How long did it take you to write this? I work in academia and am curious to know how such a piece of writing relates to writing an opinion piece on my planet.
Is there a video and/or Q&A at some point (forgive me if I missed it).
LOL. Your question opens a can of worms. It took more than a year from when I first committed to writing about simulators, but the reason it took so long wasn’t because writing the actual words in this post took a long time, rather:
I spent the first few months rescoping and refactoring outlines. Most of the ideas I wanted to express were stated in the ontology I’ve begun to present in this post, and I kept running into conceptual dependencies. The actual content of this post is very pared down in scope compared to what I had originally planned.
After I settled on an outline for the first post, I failed repeatedly at following through with expanding the outline. I like writing to pin down and generate fresh ideas, but hate writing anything I’ve already written before. Every time I sat down to write I ended up writing about something novel and out of scope of the outline, and ended up having to export the content into separate drafts. I have something like 20 drafts that are intended to be part of this sequence, most of them unintentionally created from tangents while I was trying to finish writing whatever would be the first post in the sequence.
All this was very discouraging and caused me to procrastinate writing, in addition to having been very busy with other tasks since the beginning.
I’d approximate that I spent about 15 hours writing what ended up being in this post and maybe 150-200 hours writing content that didn’t make it into this post but was supposed to. (I did learn a lot from the failed attempts and the post would not have been as good if I’d just spent 15 hours writing it a year ago. But the delay was no where near worth it.)
There are some videos out there of me presenting or answering questions about related things, but none that go into as much depth as this post. I don’t have a video or Q&A planned right now, but I might train GPT-3 on my drafts and set up a simulators Q&A chatroom.
Thanks for the great post. 2-meta questions.
How long did it take you to write this? I work in academia and am curious to know how such a piece of writing relates to writing an opinion piece on my planet.
Is there a video and/or Q&A at some point (forgive me if I missed it).
LOL. Your question opens a can of worms. It took more than a year from when I first committed to writing about simulators, but the reason it took so long wasn’t because writing the actual words in this post took a long time, rather:
I spent the first few months rescoping and refactoring outlines. Most of the ideas I wanted to express were stated in the ontology I’ve begun to present in this post, and I kept running into conceptual dependencies. The actual content of this post is very pared down in scope compared to what I had originally planned.
After I settled on an outline for the first post, I failed repeatedly at following through with expanding the outline. I like writing to pin down and generate fresh ideas, but hate writing anything I’ve already written before. Every time I sat down to write I ended up writing about something novel and out of scope of the outline, and ended up having to export the content into separate drafts. I have something like 20 drafts that are intended to be part of this sequence, most of them unintentionally created from tangents while I was trying to finish writing whatever would be the first post in the sequence.
All this was very discouraging and caused me to procrastinate writing, in addition to having been very busy with other tasks since the beginning.
I’d approximate that I spent about 15 hours writing what ended up being in this post and maybe 150-200 hours writing content that didn’t make it into this post but was supposed to. (I did learn a lot from the failed attempts and the post would not have been as good if I’d just spent 15 hours writing it a year ago. But the delay was no where near worth it.)
There are some videos out there of me presenting or answering questions about related things, but none that go into as much depth as this post. I don’t have a video or Q&A planned right now, but I might train GPT-3 on my drafts and set up a simulators Q&A chatroom.
Thanks for sharing! If I had a penny for every article that—in hindsight—would have taken me 10% of the time/effort to write … lol