×
all 37 comments
sorted by:
best

[–]Unlikely-Platform-47 22 points23 points  (10 children)

I do think there's a slight correlation between running out of ideas and using a book as the last way to communicate your big idea. Hence, not surprising if they don't go back to blogging after.

'Sadly, Porn' is all of TLP's ideas in one, but it does seem like it tore him apart to make it. He even says in it that he basically finished it by locking himself away in Covid and writing for one week straight. Which possibly explains some of the style and organisation.

And as much as I like that book ... no one has really read it. Which does lead me to a lot of the implications you draw here.

[–]casualsubversive 22 points23 points  (3 children)

And as much as I like that book ... no one has really read it.

I feel like having any description of what the book contained on it's Amazon listing might have helped with that. Even the image of the back cover just has lorem ipsum placeholder text on it.

[–]Unlikely-Platform-47 9 points10 points  (2 children)

An easter egg is that it actually isnt regular lorem ipsum placeholder

[–]casualsubversive 11 points12 points  (1 child)

That's cute, I guess, but hardly illuminating. It seems rather self defeating. Random discovery of his book isn't impossible—I've read two of the other books listed in "Customers who viewed this item also viewed"—but I'd never have given this book a second thought if I hadn't specifically searched for it based on your comment. If it tore him apart to write, doesn't he want anyone to read it?

[–]Unlikely-Platform-47 4 points5 points  (0 children)

haha i'm not saying it's anything other than an interesting detail.

and yeah he also says in the book he intentionally wrote it in a way that wouldnt be for 99% of people. which is odd

maybe inspired by Lacan's intentional obfuscation

[–]greyenlightenment 5 points6 points  (5 children)

it does not need to be read if it's influential, which it clearly was given that people talk about it still. it's better to have a book that has the attention of important people than read by many people and forgotten, unless you're talking money

[–]gwern 7 points8 points  (3 children)

it's influential, which it clearly was given that people talk about it still

That doesn't follow, especially when the 'talk' is often along the lines of 'it made no sense to me' or 'it was dumb'. (And if you have to throw out 99% of the readers right from the start, how influential is that residue really going to be?)

[–]greyenlightenment 3 points4 points  (1 child)

given that the vast majority of books go unnoticed, if people are complaining that the book is hard to understand or even bad, this is good. Look at Infinite Jest...that is part of the mystique. Unless you are writing a textbook, in which confusion is generally bad.

[–]gwern 5 points6 points  (0 children)

given that the vast majority of books go unnoticed

The vast majority of books do not have a large blog audience which has been waiting for the summa for half a decade. His book was noticed. And he blew it - how many of the readers of Sadly, Porn do you think are going to be eager to check out his next thing...?

[–]Unlikely-Platform-47 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I do think even the most frustrated 'what even is this thing' responses to the book would still admit it has some insights buried in there, no?

maybe im just not in the same spaces, but thats been my experience

[–]Unlikely-Platform-47 4 points5 points  (0 children)

thats true

but his blog had way more attention. plus what he was making was sort of self-help content, so more readers means more people 'helped'

[–]greyenlightenment 12 points13 points  (11 children)

And one can see the impact looking at his archives⁠. You do not need advanced statistics to see a change ~2016–2017 in the posting rate. (And this is neglecting that the later WBW posts are often short; counting words & illustrations would probably show a larger loss.)

I think he simply got bored with it. His output decreased as he had run out of things to say and making new posts was too much work, and he made a lot of money too probably. He still has a huge mailing list , which can be monetized forever. Tyler Cowen for example publishes books but this has not stopped him from updating his blog constantly. Same for Robin Hanson.

Another case study is Julia Galef. Output died at around the same time as her book.

I agree that books are probably a net-negative for the author, if the author is already successful and profitable with other stuff. the book does not add to anything.

[–]gwern 13 points14 points  (4 children)

I think he simply got bored with it. His output decreased as he had run out of things to say and making new posts was too much work

I don't buy that. He ran out of material at coincidentally the same instant as he started writing a post which spiraled wildly out of control? And he hasn't been able to harvest any new material from all those years of silence or find new interests which he postponed for the book but now has the time to pursue? He has nothing to say about what Elon Musk has been up to since 2015? About AI since then? VR? Nothing? As opposed to the obvious burnout he himself talks about?

Tyler Cowen for example publishes books but this has not stopped him from updating his blog constantly.

Cowen is a freak of nature. I have no idea how he can write & blog while traveling 24/7 and thus presumably doing a large fraction of all this in airports or on planes. If you are the second coming of Tyler Cowen, you know it already and need not care about any generalizations by anyone about writing or research.

