My Advice on (Internet) Writing

A lot of writing advice seems to amount to:

I start by having verbal intelligence that’s six standard deviations above the population mean. I find that this is really helpful! Also, here are some tips on spelling and how I cope with the never-ending adoration.

I think this leaves space for advice from people with less godlike levels of natural talent e.g. your friend dynomight.

The advice

Here it is: Make something you would actually like.

Actually, let me bold the important words: Make something you would actually like.

Why you?

Why make something you would like? To be clear, I’m not suggesting you write “for yourself”. I assume that your terminal goal is to make something other people like.

But try this experiment: Go write a few thousand words and give them to someone who loves you. Now, go through paragraph-by-paragraph and try to predict what was going through their head while reading. It’s impossible. I tell you, it cannot be done!

Personally, I think this is because nobody really understands anyone else. (I recently discovered that my mother secretly hates tomatoes.) If you try to make something that other people would like, rather than yourself, you’ll likely just end up with something no one likes.

The good news is that none of us are that unique. If you like it, then I guarantee you that lots of other will too. It’s a big internet.

Most decisions follow from this principle. Should your thing be long and breezy or short and to the point? Should you start with an attention-grabbing story? Should you put your main conclusion upfront? How formal should you be? Should you tell personal stories? I think the answer is: Do whatever you would like, if you were the reader.

Sometimes people ask me why this blog is so weird. The answer is simple: I like weird. I wish other blogs had more personality, and I can’t understand why everyone seems to put so much effort into being generic. Since I don’t understand weirdness-hating, I don’t think I have any chance of making weirdness-haters happy. If I tried to be non-weird, I think I’d be bad non-weird.

This is also why I blog rather than making videos or podcasts or whatever. I like blogs. I can’t stand videos, so I don’t think I’d be any good at making them. Everyone, please stop asking me to watch videos.

Why actually?

Now, why make something you would actually like? In short, because your brain is designed to lie to you. One way it lies is by telling you your stuff is amazing even when it isn’t. To be more precise, this often happens:

1. You write something.
2. In reality, if someone else had written it, you wouldn’t like it. So you don’t actually like it.
3. But you can’t see that, because your stupid traitorous brain is lying to you.
4. So you don’t make all the changes that your thing needs.
5. And so probably no one else likes it either. :(

Probably our brains lie to us for good reasons. Probably it’s good that we think we’re better looking than we are, because that makes us more confident and effectiveness beats accuracy, etc. But while it’s hard to improve your looks, it’s easy to improve your writing. At least, it would be if you could see it for what it is.

Your brain also lies to you by telling you your writing is clear. When you write, you take some complex network of ideas that lives in your brain and compile it into a linear sequence of words. Other people only see those words.

There’s no simple formula for avoiding either of these. But try to resist.

Be on your reader’s side

I don’t know how to explain this, but I think it’s very important: You should be your reader’s ally. Or, if you like, their consigliere.

As a simple example, why is the word “consigliere” up there a link? Well, not everyone knows what that means. But I don’t like having a link, because it sort of makes me look stupid, like I just learned that word last week. But I’m on your side, goddamnit.

As another example, many people wonder how confident their tone should be. I think your confidence should reflect whatever you actually believe. Lots of people pick a conclusion and dismiss all conflicting evidence. Obviously, that does not treat the reader as an ally. But at the same time, after you’ve given a fair view of the evidence, if you think there’s a clear answer, admit it. Your readers want to know! Compare these three styles:

1. “This is the Truth, only fools disagree.”
2. “Here’s what I think and why I think it.”
3. “Here’s a bunch of evidence, about which I supposedly have no opinion.”

Number 1 is dishonest. But arguably number 3 is also dishonest. Treat your reader like an ally, who wants all the information, including your opinion.

Ideas aren’t that valuable

I want to write a post called “measles”. The idea is to look into why it declined when it did, what risks measles vaccines might pose, and what would happen if people stopped getting vaccinated.

That’s the whole idea. I have nothing else and don’t know the answers. Yet I’m pretty sure this post would be good, just because when I tried to find answers, none of the scientifically credible sources treated me like an ally. Instead, they seemed to regard me as a complete idiot, who can’t be trusted with any information that might lead to the “wrong” conclusion.

If you want that idea, take it! That would make me happy, because I have hundreds of such ideas, and I won’t live long enough to write more than a tiny fraction of them. Almost all the value is in the execution.

Some people worry about running out of ideas. I swear this is impossible. The more you write, the easier ideas are to find.

One reason is that when you write, you learn stuff. This qualifies you to write about more things and reveals more of world’s fractal complexity. Also, experience makes it much easier to recognize ideas that would translate into good posts, but only makes it slightly easier to execute on those ideas. So the ideas pile up, at an ever-accelerating pace.

