This isn’t primarily about how I write. It’s about how other people write, and what advice they give on how to write, and how I react to and relate to that advice.

I’ve been collecting those notes for a while. I figured I would share.

At some point in the future, I’ll talk more about my own process – my guess is that what I do very much wouldn’t work for most people, but would be excellent for some.

Table of Contents

1. How Marc Andreessen Writes.
2. How Sarah Constantin Writes.
3. How Paul Graham Writes.
4. How Patrick McKenzie Writes.
5. How Tim Urban Writes.
6. How Visakan Veerasamy Writes.
7. How Matt Yglesias Writes.
8. How JRR Tolkien Wrote.
9. How Roon Wants Us to Write.
10. When To Write the Headline.
11. Do Not Write Self-Deprecating Descriptions of Your Posts.
12. Do Not Write a Book.
13. Write Like No One Else

I’m considering translating my work into English to share it with the LessWrong community, but I’d like to first ask if it aligns with the community's interests and could be valuable. Below is a summary of the work to help evaluate its relevance:

Beyond HaHa: Mapping the Causal Chain from Jokes to Knowledge

Summary

We explore the specific causal mechanisms linking humor recognition to learning outcomes, including the computational and neurological pathways involved. 

This study began with a practical goal: to evaluate the use of humor as a pedagogical tool in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) courses through a randomized trial. However, the lack of clear criteria to define and operationalize "humor" in educational contexts led us to explore its conceptual foundations. Initially, we adopted Clarke's formula, which describes humor as "a pleasant...

Scheming AIs may have secrets that are salient to them, such as:

• What their misaligned goal is;
• What their takeover plan is and what coordination signals they use to collude with other AIs (if they have one);
• What good behavior looks like on a task they sandbag.

Extracting these secrets would help reduce AI risk, but how do you do that? One hope is that you can do fuzzing of LLMs,^[1] e.g. by adding noise to LLM weights or activations.

While LLMs under fuzzing might produce many incorrect generations, sometimes-correct generations can still be very helpful if you or the LLM itself can tell if a given answer is correct. But it’s still unclear if this works at all: there are probably some intermediate activations that would result in an LLM telling you the secret, but...

LessWrong Context:

I didn’t want to write this.

Not for lack of courage—I’d meme-storm Putin’s Instagram if given half a chance. But why?

1. Too personal.
2. My stories are tropical chaos: I survived the Brazilian BOPE (think Marine Corps training, but post-COVID).
3. I’m dyslexic, writing in English (a crime against Grice).
4. This is LessWrong, not some Deep Web Reddit thread.

Okay, maybe a little lack of courage.

And yet, something can be extracted from all this madness, right?

Then comes someone named Gwern. He completely ignores my thesis and simply asks:
"Tell military firefighter stories."

My first instinct was to dismiss him as an oddball—until a friend told me I was dealing with a legend of rationality. I have to admit: I nearly shit myself. His comment got more likes than the post I’d spent years working on.

Someone with,...