This is the public group instrumental rationality diary for the week of June 25th. (Based on the rate of participation in prior threads, I thought it might be a good idea to start posting every other week instead of every week. Only so much new stuff happens in a week.) It's a place to record and chat about it if you have done, or are actively doing, things like:
- Established a useful new habit
- Obtained new evidence that made you change your mind about some belief
- Decided to behave in a different way in some set of situations
- Optimized some part of a common routine or cached behavior
- Consciously changed your emotions or affect with respect to something
- Consciously pursued new valuable information about something that could make a big difference in your life
- Learned something new about your beliefs, behavior, or life that surprised you
- Tried doing any of the above and failed
Or anything else interesting which you want to share, so that other people can think about it, and perhaps be inspired to take action themselves. Try to include enough details so that everyone can use each other's experiences to learn about what tends to work out, and what doesn't tend to work out.
Thanks to everyone who contributes!
The terrible habits I had were listed as follows. "Writing for the sound of it" This was later explained as writing the way I talk or writing to sound like speech and eschewing the more visually oriented prose. "Getting into the habit of appealing to the wrong audience." This is a pretty fair criticism and I do admit my style became more academic writing less for popular consumption. I cared less about a clever turn of phrase or a good hook than I cared about fitting the tone set out for the work. This led to the odd an unenviable position of one of my later teachers saying they would like to keep some of my work for their personal circulation and to use as class lecture notes but saying under no circumstances should such things be said in respectable journals. Finally, and the reason I severed my connection to the keys was that I wrote too casually and fluidly. Most people when they write for a paper or some sort of formal arrangement sit down with a deadly and serious purpose. They make their keyboard their altar and put themselves in an almost sacred mindset. My words were trash, wrappers in which to convey sticky and sweet ideas and I thought nothing of filling a page with empty calories. I was overly comfortable and familiar with writing and so perhaps did not place the thought and ceremony I should into every painfully wrought sentence. Or maybe, as with many English professors, she was a frustrated writer and disliked the fact that I, an uneducated plebeian, taking beginners English at nearly age 30 had written and sold a book and she hadn't. Either way this was one of my first critiques given by someone who was supposedly judging me on some empirical merit as opposed to whether or not they personally would buy my words and so it struck home.
Interesting and appreciated! Especially since I may have both of those going on with my own writing...
The latter critique sounds like "practice makes permanent" advice combined with particular taste about the quality of one's typical audience and your discourse intentions, which makes sense to me. LW seems to appreciate a sort of moralistic criticism, for example, and unless I consciously recalibrate, I've noticed that creeping into text where that's not helpful. I think I'm going to have to think about this one...
The former critique, curiousl... (read more)