The pleasures and pitfalls of writing about yourself

reflections & intentions for this blog

The Tightrope Walker by Roberto Weigand

When I look back on everything I’ve written in this blog, each post can be bucketed into one of two categories: nerdposting and feelingsposting. Nerdposting is when I write about something I’m interested in, primarily in the third person, with the goal of putting forward an argument or an explanation (examples: questions about the brain, revolutionary biology, or machine learning in science). Feelingsposting is when I share about my personal experiences and attempt to describe a distinct mood, with the goal of conveying some insight about emotions or life (examples: real life, give your friends a chance to abandon you). I’ve also occasionally tried blending the two, like in the problem of other minds or how to think well. But I’ve always felt there’s some incompatibility between them, and this post is my attempt at talking about my experience of writing each, and what I would like to focus on more.

Feelingsposting is a kind of public journalling. You use the written page to process and communicate lessons you’ve learned about how to live. I didn’t have an explicit intention to do this when I started this blog but that is how a lot of the essays have turned out. It’s easy for me to do this kind of writing because this is literally how I journal—many of the posts I’ve published were basically journal entries with a bit of editing. And I tend to get pretty vulnerable with these posts, like when I wrote about my relationship with my brother, or giving and receiving rejection. I sometimes look back at these pieces and think, damn, that was some pretty wise stuff. And clearly other people have found some value in them too: about 100k people have now visited this blog in aggregate.

And yet, these days I’m not quite as excited about public online vulnerability as I used to be. Writing about your emotions necessitates and encourages a tendency to ascribe a lot of significance to your emotions. Most of us already think about ourselves too much, and when you build a brand off writing about your emotions you turn this tendency into overdrive. If you’re not careful you start to develop some bad habits, like constantly mining your experiences for snappy insights to share in a self-help essay, or unconsciously believing that “if you don’t post about it, it didn’t happen.” In the extreme, it leads to a state of mind where anytime you have a remotely profound experience, you feel a craving to post about it on the internet as a way of validating that it was real. Writing just becomes a vessel for the ego to confirm that I Exist And My Experiences Are Important.

Contrast this with nerdposting. On one level, it’s harder than the personal writing because it requires actual research; and by virtue of the topic being less personal, it’s easier to be wrong. Anytime you want to make a claim about developmental biology or the philosophy of causation there’s a temptation to add five thousand footnotes to it, to read one more paper to make sure you’re not saying anything factually incorrect. But what I love about this kind of writing is that it forces me to spend more time thinking about the questions I’ve always been most fascinated by. In fact, in the past few months—in large part by virtue of deciding to focus more of my writing and tweets on explaining and synthesizing research in biology, AI, and other fields—I’ve felt a surge of curiosity and excitement about learning that is unparalleled even for me. I’ve never had so many rabbitholes that I’m eager to dive into, between the bioelectrical properties of cancer to the parallels between natural selection and learning in brains. The nice thing about this blog is that it adds more purpose to that quest: I’m reading not just to learn for myself but to find the most interesting bits and share them with you.

Despite all this excitement, I’ve hesitated to do more nerdposting here because I worry that “that’s not what people are here for,” that I will somehow overwhelm people with references to biology papers. Historically my more vulnerable writings have gotten more attention and new subscribers, and it’s very tempting to keep going down the path of maximal virality by doing more of that. This is often the suggested strategy for succeeding in online writing: once you find a “niche” that works, double down and keep exploiting it. I do want this blog to grow and I want to reach more people, but I want to do it in a way that feels true to my evolving interests and values. I actually can’t do it in a way that feels disingenuous.

All of that is not to say that I’m going to abandon feelingsposting altogether. It’s just that I don’t want to feel obligated to do that on a schedule: science essays can be put together weekly, but profound personal transformations can’t. I want to talk about my experience being a human, but only when I have something genuinely important to say on the matter; I’d like to spend the rest of the time engaging with intellectual questions. Questions like: How does biology construct itself from small parts? If scaling LLMs is not the path to AGI, what will be? How does the brain learn and create complex models of the world so efficiently? How did evolution stumble upon step-changes like multicellularity, cognition, self-awareness, and creativity? How do we create a more loving, wise, and less polarized society? These are questions that feel not just fascinating but urgent. I’ve tried to capture all of them in the new tagline for this blog: “deepdives into open questions in science, philosophy, and how to be a human.” It always comes back in one way or another to the fundamental questions about the universe and our place in it. Or as philosopher Gary Drescher eloquently put it: “WTF is going on and WTF are we doing here.”

The other night I was struck by a passage in Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful, where he described the kinds of ideas I find most compelling, the eurekas that I’m most excited to read and write about:

The greatest “eurekas” in science combine both sensual aesthetics and conceptual insight. The physicist Victor Weisskopf (also a pianist) noted, “What is beautiful in science is the same thing that is beautiful in Beethoven. There’s a fog of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together before.” In short, the best science offers the same kind of experience as the best books or films do.

That’s what comes to mind when I think about the phrase “bits of wonder” – little aspects of the world that, when you look at them more closely, open up into a giant window of mystery, and ultimately clarity and wisdom. Both the personal essays and the science essays have that same purpose: to help both me and you break through the fog of the world around us, and suddenly see the connection.