Is it possible to be a good blogger if you don't have some kind of a chip on your shoulder?
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I think it’s possible, but you’d need a different source of motivation
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I don’t know what motivates people besides pettiness and resentment
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I think this is basically wrong. If you know what motivates you, you will generally find other media to express yourself, not blogging. Like Twitter. Blogging tends to clarify very illegible motives into less illegible ones.
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At least longform is this way. Pettiness and spite don't really sustain more than a few hundred words usually. It's a convergent, close-ended motive that kills generativity needed to power past ~1500.
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I don't know I've written 40,000 word books out of spite. Not saying they're good but strong hypothesis-driven perspectives are often motivated by some kind of anger at what you feel is a wrong in the world.
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Ah you fit under the "taleb exception" and that stuff is generally terrible. Too terrible to market. He's an exception. "I hate X" is a poor axiom for structuring big ideas. Like trying to build a house out of blood of enemies. Cement is better.
Well the history of philosophy is nothing but bitter blood feuds: the Stoics hated the Skeptics, the Positivists hated the Idealists, the Postmodernists hated everyone etc.
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I think you're confusing disagreement for hate to some extent. I do see resentment-driven longform in magazine editorial world though. Like New Yorker anti-tech resentment features as a genre. That's not quite blogging. I classify that with journalism.
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