I used to blog several times a week, for years. Never made a cent at it, it was just the place to talk about the stuff I was thinking about. Very useful for me to marshal my thoughts.
Unfortunately when social media got started, people quit reading my blog, so I started putting them on facebook or twitter instead. And it's a real shame, because I can never find them again there. It's not such a great place for that.
I do at least have my writer blog, where I post once a month about some writing related thing in the hopes someone will read it, though as far as I can tell very few people do. But the trouble is, it has to be on topic, so there's no place for my random parenting essays or religion this thoughts.
> I only hear from people if they think my post is a pile of shit and I have the dumbest takes since Marc Andreessen.
You say that, but when I kept running into you at LessOnline I'm pretty sure I gushed an embarrassing amount about your greatness.
More seriously though, this does speak to me. I write stuff a lot less frequently and don't consider blogging a part of my identity, but mostly when I do write something it's because I catch myself telling everybody I know about something I read, every little stupid detail of how dumb it is, and the only way to partially spare them is to post 5-10k words about it instead.
> People who don’t write online think that online writers hear a constant chorus of agreement. But in my experience, when people agree with my post, they never tell me! They nod along, maybe send a link to a friend, and go on with their lives. I only hear from people if they think my post is a pile of shit and I have the dumbest takes since Marc Andreessen.
> And then you have to figure out if they’re the kind of person who gets bitter and vindictive, or the kind of person who sees it all as kayfabe and is happy to write a thousand-word post calling you an evil moron and then DM you to go “I’m in town, want to get coffee?”
What?! Ozy, you're a rationalist! The kind of guy who gets called an evil moron, and goes "Yay, someone is arguing with me! We are now friends." The kind of guy who gets frustrated after thirty seconds of agreement and compliments, and casts about for something to disagree on, so the conversation can get interesting. All of those are clearly upsides, not downsides!
Pissing on the poor is very annoying though, yeah. You can painstakingly explain their mistake, and everyone sees what a perfect martyr angel you are, that's some consolation.
Unrelatedly, I saw the photo of the Experimental History guy on the Inkhaven website and thought he was you.
I feel like this is an example of the thing where people who read my blog have a fictional version of me in their heads that they've formed from reading my blog but that isn't me! It actually makes me very sad when people call me an evil moron; it gives me panic attacks. I don't tend to write about this because mentioning that Internet hate gives you panic attacks makes everyone think you're a pathetic wimp.
In my partial defence, you do (did?) call yourself a rationalist, and every single rationalist I personally know loves disagreement and barely notices if there's personal attacks mixed in there, so it's not moon logic like "zie has like thirty blog posts about marrying this guy, zie must be married to this totally different guy"
I was gonna say "this is surprising, I feel like people who read a lot of my online writing have a good read on who I actually am, I rarely hear a wrong guess" but it occurs to me that maybe I only hear like 1% of their guesses.
I'm not Ozy, and I'm not sure if I self-identify as rationalist but I'm sure most other people will describe me as one, and I also don't like it when people insult me. It does give some relief that most people who insult me are idiots, but it's always a little upsetting every time someone who insulted me significantly turned out to be a centimillionaire or goes on to get a senior job in the White House or something, which happens with some regularity.
Hm, I really do have some recurring comments I should write down, don't I? Unfortunately the only one I can think off of the top of my head is the "numbers rant", which somehow I've never posted to Dreamwidth. Are there others or is that the last remaining one...? (Unfortunately Reddit doesn't seem to keep comment histories far back enough for me to check for others I might be forgetting.)
(I guess there's correcting common misconceptions about infinite cardinals, but, well, any mathematician can do that. That's not worth a post, that's just something any mathematician will do when it comes up. Well, unless they don't actually know their set theory, which is more common than one would hope. Anyway, I should add "post the numbers rant to DW" on my todo list.)
