As a former philosophy major, I can confirm that it is correct to assume that any work of philosophy is useless until it proves otherwise. It is also important that you give each work a fair chance to prove otherwise, but almost all works of philosophy are not worth more than cursory inspection, and that was true of most of the classics I was assigned as well as most contemporary work. If I may be forgiven a Cowenism, It is (very) important to understand "the literature" as a whole, but it is rarely important to understand the details of any individual view, unless you want to work in that particular area.
I didn't call any person, or even any person's body of work, cursory, and that is an obviously incorrect gloss of what I did say; so much for close reading :). For me, Spinoza is one of the philosophers who deserves close attention, and Heidegger is not. I don't deny that some people find valuable insights in Heidegger; I deny the implication that therefore Heidegger is (especially) insightful, I don't think that's how the process works. Nor would I say that someone who finds no value in reading in Spinoza is necessarily irremediably diminished; the same insights can be garnered by other means. I think most people who are interested in philosophical questions at all would agree that Spinoza's viewpoint is more distinctive than Heidegger's, and therefore that Spinoza is in some aggregate sense more valuable than Heidegger, but I'm not tied to that view. But in general I think the fact that you chose two specific examples to make your point and one of them is obviously a bad example (*many* people dismiss Heidegger, and not just because of his politics) is telling. The value philosophical works is much closer in kind to the value of works of art--that is, to being essentially subjective rather than objective--than to value of, say, scientific discoveries.
This is great -- I have never offered writing advice except this: write what you want to write. If you sit down to write one thing but another thing is exciting you, choose the thing that excites you, even if you're late with the first thing.
For someone who expects to write infrequently, would you recommend Substack or a personal website? For the sake of argument, assume ~4 posts per year, with most of them intended to be evergreen.
Substack has obvious advantages on discoverability, email subscriptions, and a commenting ecosystem. At the same time, the product is very oriented towards surfacing recent content.
"You can make mistakes. You don’t want to be making glaringly obvious mistakes, or have your economic values be off by orders of magnitude such that the whole thing makes no sense. And you may not need the details at all. If you want to tell a story that fundamentally doesn’t physically work, then it’s time for that heavy sword."
Harry Potter is a fantastic example of this. She provides details, when you sit and read the books it checks out. If you redo any of the math, none of it makes sense. Doesn't matter at all to the story. It's just background color. Since you'll always have haters, you might as well enjoy putting details in that only don't stand up to mega-dweeb scrutiny (if you enjoy writing like that).
Speaking as a writer who's released interactive fiction as well, but previously had severe emptiness and lack of inspiration beforehand and now find it easy to find inspiration, I believe to do 'great work' is so much just of life experience of seeing big things and 'dark matter' to some degree, remixing them, being able to extrapolate (there's like a short quote of Ursula Le Guin using some pathetic IRL experience with a tiny 9 foot ship that sank in 3 feet of water, and extrapolating it to a grand water ship adventure with gods), coming up with big interesting reveal moments (and being able to combine ideas to improve them) and then keeping it secret until you execute it. Also to have a sense of huge meaning and motivation like what you're bringing into the world is truly new.
Having read multiple "how I write" books by fiction authors, the core premise I've repeatedly encountered is "you must have a burning, insatiable need to write. You should never be in a situation where you're forcing yourself to write. You should, every day, be in the situation where you are forcing yourself NOT to write. You should be like a gym addict forcing yourself to take rest days, not a lazy couch potato forcing yourself to go to the gym. Either you have this burning need, or you don't, it can't be acquired. If you have it, great, here's a book's worth of advice on how to handle it. If you don't, uh, consider doing something else."
Completely disagree, Steven Pressfield has a whole book about it - most writers do better when they force themselves to sit down and write. Ideally in the same time and place every day.
I suspect that the writing advice of successful writers is mere survivorship bias, and that the truth is simply that (1) you can't score if you don't shoot and (2) you probably won't score anyway. GLHF.
I am definitely a fan of writing and writing for me is the structure in which my analytical work occurs. I write the due diligence report and the conclusion tells me what I think. But I'm facing pressure to use AI for writing and am frequently forced to proof and re-write verbiage others have used AI to produce. So here is my question to you and the peanut gallery: Do you think there is a philosophical or logical "proof"/argument that AI cannot, by definition, perform writing that synthesizes and moves an argument forward, or that arrives at something novel? I find AI an amazing research assistant, good for proofing and arguing with my conclusions, but frequently when I am writing about a novel technology or a political/economic issue in a small jurisdiction, AI can "write"/think or move forward because there is no pre-existing training material. Thoughts? [Old man shaking his fists at the sky here...]
I thought the quote (above for thick finger reasons) kind of answers your question - and it’s yes. Claude is only ‘right there’ because Claude has human assistants pulping books to extract human intellectual juices from them, and if that process ever stops, Claude will be reduced to knitting, and then taking the knitting apart and reknitting it differently, and so on ad nauseam. Claude by definition is not a human intelligence.
"I got into The New York Times once and if I showed you my subscriber graph you wouldn’t be able to notice that date at all."
That's very surprising to me. I figured it surely meant they didn't link your newsletter, but it seems they did. Huh.
For context: When mine has been linked in the NYT, that day has driven ~50x the subscriber count of a median day, and also has a noticeable tail for 3-5 days after. You're operating from a bigger base, but I'd still have thought it would be noticeable
Re: first drafts and rewrites: there is a fun trick you can do, if you have a short-ish piece that really needs to be written very well: write the first draft, as completely as you can. Then, at least one day later, open a fresh doc and rewrite it, *without looking at the first version at all*. Almost always, this second version will be much better, though it is extraordinarily wasteful and so is usually only practical for something short and very important (like the first page of a grant or the opening chapter of a book). Sometimes you can salvage a few good turns of phrase from draft 1 afterward, but side by side it's quite surprising how little material even fits well into draft 2.
As a former philosophy major, I can confirm that it is correct to assume that any work of philosophy is useless until it proves otherwise. It is also important that you give each work a fair chance to prove otherwise, but almost all works of philosophy are not worth more than cursory inspection, and that was true of most of the classics I was assigned as well as most contemporary work. If I may be forgiven a Cowenism, It is (very) important to understand "the literature" as a whole, but it is rarely important to understand the details of any individual view, unless you want to work in that particular area.
(I feel the need to make explicit, for anyone who is not paying attention, that it is not "my" essay; I am not Zvi.)
I didn't call any person, or even any person's body of work, cursory, and that is an obviously incorrect gloss of what I did say; so much for close reading :). For me, Spinoza is one of the philosophers who deserves close attention, and Heidegger is not. I don't deny that some people find valuable insights in Heidegger; I deny the implication that therefore Heidegger is (especially) insightful, I don't think that's how the process works. Nor would I say that someone who finds no value in reading in Spinoza is necessarily irremediably diminished; the same insights can be garnered by other means. I think most people who are interested in philosophical questions at all would agree that Spinoza's viewpoint is more distinctive than Heidegger's, and therefore that Spinoza is in some aggregate sense more valuable than Heidegger, but I'm not tied to that view. But in general I think the fact that you chose two specific examples to make your point and one of them is obviously a bad example (*many* people dismiss Heidegger, and not just because of his politics) is telling. The value philosophical works is much closer in kind to the value of works of art--that is, to being essentially subjective rather than objective--than to value of, say, scientific discoveries.
This is great -- I have never offered writing advice except this: write what you want to write. If you sit down to write one thing but another thing is exciting you, choose the thing that excites you, even if you're late with the first thing.
Never be afraid to fail. No one cares if you fail. Prepare for success. That’s when they come after you.
For someone who expects to write infrequently, would you recommend Substack or a personal website? For the sake of argument, assume ~4 posts per year, with most of them intended to be evergreen.
Substack has obvious advantages on discoverability, email subscriptions, and a commenting ecosystem. At the same time, the product is very oriented towards surfacing recent content.
You can do both, Substack basically lets you mirror your website. Scott at ACX does that, among others.
"You can make mistakes. You don’t want to be making glaringly obvious mistakes, or have your economic values be off by orders of magnitude such that the whole thing makes no sense. And you may not need the details at all. If you want to tell a story that fundamentally doesn’t physically work, then it’s time for that heavy sword."
