I'm Georgia. I crosspost some of my writings from eukaryotewritesblog.com.
I'd suggest writing about stuff you're interested in but that don't feel crucial to get right, if that makes sense. A hobby, fiction, stories from your life, about your day, funny observations...
If you don't have any other interests and just have to write about unimportant boring stuff - hey, yeah, sure, polish turds. I'm reading Ulysses right now and it's, like, mythologizing some guys going around their everyday lives and drinking and being casually rude. And it's one of the most beloved novels ever. Writing about boring everyday bullshit in ways that sound cool is a time-honored tradition.
Well, okay, you can also start writing about things you really care about - but I feel like there's a kind of person who might read this who, like, has a thing they really care about - "we need to develop more mRNA vaccines", maybe - and is going to write a mid essay about mRNA vaccines, and then they'll sadly think "well, nobody liked that essay," and never go back to it - and that would be sad. So if you're going to practice via writing things that are very important to you, you might have to be willing to write on the same topic/thesis a few times.
(Also, if a person in your audience reads one essay from you and doesn't like it, they might not be willing to read a second essay from you on the same topic even if it's better now - so you might also want to show different iterations to different audiences, if your potential audience isn't large. YMMV.)
Yeah, so I bet passive osmosis has in fact gotten you somewhere, but to go a bit beyond that -
Okay, hm, interesting. (If I do write a "how to write good" post it'll probably be more general + kind of aimed at people with different problems than yours, like not writing enough, so I'll give this a shot now.)
Obviously I don't know what you've tried already and it seems like you have tried some things (I looked up Dionysian Imitatio and was like "I think this person already knows more about writing methods than me", haha), so apologies if these ideas are completely off the mark -
Questions and people misinterpreting you
Conciseness
Voice
Structure
😅 You know, I was thinking of calling it "Learn to write good BEFORE you have something worth saying", but figured I'd get some people rolling their eyes at the grammar of "write good" in a post purporting to offer writing advice. This would however have disambiguated the point you mentioned, which I hadn't thought about. Really goes to show you something or other.
That is definitely true and the title is being a little clickbaity about it, but my thinking is: the kind of person I'm imagining is going around thinking "I don't need to practice writing, I'll just wait til I figure out The Answer and it'll be fine" and I'm trying to convince them that they'll still want to be good at writing even once they know The Answer.
Yeah, agree. (Also agree with Dagon in not having an existing expectation of strong privacy in LW DMs. Weak privacy, yes, like that mods wouldn't read messages as a matter of course.)
Here's how I would think to implement this unintrusively: little ℹ️-type icon on a top corner of the screen of the DM interface screen (or to the side of the "Conversation with XYZ" header, or something.) When you click on that icon, it toggles a writeup about circumstances in which information from the message might be sent to someone else (what information and who.)
I don't disagree with you about not wanting to read LLM output, but:
> Everyone in Cyborgism or AI Twitter or LW who talks a lot about talking a lot to LLMs for generic conversation, rather than specific tasks, seems to lose their edge and ability to think critically
- is a very strong claim to just throw out there. Everyone? Are you sure you're not remembering the people who stand out and confirm your theory? You're getting that they're (for twitter users) "losing their edge and ability to think critically" from, like, tweets?