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Mar 2, 2023Liked by tailcalled

This was very good, thank you. Your writing is very dense, almost textbook like. But your posts have always been worth it when I have the time/stamina to parse them.

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What an unusual little blog you've begun! I found you from astralcodex.com from your comment "I draw the opposite conclusion that you do. Since a lot of the psychological manifestations of 'addiction"'is just normal motivational dynamics," and I'm reading your work because you really come across as extremely intelligent and very well read.

That stated, I do think you need to work on your style! I have a sense that I already know 2/3 of what you were writing in this post, and that's the only way I was able to follow half of it.

Advice: Say less in any one post. Use more concrete examples. And, motivate posts at the outset with some kind of hook. For instance, that AstralCodex post you replied to began with potato chips; it said basically that the flow state and one's experience of addiction were the same, it talked about heroin a bit, and the whole thing worked. This post of yours seems far more important and its implications strike me as extremely interesting, but I didn't know why I was reading it (except that you seem brilliant), nothing was ever contextualized enough to follow clearly, and it was far too much to digest all at once.

Good luck, Mysterious Person From The Internet, and I'll visit you again!

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