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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to write better blog posts, published by mariushobbhahn on January 25, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. About two years ago I started my personal blog and then branched out to the EA forum and LessWrong. My experience was overwhelmingly positive (much better than anticipated). This post is intended to encourage people, share some lessons and make it easier to start. I’d like to thank Max Räuker, Moritz Hanke and Simon Grimm for their feedback. Clarification: these tips are intended for less experienced writers. I don’t claim to know everything and am interested in improving further. Feedback and discussions are welcome. Also, there is a forum post called “How to use the forum” (2018) but I don’t think most people know it exists. So it makes sense to reiterate some of their guidelines. TL;DR: writing blog posts is good for lots of reasons, e.g. gaining clarity, education, interaction with others and career building. There are different tips and tricks to write better ranging from cutting content aggressively to quantifying uncertainty. The most important one is to just start writing and then iterate. If you dislike having your own blog, write posts on the forum and hop on other people’s projects. Why write a blog post? You learn a lot: Aiming at writing a post is a way of gaining clarity on what you know and what you don't know. It will structure your thinking and lead you to research more thoroughly. Expecting others to read your post will likely also give you extra motivation to improve the article. Furthermore, I think people underestimate how much you can learn with 20 hours of focused googling, reading abstracts, skimming papers or videos, etc. By now, when I want to get a better grasp of a topic, I start writing a blog post. It’s a positive experience: Most of my initial intuitive concerns were very wrong. The world didn’t fall apart after sharing the first post and the feedback I got was positive. Most of the time, not that many people read your first posts and they are usually part of some ingroup, thus more forgiving. On the other hand, once my blog posts got better, the experience just became more and more satisfying. People responded to my posts, answered important questions, reached out via DM or mail, etc. It makes me feel like I contribute something to solving important problems, which is a great experience. You help others: We don’t have the time and energy to research every topic or think about every question in detail. However, we can read a 10-minute summary to get a sufficiently good grasp of the issue. If you did a decent job with your post, most people will be very thankful for that. It might get you a job: Work trials at some EA organizations are comparable to writing a blog post, i.e. you are supposed to research a question and write down your results in a given amount of time. Having experience with that type of work is beneficial. Furthermore, your blog can already function as a signal for motivation and quality to potential future employers. I personally know of cases where people were hired because of blogposts they wrote. What should I write about? Here are some suggestions. I mostly chose example posts that are of very high quality in my opinion. I would frame them as something to aspire to, not the threshold for starting. Write about obvious things. We have a hard time understanding how large the understanding gap between experts and non-experts really is. Thus, extracting and summarizing your latent knowledge is super useful for others. A good example is Neel Nanda’s post “AI alignment a bird’s eye view”. Your latest research: Research speed increases by sharing your latest findings. A positive example of such a post is Ajeya Cotra’s “Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning”. Clarifying beliefs: Writing down bel...