I certainly don't write well enough to be considered "porn" :)

It's true that my blog doesn't have a terminal value outside itself, although I will occasionally write about Effective Altruism topics.My goal is to have a popular blog with a lively discussion, my blog will be popular if people enjoy my writing. That's the goal in itself, I am not planning to turn it into a source of income or anything like that.

Different people enjoy vastly different things: I am getting overwhelmingly positive response on LessWrong, and overwhelmingly negative response on Reddit. That's a good thing: like a dating profile my goal is to find my specific audience and not write universal clickbait, and LW is definitely the audience I aspire to have.

To apply to a LW audience, I'm trying to:

• Come up with genuine insights based on analysis rather than repeat common wisdom that's based on sounding plausible.

• Be always willing to learn and be corrected, including offering a reward for people finding major errors in my posts. One person has deserved it so far for pointing out a serious factual mistake that I fell for because of confirmation bias.

• Show my math. If you don't want to see me calculate the influence of outliers on a regression slope, the blog isn't for you ;) If I can't do the math myself, I won't take someone else's word for it.

• Puns.

The above list is very different from what would apply to 90% of my Facebook friends, for example, and I'm OK with it. If I wanted 100,000 shares, I would write "27 ways how Bernie is actually a lot like Batman and Trump is like Lex Luthor".

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read

Pliny the Elder (via Civilization IV)