Same for Robin Hanson.

But Hanson doesn't really write books. In his entire 30-year-ish academic career (he's 65yo), he published one book 8 years ago (based explicitly on the constant blog updates), and co-authored one book with another guy (also based mostly on the constant blog updates) whose contribution was presumably to do most of the actual book writing after Hanson provided the references/ideas in all those blog posts. (And as far as I know, he's not working a book now either: he chose to do Grabby Aliens as a website/multimedia mix, and his comments on 'the sacred' or 'global drift', his two major themes as he avoids AI, are still very far from even a paper, much less a book.) You can't call 1 book in 30+ years a very central, compelling example of someone who 'writes books', to be mentioned in the same breath as Tyler Cowen with like 15+ books in <30 years.

And I think the first case was highly justifiable by my criteria: clearly no one else was ever going to write anything like Hanson's Age of Em, in part because no one thinks it's remotely plausible or is remotely as enthusiastic about imagining em hell as Hanson is; and the paradigm is even less convincing when scattered across penny-packet blog posts which are generally totally unorganized and impossible to read in a logical sequence (and moving to Substack has made that still worse). You can argue that he shouldn't believe it as strongly as he does, or that perhaps the genre of an academic nonfiction book is wrong and it'd make more sense to try to recast it as a Blindsight-style hard SF novel - but given that he does believe it as important as he does and it is as idiosyncratic as it is and as comprehensive & large a topic as it is, then a book is the right thing to do.

[–]mouseman1011 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I think part of Cowen’s advantage is that he doesn’t “reject too soon” or “discriminate too severely,” to quote Friedrich Schiller. He posts constantly, but it’s often short stuff. He’s also in his 60s and thus has decades of mental material to draw from. And he gets things wrong sometimes!

Also, he’s a synergist. I attended a talk of his on AI at UNC this month. Much of what he said I’d already heard or read on CWT/MR, and his notes were written on an airplane barf bag. He even added that he’s been giving a lot of talks on AI recently, with updates as the tech improves.

Insisting that your written output be both exhaustive and perfect is a recipe for burnout and/or irregular publishing.

[–]erwgv3g34 1 point2 points  (2 children)

What about Bryan Caplan? On top of his regular books and his nonfiction comic book collaborations, he has published six books so far that are nothing more than collections of his blog posts (plus sometimes an original essay).

I like the idea; I wish more bloggers with years of output would consolidate their work like that instead of leaving newcomers to hunt down their articles one by one, often across multiple blogs and usernames.

In your case it would be a bit harder, since you don't have as much of a theme as some of these other authors, but I don't see why you couldn't make a "best of" collection of essays with a pretentious title (or just follow the practice of naming the collection after one of the essays; see George Orwell's bibliography).

[–]gwern 3 points4 points  (1 child)

he has published six books so far that are nothing more than collections of his blog posts (plus sometimes an original essay).

Really, it's six now? Wow. I guess I just tune them out because if you had asked me, I would've said, he had 3 - The Case against Education, the parenting one, and the new open borders comic. I wonder how successful the others are.

[–]ScottAlexander 9 points10 points  (5 children)

What is Tim doing these days?

He still has a huge mailing list , which can be monetized forever.

I also have a huge mailing list and would have no idea how to monetize it (other than by blogging) without making everyone realize I've turned evil and block me immediately. I assume there are ways, but being a blogger doesn't necessarily teach you them.

[–]greyenlightenment 1 point2 points  (4 children)

A start-up has a productivity app. They need to get the word out, so they pay you to mention it in the newsletter, and having it tried it yourself, you agree, and it would be a good fit for readers too. It's easy to integrate monetization without it being annoying.

[–]ScottAlexander 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That only works if you're also blogging. I got the impression OP meant you didn't have to blog because you could just monetize the newsletter.

[–]SirFormalTrifle 3 points4 points  (2 children)

I read Scott's stuff sometimes, but he advertised BeeTasker on his blog for years and I couldn't tell you much about it. Maybe it donated money to Hitler whenever you didn't complete tasks, or maybe it put you in an electroshock chamber when you didn't meet your goals, or maybe that was a Stephen King short story. I don't know.

I think he also advertised soylent brownies for a while, and I also never tried those.

Scott has one of my email addresses, and I think his appraisal of its value is accurate.

[–]greyenlightenment 1 point2 points  (0 children)

lol oh yeah I remember those ads. The Meal Squares and beeminder. I think Jane street too.

[–]Uncaffeinated 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I tried Meal Squares once due to SSC.

