# [[Hot takes are tempting but lead into rabbit holes]] ###### March 26, 2023 ##### Publishing online regularly to think "with the garage door open" is a concept I like a lot, but there are pitfalls. # A recent discussion on the New Models Discord raised an issue with publishing online: the mechanics of the currently dominating social media platforms reward brevity, sharpness and originality. These are all qualities of good writing, but they also have their downsides: - excessive brevity deletes nuance and uncertainty of ideas - extreme sharpness makes statements more polarizing, fueling the social media outrage spiral - forced originality creates redundant complexity and disguises preexisting strains of thought How to avoid these effects of the medium on the message? I think accepting a reduced virality of the content posted online could be a first step. Longer form writing on blog platforms is a good first step to avoid the worst effects, but you have to live with the reduced reach and impact. But how many people do I HAVE to reach anyways? "Working with the garage door open" and "Doing a discount yard sale from the garage" are structurally similar things, but with different goals. So it might come down to **honesty of objectives** towards myself: do I want to work on things I would have worked on anyways, or do I actually want to sell something (to many people preferably)? Another thing I see in many digital gardens^[https://devonzuegel.com/post/epistemic-statuses-are-lazy-and-that-is-a-good-thing] & like: disclosure of the **epistemic status of ideas**. "I might be wrong" can go a long way and the inclusion of possible counterarguments can work against the monocausality of "Hot Take" writing. Lastly, on originality: I used to think that I have to come up with original and funny terms for my ideas all the time. After a while I realized this does not scale well, because it leads into weird rabbit holes of a claimed substance that in fact was not much more than a reframing of existing ideas. Same things should be called the same to **avoid intellectual redundancy** and the trap of building personal frameworks to explain the world aka conspiracy theories.^[![[IMG_0048.jpeg]][@](https://twitter.com/NicolasGalita/status/1634096281516646400?s=20)]