As someone with a decent amount of ideas but not a lot of published writings, I notice I have a few things blocking me from writing more:
I do enjoy the few times I have simply taken 20min to write a draft without the intention of publishing it. Those have usually been helpful in shaping my ideas.
This doesn't really relate to your posts but it came to mind and I guess your post incentivized me to write more, resulting in this comment
Writing here, for me, means exposing myself to people who have a more established worldview than mine.
What I think is, "They have a broad context that I'm unfamiliar with, a well-read and understood bibliography, and of course, limited time, like everyone else."
Are my comments a waste of people's time? That's what I'm wondering as I write this.
I like to brainstorm. I get up in the morning, and before going to work, before showering, I open a Learning Link (LLm), usually a Gemini, who's more of a flatterer and lets me explore ideas more freely. I tell them, "Tell me something that's unresolved, and I'll give you the solution in a sentence." It's clear I'm not capable of solving most of the problems they present, but the process of debating with the LLm expands my knowledge on the subject. Sometimes, during the discussion, I think, "That's a good idea," and I leave the flattering Gemini behind. I ask Chatgpt, whom I've "trained" to always find flaws. I pass it on to Copilot, to Claude. They all try to steer me toward what already exists. I reply, "No! That's not what I'm proposing. What I'm proposing is better and it has to work" (even though I don't have the training to know if what I'm thinking is based on something real or not). I think that since I started using LLM, I'm constantly thinking about paths, about learning things, about writing them down..
You can also make a substack and publish there.
Lesswrong is a bit of a different animal, though, most people here are kind in arguments. I think the worst outcome for commenting is getting ignored (and better is being argued with). There's of course the worst worst outcome of everything you're writing being heavily downvoted, but that's usually for:
A useful skill here is "being aware of what you're denying about yourself or your experience" (aka eating the shadow) so you can be very honest with yourself. Your LLM scaffold can do part of this (your chatGPT version), but it'll miss things for sure.
Fundamentally, when "write a blog post" is something available as an action in your mind, you will notice more thoughts that could become blog posts. In addition, it helps encourage thinking independently.
The ones who are most successful at writeathons (Inkhaven, NaNoWriMo) are those with an overhang of things to say, usually in the form of:
When Scott Alexander said:
, it may seem you can just write every day, but that'd be Goodharting. There's something hidden in the writing process you can't see: they have something to say.
They'll have an idea (somehow) and think it through by [writing it out/sitting quietly/etc]. This can then generate more ideas, some of which aren't even related to the original idea!
At this point, though, my imaginary interlocutor would like to say:
Catching Ideas
Have an idea? Write down the idea. This is equivalent to giving your idea-generating process a cookie, reinforcing the habit of generating ideas.
Sometimes, when I'm writing one post, a different idea will pop into my head. If I don't write down a filler-title and basic idea within ~1 min, it's gone.
Other times I get ideas from:
For several of these, I can't write the idea down quickly, but my mind is focused on the idea, building off of it. It's much easier to start writing once I have this overhang of things-to-say that I've been working on while lying in bed for [15] min.
From this process, I have ~80 "draft" posts at the moment [1](most are just a title and a few words); I'm bottlenecked on actually putting in time to finish posts. The drafts make it quite easy to get back into the mind-state I was in when I generated the idea, as if I'm prompting myself, lol.
Just [Write] and Nobody Will Get Hurt
When I wrote the most was when I was constantly babble-writing. It'd be the first thing I'd do: write what I wanted to do that day, do those things, then go back to writing. To be clear, I'd be typing very incorrectly. There can easily be friction to starting writing, so stack everything in your favor to get the writing-train rolling.
We now have Claude and voice-to-text, which have similarly helped me get out of slumps (I still might prefer just writing, unsure). There's an additional component here: Claude's a decent editor & secretary, so I'm not too blocked on "ugh, I have to look up the correct link or quote here, or the actual phrase people use" when writing.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good. Communicate what you wanted to say; later you can focus on [standard writing advice] and actually including a proper conclusion to your
Here's an example of my drafts. I use roam research with [[Title Post]] notation to quickly make a post. I think Notion is free and also works. I don't like writing drafts in the LW editor because it feels like I should have a higher standard of writing here (or I'm scared of writing something stupid when I was just "babbling" and incidentally hit "publish".