# notes --- - [[{5.3b} publishing online is querying the internet for community]] - publish what would have excited you six months ago - do not stress over making your writing accessible # Highlights --- > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > that you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development. You become more agentic. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > The simple things do not surprise you anymore. So you turn your attention to more complicated things. This is an amazing algorithm: do interesting things and magically arrive at a complex understanding of the world. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about. > >(There is a counteracting force in that humans tend to mimic the interests of those around them. But this is of little help for those of us for whom ”those around them” mostly means niche bloggers, contributors at Wikipedia, and Erasmus of Rotterdam.) > [!check]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. **Clear writing is clear thinking**. But to make the content accessible? To cut digressions and obscure references to reduce the number of things people need to understand to make sense of your argument? Really? > >That is against our purposes here. A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. > [!check]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > So what do you do? > >You ask yourself: **What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago** (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted. > [!check]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen. > >Those were tears of homecoming. > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > In other words, I have, to a degree, automated my obsessions now. I have summoned a milieu that pulls me where I want to go! > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > The social structure of the internet is shaped like a river. > [!action]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet > [!highlight]+ Sun May 26 2024 00:37:17 GMT-0400 > > **This is what online writing is at its limit—the summoning of a new culture.** #type/highlight #topic/writing #topic/culture