Half A Month Of Consolation Writing Advice
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This month, rationalist institution Lighthaven is running their second Inkhaven, a bootcamp for aspiring bloggers. Participants have to publish a post a day, or they get kicked out. You can read their posts here.
I’m too old to manage that pace, but agreed to participate as an advisor. Then I missed the first half of the month because I was on a trip. As compensation, here are fifteen pieces of writing advice for the fifteen days I was absent.
1: Against microdishonesty
Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.
I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.
There are countless reasons to lie when you’re writing. Maybe you thought of a really clever introduction, but the thing it introduces is 5% different from the thing you really want to say, so you need to be a little vague and smush them together. Maybe you have a really great perspective on something which is almost like the topic du jour, and you need to make it sound like it’s exactly the topic du jour to get it published. Maybe you can rebut 99 out of 100 arguments for some stupid evil position that you want to debunk, but it would be embarrassing to leave one hanging, so you smudge it together into the other 99 arguments. English will punish you for all these things. Sometimes there’s no better solution and you have to settle, but your readers will notice.
One mentee asked me to fix an autobiographical essay. The first part, about how a certain trauma made them lose faith in humanity, was great. But they wanted help with the second part, on how they worked hard to see the best in everyone and eventually recovered. They couldn’t make it sound right. After some prodding, we diagnosed the problem: their regaining of faith in humanity was still sort of aspirational. They’d tried hard to see the best in people. There had been a few small victories, and some seeds that might grow into something more. But the bulk of their “recovery of faith” section was being driven more by their feeling that, c’mon, you’ve got to have a “recovery of faith” section in an essay like that, than by any real positive feelings. I dunno, man. Maybe you should change all of your verbs to the active voice, I hear that helps.
2: Avoid cliches like the plague
This is the legally mandated header for any discussion of cliches. The problem is, it means everyone knows that “like the plague” is a cliche, but no one’s sure about anything else. Are the following the sorts of cliches you should be avoiding?
“In some sense”
“In the grand scheme of things”
“Once in a blue moon”
“Through diligent practice”
“Comparing apples to apples”
“The arc of history”
“The data say”
“Life hack”
“Would be a good start”
My answer: it doesn’t matter, you will never remove all of these from your writing, and you’ll go crazy if you try, working yourself into a state of hypersensitivity where your fingers start typing “a good start” and then you catch yourself and replace it with “a beneficial beginning” or something equally barbaric. In some sense, in the grand scheme of things, cliches are semantic building blocks, bigger than words but smaller than entire concepts; reject the ones handed to you by past generations, and you will have to build every brick of your edifice from scratch as you go.
So what’s left of avoiding cliches like the plague? The ACLTP commandment is usually interpreted as being about deleting the cliche - just say “avoid cliches”! - and this too has its season. But I’ve found it helpful to think of cliches as missed quest hooks - signs that you could have said something really unique and interesting here. What about “Avoid cliches with all the ferocity of Jim Cramer avoiding good stock picks”?
If you do this all the time, you’ll either end up cringe or the next Shakespeare, no middle ground. But if you do it once in a blue moon, your writing will get much more interesting.
3: Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for thirty years
Freshman English class tells you to avoid passive voice. Senior English class tells you that’s garbage, your freshman English teacher was a dunce, Shakespeare or Hemingway or whoever used passive voice all the time. As usual, the synthesis is to avoid the bad thing that passive voice points at. If you’re Shakespeare or Hemingway, you can effortlessly avoid the bad thing while writing your sentences as passively as you want. If you’re just getting started, practice by avoiding passive voice until this effort gives you an ear for the indescribable bad thing, then avoid the indescribable bad thing directly.
The last time they held Inkhaven, I fantasized about telling my mentees to go to a monastery on a distant mountaintop and submit to some discipline for thirty years. Then, after they had mastered it, they could come down from the mountain and write however they wanted. Sure, be like Shakespeare and Hemingway and write lots of passive sentences - after you’ve spent thirty years on a mountaintop writing in only active voice.
Disciplines I’ve considered assigning people:
No adverbs. Mark Twain once said, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
No excessively strong language. “Humongous”, “amazing”, “crazy”, etc. These words are fun, but beginners turn them into a crutch, and after the fiftieth humongous amazing crazy thing your readers will become so annoyed by adjective inflation that they’ll start asking Jerome Powell to raise the literary interest rate.
