I find that writing is a surprisingly good way of getting around perfectionism and practicing publishing unfinished things. I often find myself with a small pit in my stomach when I try to post things that are serious in nature, my thoughts go a bit like “Oh but will people understand this?”, “Is this well-supported or am I not standing on firm ground?”, “Oh my god I have to rewrite this entire post with a new example and intro section.”
It just turns into a set of long edits and procrastination over what will amount to a post where I get likeless than 20 upvotes. There are also other ways of writing, I can for example spend a day on a bender on a really weird idea I get and just kind of put together some shit where I’m like “eh, this is cool” and then post it and people are like this is cool!
Me: “But what about my well thought through point about philosophy of science?”
My imaginary audience in my head: “No, we want crystals!”
Then I’m like, “okay, maybe people just like crystals? Kinda weird but whatever?”, I then do a follow up postto it and it’s no way near as upvoted again. So I’m just at this point like “whatever dude, I don’t have enough data yet” and it also just drops the pressure immensely because part of me is like “oh the world didn’t explode and not that many people cared about the minutia of whether active inference accurately models value change in meditation”. (My takeaway is that it is more dependent on the quality of the idea and length of post/and that I don’t know yet.)
In the end after writing something, it feels like the most likely outcome of you writing online is that no one is going to give a shit and that is quite freeing since you can then write without the pressure of feeling that my entire world will go under if you write something stupid.
Over time by writing things and putting things out there, doing the same is starting to feel more and more safe and it feels like it is increasing my agency and the risks I’m willing to take in my writing. Exposure Therapy!
I also find that living in a place without many rationalists and AI Safety people makes it so that I’m a lot more free from the existing social pressures that go with living in the Bay or London. It’s a bit more like “Oh, here’s the group of cool people who care about the future that I can interface with through the screen” rather than “Hmm, I wonder what Chris will think about this shortform” or “Oh my god, will people think that I’m weird if I write this response in this way”.
As always, this advice might not apply to you but you might want to consider writing stupid exploratory ideas to get over the procrastination and fear that you have for getting your normal writing out there. (And go live in another country for a while if you’re self censoring!)
On writing as exposure therapy:
I find that writing is a surprisingly good way of getting around perfectionism and practicing publishing unfinished things. I often find myself with a small pit in my stomach when I try to post things that are serious in nature, my thoughts go a bit like “Oh but will people understand this?”, “Is this well-supported or am I not standing on firm ground?”, “Oh my god I have to rewrite this entire post with a new example and intro section.”
It just turns into a set of long edits and procrastination over what will amount to a post where I get like less than 20 upvotes. There are also other ways of writing, I can for example spend a day on a bender on a really weird idea I get and just kind of put together some shit where I’m like “eh, this is cool” and then post it and people are like this is cool!
Me: “But what about my well thought through point about philosophy of science?”
My imaginary audience in my head: “No, we want crystals!”
Then I’m like, “okay, maybe people just like crystals? Kinda weird but whatever?”, I then do a follow up post to it and it’s no way near as upvoted again. So I’m just at this point like “whatever dude, I don’t have enough data yet” and it also just drops the pressure immensely because part of me is like “oh the world didn’t explode and not that many people cared about the minutia of whether active inference accurately models value change in meditation”. (My takeaway is that it is more dependent on the quality of the idea and length of post/and that I don’t know yet.)
In the end after writing something, it feels like the most likely outcome of you writing online is that no one is going to give a shit and that is quite freeing since you can then write without the pressure of feeling that my entire world will go under if you write something stupid.
Over time by writing things and putting things out there, doing the same is starting to feel more and more safe and it feels like it is increasing my agency and the risks I’m willing to take in my writing. Exposure Therapy!
I also find that living in a place without many rationalists and AI Safety people makes it so that I’m a lot more free from the existing social pressures that go with living in the Bay or London. It’s a bit more like “Oh, here’s the group of cool people who care about the future that I can interface with through the screen” rather than “Hmm, I wonder what Chris will think about this shortform” or “Oh my god, will people think that I’m weird if I write this response in this way”.
As always, this advice might not apply to you but you might want to consider writing stupid exploratory ideas to get over the procrastination and fear that you have for getting your normal writing out there. (And go live in another country for a while if you’re self censoring!)