Of course, approximately nobody reads my Dreamwidth (which, yes, was ported over from the LiveJournal I started back in high school, and still has plenty of old diary-style entries, and even gets new ones now and then, although that's much reduced as that sort of thing has since mostly moved into private correspondence); I did at least a few months ago take some of the old rationality-related posts and repost them to LW. So that's helpful?
A while back I thought of starting a new blog -- under a new name, although I can't imagine tying it back to my existing ones would be *that* hard -- where I'd write down some thoughts on politics that I feel are not sufficiently expressed in the current environment. This never really happened though, for a few reasons -- one being, that if I have time to be writing about politics, then I have time to be writing up my math backlog, which is rather less unpleasant and shouldn't I really be doing that? (Two initial posts got written, but not the big intro where I explained my overall how-I'm-analyzing-things that would inform basically every other post.) (Also, some of it potentially runs up against some "personal is political" barriers where, uh, I'm not sure I can make the point I want to make without revealing more than I'd like...)
(Sometimes, when you have something to say, if you wait long enough someone else will say it for you. And with the power of illiberal SJ being largely on the wane, and the beginning of a return of liberalism among the "blue tribe", people are starting to say some of this stuff. Unfortunately some of it I feel like is not there, and thus still needs to be written up at some point...)
(Also sometimes someone comes along and expresses a version that is a bit *off* but it really takes off and people just use its concepts instead of insisting on correcting them, argh. It really annoys me how when someone introduces a new concept so many people will just be like "yes I will use that concept" instead of "hm let me prod it for holes and make sure it's not a slightly-off version of the correct concept, that will mislead people".)
Anyway, maybe I should just accept that I'm never going to write this and see which of the planned posts can be pulled out and just posted to Dreamwidth solo w/o all the context the other posts would provide. There's at least one that can be, I think. But if I do post it, it sure would interfere if I ever did want to write the rest...
I used to blog several times a week, for years. Never made a cent at it, it was just the place to talk about the stuff I was thinking about. Very useful for me to marshal my thoughts.
Unfortunately when social media got started, people quit reading my blog, so I started putting them on facebook or twitter instead. And it's a real shame, because I can never find them again there. It's not such a great place for that.
I do at least have my writer blog, where I post once a month about some writing related thing in the hopes someone will read it, though as far as I can tell very few people do. But the trouble is, it has to be on topic, so there's no place for my random parenting essays or religion this thoughts.
> I only hear from people if they think my post is a pile of shit and I have the dumbest takes since Marc Andreessen.
You say that, but when I kept running into you at LessOnline I'm pretty sure I gushed an embarrassing amount about your greatness.
More seriously though, this does speak to me. I write stuff a lot less frequently and don't consider blogging a part of my identity, but mostly when I do write something it's because I catch myself telling everybody I know about something I read, every little stupid detail of how dumb it is, and the only way to partially spare them is to post 5-10k words about it instead.
> People who don’t write online think that online writers hear a constant chorus of agreement. But in my experience, when people agree with my post, they never tell me! They nod along, maybe send a link to a friend, and go on with their lives. I only hear from people if they think my post is a pile of shit and I have the dumbest takes since Marc Andreessen.
> And then you have to figure out if they’re the kind of person who gets bitter and vindictive, or the kind of person who sees it all as kayfabe and is happy to write a thousand-word post calling you an evil moron and then DM you to go “I’m in town, want to get coffee?”
What?! Ozy, you're a rationalist! The kind of guy who gets called an evil moron, and goes "Yay, someone is arguing with me! We are now friends." The kind of guy who gets frustrated after thirty seconds of agreement and compliments, and casts about for something to disagree on, so the conversation can get interesting. All of those are clearly upsides, not downsides!
Pissing on the poor is very annoying though, yeah. You can painstakingly explain their mistake, and everyone sees what a perfect martyr angel you are, that's some consolation.
Unrelatedly, I saw the photo of the Experimental History guy on the Inkhaven website and thought he was you.
