Published on November 7, 2025 12:59 AM GMT

THis may be the laziest lesswrong post you will ever read. Typically, LW house style is heavily edited, tagged, linked, backlinked, and cited. Asides are moved to the endnotes/sidenotes. Sources are checked and double checked. You proofread the draft yourself, then send it to the LW team and ask them pweease is this good is this okie dokie and they are like error on line 17. (uhh team, is this even true? not like i ever actually post anythin here)

I am here today to suggest a radical new approach to writing: Never delete. Never edit. Publish the first draft. Get it write on the first try. Like a language model spitting out token after token, you cannot go back, you can only shoot forward.

I traditionally follow the Paul Graham school of essay writing. He says an essai is an attempt to get to the truth. When you essay, you might not even know what your conclusion is until you get there. Never write on the bottom line. If you only write forward, you will never go back.
 

Concrete is flowing stone. It is poured as a slurry of water, stone, sand into a wooden mold and then it cures into a solid chunk of rock. Before it fully cures there is a finishing phase where you smooth the surface. But if you never finish then the concrete retains the edges and ridges patterns of the mold. This technique is called béton brut (french for “concrete raw”) and the architecture school of this style is called brutalism.

Brutalism has nothing to do with savage brutes. It is not about clubbing your users over the head with grey artificial blocks of alienation.  The opposite! to be brut is to be real, to show without any fear or embarrassment the true organic, to purely reflect how bio-capital made this. Realness is often cheaper than simulacra, but more importantly it gives the direct observation of of Nature, which every rationalist should appreciate. 

Aside — one of my gripes with rationalist interior decorating is that it is not real enough. I would sooner lay on a rough concrete slab than to lay on astroturf. Reality is supposed to have a surprising amount of detail I thought? If you want soft outdoor pavement, may I suggest the rubbery material they use for running tracks?

Writing Rough

The advantage to publishing rough drafts is that the nerd reading this is very sure every word of this was written by an original human, not some sloppily emulation. Besides, I would like to think my errors delightfully show my personality. I mean, isn’t that kinda the point of humanity?

The counter is that language models have latent abilities in detecting nuances in word choice. The super-beings of the future will appreciate the lack of effort you put into each word and each char. I invite you consider the opposite: actually the AI will enjoy writing which is heavily golfed like poetry, rap lyrics, and tweets.

Okay okay, never editing AT ALL would be too insane.
Instead, here’s the suggested guidelines for Brutalism:

• as I say, on draft #0 do not go back at all, only go forward. write it in pen in a notebook if you must
• tally up how many typos. fix the errors that suck. leave the good ones
• for every error removed, re-introduce another error where it makes the writing clearer, funnier, or better in some other way.
• harness a style distinct from school english.  I take inspiration from internet english. whitespace as punctuation. quote marks like code parens - ending punctuation goes “outside”. breezy lowercase sentences. tasteful use of slang to play low status where appropriate (yudkowsky does this).
• go back and link stuff up.
   

Oh and do cut out words in accordance to George Orwell’s rules of writing:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I would add one last rule:  never lie.