Why I don't write as much as I used to

By Brian Tomasik

First published: . Last nontrivial update: .

Summary

This piece collects reasons why, as of the 2020s decade, I don't publish nearly as many articles on my websites as I did in the past. Some of the reasons are due to changing circumstances in the effective-altruism movement, and some are due to changes in my own beliefs and preferences.

Contents

Introduction

Ever since I began school, I've been writing a lot. In elementary grades, I wrote several research papers on animals (such as Komodo dragons), as well as other topics such as Jimmy Carter's presidency. I also wrote several fiction stories during each grade of elementary school. In 8th grade, my English teacher required his students to keep a writing journal in which we had to practice writing large amounts of text. My 11th-grade English teacher assigned his class a 500-word essay each week.

I continued this habit of frequent writing beyond high school, by writing mini essays to myself. In 2006, I got a website and started writing articles for it. My pace of writing on my website increased in 2013-2014 as I was leaving my job at Microsoft in order to do independent research and writing full-time. Eventually, my main website, Essays on Reducing Suffering, accumulated several hundred articles.

By roughly 2019, I was writing fewer new articles than I had before. This was due to a combination of many different factors, which I'll describe in the remainder of this piece.

Growth and professionalization of effective altruism

In 2006, I was a random college student with a website of personal musings about utilitarian ethics. I met a few other utilitarians online, especially as the original Felicifia and Overcoming Bias communities emerged, but everything was still very informal, and many core topics were just being discussed (among ourselves, at least) for the first time. It was easy for people to make contributions because there was so little existing writing on these issues (that we knew about, at least).

In the 2010s, the utilitarian and effective-altruism (EA) communities became more organized, as GiveWell grew, 80,000 Hours was founded, and various other EA organizations developed. More people began working on EA full-time, and more total people joined the movement. In the later 2010s, the amount of money available in EA exploded thanks to Open Philanthropy, cryptocurrency investments, high-net-worth fundraising, and earning to give. Meanwhile, the people who had been in EA for a long time were now older and wiser.

In this more mature EA world, it became harder and harder to say anything original. The big-picture questions had been discussed many times, and new discussions were usually refinements/updates to older discussions or elaboration of details about a topic. Meanwhile, the amount of literature that needed to be read in order to be up to speed on a given topic kept increasing. This is similar to what happens in many academic and professional fields, where an increasing volume of knowledge forces specialization and makes it harder to find novel insights.

In many cases, maybe it was always hard to make many novel contributions to the literature, and in the old days, we just didn't know enough of that prior literature to be worried about this fact. For example, even before I began writing about utilitarianism in ~2005, there was already a mountain of academic discussion about relevant issues, such as activist strategy, the nature of consciousness, decision theory, and artificial-intelligence scenarios. Over time, I became increasingly aware of that existing literature, which made my own contributions seem less useful than I might have originally thought. (That said, I think I always realized that I was a bit of an amateur, and I saw my writing as partly an exercise in helping me learn. This is similar to why teachers assign research papers to students.)

One example where there was already a ton of prior literature was the topic of consciousness. In the earlier days (~2008 to ~2015), I was mainly trying to figure out the question for myself, using various articles, books, podcasts, and forum discussions to help. As I read more, I discovered an increasing number of authors who had already said the kinds of ideas that I had come up with. As of the late 2010s, the field of "illusionism" (which roughly describes my stance on consciousness) was fairly well established, which made my own writings on the topic feel less special. To be fair, some of these developments in the academic literature didn't happen until after my own writings. For example, the special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on illusionism was published in 2016, while many of my articles on consciousness were from 2014 or earlier. But I've also found some books and articles from the 1990s that say similar things.

It seems to me that when people conduct research that doesn't involve new experiments, most of the work involved is about finding the relevant information or ideas that already exist somewhere, or else reinventing them. It's less likely that you will personally come up with new discoveries (other than at a micro level, such as when analyzing some particular question faced by a particular organization at a particular point in time).

The growth and professionalization that applied to EA as a whole also applied to the subset of EA focused on reducing risks of astronomical future suffering (s-risks). Prior to ~2017, the amount of writing on s-risks was small, and I was able to read all of it. By 2018-2021, the volume of writing on these topics kept growing, and I was only able to keep up with a small fraction of it. Some of the writing on these topics is technical, and understanding the details would require me to invest a lot of time on learning the relevant background material. A similar trend happened to the fields of wild-animal suffering and invertebrate welfare in the late 2010s.

Of course, this is a good "problem" to have. :) Making these fields larger and more rigorous was the goal all along. But it does mean that I personally have less left to contribute.

