It is currently 10:28pm, on the 4th of February as I am writing this. That is, precisely 9 hours and 32 minutes before this is posted (8:00 am on Sunday). This was not my original plan for this week’s post.
Thursday evening, I finished writing my draft on the benefits of self-organizing systems and evolution as oppose to conscious delicate human design. I argue that in the case of artificial general intelligence (AGI), self-organization will prove to be more effective. I posted this draft on the r/agi subreddit so I could get feedback on my writing. Thursday was the first time I got feedback on my posts from a source outside my family.
The type of feedback I receive from my family is incredibly useful. They point out exactly where I start stumbling on my written word, and fail to properly explain a concept. What they don’t do, is show me where I fail to understand a concept. Which is very reasonable, since none of them are experts in AGI.
On reddit, the feedback I received made me realize very quickly that I had no idea what I was talking about, and that I was really just writing something because I wanted to write. As a result, the ideas within that post need a lot of re-working and extra learning. Since I don’t want to publish a post full of crappy ideas, I will hold off on publishing it. Instead you get this quick reflection on my writing process.
I have 3 goals when it comes to writing these posts:
Present neat ideas to all of you
Update all of you on my progress building intelligent systems
Improve my writing capabilities
If I were to spend time editing the draft, it would accomplish #3 and I would improve my writing skills. But the ideas would still be crap.
What have I learned through this experience?
Great posts with great ideas require more than one week to write and edit
Feedback from multiple different sources is necessary to create a great post
The possibilities ahead of me are endless, and I am very excited to explore them
To implement these learnings, I’ll be testing a new writing workflow for the next month.
Currently, I find an idea I want to write about roughly halfway through the week. I’ll sit down and quickly write out a draft on Friday or Saturday. Then if I wrote on Friday, I’ll get a few rounds of feedback before posting.
You could say this system is working because I am posting every week. But, it’s not helping me accomplish any of the 3 goals I outlined earlier.
For the next few weeks, as a test, I will be working on a few drafts per week. I’ll dedicate more time over the next few days to getting a few weeks ahead in posts so that I can actually spend upwards of 2 weeks working on a post instead of a few days. I am hoping that this parallel structure and the extra time on each post will help me produce higher quality work, and write about better thought out ideas.
I’m very thankful to the people who responded to my reddit post. I want the quality of every piece to improve over the one before it. My current system is not allowing me to do so. I have no clue what I’m doing, but I am hungry to learn more.
When I started getting feedback on reddit, new ideas were exposed to me, and it made me realize once again how little I actually know. I’m very excited to explore these possibilities, and I’m happy you’re hanging on for the ride.
Trial and error ;)
As you said, remember that writing can serve both the writer's needs and the readers' needs in various ways, sometimes more the former and sometimes more the latter, in both subtle and not-so-subtle manners. I would say that you're learning about the process of writing and refining it as you're going along, which is valuable in itself, of course. Keep learning!