Where have all the good bloggers gone?

Advice from Scott Alexander.

This post is a repost from Reddit, where I discussed the advice that Scott Alexander, author of AstralCodexTen, gives to bloggers. Scott is one of the most prolific online bloggers, dedicated to “figuring out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.” I previously posted this on Substack before taking it down to make edits, so you may have already seen this.

Scott's recent appearance on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Daniel Kokotajlo was to raise awareness of their (alarming) AI-2027 prediction. This prediction itself has obviously received the most discussion, but there was a ten minute discussion at the end where Scott gives blogging advice I also found interesting and relevant. Although it's overshadowed by the far more important discussion in Scott's (first?) appearance on a podcast, I feel it deserves it's own attention. You can find the transcript of this section on Dwarkesh Patel's Substack (crtl+f "Blogging Advice).

I. So where are all the good bloggers?

Dwarkesh: How often do you discover a new blogger you’re super excited about?

Scott: [On the] order of once a year.

This is not a good sign for those of us who enjoy reading blog posts! A new great blogger once per year is absolutely abysmal, considering (as we're about to learn) many of them stop posting, never to return. Scott thinks so too, but doesn't have a great explanation why, despite the size of the internet, this isn't far more common.

The first proposed explanation is that this to be a great blogger simply requires an intersection of too many specific characteristics. In the same way we shouldn't expect to find many half-Tibetan, half-Mapuche bloggers on Substack, we shouldn't expect to find many bloggers who;

1. Can come up with ideas,

2. Are prolific writers,

3. And are good writers.

Scott can't think of many great blogs that aren't prolific either, but this might be the natural result of many great bloggers not starting out great. The number of great bloggers who are great from their first few dozen posts would end up much smaller than the number of prolific bloggers that are able to work their way into greatness through consistent feedback and improvement. Another explanation is that there's a unique skillset necessary for great blogging, that isn't present in other forms of media. Scott mentions Works In Progress as a great magazine, but many contributors who make great posts, aren't bloggers (or great bloggers) themselves. Scott thinks;

Or it could be- one thing that has always amazed me is there are so many good posters on Twitter. There were so many good posters on Livejournal before it got taken over by Russia. There were so many good people on Tumblr before it got taken over by woke.

So short form media, specifically Twitter, Livejournal and Tumblr have (or had) many great content creators, but when translated to slightly longer form content, didn't have much to say. Dwarkesh, who has met and hosted many bloggers, and prolific Twitter posters had this to say;

On the point about “well, there’s people who can write short form, so why isn’t that translating?” I will mention something that has actually radicalized me against Twitter as an information source is I’ll meet- and this has happened multiple times- I’ll meet somebody who seems to be an interesting poster, has funny, seemingly insightful posts on Twitter. I’ll meet them in person and they are just absolute idiots. It’s like they’ve got 240 characters of something that sounds insightful and it matches to somebody who maybe has a deep worldview, you might say, but they actually don’t have it. Whereas I’ve actually had the opposite feeling when I meet anonymous bloggers in real life where I’m like, “oh, there’s actually even more to you than I realized off your online persona”.

Perhaps Twitter, with its 240 character limit allows for a sort of cargo-cult writing, in that from a distance it appears like the intelligent writing, but when brought under scrutiny, it proves to be an imitation.

This plane was built in the hope it would attract a real plane, along the with the gifts they received in their first encounter.

A decently savvy person can play the role of creating good content, without actually having the broader personality to back it up. This might be a filtering thing, where a larger number of people can appear intelligent and interesting in short-form, while only a small portion of those can maintain that appearance in long-form, or it might be a quality of X (formerly known as Twitter) itself. Personally, I suspect the latter.

Scott and Daniel were discussed the Time Horizon of AI, basically the amount of time an AI can operate on a task before it starts to fail at a higher rate, suggesting that there might be a human equivalent to this concept. To Scott, it seems like there are a decent number of people who can write an excellent Twitter post, or a comment that gets right to the heart of the issue, but aren't able to extend their "time horizon" as far as a blog post. Scott is self-admittedly the same way, saying;

I can easily write a blog post, like a normal length ACX blog post, but if you ask me to write a novella or something that’s four times the length of the average ACX blog post, then it’s this giant mess of “re re re re” outline that just gets redone and redone and maybe eventually I make it work. I did somehow publish Unsong, but it’s a much less natural task. So maybe one of the skills that goes into blogging is this.

But I mean… no, because people write books and they write journal articles and they write works in progress articles all the time. So I’m back to not understanding this.

I think this is the right direction. An LLM with a time horizon of 1,000 words can still write a response 100 words long. In a similar way, perhaps a person with a "time horizon" of 50,000 words can have no trouble writing a Works In Progress article, as that's well within their maximum horizon.