I could try to specialize in some particular sub-topic within one of these fields, in order to be an expert in that domain and make contributions there. But the payoff from doing that doesn't seem extremely high, and maybe partly due to personal preference, I'm more inclined to take a high-level view and continue learning about lots of things (both within and outside of EA) rather than focusing too heavily on one thing. Of course, sometimes I might use this reasoning as an excuse to be lazy and learn about less important topics for fun.

Now that I already have a large body of online writings, the marginal value of additional writings is plausibly lower. If I were to write more, it would probably be about increasingly niche issues. But I think the main value of my writings is to get people interested via the big ideas, like wild-animal suffering, insect sentience, suffering-focused ethics, and the concept of s-risks. From that starting point, people can "graduate" to the more advanced research being done by organizations like the Center on Long-Term Risk and the Center for Reducing Suffering.

As the EA and suffering-reduction communities matured, they also had more money to spend on grants, as well as more people to connect with. I often felt that it was more useful to give some high-level thoughts on grantmaking and organization strategy than to write a new public-facing article for my website.

In the old days, many of my discussions about EA had been in public forums with other amateurs. This meant it was possible to consolidate insights from those discussions into public website articles. As EA became professionalized, more discussions became private, which made publishing insights from those discussions trickier.

Higher standards for my writing

In 2006, I was an unknown student who had written a few amateur ideas and put them online. I had almost no readers, so the quality of my writings didn't seem to matter that much; I was mainly just expressing myself and hoping it would influence a few people. By the later 2010s, I had a lot of readers, many of whom were themselves fairly educated on EA issues, so I felt more hesitant to write random unpolished thoughts, except in ways that were informal/autobiographical (like the essay you're reading now) or in pieces that I knew not many people would read (such as my article on bit rot from 2019). When writing articles about reducing suffering, I knew there would be numerous sharp-eyed critics who might notice arguments or literature that I had missed, which meant I felt reticent to publish something without doing lots of background research. Also, if there were already a lot of smart people aware of these issues, writing an amateurish article seemed less useful anyway.

As I mentioned in the previous section, to some extent this was always a problem. For example, my amateur writings on consciousness could have always been criticized extensively by expert neuroscientists or philosophers of mind. But since I didn't have many of those experts in my social circles, I got less feedback about my errors, and relative to the level of expertise of my readership, my articles might still have been useful contributions.

As I learned more about the topics I was writing about, I sometimes discovered mistakes in my previous views. Sometimes I corrected what I had written earlier, and sometimes I just wrote a warning at the top of the page to announce my ignorance, like I did with my page on investing and personal finance. As the number of articles on my websites increased, the work required to make these corrections increased. I also became more reluctant to write about new topics without a good understanding of them, lest I keep creating messes of inaccuracy that would need cleaning up later.

These days, I tend to feel like you can only write "state of the art" and relatively error-free articles if (1) you're an expert in a particular field or (2) you're writing about something you know personally, such as an organization you work with or your personal life (which are special cases of being an expert in a particular field). People who for their jobs have to write about lots of different topics often get things wrong—sometimes small details but sometimes crucial points. At least half of newspaper articles contain an error.

I feel like the standards for accuracy in comments are lower than in main articles, so I tend not to refrain from putting my ignorance on display in comments. However, as I mentioned, a lot of EA discussions occur in private these days, so they aren't visible to outsiders.

In addition to being more careful about accuracy, I also became more conscious of people's privacy. This meant that when I uploaded content that included other people (such as old videos, or documents mentioning information about other people), I spent more time asking people's permission and making sure that what I was publishing didn't contain too much personal detail. I ask people's permission before acknowledging them in an article or quoting non-public conversations, and I save a record of that permission to my notes for future reference.

Maybe I have fewer strong opinions

As I get older, I often feel like I have fewer new ideas to share. I think this is partly because I actually do have fewer original ideas. And part of the explanation is that I'm now more aware that the things I might write have probably already been written by someone else or might be wrong.

There's a saying that "young people think they know everything", and while that was never literally true for me by any means, I think a much weaker statement in that direction was true. When I was younger, I felt like I had important insights that needed to be expressed to a greater degree than I do now. These days, I've been exposed to enough intellectual viewpoints that any given one of them appears less special. Most new ideas feel like the same old kind of stuff I've been hearing for a long time. I still get temporarily obsessed with certain topics, but I'm less likely to see those topics as groundbreaking.

I like this Quora answer by Allen Walker, although it's a bit exaggerated:

Not all young people think they know everything. Though generally speaking, most young people do. That's due to the fact that the world to them is a very small place.

When you're young, the entire world is made up of everything in front of you. That's because as a youth, you can't see beyond the things you can't see. This may sound plainly obvious but people don't know what they don't know. And when you're young, if you don't know something, it just simply doesn't exist. That's because you never experience the real feeling of not knowing.

