"why don't you write a blog, alfred"

(this medium page is not a blog)

I get this question a lot, and I do have a substack, but this question isn't asking exactly that, it's more like "why don't you post the ideas here on a blog"

I have ADHDish thoughtfloods often, i.e. a burst of ideas so intrusive that unless I articulate them (either in writing or via an otter recording) I will have that thought in my head for hours and be unable to think about anything else or focus on anything else, much like how it's difficult to concentrate when you feel a massive urge to poop

and, much like pooping, I resolve this by thoughtdumping on facebook. most of my posts — let’s say 19 out of 20 — are from-the-dome or more or less completely improvised. you don’t structure a dump. you dump.

"but lots of people make blog posts as long as your facebook posts" yes, well, I know that, but:

(1) those people are the informational, epistemic, and authorial equivalent of people selling cheap mass-market souvenirs from a tourist trap gift shop, and

(2) to be very blunt about this I think they either think slower than me or write slower than me or both. my top-of-the-dome is their deep dive. my system 1 their system 2, my warmup their workout and so on. there are of course legitimate reasons to write 250-500 word blog posts, but I think in the case of sociopolitical commentary and philosophy it's a compromise.

I type at a low end of 115wpm and a peak of 145. my compositional WPM — the words I actually write per minute — is between 20 and 90, depending on how much I already know what I’m going to say. this post took between three and five minutes to write, which is somewhere between the length of "old town road" by lil nas x and "lose yourself" by eminem.

my facebook posts take between 30 seconds and 10 minutes to make in 99% of cases. a proper blog post will take between 5-10 hours to gather the citations and account for all of the objections a much larger audience might make. blogging is the next step up in rigor from what I’m doing, and a step in rigor before writing an academic article.

(and if you think I’m just ac hoc-ing this, here’s dan luu saying basically the same thing: https://archive.ph/dbz4D)

so, "why don’t you write a blog" is sort of a self-answering question — because then it’d be writing a blog.