When you write, you should try to say things that are obviously true, and spend very little time worrying about whether you’re being original. Ironically, this is the best way to do truly original writing.
\nEvery important idea has been discussed already. I learned this in grad school for philosophy1, but it’s true across the board. Almost every field2 has generations of very smart people who’ve spent their whole lives thinking about the biggest problems. If you try to only write about ideas that are truly brand-new, you will restrict yourself to writing about ideas that weren’t important enough to be considered before: in other words, trivia and ephemera.
\nWhat happens if you focus on the obvious instead? Writing about things that are obviously true is surprisingly difficult. Writing about anything is difficult, because reality has a surprising amount of detail. Still, writing about obvious things is especially difficult, because they’re almost too obvious to see.
\nIt’s trivial for me to come up with non-obvious things I believe (for instance, I don’t like database foreign keys), but it’s hard for me to articulate the parts of what I believe that are truly fundamental. I think it’s the same reason why I can’t see the glasses on my face: they’re not something I look at, they’re something I look with. The beliefs you consider the most obvious often play a role like this. Writing about them can be really worthwhile, because reading about your basic assumptions can help other people articulate and examine their own.
\nMy most popular blog post — How I ship projects at big tech companies — is a nice example. I knew I had strong opinions on how to ship projects (if for no other reason than I kept watching other people doing it wrong), but it took hours of sitting down and writing to realise that I actually just had a different definition of “shipping”3, and that all of my object-level advice flowed naturally from that. That definition was so obvious I struggled to notice it at all.
\nThe other reason to try and be obvious is that trying to be original is really boring. Here’s a quote from Keith Johnstone’s Impro, a book I consider far too cult-like but that does have some great advice about originality:
\n\n\nIf someone says ‘What’s for supper?’ a bad improviser will desperately try to think up something original. Whatever he says he’ll be too slow. He’ll finally drag up some idea like ‘fried mermaid’. If he’d just said ‘fish’ the audience would have been delighted. No two people are exactly alike, and the more obvious an improviser is, the more himself he appears. If he wants to impress us with his originality, then he’ll search out ideas that are actually commoner and less interesting. I gave up asking London audiences to suggest where scenes should take place. Some idiot would always shout out either ‘Leicester Square public lavatories’ or ‘outside Buckingham Palace’ (never ‘inside Buckingham Palace’). People trying to be original always arrive at the same boring old answers. Ask people to give you an original idea and see the chaos it throws them into. If they said the first thing that came into their head, there’d be no problem.
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I think this is absolutely correct. When you’re trying to be original, you’re striking out into nothingness, and you’ll likely end up pattern-matching to “something that sounds kind of transgressive”, which is as boring as it sounds. When you’re trying to say something obvious, you’re reflecting on your own experiences, which have the interesting grit and detail of reality, and are far more likely to sound original to your readers.
\nIf you think you’re the first to have a philosophical idea, you’re probably not even in the first few hundred to write about it.
\n↩\nOf course, if you’re in a brand new field of study, it’s easy to make a lot of original observations very quickly. I call this the “gentleman scientist” era of a field. It’s good to try and be original in these limited circumstances, because there’s such a wealth of ideas that nobody has tried yet.
\n↩\nIn brief, I think “shipping” is socially defined: something is shipped when the relevant decision-makers at a company agree that it is shipped.
\n↩\nEvery post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish.
Typically I learn way more than two things. For instance, in my o3 geoguessr post, I started out with the idea that most AI prompts probably don’t work, and I ended up learning that newer OpenAI models have lost o3’s ability to geolocate. That’s interesting! In my most recent post on C2PA, I started out with the idea that C2PA requires near-universal adoption, but I learned a ton of things about PKI, managing private keys on local devices, how C2PA actually works, and so on. In my post on the Luddites, I started out with the idea that the Luddite movement was fundamentally decentralized, but ended up fascinated by Luddite culture (which was far more elitist, misogynist, and violent than the pop-Luddism books describe). I could do this for every single post on the blog.
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