But as you grow older, you make more mistakes and you gain more experience. You begin to realize that the world isn't just made up of the things in front of you. That's when you being to ponder on the endless wonders of the world that you know nothing about. That's when you know that you don't know.

In the old days, I probably had more "Someone is wrong on the Internet" energy, i.e., when I saw an opinion I disagreed with, I felt motivated to write a rebuttal to explain what I saw as the correct view. Nowadays, I may be more likely to think something like this: "I intuitively disagree with that point of view, but I can see some arguments for it. Delving into the background literature to form a more solid opinion would take a long time, but I'm too busy with other things, so I'll just leave it." This illustrates a general problem online: the people who are more careful when forming opinions are a lot slower and produce a lot less content. Meanwhile, people who only skim an article and reply to it without much context can produce a lot of Tweets and blog posts. Thus, much of the content that exists is of this shallow variety.

From Aristotle's Rhetoric (Book II):

Young men [...] think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it[...].

Elderly Men[...] are sure about nothing and under-do everything. They 'think', but they never 'know'; and because of their hesitation they always add a 'possibly' or a 'perhaps', putting everything this way and nothing positively.

Of course, these are all overgeneralizations. There were plenty of times in the past when I felt unsure about things, and there are times now when I do have strong opinions. For example, my allegiance to suffering-focused ethics remains high because ethical views can't be factually incorrect; they're just opinions.

Other factors

I've always enjoyed organizing things, including information. Some of the motivation for writing pieces on my website was to organize the information I found about various topics. That's why many articles are more like collections of quotations from other sources than they are original research papers. I still think this task of organizing information is valuable and should be done, but I often feel like there's just too much information for me to keep up with. For example, I used to add links to new articles that I found about insect sentience to my "Do Bugs Feel Pain?" page. Eventually I concluded that there were just too many new (and old) articles on the topic, and I didn't have time to keep adding links to them.

I tend to become interested in more and more areas over time, as I get exposed to new things. This means the amount of time I have to spend on any given topic area is smaller, and it becomes infeasible to continue collecting information on each of those topics. I also realize that people can often just do a web search or consult Wikipedia to find a lot of relevant information, and I personally don't have to try to collect it.

I like uploading things that I wrote or videos that I made a long time ago to my website or to YouTube, because I personally enjoy revisiting that content and find it fun to share it. I hope to upload some more old content some day, but often I find myself too busy, and I feel overwhelmed by how much old content I have, most of which I'll never have time to sort through. I could also be creating lots of new personal content if I wanted to (such as new photos, videos, and written stories about my life); this adds to the feeling that it would be an impossible task to ever upload all of the sentimentally valuable data that I could upload.

Artificial intelligence (AI) advancements like GPT-3 and DALL-E reduce my enthusiasm for preserving my own creative writing or drawings, because it feels like there's an almost infinite supply of stories and drawings that an AI could create. As AI language models improve in accuracy, they'll probably also be able to produce some decent nonfiction writing. Already in 2022, GPT-3 can write a short, general essay on reducing wild-animal suffering at the level of quality we might expect from an average high-school student who was unfamiliar with EA's views on the topic. Even my jokes will be replaceable by AI-made jokes within a few years or decades. The prospect of cheap and effectively unlimited AI content in the not-so-distant future makes saving or generating my own human-made content feel less worthwhile.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, I began spending more time on some "practical" life areas that I had so far neglected to some degree. For example, I thought more carefully about where I want to live, and I began learning more about how to maintain a house. I learned more about best practices for using computers and backing up data. I had more doctor visits than in the past due to some ongoing health issues. In 2020 I began exploring romantic relationships again for the first time in many years.

I also seemed to have more communications to reply to than in the past.

In general, I often feel more busy now than I used to, and it's harder to find time to go off and research a topic to the depth that would be required to write about it, especially relative to my higher standards for quality. It always feels like there's too much else going on, and some of those other things seem more important than reading or writing about abstract intellectual issues.

It's also possible that I'm slightly lazier than in the past. For example, as a form of mental relaxation, I spend some time learning about current events or other topics that aren't the most relevant to reducing suffering. In the first few years of EA, I found it easier to consume a large volume of EA content because it was newer and more exciting. Now I need more breaks from the EA bubble. In any case, I would argue against any sharp distinction between "important" EA-relevant knowledge and "unimportant" knowledge about other parts of the world.

Acknowledgments

In 2015, one friend told me that it's very difficult to write anything new on the subject of consciousness, and on reflection, I came to agree with that assessment. Also in the mid-2010s, another friend pointed out to me how some ideas within EA, such as "torture vs dust specks", had already been discussed in the academic philosophy literature.