2+ week, 17+ hour ago (304+ words) In the novella "The Suitcase" by nonconformist soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov I came across a dialogue that contains one of the most important writing hacks I know. The dialogue is between the mother of Dovlatov's friend and Dovlatov himself. "You know, I've long wanted to write about Kolya. Something like memoirs'Write it'I'm afraid I don't have talent. Though all my friends liked my letters.'Then write it as a long letter.'The hardest thing is to start. Really, where did it all begin? Maybe from the day we met? Or much earlier?'So start it just like that.'How?""The hardest thing is to start. Really, where did it all begin" I learned to write from Sasha Chapin (website; substack) " back when he was still doing writing coaching. Since then he moved onto a more fashionable occupation " being a CEO…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago (296+ words) Inkheaven is going on. I would've liked to participate directly, and lacking that, I would still have liked to start posting every day in November on my own, like some people do. But neither has happened, so here we are, more than halfway through November. There could be other things to get curious about. How am I able to get the key into the keyhole in the right direction on the first try? There are so many places on the door I could be trying to fit the key into, so many orientations and speeds, and yet there's this tiny target in the phase space that I happen to hit every time (well, almost). How did I not lose my phone despite thousands of opportunities to do so? I take it out so many times, and to not lose it,…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago (299+ words) Do you ever write things that have to be under or over a specific number of words? Like right now I'm at Inkhaven where everyone has to publish a 500-word blog post every day by midnight or be kicked out." Anyway, I was writing a new post here in the LessWrong editor and got sick of pasting my text into a Google Doc to check the word count. So, after a drawn-out fight with my robominions, I'm proud to say I have created a handy tool for seeing your word count in any browser-based editor. By which I mean the LessWrong editor and GitHub Issues, those being the ones I've tried. I'm going to assume you don't care about the technical details (google "bookmarklet" if you do) and just give the instructions for getting this working: That's it for setup....

3+ week, 5+ day ago (222+ words) Put people in synthetic situations where the problems you're warning people against are anomalously but legitimately salient. No. It should be. But it isn't. Despite its merits, my genre: Well, in the immediate term, my plan . . . . . . is to make this post, and then hope someone else follows up on it. I do have some ideas for rationalish/inferencey games[5], but I'm starting a demanding new dayjob next week and I expect that to be my priority for the foreseeable; realistically you're not going to get anything solid from me until the middle of next year at the earliest. So if anyone wants a headstart on me, they're warmly encouraged to begin building now[6]. (Also, if anyone knows about already-existing rationality games I might have missed, I look forward to seeing them in the comments.) Conversely, most of our failures seem…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago (298+ words) Maybe some people are not curious enough about their inner world to notice their own non-verbal thinking? Or have they never realized that their own 2 eyes can see colors differently? Never stood by the window on a sunny day (or played with a flashlight), closed their eyes with a hand covering one, and shining the bright light through the other eyelid for ~10 seconds? Or they did it and there is only one redness to call the thing they see? Words represent stuff, not make it up. Here, a picture: Every number on the picture represents the same share of red for me (as seen on the real life objects, not on the pixels) - especially the two objects #3 look really really the same color (as if the aluminum pieces were manufactured with the same dye). And #7 is probably not a "red…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago (209+ words) Do we mean active LessWrong users? Maybe it's less than half though. There might be a large contingent that has only read like, HPMOR and the Sequences Highlights. Fairly active Less wrong users? Probably not What's the upshot of all this? For writers, most discourse on your work is going to look like everyone is horribly caricaturing your ideas because participants know only of the caricature. It's not malicious. Don't take it personally, it's not malicious. After all, even supervillains can't get people to listen to their monologues." For readers, while reading a work you've heard of second-hand won't necessarily be useful to you, it will probably teach you something. Yes, even works by that guy you totally hate." In fact, it's true even for works by that guy you love. Or for works that your information bubble won't stop…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago (222+ words) Yesterday I briefly wrote about validation before getting railroaded into sycophancy. Am I really this desperate for validation? Apparently. I do recognize that most stuff I do is for external validation. Most of what I am is for external validation. Compartmentalizing habits is not easy, so mostly you just have them all the time, even alone. Lacan's symbolic invisible audience is watching your every action, after all. (Suggested reading: Sadly, Porn (see Scott's excellent review)). I have never been that affected by The Gaze when alone, for me it has always been about other people. I seem to be out of my depth here. Time to turn on the authoritative source on status games The Gervais Principle. I suggest you just read the whole thing; it cannot be easily summarized here, and the following part doesn't make much sense without....

3+ week, 3+ day ago (274+ words) NB: This isn't my typical, more epistemically cautious writing. It's more like a polemic. It's channeling something, but I'm not quite sure what. You should read this not as me fully endorsing every sentence if taken literally and out of context, but as a whole that gives expression to thoughts and feelings that I see in myself and others. If all this makes you afraid of The Sort, you needn't worry. The Sort is already here, and you have already been sorted. In fact, if you're reading this, there's a good chance you got sorted near the top yourself, or at least onto the fringes of the Sorted. The only thing we really have left to worry about is how to live well under the watchful eye of The Sort. To be Sorted is to live in fear of being…...

3+ week, 3+ day ago (139+ words) I've been totally lacking energy since Halloween, so I've decided to rant about Halloween decorations to help me get back my Halloween spirit. I've noticed many people decorate their lawns with fake tombstones. Some look kind of like actual tombstones, but many look something like this: You know they're supposed to be tombstones, but they don't even really resemble actual tombstones: I imagine the first Halloween tombstones must have looked like actual tombstones, but over time there's been a sort of conceptual drift, where the Halloween tombstone took on an exaggerated appearance (R.I.P." in huge letters being common on Halloween tombstones, but horribly offensive on real ones) and incorporated other spooky elements, like skulls and grim reapers. These ones at least have a tombstone shape. Some don't even have that....

3+ week, 6+ day ago (292+ words) Until yesterday, I believed that the only reason not to write blog posts was opportunity cost. "I could spend the next hour writing a blog post very quickly," I would tell myself, "but then I can't spend that hour on anything else." It didn't occur to me that writing a blog post under severe time constraints might have other costs. To my consternation and delight, I have very rapidly discovered over the past two days that writing blog posts when you don't really have time to properly edit them, sit on them overnight, get feedback, etc., has many costs, and that these costs mostly don't matter, respectively. The costs don't matter because (1) they are smaller than they might seem, (2) there are workarounds to decrease them, and (3) the benefits are larger. Let's work through some examples. Nobody wants a blog full…...