Realized today that I have a ton of unpublished mini-theories or mini-essays or whatever. Okay, I knew that part. What I realized today was that the reason I haven't published them isn't "they aren't good enough" but "nobody has the context to follow them"
Publishing ideas without writing the introduction first
10 tweets · July 2019 · 112 likes · 1 retweets · read on Twitter
I've been meaning for 2 years to write up a satisfactory introduction to Perceptual Control Theory that would allow me to then say the things I was excited to say about it. But I could never get motivated enough to write that introduction.
Today, on an email thread, I spotted someone saying something about suffering (in the Buddhist sense) in term of error signals, and I just wrote up my theory from 2 years ago (lightly improved since) as a reply to that thread! (Here it is because #ErrTowardsPublishing)
There was a sense of "oh, there's at least one person here who will read this and be able to understand it roughly in the terms in which I'm thinking it". And that energized me to write it. This has been happening to me a lot; today's example was just clearer than the rest.
Other examples: yesterday I laid out a model in a chat to @reasonisfun, that I'd been refining for 6 months, because it was answering a question that almost nobody else in the world was asking because it relates a few different uncommon models.
Twitter is a fucking fantastic medium for this sort of thing. It organically constantly generates the phenomenon of "if you want to write an interesting essay, write it to an audience of one specific interested person."
A substantial fraction of my published-online writing in the last year has been not just on twitter but as replies to people. I realized today I need other mediums that also feel appropriate for writing about whatever feels exciting without worrying about giving context first.
This is a pretty simple thing on one level: post text to internet. I could use my own blog, or some new blog, or Medium, or whatever. I'm now imagining almost something like... starting with emails to people, then having an explicitly epistolary blog. Thoughts? Ideas?
Or what about even having a group blog somewhere, called something like "Thinking Edge", where multiple people can publish things that aren't assuming more than a handful of people can actually follow them, and that's fine. Or would that make it worse because it would diverge?
useful example