How To Write Quickly While Maintaining Epistemic Rigor
# | #writing, #lesswrong
johnswentworth (lesswrong):
There’s this trap people fall into when writing, especially for a place like LessWrong where the bar for epistemic rigor is pretty high. They have a good idea, or an interesting belief, or a cool model. They write it out, but they’re not really sure if it’s true. So they go looking for evidence (not necessarily confirmation bias, just checking the evidence in either direction) and soon end up down a research rabbit hole. Eventually, they give up and never actually publish the piece.
This post is about how to avoid that, without sacrificing good epistemics.
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.
I claim that this promotes better epistemics overall than always researching everything in depth.