Voicing Voice

"I especially like the idea that your voice only can come forth truly in an open dialogue; this has been super useful for me personally, and professionally working with autistic children."

I like this idea a lot, and would like to explore it further, is Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics a good source for further reading on that idea? What other further reading sources might you recommend?

Thanks for you comment! I have added Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics and Kaj Sotala's sequence on IFS to my deep-dive bookmark folder. Do you recommend any of Bachtin's other work in particular regarding dialogue? Other subjects?

I agree with those two components of the voice and add a third, because I think the understanding component is necessarily different than the capability to clearly explain said understanding. Communicating thoughts into expressible (aka communicable) formats such as speech, writing, videos, music etc. is at times very non-trivial or downright rather difficult. Understanding and explaining do seem to reinforce each other, though.

It sounds like you don't feel safe freely and openly expressing yourself, developing your voice, etc. And/or, do you feel you need different types of people to express different parts of yourself in a way that actually gets at those different parts, i.e. you might not even remember or think of mentioning one part, framing something in a certain way, except around people who draw such out of you? I will note that writing publicly is a great way to get people of all walks of life to interact with your work, to draw different parts of you out into legible consciousness. Writing publicly impacts me in that way, at least.

What is your fear heuristic [LW · GW] and how audacious [LW · GW] are you?

"I plan to write a blog, but currently it only exists in my imagination (and I procrastinate a lot), and it will probably just be a collection of random things with no unifying topic other than "this is what interests me"

I would be happy to read what you may write if you post something, you are welcome to PM me if you'd like some editing or proofreading assistance for a post too. I think writing about things that interest you is pretty much what most people who write publicly on a regular basis do, even those who get paid for it (why would they take a job that is completely uninteresting to them?; exception to my statement does include content writers for business sites, advertisers, and other forms of writing that are more purely commercial or coerced via payment or status-seeking in some way). I know it's what I do, I don't write about what's uninteresting to me, unless it's required as part of a business or educational thing.

All of what I've written on LessWrong has been a collection of random things that interest me :) Noticing a commonality to writings or deciding to deliberately write about something in common will likely come later.

ne of the most important pillars of happiness is speaking your mind.

I posit that a more accurate statement is "one of the most important pillars of happiness is being in the position where you can speak your mind."

I think that, on net, speaking your mind being happiness-increasing is completely dependent upon your situation in life, the way you relate to others and the current arrangement of your personality. It is a great position to be in wherein you can speak your mind and it increases your happiness.  However, there are costs to keeping your thoughts to yourself and there are costs to speaking your mind and you have to weigh those costs.

I'm a very happy person (some would say irritatingly so), but some of the worst periods of my life come from speaking my mind.

In my current situation and relationships, speaking my mind about almost anything would very likely improve my happiness, but in other periods of my life the costs and benefits did not always tilt that way for all possible things I may have wanted to say.

I agree, though I think a prerequisite to speaking one's mind is to have a mind to speak, i.e. have developed your own thoughts enough to have something to say, or at minimum, have enough of a sense of self to know when something is wrong, right, other category, specifically, when something is legible enough to notice and then say something about. It's hard to speak one's mind if one never develops one's own voice (mind, sense of self, whatever you may call it) enough to be cognizant of things to say that need saying (or merely having the capability to feel the desire to say something).

Further developing my capabilities to speak my mind via increasing the coherence of my sense of self or voice is a contributing reason for why I wrote Voicing Voice.

Because voicing one's unique voice requires doing a novel thing that may not have ever done in the same way? And doing that novel thing is potentially valuable, but because it's novel, is more difficult, yes?

I'm curious to hear more about your contrary experience if you're comfortable with sharing that. What does "integrate to everything" mean?

Understanding a particular thing properly implies a possible gears level of understanding for said thing, which requires an understanding of the specifics of how such thing was constructed after deconstructing it, necessarily, I think. So I agree with "understanding something properly will inevitably lead you to be able to recreate and be that kind of thing", even if sometimes that may be extraordinarily difficult. Are you referring to esoteric writing / reading in your post? Your talk of special decoding skills, taking philosophers seriously and vividly causes connections that most others miss, 'it takes one to know one', etc. give me that impression.

"So I guess it makes more sense for me to see "undeveloped voice" as the inabilty to see or look at your life, not taking it seriously, assuming it has properties that other peoples lives have. Then it is not so much whether your life is communicated to the world but rather whether you partipate and steer your own life."

I agree. You make a few great points here, thanks. Do you have any further thoughts on the subject, or recommended readings? Ideas on how people develop the voice and increase the agency over their own life?