Harry Potter is a fantastic example of this. She provides details, when you sit and read the books it checks out. If you redo any of the math, none of it makes sense. Doesn't matter at all to the story. It's just background color. Since you'll always have haters, you might as well enjoy putting details in that only don't stand up to mega-dweeb scrutiny (if you enjoy writing like that).
Speaking as a writer who's released interactive fiction as well, but previously had severe emptiness and lack of inspiration beforehand and now find it easy to find inspiration, I believe to do 'great work' is so much just of life experience of seeing big things and 'dark matter' to some degree, remixing them, being able to extrapolate (there's like a short quote of Ursula Le Guin using some pathetic IRL experience with a tiny 9 foot ship that sank in 3 feet of water, and extrapolating it to a grand water ship adventure with gods), coming up with big interesting reveal moments (and being able to combine ideas to improve them) and then keeping it secret until you execute it. Also to have a sense of huge meaning and motivation like what you're bringing into the world is truly new.
Having read multiple "how I write" books by fiction authors, the core premise I've repeatedly encountered is "you must have a burning, insatiable need to write. You should never be in a situation where you're forcing yourself to write. You should, every day, be in the situation where you are forcing yourself NOT to write. You should be like a gym addict forcing yourself to take rest days, not a lazy couch potato forcing yourself to go to the gym. Either you have this burning need, or you don't, it can't be acquired. If you have it, great, here's a book's worth of advice on how to handle it. If you don't, uh, consider doing something else."
Completely disagree, Steven Pressfield has a whole book about it - most writers do better when they force themselves to sit down and write. Ideally in the same time and place every day.
"The reason The Sequences work so well is that while they form one large construction, you can link to or read each individual post on its own."
You're not wrong, but also the Sequences literally have a post about how you can't usefully do that. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HLqWn5LASfhhArZ7w/expecting-short-inferential-distances
I'd love to read that but then I guess I'd have to read all the rest.
If any of the NYT's readers matter, it's because they inherited money.
I suspect that the writing advice of successful writers is mere survivorship bias, and that the truth is simply that (1) you can't score if you don't shoot and (2) you probably won't score anyway. GLHF.
I am definitely a fan of writing and writing for me is the structure in which my analytical work occurs. I write the due diligence report and the conclusion tells me what I think. But I'm facing pressure to use AI for writing and am frequently forced to proof and re-write verbiage others have used AI to produce. So here is my question to you and the peanut gallery: Do you think there is a philosophical or logical "proof"/argument that AI cannot, by definition, perform writing that synthesizes and moves an argument forward, or that arrives at something novel? I find AI an amazing research assistant, good for proofing and arguing with my conclusions, but frequently when I am writing about a novel technology or a political/economic issue in a small jurisdiction, AI can "write"/think or move forward because there is no pre-existing training material. Thoughts? [Old man shaking his fists at the sky here...]
It seems so weird to impose on people and ask them to be interviewed, especially when Claude is right there,
I thought the quote (above for thick finger reasons) kind of answers your question - and it’s yes. Claude is only ‘right there’ because Claude has human assistants pulping books to extract human intellectual juices from them, and if that process ever stops, Claude will be reduced to knitting, and then taking the knitting apart and reknitting it differently, and so on ad nauseam. Claude by definition is not a human intelligence.
"I got into The New York Times once and if I showed you my subscriber graph you wouldn’t be able to notice that date at all."
That's very surprising to me. I figured it surely meant they didn't link your newsletter, but it seems they did. Huh.
For context: When mine has been linked in the NYT, that day has driven ~50x the subscriber count of a median day, and also has a noticeable tail for 3-5 days after. You're operating from a bigger base, but I'd still have thought it would be noticeable
Apparently the reward for becoming a better writer is upgrading from ‘Can I write?’ to ‘Have I already written everything?’ Progress is so subtle.
Re: first drafts and rewrites: there is a fun trick you can do, if you have a short-ish piece that really needs to be written very well: write the first draft, as completely as you can. Then, at least one day later, open a fresh doc and rewrite it, *without looking at the first version at all*. Almost always, this second version will be much better, though it is extraordinarily wasteful and so is usually only practical for something short and very important (like the first page of a grant or the opening chapter of a book). Sometimes you can salvage a few good turns of phrase from draft 1 afterward, but side by side it's quite surprising how little material even fits well into draft 2.