[Exploratory] Exploratory Writing Info

post by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2022-09-03T02:50:57.795Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

Contents

3 comments

TL;DR - As an experiment I will post the unedited notes that I generate when thinking about something, to see if they are useful to people. The titles of such posts will be prefixed with '[Exploratory]'. I am not even gonna check for spelling, and I am very bad at spelling.

Compared to the average person, I might be considered a prolific writer. I wrote around 1.200.000 words in the last 4 years or so. Almost all of this was never seen by another person. Most of my writing is exploratory writing, meaning writing that is meant to augment my thought process (you don't need a computer to be a cyborg YAY). Often I don't want to spend the extra time to edit the things I write such that they become easy to parse by another person. However, it seems that it might be worth posting them anyway, in their very rough and unpolished form, at least for some of them.

I now want to perform an experiment. When I am doing some exploratory writing, then I want to just post it, almost completely unedited (I might do edits while writing it, or when I think it would be useful for me, but otherwise I will try to avoid it). This includes not even checking for spelling mistakes. And I am very bad at spelling.

If you read such a post, please upvote it if you think this provides positive value, compared to not having it, and downvote if you think it would be better to not post it (e.g. because the post is garbage and just adds noise, making it actually harder to find good content).

This post is an exploratory post. The titles of exploratory posts will be prefixed with '[Exploratory]'. Feedback on how to improve this, in the spirit that I am going for (minimizing overhead from getting to writing I have, to publishing it) is welcome. There might be things that are very low effort that would drastically improve the quality of the posts, that I have missed (in the spirit of what I am doing, I have not thought very long about how to best go about this). [Edit: These posts will also not be promotable to front-page posts, at least for now (excluding the first two posts). This might change in the future if this is useful.]

3 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2022-09-06T00:31:43.027Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

A bit more context. A few weeks ago I was working on writing a blog post for 7 days, and I still have not published it. In part, this experiment is about making me less averse to publishing things, because the idea here is to publish the (in some sense) worst writing that I am producing. Now that I think about it, there are probably a lot more things that I can do, in order to become better at communicating things. The best way is probably to just go through the entire process of writing stuff up and posting it. There are some youtube channels I like, where their old videos just suck, but their new ones are pretty good. I should probably try to emulate this, by just going through the whole creation process many times.

comment by Mo Putera (Mo Nastri) · 2022-09-06T09:33:50.540Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Would you say this is the same as babbling [LW · GW]?

Replies from: johannes-c-mayer
↑ comment by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2022-09-06T20:55:33.944Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I have not read this post, just looked at it for 30 seconds. It seems you can apply the babble and prune framework at different levels. What the author there talks about seems to be about the actual idea generation process. In that sense, the content here is already pruned, in the sense that I thought the idea was worth writing about and finished my exploratory writing.

This post did not cause me to come up with this scheme, so what the post talks about is probably at least slightly different.