来源：https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query
本文是系列文章的第三篇。
我出生于 1989 年 7 月，这意味着我是最后一代能够记得互联网出现之前时光的人。电缆、数据中心和超链接在我周围成长；它们伴随着我一起成长。我发现很难将我的心理演变与互联网的发展分离开来。
当我向 2017 年出生的女儿解释时——那一年，世界上最大的经济体已经开始因这张不断演变的网络的张力而自我撕裂——我告诉她，互联网就像一种外星智慧。我们并不完全了解它是什么；它刚刚降临，而且只是第一艘飞船。我们正在试图弄清楚如何与它对话。第一批探索者注意到，通过做一些特定的手指动作，你可以让这些外星人给你展示猫和衣服的图片，或者告诉你世界正在以何种方式分崩离析。
长时间以来，我以为这就是全部。我可以以某种方式敲击键盘，屏幕就会告诉我天气，或者推荐我读哪个版本的《伊利亚特》，然后让某个人跳上卡车把书送到我家。相比屏幕，我更喜欢《伊利亚特》。
但是，2021 年末，在我又一次做出复杂的手指动作后，我在日出前醒来，注意到有些事情发生了变化。
在夜晚，互联网开始自行运转。在田野冻结等待、刺猬在落叶堆中沉睡的时候，互联网悄然无声地四处翻腾，并在我周围重新排列组合。
我写了一篇关于伊万·伊利奇（Ivan Illich）和系统思维的文章，这个话题从未引起过任何人的兴趣，甚至杂志都觉得不值得发一封拒绝信——然而突然之间，互联网重塑了自己，使我的键盘连接到了一群想要讨论这些话题的人的屏幕上，稍后，他们的键盘也连接到了我的。
就这样，互联网不仅改变了我们的生活，还改变了我们与知识、思想以及彼此之间的联系。
我已经写了 15 年，但从未发生过这样的事情。我竟然凭空召集了一次小型会议！而且我甚至不知道这是可以做到的。
这让我第一次窥见了互联网的社会机制。通过查看流量数据，并与读者交流，我可以追溯我的文字是如何在网络中传播的，也大致明白了为什么会这样。我并没有完全理解它；我觉得没有人能完全理解。但就像一个科学家拿到了一件外星文物，我会满怀欣喜地、半随机地按下每一个能找到的按钮，看看会发生什么。我会想出一系列有趣的手指动作，然后对自己说，哈哈，不知道这个组合会有什么效果？然后我就去试试。
这台机器似乎运作的方式是这样的：
我输入的词语越精确、越小众，互联网就越能把我与那些能够建立有意义关系的人匹配起来。这种精准对我来说并不容易，部分原因是我对沟通方式的理解深受大众媒体的影响。为大众写作时，你需要宽泛且略显平淡。但我并不想要大众。我想要的是特定的一群人，那些能够帮助我——一个痴迷于某些知识问题的人——的人。我不知道这些人是谁，我只知道他们存在。因此，我的写作是一种搜索查询。它需要以一种能够找到这些人的方式表达出来，并在必要时过滤掉其他人。
互联网上那些令人愉悦的部分似乎是由人类而非算法策划的。为了让我的文字在这个“地下世界”中找到它的位置，我需要粗略了解信息在那里是如何流动的。模式是这样的：文字从边缘流向中心。这是一个惊人迅速的流动。然后，文字又从中心以更广泛但更缓慢的流动再次传回边缘。
在本文的剩余部分，我将详细解析这两个陈述。
表面上看，我主要是在谈论如何通过写作建立有意义的关系。我认为这样做既美好又重要。但背后隐藏着一个更大的想法，即你可以通过重塑你的关系来塑造自己。通过改变你对话的对象以及你引发的回应，你引导了自己的发展。你会变得更加自主和有掌控力。
社交搜索查询的语法
人类的大脑天生倾向于关注“意外性”，并因此获得奖励。当我们把注意力转向那些让我们感到惊讶的事物时，我们会感到兴奋——而我们对世界的认知模型也会随之改变。它变得更加复杂。
起初，这很容易。我一岁的孩子今天看到一只母鸡时完全沉浸在喜悦中。但过了一段时间，即使母鸡在刨土，它们也不再让我们感到惊讶了。我们需要更大的刺激才能获得同样的兴奋感。为了让母鸡重新变得有趣，你或许可以读一读它们最初是如何生活在丛林中的，或者研究鸡蛋生产的生物学原理，又或者更可能的是，你会去追求比母鸡更有趣的东西。无论如何，通过追随你的兴趣，你会走向复杂性。简单的事物不再让你感到惊讶，于是你将注意力转向更复杂的事物。这是一个惊人的算法：做有趣的事情，并神奇地达到对世界的复杂理解。
