LW Distillation: How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor
Summary of a LessWrong post by John Wentworth
This is a summary of the forum post How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor by johnswentworth.
People trying to write about a new idea often:
go down a rabbit hole looking for supporting evidence, and
never actually finish writing the piece.
How do you avoid this trap?
There’s one trick, and it’s simple: stop trying to justify your beliefs. Don’t go looking for citations to back your claim. Instead, think about why you currently believe this thing, and try to accurately describe what led you to believe it.
Improving your truth-finding process is more valuable than being right.
If you’re right, others can learn from you.
If you’re wrong, others can debug your process.
This goes against what they teach in school, which is to make confident arguments for one side of an issue.
Explaining how much data you looked at before formulating your theory indicates to the reader if you’re overfitting.
You should still do fact-checking, but actually finishing is the priority.
In short, don’t try to persuade people of your idea’s value. Try to neutrally describe where the idea came from and why it looks valuable to you.