I write a lot. There are many good approaches to writing. My method is not the one right answer, but it has advantages.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2609-how-i-write-a-lot
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2609-how-i-write-a-lot
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Cool article! I think it’ll be helpful for my progress. It’s similar to Write How You Speak which I’ve said multiple times has helped me write more. I definitely write a lot faster than I did before I started posting on the forum.
I think people should study grammar before debating advanced topics and being confident. If you’re debating for fun, learning and practice, while not being very confident you’re right, that’s fine.
I think I’ve had an attitude that debates are super important so I should be really skilled and I should put lots of effort into it. I should think more about learning opportunities with lower-stakes debates. I think I learned a lot in my discussion with actually_thinking.
Also, in general, I think you should try to fix writing errors primarily by changing how you think. Change your ideas that are the root cause of those errors.
That’s interesting. Seems like a good approach.
But even if you don’t, if you’re reading this, I bet you’re the kind of person who will pick up on some problems and make improvements even with no organized attempt to do so. If you think your writing is pretty much perfect, then reviewing for errors and getting more feedback from others would help. But most people reading this probably already see plenty of imperfections in their writing,
Yes, I do notice mistakes.
Do you rewrite a lot in programming too? Like rewrite functions more than other programmers do?
Thank you for sharing your ideas about how to write a lot and get better at writing.
Quoting from the article:
The libertarian psychiatry critic Thomas Szasz, who wrote a lot (over 30 books and around 700 papers and articles), told me that he only has an outline in his head, not on paper, when writing a book or article.
Thanks for sharing that Szaz story. It’s inspiring how prolific Szasz (and you!) was/are.
Each time I write a new draft about a topic, I might come up with a new idea, a new connection between existing ideas, or a new way of explaining part of the topic.
That seems like a huge advantage that rewriting has that editing doesn’t. And, more generally, that seems like one of the big benefits of freewriting about a topic.
In the past, I would’ve thought that rewriting would be a huge hassle. But now, it seems like the author can get more personal benefit from rewriting than they can from editing. Editing is done for the benefit of others, whereas rewriting can help one to discover new ideas and connections. So it’s the selfish thing to do lol.
Lesson: Rewriting is more personally beneficial than editing.
When I abandon a draft and start another, I see the prior draft as part of my process of thinking the topic through and organizing my thoughts.
Wow, that’s a really great perspective. I really like that. Before reading this article, I thought that writing multiple drafts would be repetitive and a waste.
Also, in general, I think you should try to fix writing errors primarily by changing how you think.
I like this idea a lot. I’ve noticed a similar thing myself: If I understand a topic well, then I can easily write about it. Whereas if I doesn’t understand a topic well, then I will struggle to write about it. So it’s not just that I’m bad at writing per se, but that I don’t understand the topic well enough.
It reminds me of the “Feynman” technique (which apparently isn’t from Feynman) which I learned about because it was mentioned in this post. I liked the idea a lot. I might try it sometime.
Overall, I think writing time is more productive than editing time in terms of thinking and learning about your topic.
Makes total sense (given your explanations). This is one of the big new ideas I learned from this article.
Related: I’ve been listening to a biography of Isaac Newton (by James Gleick) in the background and apparently he wrote millions and millions of words of private writing about stuff he was researching.
(I ommitted a numbered footnote):
He [Newton] opened the nearly blank thousand-page commonplace book he had inherited from his stepfather and named it his Waste Book. He began filling it with reading notes. These mutated seamlessly into original research. He set himself problems; considered them obsessively; calculated answers, and asked new questions. He pushed past the frontier of knowledge (though he did not know this).
By then he had written more than a million words and published almost none. He wrote for himself, careless of food and sleep. He wrote to calculate, laying down numbers in spidery lines and broad columns. He computed as most people daydream. The flow of his thought slipped back and forth between English and Latin. He wrote to read, copying out books and manuscripts verbatim, sometimes the same text again and again. More determined than joyful, he wrote to reason, to meditate, and to occupy his febrile mind.
As his health declined, he kept writing.
Incidentally, that quote about Newton’s “reading notes” mutating “seamlessly into original research … (though he did not know this)” reminded me of something ET said (IIRC) about how he unwittingly invented new ideas to fill the gaps in Deutsch’s ideas while studying/learning Deutsch’s ideas.
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I really liked this article. The theme of quantity over quality I think applies to improving at writing music too. Like how it applies with pottery or photography. There are some differences I can see like, what does the role of a draft play in music writing? Something for me to think about.
I think I’ve gotten myself confused with the CF ideas about practise, and aiming for high accuracy when practising things, like with typing, and this approach, which focusses on lots of experience. I think I’m conflicted about doing lots of low quality things, but doing it to gain experience. But I sense that the difference is what goal you should be trying to succeed at. With typing, you cant work on speed directly, you have to work on accuracy. With writing, or photography, or music, other things, you perhaps have to work on quality similarly indirectly.
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Not having high accuracy at something means you can’t considered it finished and ready to build multiple layers of other skills on top of. You can skip ahead with plans to revisit it later.
With typing, I don’t think goal accuracy should affect quantity (number of hours practiced). Being below your goal accuracy shouldn’t prevent you from practicing. It can result in fewer words typed per hour of practice, but I think that’s OK as long as it’s still a lot of words typed. If you spend the majority of your practice time making plans for how to be a great typist, and debating typing strategies, instead of actually typing, that would be a problem.
Yeah true. I guess for some reason I think like you should avoid skipping ahead. I know you’ve written about cycling between prerequisites and trying higher level things, though.
Yeah and if anything you should practise more if you aren’t accurate. Or at least yeah it shouldn’t prevent you practising. In the same way, being a low quality writer should mean you should be writing a lot (provided of course you want to get better at writing.)