然而，遗憾的是，这条道路也很可能最终导致存在主义的孤独和哭泣。把你引向那里的原因在于，吸引你兴趣的那种特定复杂性是非常个人化的。人们对各种各样的事物感兴趣。我甚至从可靠的来源听说，有些人竟然对巴西足球运动员的名字感兴趣！拥有随着复杂性增长而变得独特的兴趣意味着，如果你走得太远，你最终会痴迷于周围没有人关心的东西。
（当然，这里有一个反作用力，那就是人类倾向于模仿周围人的兴趣。但对于我们这些“周围人”主要是指小众博主、维基百科贡献者和鹿特丹的伊拉斯谟的人来说，这种模仿并没有多大帮助。)
人们对自己的兴趣感到孤独，这在某种程度上一直是事实，但互联网让这种情况变得更糟。信息的过剩让你能够以疯狂的速度沿着你的兴趣路径前进。在互联网上，奇境是递归的，一个又一个“兔子洞”接连出现，你永远无法停止坠落。而你坠落得越深，就越不可能遇到任何与你一同坠落的人。这会让你感到极度悲伤。你会去看望父母，当他们问起你的生活时，你只有两种选择：要么说得让他们听不懂，看着他们对你兴奋的事情感到担忧；要么谈论一些表面化的内容，然后在夜晚独处时默默流泪。
我之所以详细描述这种动态，原因有两点。首先，如果你愿意，你可以摆脱这种困境。方法就是在网上写作（或者发布很酷的软件、视频，或者其他能让你兴奋的东西——只要你公开工作）。其次，如果你想摆脱这种困境，关键在于理解：你并不是唯一一个找不到人讨论自己痴迷事物的人。
在公开写作时，有一种普遍的观点认为，你应该让内容易于理解。这是大众媒体遗留下来的观念。面向大量多样化人群的文字需要简单、清晰且没有术语。当然，写得清楚是有价值的，但仅限于一定程度。清晰的写作反映了清晰的思考。但为了让内容“易于理解”？为了删减旁枝末节和晦涩的引用，减少人们理解你的论点所需掌握的知识量？真的吗？
这与我们的目标背道而驰。一篇博客文章是一种搜索查询。你写作是为了找到你的“部落”；你写作是为了让他们知道应该把哪些有趣的东西转发到你的收件箱。如果你遵循所谓的“常识”，你就会删掉那些帮助你找到这些人的关键内容。这就像是有人告诉作曲家莫顿·费尔德曼（Morton Feldman），他应该为“街头普通人”创作音乐。费尔德曼走到窗前向外看去，他看到了谁？杰克逊·波洛克（Jackson Pollock）。
为杰克逊·波洛克而写。
那些能够与你进行深度对话的人，和你一样，早已对简单、清晰的事物感到过惊讶。他们需要更多刺激才能兴奋起来。而这“更多”的内容将是极度个人化的，无法用一套写作规则来概括。
那么，你该怎么做呢？
你可以问自己：如果我在六个月前（或者一周前，或者根据你的写作速度）读到什么内容会让我从椅子上跳起来？如果你发现了某些让你欣喜若狂的东西，那就应该写下来。不要简化它，因为六个月前的你并不愚蠢，只是知道得更少。你还应该尽可能地用丰富的细节和美感来写作，因为那正是你当时所渴望的内容。
六个月前，我正在思考大型语言模型将如何影响我们的学习方式。那篇《使用 GPT-3 增强人类学习》的文章，如果我当时读到，一定会让我激动得从椅子上跳起来，然后跑出去，兴奋地、语无伦次地告诉约翰娜。正因如此，我写了这篇文章。
为了让自己感兴趣，我把文章写得又长又详细。我喜欢人们不仅抽象地谈论问题，而是通过例子来展示，最好是很多例子，并且最好是来自真实世界的、带有混乱性的例子。有些人觉得这种“过量”令人厌烦，但我不这么认为。丰富的数据让我能够对某个领域形成一种隐性的理解。因此，我写了 3000 字，探讨如何以更真实的方式提示 GPT-3，并包含了一段长长的对话，其中 AI 诊断了约翰娜的手痒问题；还有一段关于城市如何影响创新的对话；以及第三段关于数字化媒介下的学徒制的内容。我还让这篇文章带有一点文学性和华丽风格，而这在写关于 AI 的文章时是“不应该”做的，至少如果你想让普通的《LessWrong》读者给你点赞的话。我不是普通的《LessWrong》读者；相比埃利泽·尤德考斯基（Eliezer Yudkowsky）的理性主义论述，我更喜欢托马斯·伯恩哈德（Thomas Bernhard）的激烈批判。因此，我选择了华丽的表达方式。
