Inadequacy

I've been reading a lot of Star Slate Codex recently. It's fantastic, probably the best blog-like thing I've ever read. I have a fairly short list of blog-like things that I've been enthusiastic about at one point or another, (enthusiastic enough to spend 100+ hours reading). In no particular order, they're Paul Graham's essays, the War Nerd, Unqualified Reservations, Less Wrong, and Overcoming Bias. I should go back and read more of Yvain's contributions to Less Wrong because, Star Slate Codex seems significantly better to me than the average material I remember reading on Less Wrong. (Yvain was a previous online identity of Scott Alexander S., Star Slate Codex's author, who keeps his last name semi-private though it's easy enough to find.)

A lot of today's best writing is being done on blogs, in my opinion. Much of what I've read in any of those blogs would be in the top quartile of the non-fiction that I've read in my life. For reference, I've read thirty works of recently published works of non-fiction with four or more stars on Amazon in the past twelve months (all of which I plan to eventually review on my other blog...). Krug's Don't Make Me Think, and Gladwell's Outliers would be two books I would put in the lower quartile of those thirty. Don Norman's Design of Everyday Things and King's On Writing would be towards the top. Paul Ekman, Margaret Mead, and Dan Ariely would be in the middle.

Even so, reading a blog as good as Star Slate Codex makes me begin to feel very inadequate as a writer. I don't feel at all bad that that blog is much better than mine. All of the blogs I've mentioned and a lot of the ones I've read a little bit of but haven't read with any enthusiasm are a lot better than this one. (I'm still trying to get the hang of what I'm doing here, and would be rather embarrassed if I had readers). What makes me feel inadequate when I read Star Slate Codex is that some of it is better than my best writing... and it's a blog that gets updated all the time. Just like squid314 before it and many other oeuvre to which Scott A. has contributed over the years. Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a lot of great essays in his two year period of posting something every day, but he also wrote a lot of pieces that seemed like the work of someone who was posting everyday for the sake of churn. Practically nothing on Star Slate Codex seems like it is written for the sake of churn, at least practically nothing I've read. I started with the archives, before I looked into the top posts. Even a lot of his everyday posts that he doesn't single out as being particularly good are particularly good, just maybe not quite as particularly good as some of his other posts. So basically, Scott Alexander is someone who can sit down at his computer and effortlessly write long, clean posts that are as good or better than my best writing (which in general doesn't show up on my blog... nor is it something that I expect will become a staple of blogging in the future, since the point for me at least is to write regularly).

Since I want to write, my takeaway from this discovery is not going to be any form of surrender. Scott Alexander is quite a bit older than me, and he has been writing daily or near daily posts, many of which deal with recurring themes, for a lot longer than I have. Actually, even though comparing myself to him makes me feel inadequate, I consider my desire to compare myself to him and realize that I don't measure up a positive sign. As Thiel discusses in Zero to One, one of the ways that people manipulate beliefs is to mess with the sets of comparisons. Successful organizations (while they tend to be highly focused) also tend to see themselves as a contender in a huge ocean. Google doesn't look at itself as a search giant; it looks at itself as a major player in the huge field having to do with organization of information.

In contrast, organizations on their way to failure restrict their circles of comparison in such a way that allows them to view themselves as being great at what they do. This is what I naturally do with music... I know several people who are better at each musical skill than I take pride in possessing (assuming I'm not tinkering with the definition of "musical skill" just so that I can be special), but I don't personally know anyone who improvises on the piano, writes music, plays classical music from every epoch on the piano, plays pop and rock music on the piano, and sings in a variety of styles all better than I do. When I want to compare myself to other amateur musicians, I've defined a very special niche for comparison which is designed to make me feel good about myself -- someone is only better than me if they are better at every musical skill in which I happen to have an interest, and most people who have musical skills have a different set of interests to begin with... and to the the extent that our interests overlap, they are better at certain things and worse at others. By choosing a very specific criterion as my basis of comparison, I'm implicitly admitting that I am not a great musician, and that I don't really have much hope of ever becoming one. I can admit this consciously without it registering emotionally.

Feelings of musical adequacy would be a bad sign for me if I wanted to become a great musician because I've taken a view of musical abilities which is designed to cater to my sense of pride, as opposed to one that motivates improvement. Monet was almost never satisfied with his own paintings. Jimi Hendrix was never satisfied with his guitar ability. Even when he was the best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods was never satisfied with his stroke. Nadal keeps tinkering with his serve. People who remain eternally amateurs, on the other hand, seem to find it much easier to take pride in what they can do. I'm reasonably satisfied with my musical ability. I had several friends in college who were extremely proud of their artistic abilities... and I myself have been extremely proud of them at various times. I became proud of my programming ability about six months after I started to code... and honestly, I probably haven't improved much since that happened. All of those forms of pride that I've seen in myself and others tend to rest more on finding a way to compare one's ability favorably to an unimportant category than they do in feeling oneself close to the end of a long journey towards mastery. Feelings of adequacy seem to come from and lead to persistent mediocrity, and are a bad sign for anyone who wants to excel at anything.