I feel like this is an example of the thing where people who read my blog have a fictional version of me in their heads that they've formed from reading my blog but that isn't me! It actually makes me very sad when people call me an evil moron; it gives me panic attacks. I don't tend to write about this because mentioning that Internet hate gives you panic attacks makes everyone think you're a pathetic wimp.
Huh! My bad, sorry.
In my partial defence, you do (did?) call yourself a rationalist, and every single rationalist I personally know loves disagreement and barely notices if there's personal attacks mixed in there, so it's not moon logic like "zie has like thirty blog posts about marrying this guy, zie must be married to this totally different guy"
I was gonna say "this is surprising, I feel like people who read a lot of my online writing have a good read on who I actually am, I rarely hear a wrong guess" but it occurs to me that maybe I only hear like 1% of their guesses.
Yeah, I think I might have that opinion if I got less hate than I do! >.<
I don't see it here in the comments - are the haters using other venues (Substack Notes? The X-parrot? Email? Reddit?) or do you just delete+ban?
I'm not Ozy, and I'm not sure if I self-identify as rationalist but I'm sure most other people will describe me as one, and I also don't like it when people insult me. It does give some relief that most people who insult me are idiots, but it's always a little upsetting every time someone who insulted me significantly turned out to be a centimillionaire or goes on to get a senior job in the White House or something, which happens with some regularity.
Good poast OP ty
Substack has horrible SEO, the same with your own obscure personal website. Much better to write a post in a relevant subreddit.
Hm, I really do have some recurring comments I should write down, don't I? Unfortunately the only one I can think off of the top of my head is the "numbers rant", which somehow I've never posted to Dreamwidth. Are there others or is that the last remaining one...? (Unfortunately Reddit doesn't seem to keep comment histories far back enough for me to check for others I might be forgetting.)
(I guess there's correcting common misconceptions about infinite cardinals, but, well, any mathematician can do that. That's not worth a post, that's just something any mathematician will do when it comes up. Well, unless they don't actually know their set theory, which is more common than one would hope. Anyway, I should add "post the numbers rant to DW" on my todo list.)
Of course, approximately nobody reads my Dreamwidth (which, yes, was ported over from the LiveJournal I started back in high school, and still has plenty of old diary-style entries, and even gets new ones now and then, although that's much reduced as that sort of thing has since mostly moved into private correspondence); I did at least a few months ago take some of the old rationality-related posts and repost them to LW. So that's helpful?
A while back I thought of starting a new blog -- under a new name, although I can't imagine tying it back to my existing ones would be *that* hard -- where I'd write down some thoughts on politics that I feel are not sufficiently expressed in the current environment. This never really happened though, for a few reasons -- one being, that if I have time to be writing about politics, then I have time to be writing up my math backlog, which is rather less unpleasant and shouldn't I really be doing that? (Two initial posts got written, but not the big intro where I explained my overall how-I'm-analyzing-things that would inform basically every other post.) (Also, some of it potentially runs up against some "personal is political" barriers where, uh, I'm not sure I can make the point I want to make without revealing more than I'd like...)
(Sometimes, when you have something to say, if you wait long enough someone else will say it for you. And with the power of illiberal SJ being largely on the wane, and the beginning of a return of liberalism among the "blue tribe", people are starting to say some of this stuff. Unfortunately some of it I feel like is not there, and thus still needs to be written up at some point...)
(Also sometimes someone comes along and expresses a version that is a bit *off* but it really takes off and people just use its concepts instead of insisting on correcting them, argh. It really annoys me how when someone introduces a new concept so many people will just be like "yes I will use that concept" instead of "hm let me prod it for holes and make sure it's not a slightly-off version of the correct concept, that will mislead people".)
Anyway, maybe I should just accept that I'm never going to write this and see which of the planned posts can be pulled out and just posted to Dreamwidth solo w/o all the context the other posts would provide. There's at least one that can be, I think. But if I do post it, it sure would interfere if I ever did want to write the rest...