我不是说那是一篇伟大的文章；我是说我一定会爱上它。这篇文章会回答我当时大部分的疑问，并让我对语言模型有了更复杂、更深刻的理解，这种理解可以让我进一步探索更加晦涩难懂的事物。而且，由于互联网的庞大，有几千人和我有着相同的感受——我对这些人产生了深深的共鸣。
当一个陌生人出现在你的收件箱里，并且他们对你所热衷的事情同样感到兴奋时，那种感觉既疯狂又美丽！你开始抛出最晦涩的引用，他们会回应：“是的，读过，很喜欢。”头几次发生这种情况时，约翰娜问我怎么了。我当时正在厨房里哭。
那些是归乡般的泪水。
而且——仿佛这还不够美好——现在这些人开始向我推送关于语言模型、牛育种、昆体良（Quintilian）、19 世纪词典、基于图的操作系统等等各种有趣的内容……源源不断。我收到的输入比我自己能找到的更多、更好，其中很多来自清晰网络之外的资源：一些修补匠写信给我，谈论他们正在开发的工具或他们观察到的新现象。
换句话说，某种程度上，我已经自动化了我的痴迷。我召唤出了一个环境，它将我拉向我想去的方向！
搜索查询不一定要是一篇 5000 字的长文才能奏效（尽管互联网确实对此给予了丰厚的回报）。任何在过去某个时刻对你有用的东西都可以。例如，阿列克谢·古泽伊（Alexey Guzey） 制作清单，其中一半内容是引用，这些清单极其有用，并且在重塑他的社交网络方面发挥了关键作用，使他能够创办《新科学》（New Science）。大多数优秀的推特账号也可以用同样的方式来看待。
传播
如果你遵循了上述建议，你写出来的文章可能几乎没有人会喜欢。
幸运的是，即使几乎没有人喜欢，乘以整个互联网的人口基数，只要你能找到他们，数量就足够了。
那么，如何做到这一点呢？
其实，即使你是一个相对“天真”的互联网用户，你也可能已经能够发现其中的一些人。你能发现的这些人通常是那些拥有大量粉丝的人。这可能会让你感到沮丧。名人似乎遥不可及，而互联网的其他部分则显得混乱不堪。
刚开始时，我对它的运作方式的理解是这样的：我不会找到任何读者。即使找到了，他们也会像我一样的普通人，然后呢？也许？希望？当我找到更多这样的人时，我会“升级”吗？这样我就可以接触到那些拥有越来越多粉丝的人？就像攀爬公司层级一样？但事实并非如此。
互联网的社会结构更像是一条河流。
那些拥有大量粉丝的人，比如山姆·哈里斯（Sam Harris），就像是密西西比河的河口，流入墨西哥湾。山姆有数百万条“支流”。他可能密切关注几百个人，而这些人又各自关注几百个其他人——支流汇入小溪，小溪汇入河流。信息在互联网上的传播方式就是沿着这种“水流”秩序流动的：从拥有较小网络的人流向拥有较大网络的人，然后再通过更大的网络传播回来。试图“跨越陆地”，从一条支流跳到另一条支流，比顺着水流向上再向下要困难得多。
这种动态在 Twitter 上更容易观察到，因为每当你发布的内容被点赞或转发时，你都会收到通知（相比之下，博客的流量数据则模糊得多）。当我把这篇文章的标题作为一条推文发布出来时——这是一种原始的 A/B 测试方式——我可以清晰地看到这一动态。
这条推文并没有病毒式传播。我只是 Twitter 河流系统中的一条小支流（我当时的大约有 100 名粉丝）。但我的一些粉丝稍微“大”一点。我猜他们找到我，是因为我曾经回复过他们的推文，并且他们对我的回复有些兴趣。其中两人，Stian Håklev 和 Tom Critchlow，对这条推文产生了共鸣，于是他们转发了它。还有一些人点了“爱心”，这也是一种传播推文的方式（尽管比转发要弱一些）。
接着，一些比他们更大的账号也转发了这条推文，因为他们关注了 Stian 和 Tom，因此看到了它。从那里开始，这条推文迅速沿着“水流”向上传播。只花了一两个小时，这条推文就到达了它所能触及的最大账号（例如拥有 8.4 万粉丝的 Tiago Forte 转发了它，以及拥有 68.1 万粉丝的 Balaji Srinivasan 通过点赞进一步传播了它）。然而，较小的账号花了更长的时间才逐渐参与进来。信息会迅速向上流动，然后缓慢向下渗透。那些大账号之所以大并不是没有原因的，至少部分原因在于，他们在网络中花费更多时间来传递信息！