Feelings of inadequacy are not necessarily a good sign. I sucked at soccer when I was in high school. (I had little choice in whether I would play a sport during my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and I picked soccer because I would have felt more embarrassed to fail at a sport like tennis which I had actually spent a lot of time practicing. Succeeding in sports was never really much of an option for me. I was the kid that got an exception to the "no strikeouts" rule in gym class, because, really, nobody was supposed to need it quite that badly, and other people needed to have an at bat eventually.) So I worked really hard to appear to be trying at soccer practice (meaning, I would put effort into running and sometimes put some thought into determining whether I was running in the right general direction, but I never really got around to figuring out how running in general directions influenced what happened to the soccer ball). With sports, I never felt adequate. I also never felt that I could become adequate, and I was never really interested in improving. In this sort of case, feelings of inadequacy are a bad sign, in indicator of true failure.

Feelings of inadequacy are a good sign when they are accompanied by a desire to improve and a desire to exert effort and energy improving. They are especially a good sign when they are accompany a willingness to acknowledge that you need to change something.

Until I started reading Star Slate Codex, my plan for improving my writing ability was simply to write more. I'm sure that that's one piece of what I need to do, but now I also realize that I need to write better. To some extent, this is obvious. I've been practicing writing with the intent to improve. That's my primary reason for writing these almost-daily posts. (I took a break because of feelings of inadequacy which I'm coming back from now. I was also working on my book during that time, and having some degree of writer's block. As time goes by, I hope to take fewer of these breaks. The everydailyness of an exercise seems to matter more than the total amount of time devoted to it.) I even devoted some of this practice to deliberately refining particular skills. In my last post, I avoided using "to be" verbs except in the title. I plan to repeat that exercise every once in a while. I also plan to remove the concept of "should" from my writing from time to time, and focus on making object-level descriptions of whatever I'm trying to talk about. I also spend some of my time writing stories, poetry, and humor pieces. I used to write far more humor pieces, but I am questioning whether I should continue to do so, because I'd like to avoid hyperbole and bombastic fluff, and I tend to gravitate towards those devices when I'm writing comedic prose.

Reading Star Slate Codex has given me other thoughts for ways I should go about trying to improve my writing. Scott Alexander proofreads and edits all of his posts, which is not something I've done with my daily churn. Like most of the other blogs I mentioned as being particularly good, he also tends to write about topics that involve linking to sources and related posts. Sometimes he does actual statistical research, and he often embeds pictures and quotes. He revisits topics regularly, corrects himself, and revises his thoughts. These are all things that I seldom do in my day-to-day writing, probably because they are all things that I think of a little bit as work.

I love reading. I love writing. I enjoy writing about what I've read, though not quite as much as I enjoy writing about whatever happens to be on my mind. I'm less enthusiastic about the idea of exerting the effort it takes to maintain the level of organization required to keep track of what I have read so that I can link to my sources. I enjoy proofreading other people's writing much more than I enjoy proofreading my own.

These are all things that I can do, and that I should do more if I want to become better at writing. Scott Alexander has used them to refine his ability, and I would like to write more like he does. I'm going to make more of an effort to do them (beginning by proofreading this post, and inserting one link... just to get a bit more used to it). I don't want to jump into this so headlong that writing begins to feel like a chore. I don't think I am likely to continue to improve at anything once I cease to have enthusiasm for doing it, but I do want to increase my use of good habits and to learn by making changes that improve my performance.

Another thing that Scott Alexander does differently from me, which is something that I will need to work on improving eventually is that he writes a lot about his real life. I don't have much opportunity to do that at present because my real life write now is writing. I quit my last job to focus on writing a few things, that I think will lead to improved prospects for me in the future, and will begin seriously looking once I finish writing my book (that I'm almost done writing). Hopefully, I have that done seven days from now... My original target was the end of January, but I missed that. I really don't have much remaining. I've already written everything where I had a good idea in words of what I was trying to say before I started writing. Now, I just have two or three topics of maybe thirty paragraphs each that deal with ideas that I feel like I understand, but have been struggling to put into words. Most of the rest is even proof read and edited because I needed to be doing something while I was trying to figure out what to say there.

I might need to try writing a few bad drafts just to get the ideas more into words. I'll try that tactic today, and hopefully, I can turn those bad drafts into mediocre drafts tomorrow or a few days from now.