> On day 19 of daily blogging, I fine-tuned a language model on my 35 blogposts to date. It worked surprisingly well and was able to express viewpoints that I hold but had not yet written down.
Have you written about how you did this elsewhere (yet)? I would love to read about that!! I'm interested in trying something similar with my writing (99.5% unpublished).
You could do a scaling laws experiment by just training on different sized subsets of your blog posts and then seeing how much you like the resulting writing on the same prompts. Probably less confounded this way.
How robust is this desire? What happens if you miss publishing for a day? A whole week?
I suspect those who have the most passion/endogenous-motivation for writing are also the kind who'd miss a whole week on a dime simply because something else might come up and they didn't feel like it. They're confident the desire will come back, or even nonplussed about the idea that they may never write again after "breaking their streak".
See e.g. "Eliezer Yudkowsky writing the Sequences near-daily but not daily, because who cares, the specifics aren't the point, getting the ideas out is" or "Scott Alexander doesn't write daily, but can't stop himself from writing overall, in a way that's remained stable over a decade".
I'm worried you'll fall into a "Duolingo attractor" by doing this, where what ends up mattering is the streak, and you start deriving pride and eventually anxiety from HAVING to have something by tonight, *just* so you can become the kind of person who may eventually tell herself she's the kind of human who's published a post a day for 365 days straight or whatever. This is an attractive badge but... really??
I imagine there are more harmless ways to do this. e.g. spreading your writing accross platforms so no one can see it in one bound feels good? I'd count this comment as a "wrote publicly today" Duolingo tick if I were interested in that, even if short. But the real thing I'm tracking here which makes me think this comment is worth it is because I read this post of yours a few days ago and it felt off to me, something was bugging me, and I figure this is"observation:1" of sharing with another human something I think is mildly important.
That feels useful? I don't know upon waking up what the shape is but "observation:1" of me doing something—executing on some kind of behavior I want to lean toward—feels vague enough, imprecise, not even strongly precommited, that it could eventually become an endogenous thing about me that makes me impressive to others (but NOT to myself!) like the Scott Alexander thing.
Like, I'm not going to start explicitly tracking or giving any importance to the amount of Substack comments I write, but THIS specific observation of myself seems good, and maybe I'll observe myself doing this again and at some point I'll be known for writing a lot online, and have done a lot of really good work via that because my writing won't suffer from whatever the long term effects of Duolingoing yourself is.
Anyway I had a spare minute but writing meta like this makes me uncomfortable. I hope I sort of correctly explicited my feelings about this post.
one of the reasons i'm acc enthusiastic about this daily-writing thing is that you yourself have produced some absolute gems of thoughts, v outlier, and i think it has to be attributed at least in part to how prolifically you've been writing for the past ~10yrs (CoT, meta & all)
i'll write until i run out of things to write about. i'll write about how the research process is going, mathematics, philosophy, etc -- i can't imagine not endorsing that
I barely wrote online though (membrane/mind was worry my world was too internal), and the brief stint I had writing a lot of LW posts "because AI doom" did not work well for me I claim. Notably did not have the discipline nor desire to publish daily though, or be the kind of person who wrote daily, that would've been crazy.
Unsure what to make of two 100+ karma LW posts I wrote being thoughts that initially fit in ~2 minutes based on buying moth traps and watching a movie about a guy who liked being broody, respectively. Both were initially written in my docs and then I thought of LW as an afterthought. I don't think I'd've written them if I "had to publish something" that day, because then I might've not messed around having fun with ideas on my personal doc. Slack, I suppose... I don't know. This post again [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RryyWNmJNnLowbhfC/please-don-t-throw-your-mind-away] maybe related? Still confused.
Not even anxiety actually. You'll get used to writing and publishing 500 words a day no matter what. I can't tell why my intuition thinks this, but at least, if I tried doing this to me, I would predict I'd get somewhat zombified.
There's a sense in which you can be "accidentally valuable" by just describing what's going on with your life or whatever, this information might be useful to the models, etc. LLMs are often "accidentally valuable" despite the signal being lost in way more noise than Dec-2026 models will manage. But writing that's useful to *you*? I can't imagine exogenous motivation like "my past self precommited to writing daily so I gotta get this done before midnight, laptop on my knees awkwardly sat near the airport chairs notwithstanding; oh hey they're announcing my gate, quick gotta finish this paragraph and click publish, boy I've productive today!" will generate stuff you'll remember or care about in a year...
So it's not really anxiety it's more... having a system / duolingo-shaped-shiny-object / precommitment that *parasites* your time over potentially a few hours a week, newly dedicated to the parts of your writing that are slop. It'll feel normal, if a bit lacking in euphoria or curiosity-driven hypomania or memories-worth-having. Zombified, gradual, discreet, easy to attach to your identity in a way that encrusts it ever deeper, venom loosening your defenses.
