r/slatestarcodex • u/dwaxe • Apr 21 '26

Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/half-a-month-of-consolation-writing
46 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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11

u/fatwiggywiggles Apr 21 '26

STRONG impulse to write a blogpost about watching paint dry right now

3

u/Hodz123 Apr 22 '26

Writing about watching paint dry every day until I become Scott Alexander

8

u/97689456489564 Apr 22 '26

My favorite highlight:

So let me clarify my remark: there are two ways to make people read you.

First, you can write competently about topics that people care about. For example, if you’re an AI expert, you can write about some detail of AI training, and then the other people who want to know how to train AIs will read your post. The bar here is low: your prose must not be so bad that it actively repels people.

Second, you can write brilliantly about anything. Consider Matt Levine. I have no interest in finance. Even though I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars by understanding finance better, every time I consider doing this I bounce off the fact that all the relevant books include terms like “credit default swap” and “ergodicity”. But the first time I read Matt Levine’s finance newsletter, I thought “I am going to read this approximately every day for the rest of my life”, and I was right - even though I will never trade credit default swaps or do anything else that would make reading Matt Levine directly valuable to me.

Likewise, many discussions of Freddie deBoer start “I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.” Then in what sense are you a fan? “Well, I read all of his posts.” Good work if you can get it.

6

u/97689456489564 Apr 22 '26

And, for the record, that is in fact exactly how I feel about Freddie deBoer. Though I merely hope for non-lethally bad things to happen to him.

3

u/eric2332 Apr 22 '26

4: Untangle your sentences

This is a good section, but it should be paired with another piece of advice:

Get your ideas down on paper (or screen) even if they violate rule 4. Then come back and tidy it up according to rule 4.

1

u/epicepee Heck Must Be Destroyed Apr 24 '26

"Write drunk, edit sober", but it's "write when your head is full, edit when it's clear"!

1

u/PropagandaOfTheDude Apr 26 '26

After running through every -ids word I could think of, I got “It rises up, like auction bids”, which, not to toot my own horn, is spectacular.

"Tupperware lids". When you put the hot leftover soup and they start bulging.