This reminds me of how little control you have over your own mind. However, that is not the worst part. The worst part is when you don’t realize how little control you actually have.
I think I have almost my entire life fallen prey to the fallacy of believing that emotions don’t affect me. I thought I was impenetrable to feedback on the emotional level. That I could, with a cold mind, extract all of the object-level information from feedback. But then somebody gave me very negative feedback on an article I had worked very hard on for over a week. Afterwards, I basically stopped writing for 6 months about that topic. Actually, I think it still affects me now, 1 year later.
I think all of this would have been a lot less terrible had I realized what was going on. I did not even consider the possibility that I was not writing because I got some very strong negative feedback until maybe 4 months ago.
I think there is probably a time and place for intellectually isolating yourself if you are prone to this failure mode. I only notice now that I have often intellectually isolated myself in the past, and that at those times I never ran into the issue of not being able to come up with ideas. However, I think feedback can be extremely valuable, so there is certainly a balance to strike here.
That was potentially valuable early on for me when I started to write down my ideas. I wrote down probably over a million words worth of ideas before I ever wrote up anything publically. I am pretty sure >3% of all the writing I have done is public right now.
Now that I frequently talk to people about the things I am thinking about I am constantly running into the issue that I get critique about something other than the thing I am trying to explain because I am so bad at explaining. Often this only becomes apparent in hindsight. I think this could have been very damaging early on if I always got this kind of negative feedback. However, it’s worth noting that not isolating myself for so long would probably also have helped me get better at explaining.
I also wrote a huge amount in private idea-journals before I started writing publicly. There was also an intermediate stage where I wrote a lot on mailing lists, which felt less public than blogging although technically public.
I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.
This reminds me of how little control you have over your own mind. However, that is not the worst part. The worst part is when you don’t realize how little control you actually have.
I think I have almost my entire life fallen prey to the fallacy of believing that emotions don’t affect me. I thought I was impenetrable to feedback on the emotional level. That I could, with a cold mind, extract all of the object-level information from feedback. But then somebody gave me very negative feedback on an article I had worked very hard on for over a week. Afterwards, I basically stopped writing for 6 months about that topic. Actually, I think it still affects me now, 1 year later.
I think all of this would have been a lot less terrible had I realized what was going on. I did not even consider the possibility that I was not writing because I got some very strong negative feedback until maybe 4 months ago.
I think there is probably a time and place for intellectually isolating yourself if you are prone to this failure mode. I only notice now that I have often intellectually isolated myself in the past, and that at those times I never ran into the issue of not being able to come up with ideas. However, I think feedback can be extremely valuable, so there is certainly a balance to strike here.
That was potentially valuable early on for me when I started to write down my ideas. I wrote down probably over a million words worth of ideas before I ever wrote up anything publically. I am pretty sure >3% of all the writing I have done is public right now.
Now that I frequently talk to people about the things I am thinking about I am constantly running into the issue that I get critique about something other than the thing I am trying to explain because I am so bad at explaining. Often this only becomes apparent in hindsight. I think this could have been very damaging early on if I always got this kind of negative feedback. However, it’s worth noting that not isolating myself for so long would probably also have helped me get better at explaining.
Becoming good at detaching yourself from your ideas is probably better than isolating yourself as much as I did.
I also wrote a huge amount in private idea-journals before I started writing publicly. There was also an intermediate stage where I wrote a lot on mailing lists, which felt less public than blogging although technically public.
I have been doing something similar lately. I wrote with somebody online extensively, at one point writing a 4000 word Discord messages. That was mostly not about AI alignment, but was helpful in learning how to better communicate in writing.
An important transition in my private writing has been to aim for the same kind of quality I would in public content. That is a nice trick to get better at public <writing/communication>. There is very large difference between writing an idea down such that you will be able to retrieve the information content, and to write something down such that it truly stands on it’s own, such that another person can retrive the information.
This is not only useful for training communicating in writing, it also is very useful when you want to come back to your own notes much later, when you forgot about all of the context wich allowed you to fill in all the missing details. Previously I would only rarely read old nodes because they where so hard to understand and not fun to read. I think this got better.
Maybe one can get some milage out of framing the audience to include your future self.
The very first and probably most important step in the direction of “writing to effectively communicate” which I took many years ago, was to always write in “full text”, i.e. writing full sentences instead of a bunch of disparate bullet points. I think doing this is also very important to get the intelligence augmenting effects of writing.
For me the public in public writing is not the issue. The core issue for me is that I start multiple new drafts every day, and get distracted by them, such that I never finish the old drafts.
In my personal practice, there seems to be a real difference—“something magic happens”—when you’ve got an actual audience you actually want to explain something to. I would recommend this over trying to simulate the experience within personal notes, if you can get it. The audience doesn’t need to be ‘the public internet’—although each individual audience will have a different sort of impact on your writing, so EG writing to a friend who already understands you fairly well may not cause you to clarify your ideas in the same way as writing to strangers.
I would also mildly caution against a policy which makes your own personal notes too effortful to write. I wholeheartedly agree that you should keep your future self in mind as an audience, and write such that the notes will be useful if you look back at them. But if I imagine writing my own personal notes to the same standard as public-facing essays, I think I lose something—it takes too long to capture ideas that way.