Scott Alexander: belief

Transcript context

…No, not even confidence. It’s closer to maybe what an aspiring actor feels when they go to an audition where it’s like, “I feel really embarrassed. But also I just really want to be a movie star”. So the way I got through this is I blogged for like 8 to 10 years on LiveJournal before- no, it was less than that. It’s more like five years on LiveJournal before ever starting a real blog. I posted on LessWrong for a year or two before getting my own blog. I got very positive feedback from all of that, and then eventually I took the plunge to start my own blog. But it’s ridiculous. What other career do you need seven years of positive feedback before you apply for your first position? I mean, you have the same thing. You’ve gotten rave reviews for all of your podcasts, and then you’re kind of trying to transfer to blogging with probably... First of all, you have a fan base. People are going to read your blog. That, I think is one thing, is people are just afraid no one will read it, which is probably true for most people’s first blog. And then there are enough people who like you that you’ll probably get mostly positive feedback, even if the first things you write aren’t that polished. So I think you and I both had that. A lot of people I know who got into blogging kind of had something like that. And I think that’s one way to get over the fear gap. I wonder if this sends the wrong message or raises expectations or raises concerns and anxieties. But one idea I’ve been shooting around, and I’d be curious about your take on this: I feel like this slow, compounding growth of a fan base is fake. If I notice some of the most successful things in our sphere that have happened; Leopold releases Situational Awareness. He hasn’t been building up a fan base over years. It’s just really good. And as you were mentioning a second ago, whenever you notice a really great new blogger, it’s not like it then takes them a year or two to build up a fan base. Nope, everybody, at least that they care about, is talking about it almost immediately. I mean, Situational Awareness is in a different tier almost. But things like that and even things that are an order of magnitude smaller than that will literally just get read by everybody who matters. And I mean literally everybody. And I expect this to happen with AI 2027 when it comes out. But Daniel, you’ve been building your reputation within this specific community, and I expect AI 2027 it's just really good. And I expect it’ll just blow up in a way that isn’t downstream of you having built up an audience over years.…

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