Personal blogging as self-imposed oppression

Learning you were wrong about something:

No blog --> Update your beliefs.
Yes blog --> Update your beliefs, and all relevant blog posts

You can also just update your beliefs and leave the relevant blog posts unchanged. :) If I read someone's old blog post, I don't assume them to necessarily still believe the same things today, so I also don't feel like my old posts would necessarily need to be changed when my beliefs change. They're like historical records whose value is in recording what I used to believe at the time.

Maybe the real good advice is: "You should try pseudonymous blogging"?

I wholeheartedly endorse this conclusion.

As long as your personal blog exists, it will beg for your time.

Why? I see variants of this argument, not for blogging, but for publishing open source software and my response is the same: it's perfectly all right to put something out there, and then not update it or touch it or feel obligated to interact with it ever again.

In fact, for a blogpost, it's an even easier argument to make. It's not as if reading a blogpost will result in crashing software or security vulnerabilities in the same way that pulling in a dependency on an unmaintained library will.

If you feel like you have something to write, write it. When you run out of things to write, stop.

I blog, I think it's enhanced my life a lot, I think it's improved my career a lot (i.e. I get grants more easily and have access to more desirable jobs because I blog). I don't think everyone should blog (?), but I'm going to say how I deal with all the listed problems.

1. Blogging will give society more influence over your thinking.

Sometimes when I disagree with society I write a blog post. That makes it easier to feel justified in disagreeing with society. It's a thing to point other people to if I want them to also disagree with society in the same way.

There are some things I don't write about because I'm too embarrassed of my opinions etc. That isn't really worse than the situation of not blogging at all, though.

A lot of this has more to do with audience than blogging itself. If you promote the blog on LessWrong then you'll be tempted to adhere to LW frameworks, etc. There are some things I write on my blog and don't post to LW because I anticipate there being too many annoying comments enforcing local stylistic conventions. Some posts can be written for a small set of specific people you know (e.g. they can be cleaned-up versions of email threads).

2. It will enforce your current beliefs and identity.

It does make it more legible when you change your mind. It also builds up a body of work, it's tempting to write more things that share the same framework etc. This is like being an academic and building up a body of work. If you change your mind and write about it you can refer to the previous post as defining your earlier position, making it clearer what the update is. Having a body of work has benefits, often the alternative isn't being free to adopt whatever is best, it's following fashions due to lacking a leg to stand on, so to speak.

(I titled my blog "unstable ontology" partially to hint that it's expected that my frameworks will change over time.)

3. It will make your beliefs visible.

I generally find that when I write something controversial, I gain "enemies" but I also gain allies. Overall the alliances gained pay off more than the "enemies" detract, e.g. it's possible to have interesting conversations with allies and coordinate with them economically, while "enemies" weren't that useful in the first place and mostly keep their distance. It's a bit weird for me to call them "enemies" because (a) enmity can't be inferred from disagreement and (b) the disagreement already existed, you just previously didn't trust them enough to reveal that...which means revealing the disagreement actually brings you closer, making it possible at all to reconcile. Even hated can be capitalized on (hatred is a form of attention and attention can be monetized, those who hate your haters may become allies), but it takes some emotional resilience to not be brought down by it.

4. It might make you less interesting.

Basically no one writes a large fraction of their thoughts on the internet. Writing a normal amount hints that there's more. Writing can increase popularity and distinctiveness which help in dating. If someone hasn't read your whole blog, there's even some public content they don't know about... and if they have, they're attending to you a lot, maybe they're kind of obsessed with you.

As a common sense check, who has better dating prospects, a rock musician (distinctive), or a random audience member (undistinctive)? What about someone with an interesting personal aesthetic that includes clothing choices etc (distinctive), versus someone trying to look normal (undistinctive)? (Luke Muehlhauser made a similar point [AF · GW] previously.)

5. Blogging will twist your motivation and demand your time.

You can stop for a while. I do find that writing decreases the activation energy of writing more which makes more things seem like my "responsibility", which causes me to write more. But this is probably good for my career overall, I don't think I'd otherwise be doing something better with my time.

Who can make this advice into a Calibrated Proverb? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NYH8kjdpLCTXcit8C/calibration-proverbs [LW · GW]

Why not blog anonymously?

A personal blog is like opening a public door to your mind. Do you really think that you won't clean up the contents for the sake of public appearances?

This isn't true by my definition of a personal blog, which makes me think you're using a different and probably narrower definition. Can you expand on what you mean by "personal blog"?

As for the second risk (that your public claims become part of your identity), even pseudonymous blogging could be a problem if you have a certain number of followers.  To guard against this to some degree, the advice might be:
"You should try blogging under different pseudonyms" (maybe on different platforms when it is, understandably, discouraged to do so on one platform.)

2. It will enforce your current beliefs and identity

I don't like value drift [? · GW]; I want my future self to be aligned with me. Making public statements about what you value/intend to do can be very useful for constraining future you's behavior.