（顺便说一句，这正是邮政服务建立之前人们寄信的方式。在 17 世纪，如果你是一个想给另一位知识分子寄信的知识分子，你会把信寄给某个能够将其转交给马林·梅森（Marin Mersenne）的人——因为他认识所有认识任何人的人，并且肯定能找到你想要联系的那个人。这是我从 Visa 的一条推文中了解到的，而 Visa 可以说是现代版的梅森。)
那么，诀窍就在于此。你找到一个你认为最接近你想对话的人（或你想对话的那类人），然后把你的内容发送给这个人。一个 subreddit（Reddit 的子论坛）是个不错的起点。我通常通过在 Twitter 上用高质量的回复来收集有趣的人。然后我可以简单地把我的文章发布在那里，并知道他们有可能看到它。偶尔——尤其是在刚开始时——我会直接把文章发送给某些人，通过私信或电子邮件。比如，我把《在线学徒制》（Apprenticeship Online）这篇文章发给了 José Rincón，主要是为了给我对他某篇文章的一些评论提供背景。他没有直接回复我，但他确实转发了这篇文章，这为我带来了一些有趣的人进入我的圈子。事实证明，如果你写了一些你自己感兴趣的东西，很可能你喜欢的人也会觉得它有趣，并且如果你给他们机会，他们会帮你传播。
当你开始传递信息并发布博客文章时，你会逐渐积累起联系。有用的信息会开始流向你，让你自己成为一个小型的信息枢纽。这将使你能够收集和策划信息，并将其重新传播出去，从而让更多的人与你建立联系，形成一个飞轮效应，让你能够完成越来越有用、越有意义的工作。我特别喜欢当聪明的人对我提出批评时，我会邀请他们在未来的草稿中发表评论。
你还可以将文章发布到像 LessWrong 或 SlateStarCodex subreddit 这样的子论坛和论坛上，这些地方就像是互联网上的知识咖啡馆。把你的帖子粘贴到那里，在你刚开始的时候很容易找到社区；你不必对着虚空呐喊。更重要的是，许多人都会经过这些“咖啡馆”，如果他们是你的同道中人，他们可以帮助你在个人关系网络和互联网的隐秘角落里传播你的作品，甚至为你打开一些奇怪而有趣的门。我在刚开始时非常依赖论坛，通过这种方式获得了最初的几百名订阅者，但随着我已经建立起自己的联系网络，它们的重要性正在逐渐降低。现在，我可以通过直接给订阅者发邮件或发几条推文，更精准地传播我的文章。但我对这些平台，尤其是 LessWrong，怀有深深的感激之情，因为它为我提供了一位编辑，帮助我检查语法和事实。
顺便说一句，你最终会逐渐脱离论坛的原因在于，它们是由其他人撰写的搜索查询。LessWrong 是由埃利泽·尤德考斯基（Eliezer Yudkowsky）和 罗宾·汉森（Robin Hanson）通过撰写一系列极其强大的搜索查询（在 Overcoming Bias 上发表的博客文章）召唤出来的。这些博客文章的力量如此之强，以至于它们所创造的网络即使在最初的节点离开后依然存续了下来。
这就是在线写作在其极限状态下的本质——一种新文化的召唤。
如果我们稍微眯起眼睛看，甚至可以说，互联网本身也是这样诞生的。1963 年，J.C.R。 利克莱德（J.C.R。 Licklider）写了一份关于“星际计算机网络”的备忘录，而这个搜索查询是如此强大，以至于它“召唤”了外星人（比喻互联网的诞生）。
我们现在都生活在他的搜索查询之中。
此致亲切问候，
亨里克（Henrik）
全文总结：通过写作召唤同好的逆向搜索模式
总述
本文探讨了一种独特的社交模式，即通过写作吸引志同道合的人，并与之建立深度联系。这种模式可以被看作是一种“逆向搜索”，作者通过创作内容（如博客、文章或推文）发出个性化的“搜索查询”，吸引那些对相同主题感兴趣的人主动找到自己。这不仅是信息的传递，更是一种文化和关系的创造。
分述