No hedging. “It seems to me that possibly snow might be the sort of thing that is white, although other people might presumably differ”. No! Go to the mountaintop until you can write “Snow is white”. Then, when you leave the mountain, at least you’ll write some normal healthy hedge like “Snow is probably white” instead of some godforsaken sentence with eight nested layers of hedging.
No first-person presence. I fail at this constantly - I’m failing right now - there it was again! - but the mountaintop would at least teach you to separate strategic deployment of your personality from a compulsive tic to insert yourself where you don’t belong. There’s usually no need to say “I think the evidence shows that snow is white”. It’s an essay by you! Everyone already knows it’s what you think! If you say “The evidence shows snow is white”, the reader will hardly be confused about whose opinion it is.
No words like “obviously”. Either it’s obvious to the reader, in which case there’s no need to say this, or it’s not obvious, in which case it’s insulting. This is just another form of hedging - you feel so bad about making assertions that you have to qualify them with a “Don’t hurt me, I’m only saying this because it’s impossible for anyone to ever disagree.”
4: Untangle your sentences
The superprinciple of avoiding passive voice is avoiding tangled sentences. Consider:
Bob hit the ball.
The ball was hit by Bob.
The thing that was hit by Bob was the ball.
As for the thing that Bob hit, it was the ball.
As for the thing that was hit by Bob, it was the ball.
None of these are universally wrong. There are rare times where #5 is exactly what you want to say. For example:
Bob ran into his mother’s arms, face contorted with panic. “I just killed my friend Alex!” It all came out at once. “Alex dared me to try to play baseball while blindfolded. I thought I heard the pitch coming, and swung the bat as hard as I could. I heard a terrible cracking noise, and then Alex’s scream. When I took off the blindfold and looked down, there was his body, with a big gash on his skull. I touched it and my hand got covered with blood.”
But before his mother could answer, Alex walked in, looking pleased with himself. He explained that the whole thing had been a prank. He’d thrown a normal pitch, then ran over, screamed and fallen. The blood that had rubbed off on Bob’s finger was just ketchup. The gash that had scared Bob so much was just a sticker, sold as part of a Halloween costume. As for the thing that was hit by Bob, it was the ball.
But usually something like #5 happens because you started off focusing on the wrong thing, then wrote the sentence around it without thinking.
Here are some more subtle examples I’m taking from my own drafts and from some of the posts I edited last Inkhaven:
It scales sublinearly to give them this amount of money → Giving them this amount of money scales sublinearly.
In my own experience on GLP-1 medication, my experience of hunger/appetite is unaffected → In my own experience, GLP-1 medication doesn’t affect my experience of hunger.
How this usually works in practice is that young people don’t try it → In practice, young people don’t try it.
John was the person who we were looking for → We were looking for John.
It wasn’t until the third millennium BC that writing became common → Writing didn’t become common until the third millennium BC.
He has the ability to talk about whatever he likes → he can talk about whatever he likes.
All of these are like the passive voice: Shakespeare and Hemingway probably used them, they add some variety to writing, good writers will yell at me and say they’re all great. I still think that you should go to a distant mountaintop for thirty years and practice avoiding them. After you come back down, you can use them as much as you want.
5: Against explainers
I’m not completely against explainers; some of my posts probably qualify. But when I get asked to edit the Inkhaven residents’ explainers, something about them feels hollow.
Suppose someone is writing an AI explainer. Everyone knows the basics of what AI is, in the sense of “it’s when computers can do things like humans”. So what do you put in your explainer? Prompt engineering advice? The reasons some people don’t like data centers? The exact number of layers in the transformer architecture? Just start printing the weights of Kimi K2, -0.4 0.0 0.84 1.23 -0.07 and so on?
The original sin of this kind of explainer is that you don’t really have a reason for writing it. Or rather, your reason for writing it is “I feel like I should write an AI explainer” - maybe because you’re the New York Times tech section and you know AI is important and your readers want to feel like they’re on top of this important thing - and this reason doesn’t constrain the content in any way. This is its own sort of microdishonesty - the reader wants to feel like the sort of educated person who learns things about AI, you want to present yourself as the sort of knowledgeable authority who informs people about AI, you need to have some content in your AI article to maintain the charade, but it doesn’t really matter what the content is.
The more honest version of this is something like - suppose you think AI is a scam. You want to convince your readers of this. Here the content is perfectly constrained - it’s the reasons you think that AI is a scam, presented in whatever way best conveys your case to the reader. It would be pretty hard for someone who strongly believes that AI is a scam and has thought about it a lot and has good reasons for their belief to get writer’s block on their “why AI is a scam” article. They might have trouble figuring out how to arrange their essay - what to put down first - but that’s it.
If you have to do an explainer, consider framing it as the answer to some question or set of questions. An AI explainer could be “How does AI work?”, “What can I use AI for?”, “Why are some people against AI?”, etc. Even these aren’t perfect. Your discussion of how AI works will be poorly constrained: what do you even talk about there? But it’s something you can imagine someone feeling genuine curiosity about. If it helps, imagine a child asking the question innocently, because they really want to know. What kind of answer would satisfy their curiosity?
6: The Traditional Five Paragraph Essay
Another much-hated staple of freshman English class.
In case you were absent that day: the first paragraph is the introduction. Traditionally, it starts with some kind of overly broad philosophical-sounding statement: “Since the beginning of time, mankind has sought to know the size of the quark”. You go on in that vein for a few sentences, until finally you reach the last sentence of the first paragraph: your thesis statement, the thing the entire essay will argue for. “In this essay, I shall show that the quark is extremely large.”
Each of the next three paragraphs presents one piece of evidence for your thesis. The first sentence of each is a topic sentence: “The first piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from particle accelerators”. Then several sentences describing what you mean and why this is true. Next paragraph. “The second piece of evidence that the quark is large comes from theory.” And so on.
The fifth paragraph is the conclusion, where you say what you said. “In this essay, we have shown that the quark is extremely large. We have presented evidence from particle accelerators, from theory, and from eyewitness reports of people who have seen them.” Then you end with some kind of overly-broad philosophical-sounding flourish: “In the end, one thing is clear: learning about subatomic particles is part of what makes us human.”
People are basically right to hate this. It’s lazy, it’s cliched, it’s soulless. But when I try to teach people writing, I find myself coming back to it again and again. I ask my mentees questions like: What is your thesis? How does this paragraph here support the thesis? Why doesn’t the first sentence of the paragraph telegraph that? Why don’t you have your topic sentence where I’m expecting a topic sentence to be? How come you telegraph that you’re going to make this argument, and then you never mention it again? Why did you end so abruptly?
Write the Traditional Five Paragraph Essay on a distant mountaintop for thirty years. Then, when you come down, please please please write something else.
7: Against the blogosphere
The problem with bloggers is that they read blogs. So when they want to write about their exciting new opinion, it’s probably an opinion they got from a blog.
The problem with blog readers is that they also read blogs. So when they read your opinion that you got from a blog, they’ll think “Oh yeah, I read that on that other guy’s blog last week.”
The end result is that everyone talks about the same thing over and over, hoping they can be the one to educate the last person on Substack who hasn’t heard that social priming studies don’t replicate, or that stairwell restrictions are bad housing policy.
I remember thinking about this when writing my review of Seeing Like A State. I’m not cool enough to naturally in the course of my life read random books by professors of Southeast Asian anthropology, notice that they are good and relevant, and write about them. I learned about Seeing Like A State the same way as everyone else: it was a popular Silicon Valley blogosphere meme, and people were always talking about the flaws of High Modernism and replacing targets with measures and so on. At that point, the least useful thing I could do was write about Seeing Like A State. If I were actually virtuous, I would have hit some library full of other books by random Southeast Asian anthropologists until I found another that was equally exciting, then reviewed that one.
But I will say in my own defense: at least I read the book. If everything good in writing comes from contact with the world, then your goodness is proportional to how direct your contact is. Best-case scenario, you live with a Southeast Asian tribe yourself and report your results. Second-best case, you at least read the book by the guy who did that and form your own opinion. Third-best case, now you’re reading a blog post by someone who read the book, three levels distant from the world. But even that’s getting rarer. Now people are reading tweets by someone who read the review of the book by the person who met the tribe, and forming opinions based on those. At that point, almost all the work is being done by the prejudices of your sources, rather than brute facts about Southeast Asians.
You contribute to the blogosphere by injecting first-level facts about the world, or second-level primary sources by experts who have gotten the first-level facts. You draw down those contributions by playing too many games of telephone with popular topics that you got from the blogosphere itself.