[–]dr_arielzj 6 points7 points  (0 children)

As an imminently-to-be-published author with a Big 5 publisher, I very much endorse Gwern's post. I feel many things about writing my particular book were exceptional, and I certainly have no second book in me. Rather than wanting to be an author, I wanted to write this specific book. I already knew exactly what I wanted to get out, and the specific shape of the text came together quickly. I have no popularity as a blogger to diminish by writing a book, etc. etc. Unless I do the equivalent of winning the lottery, the sales will never justify the workload (~8000 hours). I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless they have, as Gwern put it, the equivalent of a chestburster that they just need to get out.

[–]MoNastri 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Around roughly the same time as WBW, there was another popular Internet blogger and writer, who gave well-received talks; he too decided to write a book to sum it all up and popularize his views, and went silent.

I'm mildly certain I know who this is, since I've been wondering about his silence since roughly the same time as WBW as well. I still reference and reshare a handful of his blog posts quite often, and I enjoyed his book too.

[–]themedstudentwho 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Who is this? (Can DM if saying so publicly is rude)

[–]lambrisse 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Who would that be? Gwern does not say anything negative about this blogger (except that he disappeared) and now I really want to discover a new blog.

[–]zeroinputagriculture 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Is it a case that the dose is the poison? Blogging regularly has a certain rhythm and scale to it, while books are a different beast due to the expectations of word count (usually in the 50-100 thousand word range for novels at least, and approximately the same for non fiction books).

Personally I think this is where modern publishing (especially self publishing) can break out of the mould. I wrote a 30 thousand word non fiction book (Taming the Apocalypse) in parallel with continuing my weekly postings at Zero Input Agriculture. The whole project took me about 4 months to complete. I did two light editing passes and rearranged some of the original chapters, but didnt rewrite anything substantially. The central concept was compact. The research was fun. I had enough energy left over to narrate it as an audiobook. None of this would have been true if I felt like I had to expand it to 100 thousand words in order to be a "real" book.

Best of all, I decided to release the audiobook version to my paid substack subscribers, as a reward for supporting me.

I know I hate doing book promotion (I learnt this from my novel writing experience a few years earlier) so I decided not to promote Taming the Apocalypse beyond appearing on relevant podcasts to have a stimulating chat with people I admire while mentioning the book tangentially. This attitude is in harmony with me not expecting the book to rocket up the best seller charts in any predictable fashion. But I am happy to be patient, keep blogging, keep podcasting, keep putting out a small book now and then when I have an idea I feel passionate enough about. I don't think I will ever write anything over 40 thousand words ever again. There is simply no need or demand for it.

[–]kobpnyh 0 points1 point  (3 children)

How much work does it really take to create an epub anthology? Something akin to the Library of Scott Alexandria, not the LW anthologies. Doesn't have to be much edited, just collecting the best posts in a more convenient format

[–]gwern 2 points3 points  (2 children)

See the Habyrka link. Given how much work it takes to create nice web pages, I can entirely believe that a good EPUB is not a matter of changing a --to=epub option in Pandoc. (A better argument is that one could/should either settle for a crummy EPUB, or get someone else to do it.)

[–]Evan_ThEvan Þ 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I've read a couple self-published books which are essentially crummy EPUB's.

One of them was really good; it's a shame the author didn't market it better, but if crumminess and really bad search optimization was what it took for him to get it published, I'm still glad he did.

[–]myunfortunatesoul 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing the link, it does seem interesting. I picked it up.

[–]BletchTheWalrus 0 points1 point  (4 children)

One counter argument is that, while your book may have a very low probability of still being read or cited hundreds of years from now, your blog has absolutely no chance of lasting much beyond your lifetime.

[–]NotUnusualYet 2 points3 points  (3 children)

I don’t think that’s true? Blogs are not dissimilar from newspaper columns or old published essays like the Federalist Papers. They can still be important historically at least.

[–]BletchTheWalrus 5 points6 points  (2 children)

We don’t have good precedent yet for how electronic media is archived over the long term. Hard drives and servers are meant to be disposable and periodically replaced, and the world is constantly generating tons of data that replaces old data. However, we have scrolls and books that we’re reading from thousands of years ago that survived through the rise and fall of several civilizations.

[–]Evan_ThEvan Þ 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Yes, but most modern books are published on acidic paper so they won't last more than a century or two at most. I expect ebooks will outlast most physical books in some form.

[–]idly 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Published books are archived in a way that blog posts are not. in most countries there are one or more libraries that are specifically tasked with archiving and preserving every book published in that country.