When Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote his original Sequences, he wrote at a rate of about one blog post per day, for a couple years. Now, they're basically the canonical text for the rationality community centered around LessWrong and similar sites.
When lsusr on LessWrong was building his body of work, he posted an average of one LessWrong article every 4 days, and has been going strong since late 2019. Sure, most of these are short and/or fictional. But he's certainly got his ideas out there, so they can be workshopped, refined, reused, and remixed by others.
When the Slate Star Codex guy was building his blog, he posted over a thousand essays over ten years. That doesn't even count his earlier Raikoth writings, much of his LessWrong sequences, his old LiveJournal, his somethimes-verbose Tumblr, or his actual current blog.
Why am I taking inspiration from these people? Specifically, why am I attempting to publish an article here on Politics is Bad every day (or as many days as I can) for the next few months?
I have incredibly massive procrastination problems, including relating to blogging.
I look up to the three bloggers listed above (and several others), for different reasons and to varying degrees. Mainly in how they use not-overly-academic language to teach and discuss complex concepts.
I'm trying to build this Substack as a place for good "rationalist-style" clearheaded takes on controversial events and ideas. That takes practice.
I have spent several months optimizing my writing techniques, so I can write both faster and more clearly. This blog is a good place to test this, and even better when the tests are frequent.
I kiiiiinda need the money, relatively soon, and Substack's Stripe payouts barely have a minimum dollar amount for withdrawals.
While I won't go out of my way to make things controversial here, the title of this blog is not entirely anticorrelated with its content and style. And despite my (distressingly, depressingly real) human urges, I don't want this to turn into a hate factory, misinformation dump, or /r/TheMotte. *shudders*. I just have ideas that I'm less than 95% comfortable putting under my own real name, at least for the time being. (This is for professional job-searching reasons, and totally not because of anything else.)
So what can you expect on Politics is Bad?
A LessWrong-style-rationalist lens on the political and cultural debates clogging your local comments section.
Clarity, humor, wit, intelligence, pedantry, praxis, mouthfeel, and similar acclaimed words.
Enough silliness to raise eyebrows, but not quite enough to make you disagree with my overall points, or otherwise bias you against me in any way. I know the deal with this to some extent.
One post per day, approximately, for the next few months.
Like any "good"" story, this one has a conflict. With the examples of influential rationalists, in an increasingly-powerful community-cluster, I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll avoid causing ridiculous blowback. On the other hand... well, sometimes activism and policy needs to be direct, and not always in the easy/fun way.
Lonely dissent doesn’t feel like going to school dressed in black. It feels like going to school wearing a clown suit. - the guy
Just as our politics must reconcile restraint and not-restraint, so too must this blog balance between weird and not-weird.
Well, to be clearer, it's not "this blog" doing the balancing, or "our politics" needing upkeep.
It's just me. And us.
Let's see where this goes...