WHY DIDN'T I WRITE MORE


This started as an answer to ‘Why didn’t I Write More’, but by the time it finished, it started taking shape of ‘What I Write’, or the bar that I set to publish what I write.


I have been in interviews where I was asked why I don't have a blog where I write steadily. While I tried to explain how writing for someone else was vastly different from writing from a personal vantage point it was a fruitless exercise.
It's difficult to explain to people that proof of work, especially in heavily abstracted tasks such as writing, doesn’t need to be visible. It just needs to be demonstrable.

A brand, or a company, has its own life, and its own value statement. There, I can focus on the craft of writing much more than the philosophy, as I am working on someone else's vision. Writing is convergent, hence easier. Tempting as it was to develop some random blog, I didn't really have much to say. Everything I thought about, was work in progress. People don't understand work in progress. Anyway, for better or for worse:


"To demonstrate persuasively that you will not sacrifice principles for victory, you have to lose."

So here, I intend to clarify my stand.

I should say why I didn't publish more, but then writing without publishing is like keeping a ship in the harbor, so as good as not writing.

The most obvious reason is there is too much stuff written out there, which people ought to read before they read something I end up writing. This especially applies to good quality, specific non-fiction, because it is largely immutable with time. The only thing that qualifies me(or anyone else for that matter) to write non-fiction is a unique foray into hitherto uncharted territory or creating significantly different/better interpretations of established ideas, if you will, the proverbial paradigm shift.



Value and Purpose

I need my writing to be valuable enough. It should serve a purpose in some way:


In my extensive reading, most of the stuff people consume is useless. Be it the soulless comedy you laugh so much at but then immediately feel empty about, or the drab drivel that passes as non-fiction these days, a sad rearrangement of the same mediocre ideas from pop culture. One may argue that the things I am critical about are valuable, that everyone is entitled to do whatever they want, and that value is subjective. While I agree with the 'do whatever you want' part I totally disagree with the other arguments.

Value is objective and intrinsic. Not even success is enough to determine the quality of something. So I draw a line, stand by it, and leave the rest to Providence.



Ideas and Plants

Ideas are like plants.
Cutting a plant too soon might serve some purpose but the plant has a much higher potential of creating an impact if left alone to evolve and mature. Especially if it has the genotype of a tree. And the best thing is that this happens effortlessly, in the background, while you are living your routine life.

Allowing ideas to mull in the catalysts of time and experience allows them to become clearer and more formidable. More often, you realize their foolishness, which is even more desirable.

This is me being heavy on metaphors, but I cannot resist making a haiku.

The ship in the harbor rots,
But a tree
Uncut and attended, thrives..



It’s Difficult

If I am writing about a topic, and in due research, I come across someone who has already covered that topic comprehensively, I will prefer to share the link to their work rather than being a middleman and putting an undeserved set of ideas to my name.

Then, there’s the divergence you encounter while writing something. Ideas are like fissile materials. Put any energy into one and it splits into multiple offshoots. Sustain this process and you end up simultaneously working on 25 ideas and have 200 references you need to study to make reasonable justice to what you started with. Add to that the expanding length of the piece you are writing; the challenge of shrinking it, and making it precise, all the while ensuring that the language isn't what you understand, but what others should be able to.

In conclusion, Analytical Writing is extremely difficult, if you insist on doing it right.



Debugging and Refactoring

This part is a bit tricky.

Society is like a huge codebase of insurmountable complexity. Human progress, across all dimensions, is basically the world moving forward, each generation reading in the progress made till that point in time, refactoring it, debugging it wherever necessary, even deleting the functions that no longer make sense, and writing new functions as needed. [1]

When instead of debugging, people start trying to delete entire portions of the code, utopically intending to build a new codebase, clefts appear in the whole psyche. (Gall's law of Designing Systems)

Now, these clefts are very important. They force out the bugs in the original code, thus enabling us to fix them. But often, they themselves create so many new bugs in the social order, that their costs outweigh their benefits. For instance, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Salafi Fundamentalism and movements in response to that i.e Zionism, Hindu Nationalism, basically any kind of systematic extremism.

