place to publish rambling thoughts, ideas, etc. as well as a great public notebook / journal. The quality standards are higher here on LessWrong than on Facebook, which makes my rambling LW notes / journal entries in the shortform section feel higher quality than they otherwise would be on FB, though I don’t find that an impediment nor source of anxiety for writing, in fact, it’s the other way around. It’s writing actual posts and commenting on other’s posts that generate the most writing related anxiety for me on LW; I suspect the shortform’s immunity from that anxiety comes from its explicit sitewide designation as a low effort, low epistemic standard, blog-y, ramble-y, kind of space.
Cool! In the past LessWrong had posts divided into “main” and “discussion”. Technically you can use discussion for whatever you want: ramblings, questions, etc. But that wasn’t the social norm. I think people still held themselves to a relatively high standard in the discussion section as well.
And I’ve always hypothesized that having sections that are dedicated to eg. shortform or eg. questions would make people a lot more comfortable eg. with off the cuff writing or eg. asking questions. Having a dedicated section just makes it really clear that what you’re doing is ok.
Now I suspect that social norms are the more important piece. Even if shortforms are available and labeled as such, if other people are using it for more well thought out and researched writing, it’s hard to go against the grain and do off the cuff writing their. As I talk about in the OP, I think off the cuff writing is important in helping you think, so I am glad to see you using it that way! Doing so will make LessWrong more like the rationality dojo Eliezer originally envisioned.
That’s really comforting to hear that I’m not the only one with these issues :)
In fact, for a while my Facebook feed was full of long, rambling posts of me just working out ideas in writing and trying to find ways to express ideas.
Yeah I considered doing the same but I don’t have any social media accounts and don’t want to create any because it’s too dangerous of a time sink for me.
It sounds like you don’t keep an idea book or dairy or anything similar. I’m totally on board with the idea that lowering the bar for publishing posts could actually increase average quality, but another thing you could try to get yourself out of the catch-22 is to keep something like that—if you know you’re writing for yourself, maybe the monkey in the brain would not be so tempted to think it’s pointless if you don’t publish. (Keeping it in a handwritten notebook or something could help tell the monkey that you’re not making a blog post draft, since it would not be easy to copy/paste into LW.)
This could also help inspire more ideas for blog posts.
There is a relevant factor here to consider. When writing for yourself, you need to force yourself less to make things explicit. Things only need to make sense to you. You can often leave some concepts fuzzy, than if you were to write, such that another person can understand the writing.
This has the advantage that you can cover more ground in the same amount of time.
It has the disadvantage, in my model, writing forcing you to make things explicit is one of its major benefits. Making things explicit makes it easier to spot holes in your models.
I do have a bit of an idea book. On LW and Bear Blog I keep some ideas in the drafts.
Still, oddly enough, I have a really hard time bringing myself to use it if I am not planning on it being something that I publish. My monkey is weird.
I have basically the same attitude towards writing, and found it really helpful over the years to write with a mind to publish, even if all I was doing was rambling and posting on Facebook to a somewhat limited audience. In fact, for a while my Facebook feed was full of long, rambling posts of me just working out ideas in writing and trying to find ways to express ideas.
Lowering the bar to what you will write and publish if you have this impulse I think is key, though doing that on LW can be a little hard because of downvotes and critical comments, so depending on how you respond to those finding a space where you feel you can just write what you want without consequence first can be really freeing to get things going. For me that was Facebook, but I could imagine it being LW short form, Twitter, or something else.
I’m just getting started with it, but I’m finding my LessWrong Shortform section a fantastic place to publish rambling thoughts, ideas, etc. as well as a great public notebook / journal. The quality standards are higher here on LessWrong than on Facebook, which makes my rambling LW notes / journal entries in the shortform section feel higher quality than they otherwise would be on FB, though I don’t find that an impediment nor source of anxiety for writing, in fact, it’s the other way around. It’s writing actual posts and commenting on other’s posts that generate the most writing related anxiety for me on LW; I suspect the shortform’s immunity from that anxiety comes from its explicit sitewide designation as a low effort, low epistemic standard, blog-y, ramble-y, kind of space.
Cool! In the past LessWrong had posts divided into “main” and “discussion”. Technically you can use discussion for whatever you want: ramblings, questions, etc. But that wasn’t the social norm. I think people still held themselves to a relatively high standard in the discussion section as well.
And I’ve always hypothesized that having sections that are dedicated to eg. shortform or eg. questions would make people a lot more comfortable eg. with off the cuff writing or eg. asking questions. Having a dedicated section just makes it really clear that what you’re doing is ok.
Now I suspect that social norms are the more important piece. Even if shortforms are available and labeled as such, if other people are using it for more well thought out and researched writing, it’s hard to go against the grain and do off the cuff writing their. As I talk about in the OP, I think off the cuff writing is important in helping you think, so I am glad to see you using it that way! Doing so will make LessWrong more like the rationality dojo Eliezer originally envisioned.
That’s really comforting to hear that I’m not the only one with these issues :)
Yeah I considered doing the same but I don’t have any social media accounts and don’t want to create any because it’s too dangerous of a time sink for me.