I don't know. I get what pg is saying but I feel like he's missing some huge points here. I find that emotionally-laden content with overly-specified points co

I don't know. I get what pg is saying but I feel like he's missing some huge points here. I find that emotionally-laden content with overly-specified points combined with extreme surety sells better than more intellectual content that leaves many questions open to the reader. I find that in my own writing, over the years I'll take the same subject and move slowly from generalisms to specifics, and that *the process of reading, writing, and thinking about the generalisms are what drive the eventual specificity an confidence. I also find that writing and editing is itself thinking, that many times I don't slowly advance towards a goal until I've flailed around at the edges for a while. (Which he says as well, I think) Being wrong a lot in public helps to be eventually be right. There are things you'll never see unless you establish feedback mechanisms and run through them several times. There's a popular idea among some intellectuals that most books don't deserve to exist. I understand and mostly agree with that; there's been a ton of books that are supposed to say something that don't. There's also a ton of essays that show a writer wondering around in a field, circling around some idea they can barely express and how no idea how to understand. I'm okay with all of that. In fact, I think it's a good thing. I might not read any of it, but we need lots of people thinking about important things and trying to work through the issues. That's going to mean breaking a lot of these rules (or scoring low on the multiplied metric). Don't get me wrong, I like the metrics and they're a goal of mine. But you shouldn't write for other people, you should write for yourself. Otherwise you'll spend a lot of time worrying about what other people say about you. Write for yourself, figure out what's important to you, then work through becoming more and more specific as you grow. You don't play tennis by watching the scoreboard, you play by hitting the ball and engaging in the game. Likewise while you want to score high on these metrics, you've got to spread your intellectual wings and grow some. Otherwise it's just somebody talking to himself in an interesting manner. That might make a great thing to consume, but how useful is it actually? tl;dr it's better to write a lot, continue to score low on all of this as long as you're learning. Much better than scoring high and never changing.