8: Watching paint dry
One of my mentees reminded me of a perhaps ill-advised comment I made on my Dwarkesh podcast: I said that I found about one new blogger per year who I really liked. Given that there were 40 aspiring new bloggers in the first Inkhaven class alone, the odds seem pretty abysmal, don’t they?
So let me clarify my remark: there are two ways to make people read you.
First, you can write competently about topics that people care about. For example, if you’re an AI expert, you can write about some detail of AI training, and then the other people who want to know how to train AIs will read your post. The bar here is low: your prose must not be so bad that it actively repels people.
Second, you can write brilliantly about anything. Consider Matt Levine. I have no interest in finance. Even though I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars by understanding finance better, every time I consider doing this I bounce off the fact that all the relevant books include terms like “credit default swap” and “ergodicity”. But the first time I read Matt Levine’s finance newsletter, I thought “I am going to read this approximately every day for the rest of my life”, and I was right - even though I will never trade credit default swaps or do anything else that would make reading Matt Levine directly valuable to me.
Likewise, many discussions of Freddie deBoer start “I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.” Then in what sense are you a fan? “Well, I read all of his posts.” Good work if you can get it.
If you write brilliantly, the world will read your review of watching paint dry. If you’re a normal person, you have to content yourself with reaching the limited subset of people who are interested in your topic.
There’s one new brilliant person per year, maybe less. But dozens of bloggers - dozens! - reach the lower bar of providing value to the people who care about the same things they do. That could be you!
9: “Where do you get your ideas?”
A man comes to the kung fu master and asks “Can kung fu help me defeat my enemies?”
The master tells him to study at the monastery for thirty years. Over thirty years, he learns increasingly powerful techniques. Finally the master says “Your training is complete; now you can defeat any enemy who dares stand against you.”
“Great,” says the man, “Just one more question: where do you get your enemies?”
10: There are effortposts everywhere for those eyes to see
There’s almost no topic so overdone that you can’t be the first person to do a good job writing about it.
What’s the most over-discussed topic in 2026 US politics? Maybe immigrant crime? But how many blog posts have you read that actually do a good job analyzing whether immigrants commit more crime than natives? Table stakes for such a post would be to admit this is mostly true in Europe and mostly false in the US, but most people never get that far. And why is immigrant criminality so different in the US vs. Europe? Which of the two patterns applies to other countries like Canada, Australia, etc? And although first-generation immigrants in the US commit less crime than natives, does the second generation revert to the mean? (yes). To the general population mean, or the mean of their race? (mostly the latter, plus some subtleties). Can you turn this into a theory where immigration would net increase crime in the long run even in the US? (maybe). Is that theory true under current immigrant demographics? (I haven’t gotten this far). When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day.
Racial bias in the justice system. Wage stagnation. Whether COVID lockdowns worked. Some of the posts I’m proudest of involved taking a topic everyone was talking about, then being (as far as I can tell) the first blogger to put in significant effort to see which side was right.
(Not the first person; often the answers are hidden in old scientific papers. But ordinary people won’t know about those papers unless someone blogs about them.)
You can go even further. In theory, we’ve spent the past ten years arguing about whether wokeness is good or bad. In practice, have you ever seen a thoughtful, well-crafted essay called something like “Wokeness Is Good/Bad And Here Is Why?”, pitched to someone on the opposite side of the argument, intended to convince them that actually, wokeness is good/bad? Might you be the first?
This is part of why I can’t help mocking people who ask “Where do you get your ideas?” If you put in a modicum of effort, the fruit is so low-hanging that it’s burrowing tiny fruit boreholes until it dissolves into molten plant matter somewhere near the Mohorovicic discontinuity.
And this is why Bentham’s Bulldog rules Substack. As a writer, he’s competent (his prose is clear and doesn’t detract from his topic) but not brilliant (where I would happily read him write about drying paint). As a tastemaker, his topics range from standard among effective altruists, to standard among everyone - one recent banger was about whether Continental philosophy is bad and obscurantist! But he dives into them earnestly and seriously, and many of his posts are worthy of being canonical references for whatever topic he’s writing about.
He’s done this for about 0.01% of the interesting ideas. The rest are still wide open.
11: In partial, extremely grudging praise of Mikhail Samin
Mikhail Samin was part of the previous class of Inkhaven residents. On his first day, he wrote a vicious attack on Lightcone - the universally-beloved community institution that runs Lighthaven and Inkhaven itself - saying that they were making the world worse, and that nobody should donate to them. I can’t stress enough that he posted this on the first day of a monthlong commitment to live on Lightcone’s campus, eat their food, go to their workshops, and interact daily with their staff - some of whom he insulted by name.
I like Lightcone. I’ve donated to them and I encourage others to do so. I think Mikhail’s criticisms were wrong and unfair. He probably made the rest of Inkhaven several percent more awkward for everybody. I’m not saying this was wise, or correct, or good. Still, I can’t help being impressed: Mikhail has the true blogger spirit. This was the first Inkhaven post that I remember talking about with multiple friends: “Whoa, did you read that?” Granted, only because it was so tremendously ill-advised. But we did talk about it.
Everyone knows controversy sells. But it takes true blogger spirit to get it right. If you half-ass it, you’ll end up writing something about Trump or gays or whiteness indistinguishable from the thousand other essays on those topics. Or you’ll end up writing some tongue-in-cheek Against Cute Puppies post that you don’t really believe, and your readers will know you don’t believe it. There’s a certain talent - not everyone has it, but Mikhail does - involved in aiming your kick directly at the center of the hornet’s nest.
When I think back on my favorite times I made my readers mad, they didn’t involve anything about Trump or gays or whiteness. One was the post defending the phrase “I’m sorry you feel that way”. The other was when I argued against “the purpose of a system is what it does”. I’m still proud of both of those and I’m still right, sorry.
True blogger spirit is something different from offensiveness, controversy, or true hostility. It’s a sort of lightly-held fightiness that lets you notice unexpected opportunities to start pointless yet delightful conflicts. Probably it will make your life worse. But at least it will entertain other people along the way. And if most of your readers disagree with your thesis, at least you know you’re not wasting your time in arguing for it!
Unrelatedly, I enjoyed this Mikhail tweet about Eliezer Yudkowsky.
12: The purpose of poetry
The purpose of poetry is that it’s beautiful and good. Far be it from me to be the sort of Grinch who demands there be a purpose to poetry beyond this.
But if I were that sort of Grinch, I would say the purpose of poetry is to close off your options so that you have no choice but to avoid cliches like the plague.
A few months back, I was playing with the idea of writing an optimists’ counterpart to Philip Larkin’s super-depressing This Be The Verse. I got as far as:
Man passes ecstasy to man
It rises up like ________________
Enjoy your time here while you can
And if you’re up for it, have kids
So, okay, I need a simile for rising. Several present themselves. There’s the exact opposite of the original poem’s “coastal shelf” - it rises up like a mountain. But that doesn’t fit the rhyme or meter. Like the sun, like a hot air balloon, like an airplane, like bread in the oven - all the same problem. Gotta have something that rhymes with kids!
After running through every -ids word I could think of, I got “It rises up, like auction bids”, which, not to toot my own horn, is spectacular. Just a 10x better simile than the sun or balloons or whatever. Totally unpredictable beforehand, exactly right when you think about it. It makes me imagine myself finding some odd collectible in my attic, getting it auctioned off, learning that it’s actually the rare 1895 version that was owned by Queen Victoria. Two rich guys start going at it - one million! No, two million! No, TEN MILLION! and I’m just sitting there, stunned by my impossible good fortune as the numbers shoot higher and higher. And that’s what life is like, at least according to Nega-Philip-Larkin.
We, as mere mortals, cannot come up with similes like this. Our brains will too quickly throw up hot-air balloons and sunrises. Only after we force ourselves into an artificially desperate situation can we avoid cliche like the plague and reach the originality beyond. This is the purpose of poetry. But nothing prevents you from writing prose by opening a dictionary to a random page and trying to end your sentences with a word that rhymes with whatever comes up.
By the way, this whole section is a metaphor for life.
13: Runway
Once you’ve been in the Bay Area too long you lose the ability to speak in anything besides startup metaphors. “Runway” means that if your investors give you $1 million, and you burn $200,000 a month, you have five months “runway” before you have to “take off” by achieving something that gets you more money (either becoming profitable or justifying further investment). If you waste four months arguing about the color of the office carpet, you only have one month left to develop a product.