If you really run out of ideas, just take one of your old ones and do it again, better. It’s fine, I promise.

Getting feedback

The obvious antidote for your lying brain is feedback from other people. But this is tricky. For one thing, the people who love you enough to read your drafts may not be in your target audience. If they wouldn’t read it voluntarily, you probably don’t want to optimize too hard for them.

It’s also hard to get people to give negative feedback. I sometimes ask people to mark each paragraph according to a modified CRIBS system as either Confusing, Repetitive, Interesting, Boring or Shorten. I also like to ask, “If you had to cut 25%, what would you pick?”

People are better at finding problems than at giving solutions. If they didn’t understand you, how could they tell you what to change? It’s usually best if you propose a change, and then ask them if that fixes the problem.

Also, remember that people can only read something for the first time once. Also, do not explain your idea to people before they read. Make them go in blind.

(If you’re working with professional editors, none of this applies.)

Editing

You should probably edit, a lot. Some people with Godlike Talent don’t edit. But the rest of us should.

One way to edit is leave your writing alone for a week or two. This gives you back some of the perspective of a new reader, and makes it emotionally easier to delete stuff.

Here’s another exercise: Take your thing and print it out. Then, go through and circle the “good parts”. Then, delete everything else. If absolutely necessary, bring back other stuff to connect the good parts. But are you sure you need to do that?

Be funny, maybe

I think you fuckers all take yourselves too seriously.

There might be some Bourdieu-esque cultural capital thing with humor. Maybe making jokes while discussing serious ideas is a kind of countersignaling, like a billionaire wearing sneakers. Maybe it’s a way of saying, “Look at me, I can act casual and people still take me seriously! Clearly I am a big deal!” If you look at it that way, it seems kind of gross. But I wouldn’t worry about it, because Bourdieu-esque countersignaling makes everything seem gross. If you like humor, do humor.

My one insight is that humor needs to be “worth it”. Very short jokes are funny, even when they’re not very funny. For example, my use of “fuckers” up there wasn’t very funny. But it was funny (to me) because it’s just a single word. Except it’s crude, so maybe it wasn’t funny? Except, hey look, now I’m using it to illustrate a larger idea, so it wasn’t pointlessly crude. Thus, it was funny after all. Q.E.D.

Behold the Dynomight funniness formula:

     (Actual funniness) = (Baseline funniness) / (Cost of joke)

The “cost” measures how distracting the joke is. This includes the length, but also the topic. If you’re writing now in 2025, a joke about Donald Trump has to be much funnier than, say, a joke about, say, Lee Kuan Yew.

Increasing baseline funniness is hard. But decreasing “cost” is often easy. If in doubt, decrease the denominator.

In real life, very few people can tell jokes with punchlines. But lots of people can tell funny stories. I think that’s because in stories, the jokes come on top of something that’s independently interesting. If a joke with a punchline bombs, it’s very awkward. If a funny aside in a story fails, people might not even notice a joke was attempted. The same is all true for writing.

Who will read it?

Most people who write stuff hope that other people will read it. So how does that work nowadays? Discussing this feels déclassé, but I am your ally and I thought you’d want to know.

You might imagine some large group of people who are eagerly looking for more blogs: People who, if they see something good, will immediately check the archives and/or subscribe. I am like that. You might be like that. But such people are very rare. I know many bloggers who put aggressive subscribe buttons everywhere but, if pressed, admit they never subscribe to anything. This is less true for blogs devoted to money, politics, or culture war. But it’s extra-double true for generalist blogs.

If you’ve grown up with social media, you might imagine that your stuff will “go viral”. This too is rare, particularly if your post isn’t related to money, politics, culture war, or stupid bullshit. And even if something does blow up, people do not go on social media looking for long feeds to read.

I recently had a post that supposedly got 210k views on twitter. Of those twitter showed the reply with the link to my post to 9882 people (4.7%). Of those, 1655 (0.79%) clicked on the link. How many read the whole thing? One in ten? And how many of those subscribed? One in twenty? We’re now down to a number you can count on your fingers.

There are some places where people do go to find long things to read. When my posts are on Hacker News, this usually leads to several thousand views. But I think the median number who subscribe as a result is: Zero. Most people who find stuff via Hacker News like finding via Hacker News.

I’m not complaining, mind you. Theoretically, the readers of this blog could fill a small stadium. It’s nothing compared to popular writers, but it feels like an outrageous number to me. But I’ve been at this for more than five years, and I’ve written—gulp—186 posts. It wasn’t, like, easy.

Special offer: If you want me to subscribe to your blog, put the URL for the RSS feed in the comments to this post, and I will subscribe and read some possibly nonzero fraction of your posts. (Don’t be proud, if you want me to subscribe, I’m asking you to do it.)

