Writing in public is still underrated
I wrote 34 posts on this newsletter during my PhD, and my life and work are genuinely better for it. Recently I’ve met several people with very interesting ideas who never write them down. Some of them even read my Substack!
If you have ideas but never write them down, this post is for you.
Writing helps you think better. The difference between a Turing machine and a finite state machine is the tape. Your brain is much more powerful when you give it a scratchpad.
Thoughts are ephemeral. Why did I start writing the newsletter in the first place? (1) I was reading papers and having thoughts on them; (2) unless I forced myself to write them down, this knowledge would be lost to time; (3) when it’s written down, it’s much easier to polish and hit “publish”.
Scope sensitivity. Writing just reaches more people than conversations. You would spend 20 min writing an email responding to an interesting question. If you spend 3h on a short post instead, you break even at 20 careful readers. If your writing is good and 2000 people read your post, you get 100x the outcome for the same effort. 1-on-1 communication is very limited in impact compared to writing on the Internet.
Compound interest. Once you post, it’s out there for people to read years later.
Writing instead of implementing. If you’re usually only doing technical work, on the margin, writing more might be better. Engineering is getting cheaper and you might want to delay some projects in favor of writing about ideas more. Of course there has to be a balance. If you are not doing any experimentation with LLMs, your takes will soon be stale, or only influenced by other people’s lived experience. The best writing is always very directly inspired by reality, not by other people’s written word.
Updating your beliefs. Sometimes you believe something that’s very load-bearing to your view, you try writing it down, and then you realize your arguments are bad and you no longer believe it, or believe a slightly different thing. Alternatively, you write something and someone disagrees with you and they convince you. This update would not have happened if you weren’t writing.
Writing for LLMs. Gwern explained it well. If what you are writing about is novel to LLMs, it means future LLMs can learn from it, effectively helping everyone who needs that information in the future.
Instantiating a part of yourself in others. People and LLMs both learn from other people’s writing, and in the process, construct a miniature replica of the writer in their mind.
Name recognition. If you write something that has value to people, they will remember your name and they will respond to your emails and opportunities will open that were not open before. They will also be more likely to read your other work, be it papers or posts. This only applies if you are writing under your name or under a consistent pseudonym.
It’s sort of cool. I tend to like people who write on the Internet. And: after many conversations, professional and casual, I can report that writing is indeed socially reinforced, and having a large corpus of your thoughts online is a useful social signal. I don’t think this is some sort of life hack or anything, though. You still have to have novel things to say; writing merely demonstrates it. As I said in the introduction, I’ve talked to several readers of mine who had interesting insights but did not post anything regularly. If you are one of them: please stop being shy and post! It doesn’t matter if only a few people read it. The alternative is that your ideas will just go to waste.
Other people saying the same
“Why have a blog” by Alexey Guzey has a great answer to the objection: “But I don’t have anything original to say and I would be just repeating things said elsewhere on the internet!”
This short nugget by Devon Zuegel is the best practical “how to start writing” advice I’ve seen. If you manage to unblock yourself, it becomes not that hard to write your ideas down. The ideas are the difficult part.
I think of Alexey’s post often; good rec! And I don’t think I’m just deluding myself about it being ok to say things that others have said!
https://perell.com/essay/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-online a good list of tips