写作作为搜索查询：写作是一种复杂的、个性化的搜索工具。作者通过撰写长篇、详细且小众的内容，精准地表达自己的兴趣和思考，从而吸引特定的受众。相比大众媒体追求简单清晰的表达，这种写作方式更注重深度和独特性，能够帮助作者找到真正志同道合的人。
互联网的社会机制：互联网的信息流动类似于河流系统，从边缘流向中心，再从中心扩散到边缘。大V（拥有大量粉丝的人）是信息传播的关键节点，但即使是小众作者，也可以通过层层传播将自己的内容送达目标受众。通过观察流量数据和互动，作者可以追溯信息传播的路径，优化自己的写作策略。
吸引同好的过程：
精准匹配：通过高度个性化的写作，作者能够找到那些对自己独特兴趣感兴趣的人。这些读者可能是同样痴迷于冷门话题的小众群体。
双向互动：当作者与读者建立联系后，他们会互相分享资源和见解，形成一个良性循环。这种互动不仅丰富了作者的知识网络，还进一步扩大了他们的影响力。
社群构建：随着时间推移，这种连接可能催生出新的文化或思想流派，例如 LessWrong 这样的社区，就是通过深度内容召唤而来的。
写作的意义与价值：写作不仅是寻找同好的工具，也是一种自我塑造的方式。通过选择对话的对象和调整内容的方向，作者可以引导自己的成长轨迹，变得更加自主和有掌控力。同时，写作还能帮助作者摆脱因兴趣孤独带来的失落感，找到归属感。
总结
通过写作吸引同好并建立联系的过程，是一种另类的“逆向搜索”。它颠覆了传统搜索引擎的逻辑，将信息检索转化为一种基于共同兴趣的社交行为。这种模式不仅能帮助作者找到志同道合的人，还能促进知识的共享、文化的创造以及个人的成长。最终，这种写作实践让我们意识到，互联网不仅仅是信息的集合体，更是一个充满可能性的社交场域，每个人都可以通过独特的声音召唤属于自己的“部落”。
原文
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox
This essay is the third part of a series. Here is part 1, part 2, and part 4. They can be read independently.
I was born in July 1989, which means I am of the last generation who will remember the time before the internet. The cables and data centers and hyperlinks grew up around me; they grew with me. I find it hard to disentangle the evolution of my psyche from that of the internet.
Explaining it to my daughter, who was born in 2017, a year when the world’s largest economy had begun tearing itself apart from the tension of this ever-evolving network, I tell her that the internet is like an alien intelligence. We don’t know exactly what it is; it has just landed, and only the first ship. We are trying to figure out how to talk to it. The first generation of explorers have noted that by making certain finger motions you can make the aliens show you images of cats and clothes, or tell you all the ways the world is falling apart.