So why don't all these people writing great books also become great bloggers? I would guess it has something to do with the combination of "prolific" and "good ideas" requirements of being a great blogger. While writing a book definitely requires a good idea, writing a great blog requires you to consistently come up with new ideas. One must do it prolifically, since if you are consistently discussing the same topic, at the same level of detail you can achieve with a few thousand words, you probably can't produce the same "high quality" content. At that point you might as well write a full-length book, and that's what these people usually do.

Most importantly, and Scott mentions this multiple times, is courage. It definitely takes courage to create something, post it publicly, and continue to do so despite no, or even negative feedback. There's probably some evolutionary-psychology explanation, with tribes of early humans that were more unified outcompeting those that are less-so. The tribes where everyone feels a little more conformist reproduce more often, and a million years of this gives us the instinct to avoid putting our ideas out there. Scott says:

I actually know several people who I think would be great bloggers in the sense that sometimes they send me multi-paragraph emails in response to an ACX post and I’m like, “wow, this is just an extremely well written thing that could have been another blog post. Why don’t you start a blog?” And they’re like, “oh, I could never do that”. But of course there are many millions of people who seem completely unfazed in speaking their mind, who have absolutely nothing of value to say, so my explanation for this is unsatisfactory.

Maybe someone reading this has a better idea as to why so many people, especially those who have something valuable to say (and a respectable person confirms this) feel such reluctance to speak up. Maybe there's research into "stage fright" out there? Impro is probably a good starting point for dealing with this.

II. So how do we get more great bloggers?

I'd wager that everyone reading this, also reads blogs, and some of you have ambitions to be (or are already) bloggers. Maybe a few of you are great, but most are not. Personally, I'd be overjoyed to have more great content to read, and Scott fortunately gives us some advice on how to be a better blogger. First, Scott says;

Do it every day, same advice as for everything else. I say that I very rarely see new bloggers who are great. But like when I see some. I published every day for the first couple years of Slate Star Codex, maybe only the first year. Now I could never handle that schedule, I don’t know, I was in my 20s, I must have been briefly superhuman. But whenever I see a new person who blogs every day it’s very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don’t get good. That’s like my best leading indicator for who’s going to be a good blogger.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. A lot of what talent is, is simply being the most dedicated person towards a specific task, and consistently executing while trying to improve. This proves itself time and time again across basically every domain. Obviously some affinity is necessary for the task, and it helps a lot if you enjoy doing it, but the top performers in every field all have this same feature in common. They spend an uncommonly large amount of time working on the task they wish to improve at. Posting every day might not be possible for most of us, but everyone who wants to be a good blogger can certainly post more often than they already do, myself included.

But one frustration people seem to have is that they don't have much to say, so posting everyday about nothing probably wouldn’t help much. What is Scott's advice for people who feel like they'd like to share their thoughts online, but don't feel they have much to contribute?

So I think there are two possibilities there. One is that you are, in fact, a shallow person without very many ideas. In that case I’m sorry, it sounds like that’s not going to work. But usually when people complain that they’re in that category, I read their Twitter or I read their Tumblr, or I read their ACX comments, or I listen to what they have to say about AI risk when they’re just talking to people about it, and they actually have a huge amount of things to say. Somehow it’s just not connecting with whatever part of them has lists of things to blog about.

I'd agree with this. I would go farther and say that almost everyone has something interesting to say, most just don't have the experience connecting the interesting parts of yourself to a word processor. This is probably the lowest hanging fruit, as simply starting to write literally anything will build experience. Scott goes further to say;

I think a lot of blogging is reactive; You read other people’s blogs and you’re like, no, that person is totally wrong. A part of what we want to do with this scenario is say something concrete and detailed enough that people will say, no, that’s totally wrong, and write their own thing. But whether it’s by reacting to other people’s posts, which requires that you read a lot, or by having your own ideas, which requires you to remember what your ideas are, I think that 90% of people who complain that they don’t have ideas, I think actually have enough ideas. I don’t buy that as a real limiting factor for most people.

So read a lot of blog posts. Simple enough, and if you're here, you probably already meet the criteria. What else?

It’s interesting because like a lot of areas of life are selected for arrogant people who don’t know their own weaknesses because they’re the only ones who get out there. I think with blogs and I mean this is self-serving, maybe I’m an arrogant person, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hear a lot of stuff from people who are like, “I hate writing blog posts. Of course I have nothing useful to say”, but then everybody seems to like it and reblog it and say that they’re great.

Part of what happened with me was I spent my first couple years that way, and then gradually I got enough positive feedback that I managed to convince the inner critic in my head that probably people will like my blog post. But there are some things that people have loved that I was absolutely on the verge of, “no, I’m just going to delete this, it would be too crazy to put it out there”. That’s why I say that maybe the limiting factor for so many of these people is courage because everybody I talk to who blogs is within 1% of not having enough courage of blogging.

