Sorta Insightful turns six years old today!

If you’re new, every year I do a meta-post about how my blogging went that year. I’ll be honest - I’ve had a lot less motivation to write this past year. There isn’t a single reason for this. It’s more like a few reasons compounding together.

More Time on Social Media

I haven’t checked how much time I’ve been spending on YouTube and Reddit, but it’s definitely rising. Recommendation algorithms keep getting better.

I know these systems work well on me, so I try to avoid adding social media streams. I don’t have a TikTok or Instagram or Snapchat, since I don’t want to add any many mindless scrolling into my life if I can help it. We’ll see how long that lasts. For better or worse, those are the communication mediums of today, and culture goes forward with or without you.

Puzzlehunt Obligations

This past year, I’ve been doing more work for puzzlehunts. It’s hard work, but it’s fun.

I see puzzle construction as trying to tell a story where you have minimal control over how the story plays out. You’re trying to convey a solve path, but if you make it too obvious then the solve is no longer interesting.

The more relevant part re: this blog is that puzzle constructing is time consuming. It’s like game development. You place the solver in a system, they’ll stretch it in ways you never thought of, and you just have to run around patching up all the holes that become apparent. It’s also a team project with a hard deadline where I can read comments from people who are looking forward to participating. In comparison, this blog is a personal affair, with no strict deadlines or hype trains. That means I’ve felt greater feelings of responsibility and urgency for puzzlehunt writing compared to blogging.

To put hard numbers on this, based on my time tracker, last year I spent about 100 hours on blogging and about 435 hours on puzzlehunt construction. It’s a pretty stark difference.

Interest in my Hobbies are Cooling Down

A number of my posts were me writing about something I was passionate about. I had a post about a My Little Pony x Doctor Who crossover, a post about a My Little Pony x Euclidean geometry crossover, and a post about Neopets. It made sense for me to write them at the time, but I’m less into MLP now, and I’m less into Neopets ever since the site redesign, and I’m just not into fandom as aggressively as I was in 2015 or 2016. I still like MLP and Neopets, and keep up-to-date on what happens in those spaces, but they’re a smaller part of my life.

So when I think about writing a grand post explaining why I got into My Little Pony, it’s a lot harder to do so. When I consider starting a post about why you should read Gunnerkrigg Court, it’s hard because I think about Gunnerkrigg a lot less. There’s always Dominion, but at this point I’m basically retired.

What I’ve realized is that most of my posts are not long-burning posts. They’re works of passion - I bash them out in a few days, or I don’t finish them at all. Sometimes, that passion is a function of the time, rather than anything intrinsic about myself. I told a few people I was going to write an “offline RL manifesto” back in 2018, since I thought it was criminally understudied, but it’s since become a reasonably sized research area and that manifesto no longer feels as important. The post I wanted to write about measurement feels less important now that fairness / interpretability / AI safety is more widely accepted.

I know I just said blogging is a personal activity, but I guess one of my personal activities is writing up hot takes, and takes can’t be hot if you feel they’re already known. I somehow find it more rewarding to create a new point of discussion, rather than adding to or emphasizing an existing one.

I realize this isn’t how writing has to work. Preaching to the choir is fun, after all. However, it’s how I’m approaching writing right now. This is likely why I’ve found puzzle construction to be nice - puzzles deliberately aim to be novel.

Settling Into Patterns

I feel like more of my life has “normalized”, for lack of a better word. By this, I mean that if I picked some arbitrary week 1 month in the future, and made a prediction for what I would do that week, it’d be more accurate than if I did the same exercise a few years ago.

There’s just fewer surprises. I’m not meeting as many people, and I’m doing fewer new things. This is all quite terrifying, to be honest. I’m still figuring out what to do there, but seeing less means I’ve had less inspiration for blogging.

It doesn’t do you much good to draw unless you have something to draw, and the only place you’re getting anything to draw is out of that head. And the only way you can exercise the mind is by bringing new ideas to it so it’ll be surprised, and say “God I didn’t know that.” That’s the greatest thing in the world, that “Gee I didn’t know that.” And there you are, you know?

