Happy birthday to Putanumonit!

Come celebrate with me next Friday (10/28) at Zach Weinersmith’s BAH Fest West. If you move fast you can grab one of the few remaining $10 tickets. I’m giving a talk on the dumbest idea ever to solve the global food crisis. For a taste, here’s my performance from last year’s BAH Fest in MIT where I talked about sleepwalking and made fun of Max Tegmark. If I win, drinks on me.

My initial plan for the blog was to quietly practice writing for a few years until I feel I can produce something that deserves to be read. Instead, Scott Alexander linked to the third post I ever wrote and brought 5,000 readers along. In late December I decided that making Scott’s blogroll would be my goal for 2016. It happened on 12/29/2015. In May, “Shopping for Happiness” was the post of the day on The Browser, one spot ahead of Scott.

Thank you Scott! And thanks to everyone who shared, reddited, tweeted, The Browsered, Metafiltered and to everyone who told their mom. Thanks to everyone who commented, emailed me, and a huge thanks to wonderful people who joined me in donating to GiveDirectly.

Whenever a post of mine is shared there are discussions of it happening in 5 places at once (Reddit, LW, Facebook..) I do my best to engage with all of them, but I would love to consolidate most of the conversation here in the comments so it’s visible next to the post.

Two things to encourage this: first, I would like to remind everyone of my $5 reward policy for comments correcting major errors in my posts, like this one.

Second, here’s a rundown of the best comments of the year, with apologies to those I missed: scholar on male porn actors, blastmeister101 on national soccer success, my greatest fan on baby hatches, StrivingForConsistency on patterns in lottery tickets, Benjamin Arthur Schwab wrote an article on the game theory of dating in response to my article on the game theory of dating, Maggie taking first steps in LessWrongianism, BAS, entirelyuseless and JulianR on inequality, Chebky on thaumatology, Alexander Stanislaw pushing back on the GDA, Peter Gerdes disbelieves beliefs, best gamer mouse on the best gaming mouse.

One thing y’all aren’t helping me with is achieving my goal for this blog: becoming a better writer. You critique my ideas six ways to Sunday but never a grammar mistake, a poor turn of phrase, a post with a confusing structure, an incoherent explanation, or a badly constructed argument. I want my writing to be first – fun to read, second – educational, third – convincing, ultimately – inspiring. Most of the time I don’t achieve that, and I need your feedback to get better.

Please share (by comment or email) which parts of my posts worked or didn’t for you as a written essay, arguments aside. The more specific the better: it’s easier to learn from a bad paragraph than from a bad post, even easier to improve on a single bad sentence or logical argument. Rewrite a section of the post with better language and flow to demonstrate your skills, I may even include it in the post. I’m still committed to ensuring that Putanumonit is a money-losing venture. I pay to keep this ad-free and I am willing to pay for a writing coach that impresses me enough. Or, you can make this effort as a kindness to me.

My next post will the revisit the best articles I wrote this year and my follow up thoughts on them, the better to start year 2 with fresh writing and fresh ideas. My folder of draft ideas is bursting at the seams, but you are very much encouraged to post topic suggestions here or on the Full Archive page (finally updated). Feel free to also post shorter questions, I’d love to have enough to do a mailbag Q&A.

At the start of year 2 I am more committed than ever to keep writing, keep improving, and keep engaging with my readers. Thank you for sticking around.