On My Writing

In 9th grade my English teacher told me I was writing an assignment with broad over-generalizing maxims and beliefs. I tend to write absolutely, especially when being un-technical/un-scientific. I think this is because this makes my writing more concise and more clearly communicative–unencumbered by the recognition of my limitations or the limitations of my ideas.

This is because I take for that granted everything is limited. No idea or set of ideas can be truly be always “true”. Truth is assigned and constructed anyways, so most of my writing gives simplistic systems (“heuristics”) that are useful for making sense of the world.

My english teacher also told me that I lacked ethos. I still lack ethos. I would not take advice from me either, there is little proof that my ideas lead to success. This means if you are reading this you are wasting your time (unless it is the future and I have managed to make something of my life). The content you consume effects your ideas, and generally this heuristic of taking advice from people who have accomplished what your goal is is a great way of filtering noise.

I have some personal conviction, however, so I actually do believe these ideas. The problem with listening solely to successful people is that everyone else is doing this, so you are average. You’ll be “right” a lot, but it won’t be as valuable as people who are simultaneously “right” and contradicting the majority narrative. So the self has some right to be a north star.

I almost never took notes in school, instead relying on becoming familiar in broad strokes what is being taught and filling in the rest with reason and logic. I do the same thing with most of my thinking, but sometimes I find myself doing redundant work.

When I write, I write the filling and not really the broad ideas, so I can quickly “rebuild” this knowledge if I lose it. My ideas are somewhat spiky in their generation, nonlinear in their creation, so sometimes I will have a bunch of great ideas, and if I don’t write them down the next day I will just be left with the wisps of them, and sometimes I can’t fill in exactly what I thought about.

I think, as a general rule, all knowledge should be free, useful or not, so that’s why I cast my writing into the internet. Maybe 10s of people will generally find my ideas interesting, which is enough.

If I were to give myself advice 4-5 years ago, even 2-3, I would tell myself to document everything I was doing.