I am not you. But this is what would happen to my future self if I did what you're doing here, fwiw
I'm genuinely unsure how explicit "what one is doing with one's time" should be. Like, if you know you're doing X in the next hour, and you make yourself feel guilty when don't don't do X, you're going to lose opportunity Y your curiosity/scattered-mind started peering at.
Like I dunno... I just do whatever I find interesting on the moment, and have vague goals, and have a sort of blurry to-do list in my mind that I write down in scraps of text on various documents, and then do whatever is expedient anyway, which often is not that. Funnily it's only when I'm sad that I viscerally crave a set to-do list so I can feel productive and work on stupidly straightforward tasks like "tell Claude to edit the website. No not like that. That's it. Ok next."
This is more or less intentional: I've tried getting into disciplining myself, when I was a kid, but that didn't work out well. The only time I was ever writing a regular amount of words every day (3K or so) was when I was having a blast beating my other month-selves (e.g. "Who can write more, November-me or December-me?") and a/ this didn't feel like discipline at all, it felt gleeful b/ I don't ever go back to that writing, and don't predict it'd be very valuable e.g. for training/fine-tuning a model to think like me.
Same for that period of time I wrote on LW a few times a month for log-odds-of-survival reasons.
I think there's a pretty big difference between public and private writing! For one thing, private writing isn't a precommitment by default, and you can unwrap your thought more naturally, coin words instantly, write in your shortform, "lydialese", not have to hide some specifics like you would here ("a friend said"), and I dunno, never in the past 10 years have I forced myself to write a certain amount of words daily (I would run writing quantity competitions between my month-selves, but I was foolish back then and unclear this led to anything good). Also nested footnotes are a nice plus for me that I can't really stick into writing, and especially not Substack.
I love it! Check-out "lifelogging as life extension" for a sub-subculture 😄
> On day 19 of daily blogging, I fine-tuned a language model on my 35 blogposts to date. It worked surprisingly well and was able to express viewpoints that I hold but had not yet written down.
Have you written about how you did this elsewhere (yet)? I would love to read about that!! I'm interested in trying something similar with my writing (99.5% unpublished).
You could do a scaling laws experiment by just training on different sized subsets of your blog posts and then seeing how much you like the resulting writing on the same prompts. Probably less confounded this way.
Probably should use a model that was released before you started blogging to do the experiment as well (in case it saw the blogs in pretraining).
ye i want to use a proper similarity metric rather than subjective preference, this now seems extremely doable
Only a young person would come up with a beautifully deranged idea like this one.
> I’ve resolved to write 500 words/day indefinitely
Writing or publishing?
publishing*!
How robust is this desire? What happens if you miss publishing for a day? A whole week?
I suspect those who have the most passion/endogenous-motivation for writing are also the kind who'd miss a whole week on a dime simply because something else might come up and they didn't feel like it. They're confident the desire will come back, or even nonplussed about the idea that they may never write again after "breaking their streak".
See e.g. "Eliezer Yudkowsky writing the Sequences near-daily but not daily, because who cares, the specifics aren't the point, getting the ideas out is" or "Scott Alexander doesn't write daily, but can't stop himself from writing overall, in a way that's remained stable over a decade".
I'm worried you'll fall into a "Duolingo attractor" by doing this, where what ends up mattering is the streak, and you start deriving pride and eventually anxiety from HAVING to have something by tonight, *just* so you can become the kind of person who may eventually tell herself she's the kind of human who's published a post a day for 365 days straight or whatever. This is an attractive badge but... really??
I imagine there are more harmless ways to do this. e.g. spreading your writing accross platforms so no one can see it in one bound feels good? I'd count this comment as a "wrote publicly today" Duolingo tick if I were interested in that, even if short. But the real thing I'm tracking here which makes me think this comment is worth it is because I read this post of yours a few days ago and it felt off to me, something was bugging me, and I figure this is"observation:1" of sharing with another human something I think is mildly important.
That feels useful? I don't know upon waking up what the shape is but "observation:1" of me doing something—executing on some kind of behavior I want to lean toward—feels vague enough, imprecise, not even strongly precommited, that it could eventually become an endogenous thing about me that makes me impressive to others (but NOT to myself!) like the Scott Alexander thing.
Like, I'm not going to start explicitly tracking or giving any importance to the amount of Substack comments I write, but THIS specific observation of myself seems good, and maybe I'll observe myself doing this again and at some point I'll be known for writing a lot online, and have done a lot of really good work via that because my writing won't suffer from whatever the long term effects of Duolingoing yourself is.