Know your weaknesses, seek to improve them, and eventually you will receive enough positive feedback to convince yourself that you're not actually an imposter, you don't have boring ideas, and will subsequently be able to write more confidently. Apparently this can take years though, so setting accurate expectations for this time frame is incredibly important. Also, for a third time; Courage.

If you're reading this and your someone who has no ambition of becoming a blogger, but you enjoy reading great blogs, I encourage you to like, or comment, on small bloggers when you see them, to encourage others to keep up the good work. This is something I try to do whenever I read something I like, as a little encouragement can potentially tip the scale. I like to imagine the difference between a new blogger giving up, and persisting until they improve their craft, can be a few well-time comments. So what does the growth trajectory look like?

I have statistics for the first several years of Slate Star Codex, and it really did grow extremely gradually. The usual pattern is something like every viral hit, 1% of the people who read your viral hits stick around. And so after dozens of viral hits, then you have a fan base. Most posts go unnoticed, with little interest.

If you're just starting out, I imagine that getting that viral post is even more unlikely, especially if you don't personally share it in places interested readers are likely to be lurking. There are a few winners, and mostly losers, but consistent posting will increase the chance you hit a major winner. Law of large numbers and all that. But for those of you who don't have the courage, there are schemes that might make taking the leap easier! Scott says;

My friend Clara Collier, who’s the editor of Asterisk magazine, is working on something like this for AI blogging. And her idea, which I think is good, is to have a fellowship. I think Nick’s thing was also a fellowship, but the fellowship would be, there is an Asterisk AI blogging fellows’ blog or something like that. Clara will edit your post, make sure that it’s good, put it up there and she’ll select many people who she thinks will be good at this. She’ll do all of the kind of courage requiring work of being like, “yes, your post is good. I’m going to edit it now. Now it’s very good. Now I’m going to put it on the blog”...

...I don’t know how much reinforcement it takes to get over the high prior everyone has on “no one will like my blog”. But maybe for some people, the amount of reinforcement they get there will work.

If you like thinking about and discussing AI and have ambitions to be a blogger (or already are), I suggest you look into that once it's live! Also, Works In Progress is currently commissioning articles. If you have opinions about any of the following topics, and ambitions to be a blogger, this seems like the perfect opportunity (Considering Scott's praise of the magazine, he will probably read you!). You can learn more on the linked post, but here's a sample of topics:

1. Homage to Madrid: urbanism in Spain.

2. Why Ethiopia escaped colonization for so long?

3. Ending the environmental impact assessment.

4. Bill Clinton's civil service reform.

5. Land reclamation.

6. Cookbook approach for special economic zones.

7. Gigantic neo-trad Indian temples.

8. Politically viable tax reforms.

There are ~15 more on their post, but I hate really long lists, so just go check them out for the complete list of topics. Scott has more to say as to the advantages from (and for) blogging;

So I think this is the same as anybody who’s not blogging. I think the thing everybody does is they’ve read many books in the past and when they read a new book, they have enough background to think about it. Like you are thinking about our ideas in the context of Joseph Henrich’s book. I think that’s good, I think that’s the kind of place that intellectual progress comes from. I think I am more incentivized to do that. It’s hard to read books. I think if you look at the statistics, they’re terrible. Most people barely read any books in a year. And I get lots of praise when I read a book and often lots of money, and that’s a really good incentive. So I think I do more research, deep dives, read more books than I would if I weren’t a blogger. It’s an amazing side benefit. And I probably make a lot more intellectual progress than I would if I didn’t have those really good incentives.

Of course! Read a lot of books! Who woulda thunk it.

This is valuable whether or not you're a blogger, but apparently being a blogger helps reinforce this. I try to read a lot in my personal life, but it was r/slatestarcodex that convinced me to get a lot more serious about my reading (my new goal is to read the entire Western Canon). I recommend How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler if you're looking to up your level of reading. To sum it up;

1. Write often,

2. Have courage,

3. Read other bloggers (and respond to them),

4. Read a lot of books,

5. Understand that growth is not linear.

Most posts will receive little attention or interaction, but if you keep at it, a few lucky hits will receive outsized attention, and help you build a consistent fanbase. I hope this can help someone reading this to start writing (or increase their posting cadence) as I find that personally, there's only a few dozen blogs I really enjoy reading, and even then, many of their posts aren't anything special.

Edit:
Apparently Scott has already written down his writing advice in a 2016 post. Interestingly, there’s basically no overlap with what he said in this podcast, but that might an interesting follow-up read for you.