4 ms·

Such an insightful article. I'm really curious how one acquires the knowledge and develops the skills needed to write so eloquently about a deeply complicated

Such an insightful article. I'm really curious how one acquires the knowledge and develops the skills needed to write so eloquently about a deeply complicated topic. What does patio11 read, who are the people he interacts with, what helped him nurture his exploratory traits, how does he structure new knowledge. It's all a fascinating mystery to me.

jraines 4y ago
It’s probably less who he reads, than how much he writes, and on top of that who reads him. By the latter I mean partially that he likely gets good feedback, but moreso that if you know your audience, have generally been rewarded for writing for them, and have a credible belief they’ll read the next thing, you’re going to aim high and be serious about self-criticism & improvement.
- vjulian 4y ago
  I’m sure he reads and writes a lot—out of a love of language. Keen attention to detail and a sense of personal style…for instance his use of ‘make due’ instead if ‘make do’. That’s like wearing an ascot and sport coat where everyone else is wearing a boring fleece.
roenxi 4y ago
I suspect he is giving you a hint in the first paragraph of the article: > ...Europe generally (being fundamentally unserious about power policy)... What makes this article unusual is it is a serious attempt at grappling with a political topic - asking what the underlying pressures and technical requirements might be. That makes it read very differently to a lot of 'debates' where neither side is treating the topic seriously (whether that is not painting the full picture, repeating talking points, direct lies and people stopping to talk about lies, motivated or sloppy reasoning, illogical arguments, a refusal to engage with huge differences in order of magnitude, etc). If you write a lot of short-form comments (Twitter, HN, corporate media or reddit for example - anything that promotes slogans or soundbites) you probably won't learn to write like this in a million years, because they aren't environments that promote seriously dealing with topics. HN can just about manage to talk seriously on the subject programming/software, but it often has a weird disjointed style where the thought is spread across multiple comments with different authors.
patio11 4y ago
The writing ability is partially reading a lot and more writing a lot; I'm at at least ~3.5 million published words and probably another 1.5 million or so behind various firewalls. This is a lot more reps than most people, including most professional writers (somewhat surprisingly), get on writing. With regards to being able to learn about things, historically I've been weighted more towards "I read more on the Internet than almost anyone thinks is reasonable", but my job and market position have brought me into contact with people who are domain experts at various things, and when I'm planning to write about e.g. power generation I share initial thoughts with someone quite professionally familiar with that topic in Japan and e.g. they point me in the direction of virtual power plants as another subject to read about / include. From my point of view on things, my worry is erring in the direction of too explainer-y and too "smart generalist who overrates his understanding of things that he's got ~hours of time invested in." I aspire to routinely delight people who are legitimate experts adjacent to the areas I'm covering and help non-expert professionals quickly get the right set of mental models to inform their own work.

jraines 4y ago

It’s probably less who he reads, than how much he writes, and on top of that who reads him. By the latter I mean partially that he likely gets good feedback, but moreso that if you know your audience, have generally been rewarded for writing for them, and have a credible belief they’ll read the next thing, you’re going to aim high and be serious about self-criticism & improvement.

vjulian 4y ago
I’m sure he reads and writes a lot—out of a love of language. Keen attention to detail and a sense of personal style…for instance his use of ‘make due’ instead if ‘make do’. That’s like wearing an ascot and sport coat where everyone else is wearing a boring fleece.

roenxi 4y ago

I suspect he is giving you a hint in the first paragraph of the article: > ...Europe generally (being fundamentally unserious about power policy)... What makes this article unusual is it is a serious attempt at grappling with a political topic - asking what the underlying pressures and technical requirements might be. That makes it read very differently to a lot of 'debates' where neither side is treating the topic seriously (whether that is not painting the full picture, repeating talking points, direct lies and people stopping to talk about lies, motivated or sloppy reasoning, illogical arguments, a refusal to engage with huge differences in order of magnitude, etc). If you write a lot of short-form comments (Twitter, HN, corporate media or reddit for example - anything that promotes slogans or soundbites) you probably won't learn to write like this in a million years, because they aren't environments that promote seriously dealing with topics. HN can just about manage to talk seriously on the subject programming/software, but it often has a weird disjointed style where the thought is spread across multiple comments with different authors.

patio11 4y ago

The writing ability is partially reading a lot and more writing a lot; I'm at at least ~3.5 million published words and probably another 1.5 million or so behind various firewalls. This is a lot more reps than most people, including most professional writers (somewhat surprisingly), get on writing. With regards to being able to learn about things, historically I've been weighted more towards "I read more on the Internet than almost anyone thinks is reasonable", but my job and market position have brought me into contact with people who are domain experts at various things, and when I'm planning to write about e.g. power generation I share initial thoughts with someone quite professionally familiar with that topic in Japan and e.g. they point me in the direction of virtual power plants as another subject to read about / include. From my point of view on things, my worry is erring in the direction of too explainer-y and too "smart generalist who overrates his understanding of things that he's got ~hours of time invested in." I aspire to routinely delight people who are legitimate experts adjacent to the areas I'm covering and help non-expert professionals quickly get the right set of mental models to inform their own work.