Anyway I had a spare minute but writing meta like this makes me uncomfortable. I hope I sort of correctly explicited my feelings about this post.
one of the reasons i'm acc enthusiastic about this daily-writing thing is that you yourself have produced some absolute gems of thoughts, v outlier, and i think it has to be attributed at least in part to how prolifically you've been writing for the past ~10yrs (CoT, meta & all)
i'll write until i run out of things to write about. i'll write about how the research process is going, mathematics, philosophy, etc -- i can't imagine not endorsing that
I barely wrote online though (membrane/mind was worry my world was too internal), and the brief stint I had writing a lot of LW posts "because AI doom" did not work well for me I claim. Notably did not have the discipline nor desire to publish daily though, or be the kind of person who wrote daily, that would've been crazy.
Unsure what to make of two 100+ karma LW posts I wrote being thoughts that initially fit in ~2 minutes based on buying moth traps and watching a movie about a guy who liked being broody, respectively. Both were initially written in my docs and then I thought of LW as an afterthought. I don't think I'd've written them if I "had to publish something" that day, because then I might've not messed around having fun with ideas on my personal doc. Slack, I suppose... I don't know. This post again [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RryyWNmJNnLowbhfC/please-don-t-throw-your-mind-away] maybe related? Still confused.
Not even anxiety actually. You'll get used to writing and publishing 500 words a day no matter what. I can't tell why my intuition thinks this, but at least, if I tried doing this to me, I would predict I'd get somewhat zombified.
There's a sense in which you can be "accidentally valuable" by just describing what's going on with your life or whatever, this information might be useful to the models, etc. LLMs are often "accidentally valuable" despite the signal being lost in way more noise than Dec-2026 models will manage. But writing that's useful to *you*? I can't imagine exogenous motivation like "my past self precommited to writing daily so I gotta get this done before midnight, laptop on my knees awkwardly sat near the airport chairs notwithstanding; oh hey they're announcing my gate, quick gotta finish this paragraph and click publish, boy I've productive today!" will generate stuff you'll remember or care about in a year...
So it's not really anxiety it's more... having a system / duolingo-shaped-shiny-object / precommitment that *parasites* your time over potentially a few hours a week, newly dedicated to the parts of your writing that are slop. It'll feel normal, if a bit lacking in euphoria or curiosity-driven hypomania or memories-worth-having. Zombified, gradual, discreet, easy to attach to your identity in a way that encrusts it ever deeper, venom loosening your defenses.
I am not you. But this is what would happen to my future self if I did what you're doing here, fwiw
my friend jason hausenloy has been writing ~500 words/day for 6 months, come rain or shine, and he's gotten so, so good
the airport-sprint-write was fun & productive today
i guess _what would i do instead of writing?_
the counterfactual isn't blankness; it's an alternative use of time. what is it
living life / reading things with the intention to write about them later has been enriching, makes me focus + connect dots more keenly
I'm genuinely unsure how explicit "what one is doing with one's time" should be. Like, if you know you're doing X in the next hour, and you make yourself feel guilty when don't don't do X, you're going to lose opportunity Y your curiosity/scattered-mind started peering at.
Like I dunno... I just do whatever I find interesting on the moment, and have vague goals, and have a sort of blurry to-do list in my mind that I write down in scraps of text on various documents, and then do whatever is expedient anyway, which often is not that. Funnily it's only when I'm sad that I viscerally crave a set to-do list so I can feel productive and work on stupidly straightforward tasks like "tell Claude to edit the website. No not like that. That's it. Ok next."
This is more or less intentional: I've tried getting into disciplining myself, when I was a kid, but that didn't work out well. The only time I was ever writing a regular amount of words every day (3K or so) was when I was having a blast beating my other month-selves (e.g. "Who can write more, November-me or December-me?") and a/ this didn't feel like discipline at all, it felt gleeful b/ I don't ever go back to that writing, and don't predict it'd be very valuable e.g. for training/fine-tuning a model to think like me.
Same for that period of time I wrote on LW a few times a month for log-odds-of-survival reasons.
I think there's a pretty big difference between public and private writing! For one thing, private writing isn't a precommitment by default, and you can unwrap your thought more naturally, coin words instantly, write in your shortform, "lydialese", not have to hide some specifics like you would here ("a friend said"), and I dunno, never in the past 10 years have I forced myself to write a certain amount of words daily (I would run writing quantity competitions between my month-selves, but I was foolish back then and unclear this led to anything good). Also nested footnotes are a nice plus for me that I can't really stick into writing, and especially not Substack.
I'm thinking here, am not certain, untangling myself so my apologies if I seem bellicose and brick-wall-ey.
Public or private? I don't see much on his website. But, interesting.