Picking up where I left off in 2021

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged every day. I started my newest blog, world spirit sock puppet, on 7 October 2020, and blogged every day until February 20th 2021, 138 posts later.

I just came across an unpublished draft about the experience from later that year (saved May 4), which I feel that I should reckon with a bit rather than just jumping into a month of this as if it’s a new experience:

I want to blog every day, thinking that situation where you readily write online (like you readily say things) is better than this thing where nobody wants to say things in public (and here I would like to give a full explanation of the incentive dynamics of online writing, but I don’t have the time), yet there is this pressure to say good things, so you have to fight the pressure and get over it and just do it. So I’ve tried to do that, and I’ve posted every day for over four months, but it hasn’t gotten that easy. I often stay up late, then post something stupid. And I never write extensive, good posts. Should I give up? Should I modify my behavior some other way? Should I make it ten posts a day, then see if going back to one makes it easy, like with speed reading training? I feel like I have lots of ideas for good posts, but they all need longer to write well, and they deserve to be written well, so I put them aside as drafts. Which is also what I used to do when I had all the time in the world to blog, so that’s suspicious. Perhaps I just think everything should be written in the perfect future, when writing clarity onto a page, with thrilling beauty, will be easy. (If I do think that, then what?)

Maybe I should spend some time each day blogging, rather than putting something up each day? That sounds un-virtuous in ways.

I also never write beautiful things, and hardly ever take stands. Which feels like because I don’t have the time. But again, I also never seemed to have the time before.

I also wanted my blog to track more what I’m actually thinking about, and I don’t currently feel like it does. I hoped I could run everything together into one thing, by writing about what I had been thinking about or working on. But there are so many reasons to not want to talk about a thing in public. Maybe there are ways of talking about things in public that I haven’t properly exploited? Fiction, for instance. But that takes time again.

Since April 1, I’m beginning again—I’ve been taking part in Inkhaven, a program in which one must blog every day (or be kicked out and feel that one has failed and let others down). So, reflections on the above, continuing the practice nearly five years later:

I had forgotten about my feelings from back then about people not wanting to write things online. I still want to blog a lot, but it doesn’t seem at all tied up with what I remember as frustration at the intellectual action in Effective Altruism happening in closed conversations, and lost for anyone to check or reference or investigate to understand why we are doing what we are doing and if it is good. I have always felt like there is too much intellectual deference, and I guess back then I felt like this was encouraged by the only information most people had access to being nth-hand gossip about what conclusions the intellectual elites had drawn, without the ability to analyze them carefully, and greatly hindered from participating. And when I saw this happening, it felt like it was at least somewhat inspired by cowardice. I’m not sure I disagree with any of that now, but it doesn’t seem to rile me.

I had not forgotten about last time not feeling like a great success, for roughly the reasons outlined—dashing things off didn’t come to be easy, and I felt like quality took too much of a hit.

Looking back at the posts from then, am I right they were unusually low quality? Did readers like them less? It seems hard to say anything about readership actually—did I ever have working analytics? I currently have no desire to root around in google analytics and try to figure it out, which I think was not far from my experience then. And probably that in itself would have made me less feel like it was going well. Looking at that site now, it feels more like a quiet statue in a forest, whereas Substack (where I host another version of the same blog) feels like a stall in a town square - alive with interactive blips of other people’s attention.

Attention that you can get blipped with while you write is delicious and encouraging, but it does change the vibe. Performing for God is different to performing for a specific set of watching humans. So I’m not sure if this is better overall, but I wonder how much that accounted for my discouragement.

On the other hand, all of these posts were crossposted to LessWrong, and the only one from that era that made it to being curated or in the top 50 of the annual review was Elephant Seal 2—desperate late night pictures of an elephant seal. (I only have 12 posts in that category overall, but I think zero proper ones in that period is a bit lower than expected—it looks like the rate across all my eligible posts is between 2% and 6%). So probably it was a below average time.

I still don’t know how to write things freely like saying things, but this state of writing every day does feel like it brings me much closer to it, at the moment, than say two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I would look at Twitter and think ‘people are wrong on the internet, I should deal with that one day’, but now I sometimes dash the start of something off in response, and then just need to labor over wrapping it up.

Other aspects of my 2021 discontent are still very familiar: I have lots of ideas that seem like they deserve more than a day of writing, so I put them in a big list where they wither. I tend not to attempt extensive posts, even that could fit in a day, but instead mess around for three quarters of the day and then stay up late and post something worse. Though not nearly as worse as in the old days, because Inkhaven has standards, and also requires posting by midnight rather than ‘before you sleep’, which means I can still think coherently at the point I am fulfilling this obligation.

On the other hand, perhaps with time some of my persistent errors as a human weaken. I probably still have some feeling that everything should be written in the perfect future, when writing wonderful things will be easy. But having used this intuition thousands more times meanwhile (for everything, not just blog posts) and had it generally be wrong, it isn’t as compelling as it was.

A big difference between the Inkhaven experience and my previous self-administered blogging mandate is that there are 54 other people doing it with me, as well as numerous people helping and encouraging us and doing interesting things that we could take part in if we didn’t madly need to blog something. There is constant chatter in the Slack and lots of other posts to read (and have your own posts ranked in comparison to in public, I learned recently). I think that might actually make a big difference.

I feel more optimistic about getting the hang of this, and it going well, than it seems like I did at the end of last time. Is it just that hope has had time to build up again from its eternal spring? Or I haven’t spent any nights recently deliriously deleting incomprehensible sentence fragments about wolfmen in posts not about wolfmen, or ignominiously surrendering to further elephant seal photography? Or that last year lowered my standards for achieving anything? Maybe, but also I’ve had some pretty good blogging successes since then, albeit in the ‘much much much longer than one day to write’ category. And I think if something doesn’t go great, you are one time allowed to just try to do better.