(Chuck Jones, director of several classic Looney Tunes cartoons. I recommend this Every Frame a Painting video, if you haven’t seen it before.)

I am spending more time on social media…but that doesn’t seem to drive much inspiration for me.

General Tiredness with COVID-19

I stopped blogging about COVID at some point, but I remember believing that things would go back to normal after vaccines were widely available. However, I didn’t account for the degree of vaccine hesitation, as well as the slower rollout of vaccines worldwide enabling evolution of variants that (might) escape vaccines developed so far.

My expectation is that things are and will get better, but last year, I could point to a clear future event (conclusion of widescale vaccine trials). Whereas this year, I don’t have anything to point to besides rising vaccination rates (yay!) and new variants (boo), with an unclear sense on how both will evolve. That’s sapped a lot of energy out of my life in general.

* * *

I’ve considered whether all this means I should stop blogging. As an exercise, I’ve tried imagining the world where I never update this blog again…and it feels really bad. I do care about blogging, so I’ll try to slice out more time towards working on it.

Statistics

Word Count

Last year, I wrote 32,161 words. This year, I wrote 26,955 words.

5812 2020-08-18-ai-timelines.markdown  
1112 2020-08-18-five-years.markdown  
1549 2020-12-30-car-co2.markdown  
6597 2021-01-29-mh-2021.markdown  
4249 2021-02-18-flash-games.markdown  
5420 2021-04-07-grad-school-5years.markdown  
1018 2021-05-23-dominion-temple.markdown  
 587 2021-05-23-world-can-change.markdown  
 611 2021-07-05-blog-ads.markdown  
26955 total

I wrote 9 posts this year. Some were quite long - this year I averaged 3000 words per post, compared to about 2500 words per post last year.

View Counts

These are the view counts from August 18, 2020 to today, for the posts I’ve written this year.

12426 2020-08-18-ai-timelines.markdown  
  277 2020-08-18-five-years.markdown  
 1912 2020-12-30-car-co2.markdown  
  912 2021-01-29-mh-2021.markdown  
  167 2021-02-18-flash-games.markdown  
 2367 2021-04-07-grad-school-5years.markdown  
  102 2021-05-23-dominion-temple.markdown  
  210 2021-05-23-world-can-change.markdown  
   86 2021-07-05-blog-ads.markdown  

This mostly tracks what I expected, although I’m surprised the post about Flash games has so few views. Maybe my nostalgia about Flash games is narrower than I thought.

Time Spent Writing

I spent 100 hours, 11 minutes writing for my blog this year, which is about 20 hours less than I spent last year.

That rounds to 16-17 minutes per day, which is actually not too bad for a time commitment (although in practice my blogging is very bursty, rather than writing a few minutes each day).

Posts in Limbo

Post about measurement:

Odds of writing this year: 20%
Odds of writing eventually: 30%

If I don’t write this next year I’m going to remove it from my list of pending ideas.

Post about Gunnerkrigg Court:

Odds of writing this year: 45%
Odds of writing eventually: 50%

Basically I am saying that if I don’t do it this year, I don’t think it will ever happen and will remove it from this list.

Post about My Little Pony:

Odds of writing this year: 50%
Odds of writing eventually: 90%

I cannot see myself never writing about the My Little Pony fandom. It was a huge part of my life, but I’m ready to describe it as was, rather than is. Of course I say this when a lot of my music history is pony EDM…but outside of a few music artists I found via MLP, I’ve stopped caring about a lot of the brony fandom. Much of my enjoyment of MLP was derived from seeing how new episodes were interpreted by the fandom, and so far I have zero hype about Generation 5.

Post about Dominion Online:

Odds of writing this year: 25%
Odds of writing eventually: 50%

Post about puzzlehunts:

Odds of writing this year: 70%
Odds of writing eventually: 90%