For a long time, I thought this was all there was to it. I could tap the keyboard in a particular way and the screen would show me the weather, or tell me which translation of the Iliad to read and then make someone jump in a truck and drive it to our house. I preferred the Iliad to the screen.
But then, late 2021, after I had been making intricate finger movements again, I woke up before sunrise and noticed that something had changed.
During the night, the internet had been set in motion. Tossing hither and thither in silence—as the fields lay frozen and waiting and the hedgehog slept in its pile of leaves—the internet had rearranged itself around me.
I had written an essay about Ivan Illich and systems thinking, a topic I had never found anyone else intrigued by, and which magazines thought below a rejection letter—and the internet had suddenly reshaped itself so that my keyboard hooked up to the screens of a bunch of people who wanted to talk about these topics, and a little later, their keyboards hooked up to mine.
I had written for 15 years, but never before had this happened. I had conjured a minor conference! And I hadn’t even known that you could do that.
This gave me a first glimpse of the social mechanics of the internet. Looking at the traffic data, and talking to readers, I could retrace how my words had traveled through the network, and I got a sense of why. I didn’t fully understand it; I don’t think anyone does. But like a scientist who’s got hold of an alien artifact, I proceeded by gleefully and semi-randomly pushing every button I could find to see what happened. I would think of a series of funny finger movements and then I’d say to myself, LOL I wonder what this combination does? And then I’d try.
The way the machine seemed to work was:
The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. This precision was hard for me, partly because my sense for how communication is supposed to work is shaped by reading mass media. Writing for a general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. I only knew that they existed. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.
The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms. For my writing to find its way in this netherworld, I needed to have a rough sense of how information flowed down there. The pattern was this: words flowed from the periphery to the centers. This was a surprisingly rapid stream. Then the words cascaded from the center down in a broader but slower stream to the periphery again.
I will spend the rest of this essay unpacking those two statements.
It will seem like I am mainly talking about how to use writing to forge meaningful relationships. I think doing that is beautiful and important. But lurking behind it is a larger idea. Namely, that you can shape yourself by reshaping your relationships. By changing who you are addressing, and the responses you garner, you steer your development. You become more agentic.
The syntax of social search queries
Human brains are wired such that we get rewarded for attending to surprisal. If we turn our attention toward things that surprise us, we get excited — and our model of the world changes. It grows more complex.
This is easy at first. My one-year-old was in complete rapture today on seeing a hen. But after a while, hens do not surprise us anymore, even if they are scratching dirt. We need a bigger hit to get the same high. To make hens interesting again, you could perhaps read about how they originally lived in the jungle, or you might get into the biology of egg production, or, more likely, you’ll pursue something more interesting than hens. Any which way, by pursuing your interest, you will move toward complexity. The simple things do not surprise you anymore. So you turn your attention to more complicated things. This is an amazing algorithm: do interesting things and magically arrive at a complex understanding of the world.
Sadly, it also leads you down a path that will likely end in existential loneliness and sobbing. What leads you there is the fact that the particular complexity that catches your interest is highly idiosyncratic. People get interested in all sorts of things. I have heard, from credible sources, that there even exist people who are interested in the names of Brazilian soccer players! Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
(There is a counteracting force in that humans tend to mimic the interests of those around them. But this is of little help for those of us for whom ”those around them” mostly means niche bloggers, contributors at Wikipedia, and Erasmus of Rotterdam.)
People feeling alone in their interests has always been true to a certain extent, but the internet has made it much worse. The excess of information allows you to travel down your path of interest with mad velocity. On the internet, Wonderland is recursive, with rabbit holes opening up to yet more rabbit holes; you never stop falling. And the further you fall, the less likely it is that anyone you’ve ever met is falling where you are. This will make you immensely sad. You will visit your parents, and when they ask you about your life you will have two choices. You can either be incomprehensible and see them grow concerned about things you are excited about, or you can talk about surface-level things and cry a little when you are alone at night.
