[HN Gopher] Selfish Writing (2018)
___________________________________________________________________
Selfish Writing (2018)
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-12-16 10:06 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (collabfund.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (collabfund.com)
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| A lot of smart people tell you to read. It's great advice. Even
| better is to write. Putting your thoughts into words helps you
| crystallize your thoughts, scrutinize them, remember them better,
| etc.
|
| I wish someone had given me the advice to "write more" earlier in
| my career. (Note that I now maintain a blog and have written a
| book).
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| So much this. I've been a lifelong voracious reader and only
| recently have I started to take writing seriously as a way to
| determine what I really think. I am now far more articulate,
| rigorous, and confident in my own beliefs than I have ever
| been.
|
| Taking the time to write down what I am thinking really puts it
| up into the light and better equips me for communicating my
| point of view to others in a way that is robust, concise, and
| internally consistent. Even if they will never read what I've
| written.
| endofunctor91 wrote:
| knlb2022 wrote:
| As much as I enjoy writing to think, simply writing doesn't lead
| to reality testing -- I've found even greater clarity by trying
| to add numbers or simulations and trying to program around what
| I'm writing. Writing with real data intertwined and numbers
| applied is much better.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| Agreed. I'm currently working on a book on statistics[1] and
| keep discovering slight (and not so slight) misconceptions in
| my thinking thanks to the "optional" code examples and
| demonstrations. In the end, it seems the code examples won't be
| optional at all, but essential for understanding.
|
| It's the same with many science and tech subjects. You don't
| really know it until you can code it. I'm intentionally
| converting some of the derivations/experiments into exercises
| for readers to complete on their own, so they can also benefit
| from this learning process.
|
| [1] https://nobsstats.com/
| karencarits wrote:
| I fully agree with you, but as a warning: most people are
| lazy, so if valuable points are hidden in exercises for the
| reader, there is a significant chance that many will miss
| them
| k__ wrote:
| True.
|
| Being a developer in addition to being a writer helped
| tremendously.
|
| That way, I was able to really try out more than just basic
| stuff and then write about it.
| the-printer wrote:
| I gather that I am not adjacent to your field of practice by
| any means but this resonates with me deeply.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| That can work, but it depends on what you're writing about.
| Different methods apply in different situations. But good
| writing has at the very least the advantage of doing what the
| article notes: it forces you to take what are vague convictions
| and impressions and justify them. You start to notice gaps in
| knowledge, inferential leaps, and logical inconsistencies. Only
| then, and only in empirical settings, do numbers come into play
| because they need to be motivated by and understood within some
| prior context. (Even when your writing begins with some number,
| that number is contextualized in your mind.) Of course, good
| writing presupposes humility and integrity or else you risk
| rationalizing and bullshitting.
| gringoDan wrote:
| Fully agree. Some of what we today consider to be the canon of
| Western philosophy was never meant to be shared widely.
|
| Many of Aristotle's "writings" were just student-created notes of
| his teachings.
|
| Meditations, from Marcus Aurelius, is a collection of notes to
| himself on how to best govern as emperor.
| simonw wrote:
| I've been publishing weeknotes about once a week for a couple of
| years now.
|
| They're selfish writing, for me. I use them to hold myself
| accountable for making progress on my various projects.
|
| I don't particularly care if anyone else reads them.
|
| Where they do come in useful is linking people to things. I can
| say "I write something about that last year" and point back to my
| weeknotes.
|
| https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/
| paulpauper wrote:
| _Howard Marks' book The Most Important Thing has sold three-
| quarters of a million copies. I don't know what the list of all-
| time best-selling investment books looks like, but that is up
| there._
|
| It's always the same pattern with this blog: find a single
| success and then generalize it to everything, ignoring the
| obvious survivorship bias. The vast majority of books do not sell
| well, no matter what technique is used. Writing for yourself is
| good, but ideally you want other people to be interested too if
| your goal is to actually make money.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-16 23:00 UTC)