Follow me on TikTok

post by lsusr · 2025-04-01T08:22:29.521Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

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For more than five years, I've posted an average of more than 1× per week on Less Wrong. I've learned a lot from you nerds. I've made friends and found my community. Thank you for pointing out all the different ways I've been wrong. Less Wrong has changed my life [LW · GW] for the better. But it's time to say goodbye.

Let's rewind the clock back to October 19, 2019. I had just posted my 4ᵗʰ ever Less Wrong post Mediums Overpower Messages [LW · GW]. Mediums Overpower Messages is about how different forms of communication train you to think differently. Writing publicly on this website and submitting my ideas to the Internet has improved my rationality far better and faster than talking to people in real life. All of the best thinkers I'm friends with are good writers too. It's not even close. I believe this relationship is causal; learning to write well teaches you to think well. If you are a regular reader of this website and haven't written on it, then I recommend you try writing original posts. I expect you'll learn much faster. It increases your serendipity surface area too.

If you already do write on this website, then there is lots of alpha in writing different styles, such as dialogues [LW · GW], parables [LW · GW], games [LW · GW], research summaries [LW · GW], war reporting [LW · GW], fiction [? · GW], fanfiction [? · GW], fanfanfiction [LW · GW], and so on.

I feel this website's moderators do a good job of selecting what gets frontpaged. For this reason, I'm proud of the book review [LW · GW] I wrote which was kept off the frontpage due to being a political Molotov cocktail, even though it was topical and high quality. The post has 134 comments right now, despite never having hit the front page, which is evidence the moderators were correct in their decision.

The topics I'm interested in have changed over the years. One of my the earliest puzzles I explored was how to find out what ideas I have not considered, despite not having chosen not to consider [LW · GW] them. My solution was to learn a new communication medium—a new art form. But I have exhausted the easiest gains in the art of writing. I am well into the realm of diminishing returns. It is time to try something new.

At first, I experimented with YouTube and Reddit, but they are too similar to Less Wrong. To get out of my comfort zone, I needed something the opposite of Less Wrong in every possible way.

That's why I'm making TikTok videos.

It's so much fun! On Less Wrong, I can a post about Lagrangian mechanics and get comments from physicists and mathematicians. On TikTok, I got to teach a viewer that hurricanes lose energy as they pass over land. It's so much easier to teach things when your audience is people who use TikTok.

Thank you all so, so much. It's been great preaching to the choir. But it's time to bring anti-religion to the heathens.

Here's a link to my TikTok channel.

Happy April 1!

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