The reason I’m spelling out this dynamic is twofold. First, you can get out of this mess if you want to. You do that by writing online (or publishing cool pieces of software, or videos, or whatever makes you tickle—as long as you work in public). Second, if you want to get out of the mess the key lies exactly in understanding that you are not the only person who has no one to talk to about the things you get obsessed by.
When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media. Words addressed to a large and diverse set of people need to be simple and clear and free of jargon. It is valuable to write clearly of course, to a degree. Clear writing is clear thinking. But to make the content accessible? To cut digressions and obscure references to reduce the number of things people need to understand to make sense of your argument? Really?
That is against our purposes here. A blog post is a search query. You write to find your tribe; you write so they will know what kind of fascinating things they should route to your inbox. If you follow common wisdom, you will cut exactly the things that will help you find these people. It is like the time someone told the composer Morton Feldman he should write for “the man in the street”. Feldman went over and looked out the window, and who did he see? Jackson Pollock.
Write for Jackson Pollock.
The people you will be able to have deep conversations with have, like you, already been surprised by the simple, clear things. They need more to get high. And this “more” will be wildly idiosyncratic. It cannot be summarized in a list of writing rules.
So what do you do?
You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.
Six months ago, I was thinking about how large language models will affect how we learn. The essay Using GPT-3 to augment human learning would have made me jump off my chair and run out to Johanna talking excitedly and incomprehensibly; that’s why I wrote it.
To make it interesting for myself, I made it longish and detailed. I like it when people don’t just talk in the abstract but show you with examples, preferably many examples, and preferably taken from the real world so they are messy. Some people find this excess annoying. I don’t. Rich data lets me develop a tacit understanding of the domain. So I wrote 3000 words about how to prompt GPT-3 in ways that make it more truthful, and I included a long dialogue where the AI diagnoses Johanna’s itching hands; and another one about how cities affect innovation; and a third about digitally mediated apprenticeships. I also made the essay a bit literary and flamboyant, which you are not “supposed” to do when writing about AI, at least not if you want the average LessWrong reader to upvote it. I’m not the average Less Wrong reader; I much prefer Thomas Bernhard’s rants to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s. Hence, I made it flamboyant.
I’m not saying it was a great essay; I’m saying I would have loved it. The essay would have answered most of the questions I had, and it would have given me a new more complex understanding of language models that I could have used to get excited by even more obscure things. And because the internet is big, there were a few thousand people who felt the same way—and I felt really deeply for these people.
It is crazy-beautiful to have a stranger arrive in your inbox, and they are excited by exactly the same things as you! You start dropping the most obscure references, and they’re like, yeah, read that, love it. The first handful of times it happened, Johanna asked me what was wrong. I was crying in the kitchen.
Those were tears of homecoming.
And—as if that wasn’t good enough—now these people are routing me interesting things about language models, cow breeding, Quintilian, 19th-century dictionaries, graph-based operating systems . . . and on and on . . . I get more and better input than I could ever have found on my own, a lot of it from sources outside the clear web, tinkerers writing to me about tools they are building, or new observations they have made.
In other words, I have, to a degree, automated my obsessions now. I have summoned a milieu that pulls me where I want to go!
A search query doesn’t have to be a 5000-word effort post to work (though the internet does reward that amply). Anything that would have been useful to you sometime in the past will do. Alexey Guzey makes lists, half of which are made up of quotes, and they are incredibly useful and have been instrumental in reshaping his network so that he could start New Science. Most good Twitter accounts can be viewed in the same way.
Distribution
If you follow the advice above, you will write essays that almost no one likes.
Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.
How do you do that?
Well, you can probably spot a few of them already, even if you are a fairly naive internet user. The people you can spot will be those that have large followings. This might depress you. The famous people will seem out of reach, and the rest of the internet will seem to be pure madness.
When starting out, my model of how it would work was this: I wouldn’t find any readers. And if I did, they would be plebeians like myself, and then, maybe? hopefully? as I found more of them, I would level up? so that I could connect to people with increasingly large followings? like climbing a corporate hierarchy? This is not how it works.
The social structure of the internet is shaped like a river.
