Dwarkesh Patel: commitment

Transcript context

…Actually, Nick is an interesting case because Works in Progress is a great magazine. And the people who write for Works in Progress, some of them I already knew as good bloggers, others I didn’t. So I don’t understand why they can write good magazine articles without being good bloggers. In terms of writing good blogs that we all know about, that could be because of the editing. That could be because they are not prolific. Or it could be- one thing that has always amazed me is there are so many good posters on Twitter. There were so many good posters on Livejournal before it got taken over by Russia. There were so many good people on Tumblr before it got taken over by woke. But only like 1% of these people who are good at short and medium form ever go to long form. I was on Livejournal myself for several years and people liked my blog, but it was just another Livejournal. No one paid that much attention to it. Then I transitioned to WordPress and all of a sudden I got orders of magnitude much more attention. “Oh, it’s a real blog now we can discuss it now it’s part of the conversation”. I do think courage has to be some part of the explanation. Just because there are so many people who are good at using these hidden away blogging things that never get anywhere. Although it can’t be that much of the explanation because I feel like now all of those people have gotten substacks and some of those substacks went somewhere, but most of them didn’t. On the point about “well, there’s people who can write short form, so why isn’t that translating? ” I will mention something that has actually radicalized me against Twitter as an information source is I’ll meet- and this has happened multiple times- I’ll meet somebody who seems to be an interesting poster, has funny, seemingly insightful posts on Twitter. I’ll meet them in person and they are just absolute idiots. It’s like they’ve got 240 characters of something that sounds insightful and it matches to somebody who maybe has a deep worldview, you might say, but they actually don’t have it. Whereas I’ve actually had the opposite feeling when I meet anonymous bloggers in real life where I’m like, “oh, there’s actually even more to you than I realized off your online persona”. You know Alvaro de Menard, the Fantastic Anachronism guy? I met up with him recently and he gives me, he made a hundred translations of his favorite Greek poet, Cavafy, and he gave me a copy. And it’s just this thing he’s been doing on his side. It’s just like translating Greek poetry he really liked. I don’t expect any anonymous posters on Twitter to be anytime soon handing me their translation of some Roman or Greek poet or something. Yeah, so on the car ride here, Daniel and I were talking about, in AI now the thing everyone is interested in is their ‘time horizon’. Where did this come from? 5 years ago you would not have thought, “oh, time horizon. AIs will be able to do a bunch of things that last one minute, but not that last two hours”. Is there a human equivalent to time horizon? And we couldn’t figure it out, but it almost seems like there are lots of people who have the time horizon to write a really, really good comment that gets to the heart of the issue. Or a really, really good Tumblr post which is like three paragraphs but somehow can’t make it hang together for a whole blog post. And I’m the same way. I can easily write a blog post, like a normal length ACX blog post, but if you ask me to write a novella or something that’s four times the length of the average ACX blog post, then it’s this giant mess of “re re re re” outline that just gets redone and redone and maybe eventually I make it work. I did somehow publish Unsong, but it’s a much less natural task. So maybe one of the skills that goes into blogging is this. But I mean, no, because people write books and they write journal articles and they write works in progress articles all the time. So I’m back to not understanding this.…

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