Imagine the horror if the codebase is exposed to people who don’t know anything about coding, and lack a balanced, logic driven mindset.
Social media has done precisely that. It has provided a free platform for everyone to influence everything whichever way they see fit, while heavily incentivising more and more radical opinions.

In current times, the freedom, and the entitlement to a voice has turned people into stupid brats. I am always starkly aware of the vantage point I am speaking from, and the effort and sacrifice on the part of so many people it took to reach here. So, I often go down the rabbit holes of reading and understanding why things are the way they are, rather than hastily putting out half-baked ideas that seem popular and intelligent at the moment, and generate mass traction easily.


There is a lot of stuff that is going through that process I call work in progress.



The Word Output Ratio

Lets design a metric: The ratio of the words one has published to the words they have read. This applies to non domain specific, abstract stuff.


Let's call it Word Output Ratio.

My WOR should approach zero during my lifetime. This self-affirmation allows me to keep my opinions in perspective.

Most writing out there has a very high Word Output Ratio. Even when people have a decent WOR, they are muddied by biases and they write with a particular agenda in mind. They draw arguments from pre-established conclusions rather than making inferences from the arguments and facts at hand.

Perhaps no one can be rid of biases.[2] Even attempting that is foolish. But read randomly and deeply enough, and you will slowly filter away the more dangerous kinds. All zealots have only read deeply about their side of the story. That is the only way you can be sweepingly for or against something.[3]

Due to the internet, it has become very easy to appear to have a low WOR. There are a lot of ideas tossed around by people without really understanding them. But sooner or later, the chinks and lack of depth shows, especially when people are fishing for more followers and have other populist machinations to pursue instead of robust inquiry.



Impact and Reception

Certain quotes have made a deep impact on my mind:

"I was always ready to share, but before external success, nobody cared to listen."
- Naval Ravikant
"If you want to be a philosopher-king, start by being a king."
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

To add to it, another quote, by Herodotus,

"Knowledge gives weight, but achievements give luster. And a lot more people see than weigh.

Philosophy and Action is like the chicken and egg problem. Some people flout ideas as inconsequential, philosophy and thinking to be a waste of time. But philosophy is an integral part of progress, especially when you have to ascertain the long-term consequences of your actions.

That makes philosophy inseparable from action.

Having said that, I have have an inkling that philosophy can be inherently valuable even if who it originates from is not a part of the action. After all, civilization is one long relay race from one generation to the next, with one random person developing the theory and some other person, separated by time, executing it. Idea and Execution exist in a dynamic feedback loop between themselves.

There is a case for the writing itself potentially being a step to the success that qualifies it. I started this website to cover that possibility. So what I currently write about constitutes the a-priori stuff. Stuff elaborating my inclinations and intentions, rather than any discourse or advice.

Stuff that will create a path to help achieve the things I want to.



Footnotes:

[1] Apologies to coders for the crude appropriation of terms, and to non-coders for using obscure terminology. But I am yet to find a better metaphor for this. Anyway, these terms a great addition to your worldview.

[2] A great resource to read exhaustively about biases is the Less Wrong blog. It is huge, and diverges further in references and draws from multiple technical fields, including Mathematics, Linguistics and Philosophy.

[3] Bias is an interesting concept. Its destructive when systematic, but beneficial and desired when specific. In totalitarian, top-down environments, it is cancerous, but in democratic, free-market conditions, it works phenomenally. For instance, a Startup Founder can be safely allowed to be extremely biased about the efficacy of his idea as the world as a whole is abstracted from it. A selective bias is great in a Startup Founder, a scientist or a writer/storyteller but terrible in say, a Journalist or a Politician/Policy Maker. This footnote doesn't do a nuanced justice to the idea, so I may end up writing a separate essay.