We’ve been designing and running courses on AI safety and biosecurity for over 2 years, and we’ve trained ~3,000 people. Our courses finish with a 4-week project, where participants learn and write about a new topic.
To increase the number of awesome projects in the future, I interviewed 30+ participants who recently completed their project (or dropped out before finishing!). This is the result of my findings.
This post describes why writing is one of the best ways to learn, why so many people still find it really hard, and how our new Writing Intensive can help you learn better and faster!
Writing is one of the best ways to learn
Discover what you’re confused about
I love watching educational YouTube videos. Maybe you do too! Pause for a second, and think of a video you watched last week. What was the main argument? What evidence was presented? What were the implications? If you’re anything like me, you probably can’t remember much. Watching an educational YouTube video feels like learning, but it’s a trick. Unless you’re pausing the video, taking notes, and thinking through a problem for yourself, you’re watching entertainment.
Writing helps you realise you didn’t remember anything, or don’t know what you’re talking about. You might watch a video and think “waw, that was fascinating! I learnt so much,” but then you try to write down what the video was about and you realise you’re very confused. This is great! This is an opportunity to go back to the relevant part of the video, watch it more closely, and try again to understand the thing you’re confused about.
Explaining something to someone else (or yourself) is a great technique to discover what you do and don’t understand.
Improve your memory
Two people are learning a new political phenomenon. The first person spends 4 hours reading about it online. The second person spends 2 hours reading about it online, and 2 hours generating their own examples of the phenomenon. Who do you think will learn best?
The “Generation Effect” says you remember information better if you generate it yourself (i.e. the info comes from your own brain), compared to absorbing external information. Writing helps you do this, by turning loose things you’ve learnt about into a framework or narrative that makes sense for you, drawing on things you already understand.
This year, I’ve started writing a lot more. I’ve found it incredibly helpful for developing a detailed understanding and opinion on important topics. Everything I write about becomes something I understand, remember, and can tell a story about. Whereas every other book, podcast or article I’ve read has disappeared from my brain!
Develop your own opinion
The world is really complex, and it’s tempting to defer to others about what’s true and what’s not. Reading a book or watching a video is an easy way to experience someone else’s opinion, but developing your own opinion feels daunting!
But we need more people to think really hard about how to solve global problems, and to develop deep expertise. Writing about a topic helps you structure your thoughts logically, assess evidence, consider counter-arguments, and identify assumptions you’re making. If you share your writing with others who provide high-quality feedback, your understanding and opinions can improve even faster.
“The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer,” as they say.
It’s not obvious how to write to learn, so most people don’t do it
I assume you’re convinced that writing is a great way to learn. Why don’t more people do it?
You just don’t start
In order to write, you have to sit down and start. This sounds obvious, and it is, but it’s still a major blocker for most people (including myself). I’ve spent the past 3 days procrastinating on finishing this blog post, because I struggled to convince myself to start writing again (having already written the full outline and the first half of the post!). Writing is hard, and it requires a lot of cognitive effort.
If you’re starting from scratch, many writers also experience “fear of the blank page,” where the endless things you could write about becomes overwhelming. This leads to decision paralysis: you could do anything, and you end up doing nothing.
Your project balloons out of control
In user interviews with participants on our courses, almost everyone mentioned that their project was way too big, and needed to be scoped down.
It’s painful to say “I’m going to write about this very specific thing,” thereby deciding not to write about many other cool things. By avoiding this decision, some participants arrived at the submission deadline with troves of research, and no idea what they were trying to write about.
It’s so tempting to tell yourself “if I just research this one extra thing, I’ll finally know enough to start writing something!” This is a common form of self-deception. I did this with my humanities masters degree, and it led to many months of pain, followed by a 2-day sprint to throw some words together and submit the thesis. It was an avoidable shambles.
You don’t know how to write well
After my engineering undergraduate degree, I decided to do the aforementioned humanities masters degree. I wanted more training in “critical thinking” and writing, and I assumed they would provide that. I was very very wrong! Even though I asked multiple times, they failed to provide any support on how to write or think well. I felt lost all year.
Doing something new is hard, and it’s a huge help to have someone who knows what they’re doing to point you in the right direction. They can provide feedback, offer frameworks on how to do the thing well, and accelerate your upskilling.
Our Writing Intensive makes it easy for you
We’ve designed an experience that provides everything you need to go from having no ideas to publishing your thinking online. Right now, we’re experimenting with three different formats: one-day full-time, a few hours every day for a week, and a few hours every week for a month. Here’s the WIP curriculum!
No prior skills or ideas needed
You don’t need any prior writing experience. I’m particularly excited to encourage technical people to write more, both to improve their thinking and to help them communicate their ideas with the world. Though if you have written before, I still expect you to find this helpful — my colleague Li-Lian has written a whole book, and she still found it valuable! (I also recommend you read Li-Lian’s book, it’s awesome!!)
This course provides you with clarity on what you need to achieve at every step in the process. No more procrastinating in research rabbit holes!
Follow best practices by default
You’ll start by generating 20+ ideas you could write and learn about. You’ll cut these down into a shortlist, and you’ll choose the idea you’re most excited about. The first thing you’ll write is the title/headline. This forces you to figure out exactly what you’re trying to write and learn about. If your title is vague and fluffy, you’ll rewrite it many times while thinking hard about what you’re trying to do, until you land on something clear, specific and exciting. You can then move ahead!
Once you know what you’re writing about, you’ll plan! You’ll write an outline of your current hypotheses or main points, and a 1-sentence conclusion. This will help you get clarity on your current thoughts, identify things you’re confused about, and guide your research towards the most important things (instead of spending 5 hours clicking through random Wikipedia pages that seem interesting!).
Towards the end of the course, you’ll learn how to rewrite and edit your writing. You’ll finish with a masterfully crafted piece of writing which is a pleasure to read and reflects your precise thinking on this topic.
Receive accountability and feedback from your peers
The course includes 1-hour synchronous meetings with your small group of 5-6. You’ll receive feedback from your peers and your facilitator, and you’ll give feedback to others too. This is a great opportunity to apply what you’ve learnt from the course readings to other people’s writing.
The group meets up on a regular basis, providing you with accountability to move forward with your writing, and to follow the guidelines set out in the course. In previous courses, some of these groups have continued meeting up for years afterwards! So this is also a great opportunity to make new friends and find writing collaborators.
Concluding: Writing is a great way to learn; it’s hard by yourself; our Writing Intensives can help!
If this post has piqued your interest, and you’re excited to write and learn about AI Alignment, AI Governance, or Biosecurity, register your interest for a future round of our Writing Intensives!
I stumbled on this post late but it's relevance has only increased.
Thanks Dewi Erwin for sharing your insightful experiences.