Well, at least 2 of those were for SI, so those would count as a job or work; one has to eat, after all. (Speaking of which, if anyone else wants to hire me for stuff, feel free to contact me.)

But besides that, I think after a while writing/research can be a virtuous circle or autocatalytic. If you look at my repo statistics linked above, you see that I haven't always been writing as much. What seems to happen is that as I write more:

• I learn more tools

  eg. I learned meta-analysis to answer the burning question of what all the positive & negative n-back studies sum to, but then I was able to use it for iodine; I learned linear models for analyzing MoR reviews but now I can use them in my Touhou material

• I internalize a habit of noticing interesting questions that flit across my brain

  eg. 2 weeks ago while meditating: 'does more doujin stuff get released when unemployment goes up? Hey! My giant Touhou download could probably answer that!' (One could argue that these questions should probably be ignored and not investigated in depth - to paraphrase Teller, often magic is simply putting in more effort than any sane person would - but nevertheless, this is how things work for me.)

• if you aren't writing, you'll ignore useful links or quotes; but if you stick them in small asides or footnotes as you notice them, eventually you'll have something bigger.

  I grab things I see on Google Alerts & Scholar, Pubmed, Reddit, Hacker News, my RSS feeds, books I read, and note them somewhere until they finally amount to something. (An on-LW example would be my slowly accreting citations on IQ and economics.)

• people leave comments, ping me on IRC, send me emails, or leave anonymous messages, all of which can help

  The most recent examples of this come from my most popular page, on Silk Road:

  1. an anonymous message led me to investigate a vendor in depth and ponder the accusation leveled against them; in a month or two I'll write it up and give my opinions and I'll have another short essay to add to my SR page which I would not have had otherwise, and I think there's a <20% chance that in a few years this will pay off and become a very interesting essay.
  2. CMU's Christin, who wrote a paper by scraping SR for many months and giving all sorts of overall statistics, emailed me to point out I was citing inaccurate figures from the first version of his paper. I thanked him for the correction and while I was replying, mentioned I had a hard time believing his paper's claims about the extreme rarity of scams on SR as estimated through buyer feedback. After some back and forth and suggesting specific mechanisms how the estimates could be positively biased, he was able to check his database and confirmed that there was at least one large hole in the scraped data and there was probably a general undersampling of scams; so now I have a more accurate feedback estimate for my SR page (important for estimating risk of ordering) and he said he'll acknowledge me in the/a paper, which is nice.