(2021-10-21) Nielsen How To Use A Personal Website To Enhance Your Ability To Think And Create

Michael Nielsen: How to use a personal website to enhance your ability to think and create? Rough and incomplete working notes, to help me think through how to use this site.

“What and how do you write a personal site with the long-term in mind?… What sort of writing could you create if you worked on it (be it ever so rarely) for the next 60 years? – Gwern Branwen

Most personal websites aim at personal connection with other people, or at establishing oneself professionally. They’re not usually about helping the author think and create, except incidentally. (Sense-Making, Thinking Out Loud)

Let’s begin with a few of the more important principles, plus a few miscellanea that don’t really belong later in the essay. Some of this is repeated later in the essay.

The purpose of the site is to help me think well. This purpose is in opposition to many widely-used norms in online writing.

Committed writing – the sort written in blood – is an exceptional method of self-transformation. (personal development)

Each piece here should durably level up my understanding

With this site I can design an interface that better supports my work. For one thing: the site navigation and organization should help me generate new ideas, and help me see the structure in my work.

As my understanding changes, so too will the organization, since the organization expresses that understanding. Thus, I should expect to reorganize and consolidate notes often. Both are a type of meaning-making.

Make it drop-dead fast and easy to include images, video, and sound

Investing in design as a way of deepening your emotional engagement with the work

Anchoring on “it’s bad to do meta-level-thought” is a mistake. You benefit greatly from doing some thinking like this; you just don’t want it to take over your life!

The design is something I greatly admire about Gwern Branwen’s site.

One conventional reason people care about such design is to make the reader’s experience better.

But a better reason is that it makes the writer’s experience better. In particular, improving the design can be a way of enhancing your ability to think and create.

What about great sites whose design is superficially terrible?... As mentioned above, I greatly admire Cosma Shalizi and Piero Scaruffi’s sites. But design-wise both appear stuck in 1995. I’m confident that if I left my site with their design aesthetic it would strongly negatively impact how I felt about my own work.

That said, both those authors have put a tremendous amount of work into unconventional aspects of the design. In particular, they’ve both thought a great deal about the organization of information: about categories, hierarchies, navigation, information density, and many other elements. (information architecture)

Design as finding new fundamental objects and actions to support thought

This is something gwern.net does unusually well. As just one example: at the top of each webpage is a rating of the webpage’s importance; of how certain he is of the contents; of how finished the page is; what links to the page; and a bibliography of all links.

More profoundly, Gwern Branwen’s webpages are truly interlinked.

Main page types
Essays
Working notes:
Ongoing:

Page types matter more than I think: You can see this in the inspiration sites I mentioned above. Many of the authors have thought hard about the different types of page on their site. gwern.net’s metadata, in particular, gives a very fine-grained account of the purpose of a page. Much of this is about getting your own relationship to the page right

On the assumptions around blogging (and online writing in general)

It’s true there are many tremendous blogs, blogs which support the thinking of the authors – Terry Tao, Tim Gowers, Scott Alexander, and many others. But I often wonder if they’re fighting against the form.

One trouble with blogging is that people subscribe to the blog, rather than each post finding its own audience.

A media form which does this better than blogs is academic journals... each article finds its own audience.

Another problem is that blogging is by-default ephemeral. (Stream/Flow Vs Garden/Stock)

Don’t aim to build an audience or engagement. Anti-market instead. (focus)

One of the worst ideas in online writing is the unqualified idea that you should be trying to build an audience or to build engagement. This may be good if you’re trying to sell something. But it needs a lot of qualifiers if it’s to support good thinking

Suppose you’re thinking deeply about something. You’ll stop often. Get stuck....You’ll pull ideas from all kinds of places, often including technical ideas only a tiny handful of people can be expected to know. And you’ll want to use those ideas as rapidly as you are able, freely associating. And yet almost all of these actions violate the conventional wisdom about how to build an audience and engagement.

A natural response to the above is: well, why not just do the thinking in private, then? Why impose it on the public at large?

This is a false dichotomy. There’s a very large gap between “think and write for just oneself”, and “try to write for the largest possible audience”. And different types of creative work are best done at different places within that gap.

There’s something strangely difficult in writing just for oneself. As far as I can tell, almost no-one can do it productively. Most people find this: you think you understand something, then try to explain it to others, and find your understanding has important holes. Or you find that when you speak to others you naturally improve your explanations.