People with big followings, say someone like Sam Harris, is the mouth of the Mississippi emptying into the Mexican Gulf. Sam has millions of tributaries. There are perhaps a few hundred people Sam pays close attention to, and these in turn have a few hundred they listen to—tributaries flowing into headwaters flowing into rivers. The way messages spread on the internet is by flowing up this order of streams, from people with smaller networks to those with larger, and then it spreads back down through the larger networks. Going over land, from one tributary to another, is harder than going up the stream order and then down again.
This dynamic is easier to spot on Twitter, where you get notified every time someone likes or retweets what you have written (compared to a blog where the traffic data is more murky). When I tried out the title of this piece as a tweet——a primitive way to A/B-test——I could map that dynamic.
It was not a viral tweet. I am a minor tributary in the Twitter river system (my follower count was ~100 at the time). But a few of my followers were slightly larger. They had found me, I assume, because I made replies to their tweets that they sort of liked. Two of these, Stian Håklev and Tom Critchlow, resonated with the tweet, so they retweeted it. A few others gave it a heart, which is also a way to route tweets (though it is a weaker form of routing than a retweet).
Then a few accounts that were an order of magnitude larger still retweeted it, because they followed Stian and Tom and now saw it. And from there it rushed up the stream order. It only took an hour or two for the tweet to reach the largest accounts it would reach (Tiago Forte with 84k followers, who retweeted it, and Balaji Srinavasan with 681K, who routed it on through a like). But the smaller accounts took much longer. Information rushes up and then trickles down. The larger accounts are not larger without a reason, but, at least in part, because they spend more time routing information in the network!
(This, by the way, is how you sent letters before the post service was established. In the 1600s, if you were an intellectual who wanted to send a letter to another intellectual, you’d send it to someone who could forward it to Marin Mersenne—because he knew everyone who knew anyone and would surely know someone who could find the person you wanted to reach. This I learned from a tweet by Visa, who is the modern day version of Mersenne.)
The trick, then, is this. You take the person you think is closest to the person (or type of person) you want to talk to and send what you write to this person. A subreddit is a good place to start. I usually do this by collecting interesting people on Twitter through good reply game. Then I can simply post my essays there and know they will have a chance of seeing it. Occasionally—and this makes more sense in the start—I send essays to people directly, in their direct messages or to their email. I sent Apprenticeship Online to José Rincón, mostly as a way to give context to a few comments I had on one of his essays. He didn’t answer, but he did tweet out the essay, which brought in a handful of interesting people in my orbit. It turns out that if you’ve written something that you find interesting, it is not unlikely that people you like will find it interesting too, and pass it on if you give them the chance.
As you start routing information and putting out blog posts, you will begin to accumulate connections. Useful information will start to stream toward you, turning you into a small hub yourself. This will allow you to collect and curate information and route it back out, which will allow even more people to connect to you, in a flywheel that lets you do increasingly useful and good work. I especially enjoy it when intelligent people attack me; I then invite them to comment on upcoming drafts.
You can also post to subreddits and forums, like LessWrong or the SlateStarCodex subreddit, that act like intellectual cafés on the internet. Pasting your posts there, it is easy to find community when you are starting out; you don't have to scream into the void. And, more importantly, a lot of people pass through these cafés, and if they are your kind they can help spread your work in the netherworld of personal connections and open weird doors on the internet for you. I relied heavily on forums in the beginning, gaining my first hundred or so subscribers this way, but they are growing less important now that I have collected a set of connections of my own. I can get a more precise spread of my essays by just emailing them to my subscribers and putting out a few tweets. But I feel deep gratitude, especially to LessWrong, which provides me with an editor who helps me with grammar and fact-checking.
By the way, the reason you will eventually grow out of forums is that they are search queries written by other people. LessWrong was summoned into existence by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Robin Hanson writing a sequence of exceptionally powerful search queries (on Overcoming bias), blog posts so strong that the networks they created survived the exodus of the original nodes.
This is what online writing is at its limit—the summoning of a new culture.
If we squint a little, we could even say that this is how the internet itself came into existence. In 1963, J. C. R. Licklider wrote a memo about an “intergalactic computer network”, and that search query was so powerful it summoned the aliens.
We’re all living inside his search query now.
Warmly, Henrik