On the nature of writing
Tommi:
The real reason why I am so bad
Last weekend a reader told me that he likes my short stories but never reads the long ones. For him and others I could say that my bad style of writing is, in addition to my obvious stupidity and being generally untalented, also due to a conscious choice.
The nature of knowledge is such that two heads can invent better than one who is given three times as much time. Of course I would enjoy producing text whose arguments would dispel every attack and whose bump-free purity of shape would bedazzle the reader, but I don't think that it would be fair. Somehow I think that if writing a text takes much longer than reading it, the writer's real motivation is not sharing his ideas but polishing his own image as a writer.
Of course you can think by yourself and achieve results doing so, but the effort to polish the result for publication often makes it harder to understand and grasp. An incomplete and unpolished text still has the signs of work in it so that other people can grab it and take it further. If you are really interested in advancing thought and knowledge, you should immediately let loose even your weakest ideas, since it is possible that someone else would develop them further than the originator of the idea ever could.
Besides, if it was made clear in the world of ideas that all thoughts always originate from somewhere else, they would (assuming there really is something to them) be developed collectively by making minor additions, then perhaps people would lose their authoritarian worship of "creative" and "talented" people.
Even though it is wise to respect people who are smarter than you, smart people are often tempted to bask in the social attention that shines on their achievements. As fun as this would be, it advances the fallacy of authority, which in turn makes it harder for people to understand the fact that the truth of a claim is determined only by the objective reality that is independent of our wishes, and some claim is either true or false independent of who makes it.
Perhaps the reader can guess from this why I always emphasize that I am stupid, ugly, a failure and wrong in every topic. I have thought about becoming anonymous for moral reasons, but I haven't been able to solve a few problems:
- It would be unfair to discuss known people behind the shield of anonymity.
- My personality is a factor that helps the reader to interpret my texts.
- Even if I became anonymous, my style of writing is so well-known that I would be immediately revealed.
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