Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Writing about my job: Internet Blogger , published by AppliedDivinityStudies on the AI Alignment Forum.
Response to Aaron Gertler's You should write about your job.
Background
I've been writing since September 1st, 2020, initially about voting and mechanism design, then about an increasingly varied assortment of topics ranging from the importance of economic growth within an EA framework, to the organization of research institutions and more generic career advice.
The blog has been moderately successful in terms of attracting attention from people I respect without causing any major scandals or other negative effects.
I occasionally have some interruptions, but mostly work on the blog full time.
Skills
Some skills I've developed include:
Self-management: I have no deadlines, no manager, and generally speaking, no accountability. If I don't choose to do something, it won't get done. The sub-skills include finding good ideas for posts, prioritizing them correctly, avoiding distractions, and actually executing and "shipping". Anecdotally, many of the people I talk to seem to be held back here, whether they're blogging, starting a company or just trying to take a hobby more seriously. If all I got out of the last 9 months was this skill, it all would have been worth it.
Patience: It's one thing to build intuitions for exponential growth, another to actually follow through and make investments on long time scales. Since we're systematically over-exposed to successful blog posts, your view of success is likely distorted, and it will take far longer than you think to become a good writer and to get noticed.
Writing: This sounds obvious, but it's worth noting that you don't already have to be a good writer. The critical thing is not just practice, but having feedback loops, mentorship and goals. Many bloggers have public contact info, and will happily read your draft.
Talking to people: I started blogging in part because I hated lockdown-era Zoom calls, and just wanted to avoid meetings and work alone in peace. Recently, as I've ramped up on more rigorous research projects, I've had to proactively reach out to more senior researchers, ask them for introductions and email authors for clarification or feedback. I was pretty bad at this initially, and would just publish without talking to a single person, even if I was a total amateur in a field with several readily-accessible experts. Since then, I've gotten a lot better at figuring out who to talk to, which questions to ask them, and then actually taking the time to do it.
These are all skills I've developed during the course of blogging, but you can also see them as (very soft) pre-requisites. If you're really terrible at self-management, blogging might not be a good career. The degree to which this is true depends on your views on growth mindset, your own learning ability, etc. I wrote here that several prominent bloggers were "losers" in some sense in their previous endeavors, and so you shouldn't let failure in some other domain discourage you.
Career Growth
Blogging can be an end-unto-itself, but can also be a useful and low-cost way to earn a formal role at a research or media organization. You quickly build up a portfolio of past writing projects, as well as an audience and potentially connections. Some potential next steps could include:
Research Scholars Program at FHI
Future Perfect Fellow at Vox
Junior Researcher at an EA org
I haven't applied for any of these myself, but have talked to people selecting for these roles, and have some sense that they believe blogging is a reasonable entry point. Of course, that depends a lot on what kind of blogging you end up doing, and how well it fits with the interests of those programs.
Path to Impact
Scott Alexander famously wrote "The less useful, and more controversial, a po...
view more