Yeah sure I get that. Things like that aren’t usually what stop me practising things more, I think. It’s usually more like finding no way to do something relevant to the skill that feels fun and easy to do.
That being said, I could be putting a lot more effort into finding relevant alternatives. Or building that skill itself.
Actually, I think I do sometimes spend more time trying to think of/plan a good approach to learning something, at the expense of actually just trying it a bunch. Sometimes I feel like I really need to find the right way to approach something, and when I can’t find what seems like a good approach, I can be discouraged.
Im thinking the posts were sometimes really short like 50 words or 20? That still counts as being under 200 words
10 posts per day is a lot to me. That could be up to 2000 words a day.
Also I see that “most” posts were short. Some might be longer
My writing here can be seen as a section. I think.
I see the longer posts are being talked about. If the sections were short then they werent made of too many words like not a 1000 words for sure.
I see the adverb and adjective, “fairly independent” are used to describe the sections. I think that means the sections weren’t all that related to each other. Like, you didn’t really need to look at a past section to understand a future one.
I wish we were taught to think like this in school. Like, to find root causes of errors and fixing them. It feels like such a foreign concept that it seems hard to get good at
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Yeah, it was nice to learn what perfectionism is after reading some CF articles. I think trying get everything right can be a lot of work especially if you’re making lots of mistakes already.
I like the third sentence cuz I do that sometimes while playing video games. I can just do that too while writing. I think my main problem is finding something worthwhile or not too hard to work on. I think I get the idea tho
I think when you’re habits change that could be in order to correct an error. Once you do that you can think of something else to get good at and work on that.
The second sentence sounds good cuz if you’re successful with the smaller stuff then you can be more “perfectionist” and work on more things at once.
Quote below is saying that studying grammar can lead to perfectionism:
So grammar study can be a distraction from stuff like studying philosophy? I think I can tell that intuitively, but not explicitly. I think an example could be like studying grammar and you overfocus on it and it distracts you from getting other philosophy stuff correct
For this part of the quote above:
I think getting stuck like that trying to get the details right gets in the way of stuff youre intetested in. Youre probably not going to learn a lot from the grammar and the thing youre interested in
If you take out the hyphenated part it says that writing a lot is a good way to be a productive thinker and writer.
I dont get the part about never making changes to your writing approach… ok i think i get it now. So if you don’t make a change to your writing approach that prevents writing a lot then it’s a good way to be a productive thinker/writer. So if you make a change to your approach to like fix an error, but that change prevents you from writing a lot then that won’t help you be a better thinker/writer. At least not the good way of writing a lot to be a productive thinker/writer
Quote below is about the downsides of responding to individual claims:
I just saw rn that the second link is to our discussion in Critical Fallibilism and Theory of Constraints in One Analyzed Paragraph . I’m glad I could ask about local optima for more explanation 
Edit: I tried analyzing the explanation if anyone wants to see that in the discussion. I tried analyzing so it can maybe help me think about local optima better.
My question to me and other philosophers is what are you working on when ure focusing on quality? How do you know that thats gonna lead you to become a better writer overall? What goals are you missing out on not writing shorter, less complex replies?
You know how you can write when you speak? What if you compare that to when you write how you think? Maybe u can find errors and fix them?
Imo we have so many ideas in our brains that they’re all like little workers. They can do a lot of something like write a lot if you figure out a good flow. I think find what works for u.
The last sentence of the quote says if you try for perfection, it’s bad for maximizing long term writing quality. I think I do this and I dont think it has lead me to a lot of success in writing. My question to me or someone like me is: has focusing on high quality work help me get really good at something before? Has that lead to being successful at a skill?
I don’t get percentiles fully and Im also reading this quote like if youre better yesterday than today then thats not better for u today.
Im gonna look up percentiles rq…Ok, I just looked up a rq gemini description of what a percentile is. So if you have a 50th percentile work from a few years ago then that’s better than 50 percent of your work in that area but also worse than 50 percent of work.
Ok, now I see I missed the phrase “from now” meaning in the future. So hoepfully your 50 percentile stuff in the future is better than your 90 percentile work from today
I notice I need a lot of editing to make replies. What I usually do is write how I speak to edit and fix my replies. Fixing the errors I make so I dont have to edit so much is a good idea.
In the second sentence of the quote, it says to change the ideas that are the root cause of the errors. That makes more sense now cuz if im using ideas to write and i make writing errors, then maybe one writing idea can be changed to make less errors.
I agree with the last sentence of the quote. I keep seeing a lot of errors being made when I write and the thing is I kinda can’t tell if they’re the same errors. That would be good to know if they are
Oh, I see you can review your writing but after a while. Not like very often. I think if you make like an organized attempt to fix your writing like that it might slow you down. I think I do feel it slow my writing down when I try to find errors post reply. I think tho I could try to make it happen quick so it doesn’t slow me down so much.
The following quote is the next sentence after the quote above:
So if I don’t really make like an organized effort to improve, I could still try to improve when I write. I could find mistakes and work on them while I write about other topics. I think I could write about topics that interest me.
I wonder if I’m the kind of person that will pick up on problems and work on making improvements. What kind of person is that? They can pick up on some problems with their writing. I think they do this while writing. They can also make improvements without trying super hard. Like, they can be like, “oh I can work on this in my next reply.” At first it sounds kind of hard to find stuff to improve on but I think it’s probably easier than it sounds.
I could make a list about stuff to improve on that I know off the rip.
edit: something I think I want to work that I can tell is using “I” vs “they/you.” It sounds more objective to talk using those pronouns. It’s probably more interesting