Corrections To Previous ATVBTs
If you're in New York, come hear me talk about the weirdly unfamous cure for hiccups this Saturday at Nerd Nite NYC.
Recently I've been thinking about things that I wrote in previous ATVBTs that now seem wrong to me.
In 80/20 Strength Training, I approximately-recommended taking creatine. After a while taking creatine, I started to suspect it was making me more agitated/angry. I googled about this and there were various pages on "why creatine rage is a myth", i.e. pages saying that taking creatine doesn't make you agitated, but also that many other people have had this suspicion, which makes me wonder if it's real after all.
An internet friend recommended trying glycine instead of creatine, I bought some and promptly forgot to take it. I don't have a strong opinion on any of this, but wanted to update you guys in case you started creatine-ing on my account.
In my post on Prescheduling Posts, I basically recommended scheduling blogposts with increasing lags into the future. E.g. if you've written 6 posts, schedule 2 for the next two weeks, then 2 a month apart, then 2 two months apart, so you have over 6 months of runway with pre-scheduled posts.
I now feel more mixed about this – I think it maybe reduces my excitement about writing, I have ideas and I want to tell people about them, and by the time a post comes out 6 months from now I might not be excited about it, and/or I will lose 6 months of possible next-thought-having from the responses to the original post. Also, as my poetry teacher told us, the gods hate hoarders, and grant creativity only to those who trust them to give more later.
There's still some tradeoffs here – one of the most common failure modes for blogs is to not-write for a month or two, then feel like the next post has to be really good to make up for it, then not-write for a year or two until suddenly sending a "sorry I haven't written lately" post, and then never writing again. But basically I can't endorse the original thing I said any more, regardless.
In The Confounder Is Being Popular And Important, I complained about thinkfluencers advertising a life-philosophy that made them happy when (I think) really what made them happy is "finding community + having other people listen to your opinions." A reader pointed out that this is exactly what I was doing in the piece. I guess that doesn't necessarily make it an error but it does make me regret it.
I find most blogs/bloggers/blogposts overly confident, but writing in an un-confident way is annoying. In my head, all ATVBT posts have massive asteriskses, but I don't always include them in writing because (again) it's very annoying. So I have a more general sense of error/regret about a lot of my writing here, beyond these specific errors, I just feel like most of the stuff I write here is regrettably over-stated.
What do YOU think I should be sorry about? Feel free to email me or answer in the comments, as always....