Haters

Most people are pretty chill. They read stuff because they hope to get something out of it. If that doesn’t happen, they’ll stop reading and go on with their lives. But on any given day, some people will be in a bad mood and something you write will trigger something in them, and they will say you are dumb and bad.

You cannot let the haters get you down. It’s not just an issue of emotions. If the haters bother you, you may find yourself writing for them rather than for your allies. No!

For example, say you’ve decided that schools should stop serving lunch. (Why? I don’t know why.) When making your case, you may find yourself tempted to add little asides like, “To be clear, this doesn’t mean I hate kids. Children are the future!” My question is, who is that for? Is it for your ally, the reader who likes you and wants to know what you think? Or is it for yourself, to protect you from the haters?

This kind of “defensive” writing gets tiring very quickly. Your allies probably do not want or need very much of it, so keep it in check.

Also, I think defensiveness often just makes the problem worse. The slightly-contrarian friend is hated much more than the adversary. If you write “I think {environmentalism, feminism, abortion, Christianity} is bad”, people will mostly just think, “huh.” But if you write, “I am totally in favor of {environmentalism, feminism, abortion, Christianity}! I am one of the good people! I just have a couple very small concerns…”, people tend to think, “Heretic! Burn the witch!” Best to just leave your personal virtue out of it.

Much the same goes for other clarifications. Clear writing is next to godliness. But the optimal number of confused readers is not zero. If you try to chase down every possible misinterpretation, your writing will become very heavy and boring.

It’s probably human nature to be upset when people say mean things about you. We’re designed for small tribal bands. For better or worse, people who persist in internet writing tend to be exceptionally self-confident and/or thick-skinned.

If you’d like some help being more thick-skinned, remember that people who have negative reasons are much more likely to respond than people who have positive ones. (If you think something is perfect, what is there to say?)

Also, I strongly suggest you read comments for some posts you think are good. For example, here are some comments for Cold Takes’s legendary Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review. I think the comments are terrible, in both senses. They’re premised on the idea that because the author doesn’t use fancy statistical jargon, they must be statistically illiterate. But if the post tried to make those people happy, it would be worse.

Finally, there are whole communities devoted to sneering at other people. They just can’t stand the idea of people writing blogs and exploring weird ideas. This really bothers some writers. Personally, I wonder what they have going on in their lives that that’s how they’d spend their time.

Miscellanea

Should you use AI?

I think you should not. If you secretly use AI, you are not treating the reader as your ally. If you openly use AI, nobody will read it. The end.

Also, I think AI is currently still quite bad at writing compared to a skilled human. (Currently.) It’s is great at explaining well-understood facts. But for subjects that are “hard”, with sprawling / tangled / contradictory evidence, it still mostly just regurgitates the abstracts with a confident tone and minimal skepticism. You can do better.

That nagging feeling.

Often, I’m writing something and there will be one section that I can’t figure out how to write. I’ll move the paragraphs around, re-write it from scratch several times, and something always feels off. Eventually, I’ll realize that it isn’t a writing problem, it’s an ideas problem. What I need to do is change my conclusion, or re-organize the whole post.

It’s always tempting to ignore that feeling. Everything else is already in place. But if you do that, you’ll be throwing away one of the best parts of writing—how it helps you think.

Use the correct amount of formatting.

In the long-long ago, writing was paragraph after paragraph. At some point, we decided that was boring, and started adding more “formatting”, like section titles and lists and tables and figure captions, etc.

I think we’ve now reached the point where it’s common to use too much formatting. Some people go crazy and create writing that’s almost all formatting. This is disorienting for readers, and I think it often reflects writers being afraid to do the hard work of writing paragraphs that make sense.

If in doubt, I think it’s best to start with less formatting, to make sure your paragraphs are the “cake” and the formatting is just “icing”.

Explain why you already believe it.

Often, people want to make some argument, and they find themselves mired in endless amounts of new research. But hold on. If you’re trying to make some argument, then you already believe it, right? Why is that? Either:

1. You have good reasons; or
2. You don’t.

If it’s the former, you don’t need to do new research. Just mentally switch from trying to explain “why it is true” to explaining why you already believe it. Give your ally you true level of confidence. If it’s the latter, stop believing stuff without good reasons!

How to write.

I don’t think it’s possible to say much that’s useful about this. Giving advice about writing is like giving advice about how to hit a golf ball, or socialize at parties, or do rock climbing. You learn by doing.

Different people follow different processes. Some write slowly from beginning to end. Some write quick disorganized drafts and edit endlessly. Some make outlines, some don’t. Some write on paper, some with a computer. Some write in the morning, some write at night. Do whatever you want. Just do a lot of it.

Stop when it’s not getting better.

When you’re writing something, you’re too close to judge if it’s good or not. Don’t think about it. Just try to make it as good as possible. At some point, you’ll find you can’t improve it anymore. At that point, you are done.