some reflections & intentions for this blog
A lot of writing on the internet can be bucketed into one of two categories: nerdposting and feelingsposting. Nerdposting is when you write about something you’re interested in, primarily in the third person, with the goal of putting forward an argument or an explanation (examples from this blog: like questions about the brain, revolutionary biology, or machine learning in science). Feelingsposting is when you share about your personal experiences, evoking a distinct mood in the reader, with the goal of conveying some insight about emotions or life (examples: real life, or give your friends a chance to abandon you). These are the two main categories of posts I’ve written, and I’ve also tried blending the two, like in the problem of other minds or how to think well. But I’ve always felt there’s some incompatibility between them, and this post is my attempt at talking about my experience of writing each, and what I would like to focus on for this blog.
Feelingsposting is a kind of public journalling. You use the written page to process and communicate lessons you’ve learned about how to live. I didn’t have an explicit intention to do this when I started this blog but that is how a lot of the essays have turned out. I’ve always been very personable in my writing, taking after writers like Ava Huang and Sasha Chapin. I’ve also been pretty vulnerable, when writing about e.g. my relationship with my brother, or giving and receiving rejection. I think the willingness to be candid is admirable and is clearly something at least a few people value (about 100k people have now visited this blog in aggregate).
And yet, for a while I’ve begun to feel uneasy about this kind of writing. Writing so much about my personal psychology, spending so much effort analyzing my own experiences for the sake of coming away with some broadly digestible insight, has had an impact on my life that I’m not quite happy with. Most of us already think about ourselves too much, and when you build a brand off writing about your own emotions you turn this tendency into overdrive. Every experience becomes potential fodder for a snappy insight in a self-help piece. And you also develop this pernicious, unconscious attitude that “if you didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen.” The second you have even a remotely profound experience, you feel a craving to post about it on the internet as a way of validating that it was real. Writing just becomes a vessel for the ego to confirm that I Exist And My Experiences Are Important.
I don’t think these traps are unique to this style of writing and I also don’t think they are unsolvable. This is an inevitable part of doing any kind of creative work: it’s easy to get too meta about things, too concerned about what your work says about you. The very best reflective writing—the kind that I aspire to—takes both the reader and the writer on a journey beyond their individual self. It unties your chest and reminds you that you’re alive. But that kind of self-transcendent writing is extremely challenging to do, and I think it has to come from a place of genuine self-transcendence. There are many things I still haven’t transcended, many moments in which I feel utterly unwise and unfit to be giving advice to strangers on the internet. So it feels very difficult to do that kind of personal writing on a regular schedule, when my own personality and my values are shifting in real time.
Nerdposting, though, is a totally different experience. In preparation for writing my post on Michael Levin’s work, for example, I spent about fifteen hours reading his papers and watching interviews, and I loved every minute of it. Every hour of reading about his work was buffeted by an earth-shattering epiphany, like learning the collective intelligence of bacterial colonies or immortal flatworms (??). Rather than getting more preoccupied with myself and my worries, I became transfixed by the beauty of the natural world, as often happens when I read science books and papers. The benefit of intentionally writing science and philosophy essays in addition to the personal essays is that it forces me to get into this expansive state more often. The things I learn from them also feel a whole lot more tangible, they lead to more interesting conversations with other people who are studying the same things.
There’s a kind of “local minimum” effect you can fall prey to when you write online. You start out with no followers, and everything you say is a desperate howl into the void. If you do this for long enough, something you say ends up getting traction, and soon you have an “audience”. And unless you come into this journey with an extremely clear idea of what exactly you want to share with the world (which I certainly didn’t, when I was starting), you will be extremely tempted to keep writing more about the thing that you originally went viral for. In fact, this is often framed as a “strategy” rather than a trap: people who teach others about blogging argue that you should “niche down” and stick with whatever works. But there’s very little discussion of the kind of person you become when you spend all your time thinking and writing about that one thing.
All of that is not to say that I’m going to abandon feelingsposting altogether. It’s that I want this blog to be a platform for engaging with intellectual questions as well as personal ones. Questions like: How does biology construct itself from small parts? If scaling LLMs is not the path to AGI, what will be? How does the brain learn and create complex models of the world so efficiently? How did evolution stumble upon step-changes like multicellularity, cognition, self-awareness, and creativity? How do we create a more loving, wise, and less polarized society? These are the kinds of questions that give me purpose, that make me feel alive. I’ve tried to capture all of that in the new tagline for this blog: “deepdives into open questions in science, philosophy, and how to be a human.” It always comes back to the fundamental questions, the questions that are about who we are fundamentally and what our place is in this universe.
I often hesitate to go full nerdmode here because that kind of writing usually gets less engagement, but you have to think about the longer term: what are the things you thin you’ll keep writing about in the next ten years?
I’ve been reading Sean Carroll’s book Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and I was struck by the way he talks about beauty in science:
The greatest “eurekas” in science combine both sensual aesthetics and conceptual insight. The physicist Victor Weisskopf (also a pianist) noted, “What is beautiful in science is the same thing that is beautiful in Beethoven. There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.” In short, the best science offers the same kind of experience as the best books or films do.
That is the kind of science (and philosophy) that I’m most excited about. That’s what comes to mind when I think about the phrase “bits of wonder” – little aspects of the world that, when you look at them more closely, open up into a giant window of mystery, and ultimately clarity and wisdom. Both the personal essays and the science essays have that same purpose: to help both me and you break through the fog of the world around us, and suddenly see the connection.
Here are some rabbitholes I’ve been going down the past month: