Writing

Some personal facts and reflections on opaque skills

The thing I’m best known for is blogging. I would have found that surprising for most of my life. Because I never thought of writing as being my main thing.

I never enjoyed English very much when I was growing up. It was better than math (on account of math being of the devil), but throughout middle school I marginally preferred science! Throughout much of my life I tried to write fiction. It always went disastrously, horrendously, terribly—so much so that rumor has it that sometimes the paper would burst into flame and Beetlejuice would appear in a cloud of bats, gnats, and sulphur, making wisecracks and demanding my soul.

I tried writing fiction again last year; it was as much of a dumpsterfire as ever. Somehow, it seems I am simply constitutionally incapable of writing long pieces of fiction. Perhaps this is why I could never argue in defense of the self-sampling assumption…

What was my main thing? Well, basically since I was in 7th grade, my main thing has been arguing. I thought a lot about ideas. I even vaguely railed against Trotsky in my Bar Mitzvah speech! In 8th grade I had a bad economics blog, containing paragraphs like the following:

It is a common belief that the minimum wage is necessary because workers are exploited by greedy businessmen who only care about themselves and will pay their workers as little as possible. This core assumption of those who support the minimum wage is totally false. To believe this one has to fail to understand how prices are determined. Suppose there are two businessmen, A and B. Each is a greedy sociopath who only cares about themselves and would do whatever it takes to rake in another million dollars. In the absence of the minimum wage, one might expect them to each pay their workers one cent an hour. However, if person A payed their workers one cent an hour person B would pay their workers two cents an hour, and take all of the people who had previously worked for person A. Thus person A would have to pay their workers three cents an hour. The cycle continues until the workers are being payed the amount that they are really worth.

(Someone should tell this cocksure guttersnipe that he should be a bit less confident when he is disastrously wrong and that the word “paid” does not have a y in it).

I spent lots of time arguing with random people in defense of libertarianism, for instance. I was sufficiently motivated by my love of libertarian economics that despite my general hatred of math, I tried working through my Dad’s college economics book and learned all sorts of things like about how Edgeworth boxes work.

I never kept a diary nor wrote regularly for any other venue. When I briefly joined a journalism class in twelfth grade, I hated it and left very quickly.

I did write unusually quickly. I would always finish my school writing assignments ~10 times faster than everyone else did. Often people would take the entire period to do a writing assignment that I’d finish in about 10 minutes. I have a vague memory of in fourth grade finishing a writing assignment quickly enough that my teacher thought I obviously hadn’t done it—I then sat contritely staring at the paper for like 20 more minutes until it seemed like enough time had passed that it was plausible that I had done it.

(Me when I was younger).

I did do a lot of writing for high school debate. Probably over the course of the typical year, I’d do a few thousand pages worth of writing for high school debate. I spent hours a day prepping for high school debate rounds, writing out lengthy, pre-prepared responses to potential opposing arguments.

Up until I did high school debate, I never really thought I was good at any objective task. I was always outshined by my brother!

(My brother outshining me at stickfighting).

(And at being still in photos).

(When we were little his main hobby was building cool stuff like this and mine was pretending to be a superhero!)

I was alright at Magic: The Gathering, but never incredible. My best ever showing was going 9-6 at a tournament after a 6-2 start (only those who start 6-2 or better stay for the 8 rounds on day 2).

Certainly I would never have thought of writing as my thing. Arguing, sure. But writing? Never!

In hindsight, this is a pretty surprising state of affairs.

Writing is among the things I’m best at. Probably my career will mostly involve writing. To use gen-Z slang, if the AIs manage to write better than people, I’ll be “cooked.” People often ask me about how I write so much. And yet for almost my entire life, I would never have thought of writing as being my main thing—or even one of my top ten things. I would have basically regarded it like all the other school subjects.

In other words, I think I am inarguably much better at writing than at, say, science or math or history. It’s not even close. And yet this fact was opaque to me for almost my entire life. So what’s going on?

I think a few things are at work. First of all, I’ve improved a lot at writing since I began writing regularly. As I’ve mentioned before, my old articles weren’t very good. While I always wrote quickly, I didn’t always write well.

But second, I don’t really like writing intrinsically. I don’t find writing for classes particularly enjoyable. I only like writing because I feel like I have things to say. Writing is the least costly vehicle by which I deliver my thoughts. I like arguing just as much! I find writing quite tedious unless it’s on some interesting subject. I have no intrinsic love of the written word.

For this reason, I suspect that a lot more people could be writers. So long as you write quickly, you can probably become an okay blogger. Over the course of writing thousands of articles, you’ll probably become a pretty good writer even if you were never previously that good.

Skills are often opaque to people! I have a friend who is a computer science major with basically no background in philosophy. But she’s randomly really, really naturally good at philosophy. I don’t think that would ever have been obvious to her if she hadn’t gotten involved in effective altruism, where philosophy conversations tend to come up.

I watched a YouTube video recently from someone who got a Ph.D in physics after being bad at math for her entire life. She hadn’t been a STEM person in school. But it turned out that lurking behind her initial reluctance to learn math had been impressive innate math skill.

Now, not everyone is this way. Scott Alexander has apparently always been amazing at writing. Aron Wall was doing calculus in seventh grade. I have a lot of friends who always, throughout all their schooling, felt much smarter than everyone else—and that’s because they were. But many people who could do some activity extremely well are probably unaware of this fact.

I also think this should be a cause for some humility. None of my writing teachers before high school would have been particularly impressed with my writing. None of them would have had any inkling that I’d eventually become a writer.

Lastly, I think that thinking deeply about a subject is generally a more valuable gauge of one’s prowess than domain specific skills. Those who think about deep questions are probably quite a bit more likely to end up as writers than even those who write well. I’d imagine those who stay up late at night thinking about deep physics questions are even more likely to be physicists than those who excel in high school physics. If you want to excel in some domain, think hard about that domain. Make sure you deeply understand the puzzles—make it the kind of thing you think about when you are taking showers.

But ultimately, I think the most important advice is: if you want to improve at some task, do it a lot. Do ten times as much. Even if you don’t start out good at it, if you’re thoughtful and reflective and do the task a lot, you are likely to improve very dramatically. In addition, even if you haven’t had much success writing in the past, if you start doing it regularly, it might go swimmingly.

(Me in ninth grade after meeting Richard Epstein (my dad is the other person in the photo—he also has a blog that he hasn’t updated in many years but is interesting nonetheless!) I remember he said that government should only do Pareto improvements, which struck me as obviously wrong because nothing is ever a Pareto improvement—every action changes the world and leaves some people worse off. Never ask a man his salary, a woman her weight, or Richard Epstein the conditions under which government can perform actions that are Kaldor Hicks improvements).