Don't feed the void. She is fat enough!

post by Johannes C. Mayer (johannes-c-mayer) · 2022-12-29T14:18:44.526Z · LW · GW · 0 comments

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My posts. I write them. I post them. And that's it. In my head, I am not writing them to someone. And I don't expect anything back. There are obvious problems with this model. When I am writing an email to someone, I think very carefully about what to write. When I want to explain something, I think about how to make the other person understand. My mental state in that situation is significantly better at producing good writing.

But blog posts (or really any form of public writing) are about talking to another person, or ideally many! Having the model that you put out a blogpost to get sucked into the void, makes it harder to empathize with the audience. No wonder; the audience does not exist in this model. To be clear, this model is not one that I have consciously adopted, but today I noticed that it is there. And now it needs to go.

Of course, the void model is in my mind for a reason. It is a protection mechanism. If you don't expect anything you won't be disappointed. Maybe this model can be useful. I am not sure. When I started to publically write, I did not know anybody in my target audience. Especially not for AI alignment topics. Better to feed the void than to become dispirited. I would not be writing this if I lost my spirit.

But now I know at least 7 people in my target audience. So why not treat a post like I would treat an email to somebody? Just pick a person and write the post to them! Just as if I were writing a very long message to that person. I have not tried this yet, but I expect this to be a significant improvement. You try too.

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