I talked to a friend who wants to start a blog and wanted some advice on that—how to find her voice and so on. A few random thoughts:

My wife and I have often argued about whether it is better to go faster when writing essays (quantity → quality) or be more patient and thorough.

Some thoughts on that—

If you "become the average of your five closest friends," it is strange to think about how Claude and ChatGPT are now in that list for millions of people.

Reading Wittgenstein and thinking about the question of whether LLMs are, or can be, considered creative. Some notes.

There are 2 kinds of unpredictability in art etc: 1. the kind where people just do stuff randomly, and 2. the kind where people are trying to be as clear as possible but they are operating from an understanding of the world that is so different (often deeper) than your predictions fail. I prefer no2

For writing as a way to improve your thinking - what are the best methods of teaching that?
Who teaches (or taught) this at an exceptional level?

I wonder if it would be possible to do like a very hardcore writing course focused on learning how to use writing to structure your thoughts and go deeper. I'd prefer it to be cheap or free but really really demanding and hard to get into.

Hm. I gave ChatGPT and Claude essays of mine to analyze - one that people resonate with and one not, and asked it to guess which people resonated with. They picked the wrong one every time.

treat people like they are too complex to fit in your head