Your audience chose to read you for some reason. Maybe you had a catchy title. Maybe someone they liked recommended you. Maybe the algorithm placed your post in front of their eyes while they sat there drooling and immobile. They had some hope that reading you would be mildly more interesting than the alternative. That’s your runway. It will last a few sentences to a few paragraphs before they drift off. Don’t waste your first few paragraphs defining something everyone already knows the definition of, or telling a rambling story about why you decided to write this (“So I was in my favorite coffee shop, which has blue curtains, sitting next to a woman with a small grey dog, when I thought: why not write about . . . “)
14: Conflict and mystery
These drive plenty of fiction plots, but they’re also among the best tools for nonfiction.
Suppose you’re writing about something very boring, like the size of the quark. One pop-sci strategy is to discuss it through the lens of some purely human conflict between opposing thinkers. “Einstein thought the quark was small, but Oppenheimer thought it was big. They came to blows outside the Princeton bar. The girl they both liked said she would marry whichever one of them was right about quark sizes.”
Does this make you feel kind of dirty? Don’t worry: the conflict of ideas works too. “Every experimental result agrees that the quark is small. But every theoretical model says the quark absolutely has to be big, or else nothing else in physics makes sense.” This is enough conflict and mystery to hold my interest!
One of the Inkhaven posts, When The Heck Did Hammurabi Actually Rule? starts with:
Hammurabi was the king of Babylon. He reigned about 3800 years ago in Mesopotamia, in what’s now Iraq. You may have heard of his code of laws. I say “about” 3800 years ago because there are several possibilities for exactly when he reigned. Right now, the leading hypothesis is 1792-1750 BCE, but it could also be 1848-1806 BCE, or 1728-1686 BCE. Or even 1696-1654 BCE . . . If we’re uncertain, why are those dates so specific?
This has conflict - the conflict between the different sets of dates. It has mystery - why are the dates so precise? This was a good use of this post’s runway, which kept me reading further.
15: What can’t the reader trivially regenerate from a prompt?
Suppose I’m writing about whether you should get married early, or wait to find the right person. This is a great topic - it immediately introduces a conflict (between those two options) which many readers might be very invested in. I might include considerations like:
If you force yourself to marry too early, you might have to accept a worse partner than you could have found later.
If you wait too late, you might pass your (or your partner’s) fertility window and not be able to have as many children as you want.
If you force yourself to marry too early, you lose the opportunity to spend those years having a wild and memorable youth.
If you wait too late, you lose the opportunity to spend those years building a deep relationship with someone you love…
Maybe I take the pro-waiting side and only list the odd-numbered considerations; maybe I take the anti-waiting side and list the evens; maybe I’m just a neutral observer and list all of them.
Here’s my problem with this blog post: I thought of these in thirty seconds. Am I smarter than you? I’m not a marriage counselor, or a psychologist studying relationships, or a person who married at the wrong time and learned a valuable lesson. I’m just some guy who spent thirty seconds listing the obvious considerations on both sides. You could also spend thirty seconds and come up with these same obvious considerations. So why bother reading me?
This question - why should I think I have something useful to tell my readers? - is central to all nonfiction. Here are some plausible answers for why even essays on commonly-considered topics might be valuable:
[after writing this part, I realized you could trivially regenerate my list in thirty seconds, so I deleted it]
15.5: Just say the thing you want to say
I missed half of day sixteen, so I need half a piece of advice, and this is really just a riff on section one.
If your complaint is “I had a hard time writing this essay, because I think this point is mostly true but I’m not sure how it addresses objection Y”, your new thesis is “this point is mostly true but I’m not sure how it addresses objection Y”. That’s a fine thesis. It’s a little more complicated, but this is counterbalanced by the increased ease of writing what you actually believe.
A pleasant surprise I’ve had when blogging is that when I err in the direction of honesty - admitting when I’m wrong, signposting where I don’t understand something, accurately conveying my uncertainty - people praise my honesty, and nothing bad happens. This is to the credit of my readers and community (ie you). But most ACX readers trying to blog will have a similar audience and can also expect this pleasant surprise.
Your writing is the coherent extrapolated volition of your thoughts. It’s what your thoughts would be if you “knew more, thought faster, were more the person you wished you were, had grown up further, converged rather than diverged, extrapolated as you wish you could extrapolated, interpreted as you wish could interpret”. With unlimited time to outline and rewrite, and unlimited working memory in the form of the blank page in front of you, you can polish and rarefy your thoughts until they shine. But they should still be, in the end, your thoughts. Don’t get so hung up on the writing process that you become unfaithful to them in any way.