What are you thinking about writing?

By Toby Tremlett🔹 @ 2026-02-16T13:39 (+20)

Next week (23rd Feb – 1st March) is Draft Amnesty Week — the week when we post incomplete or scrappy posts without judgement. The core idea behind draft amnesty week is that a lot of us have half-written or half-thought-through ideas sitting around somewhere, which will never see the light of the Forum without a week like this.

However, the reputational cover of draft amnesty week also helps people who want to write their first post without judgement, or whip together a quick post on a subject they aren't sure about.

I'm publishing this thread now (along with What would you like someone to write?) to help authors brainstorm some ideas. You can use it however you like — to get some reactions to posts you plan on writing, have already written, or don't plan to post during the event. I'd recommend that you post each idea as a different answer, though, so that people can react to them separately.

Christina La Fleur @ 2026-02-17T09:47 (+8)

Frankly, posting on this forum intimidates me the way reading any critical essay by Chomsky does. I do want to be intellectually responsible, but I don't much like the idea of being on either end, frankly, of an intellectual firing squad.

In some ways, this comment is in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week. 

feijão @ 2026-02-17T21:02 (+5)

Definitely relate to this. It helps to recognise that the people on this forum are all here by their desire to help, and everyone I've interacted with has been a genuinely awesome person. The worst case scenario is some constructive feedback which helps us grow and develop our ideas; people aren't usually coming from a place of 'gotcha' or condescension.  If that's the worst case scenario, sharing your thoughts sounds pretty good!

NickLaing @ 2026-02-19T14:36 (+2)

Thanks @feijão. I think the worse case is slightly worse than that. I've had some pretty derisory feedback at times, but mostly only in animal welfare discussions. But in general yes constructive criticism is the order of the day here, more than anywhere else on the internet.

JessMasterson @ 2026-02-18T22:02 (+3)

I totally understand that and I felt exactly the same. I think the most liberating thing is probably just trying to resist being too married to your ideas - it''ll be easier to take if people say they're wrong.

Joseph_Chu @ 2026-02-18T15:03 (+2)

I've been on this forum since 2014 and I -still- feel this way sometimes. Although, I will say Less Wrong is notably worse for this.

It does get better after you make a few comments/posts and notice people aren't jumping all over you. I used to be much more terrified, but now, I'm only kinda apprehensive whenever I post.

Joseph_Chu @ 2026-02-18T15:16 (+3)

Not quite a draft amnesty thing, but I have been playing with the idea of writing short stories or perhaps even novels that use time travellers as a vehicle for Longtermism. The idea is that time travellers from the far distant future are our descendents, the very people that Longtermism cares about, so their perspective could be something worth exploring in fiction.

Given, I'm more of a soft Longtermist, and creative writing is notoriously hard to make any kind of living out of, so I'm not sure to what extent this is worth doing/trying/exploring, even as just a side project.

MaxSJC @ 2026-02-20T08:52 (+1)

I honestly just want to ask about any remote, part-time English-Mandarin translator roles.

Max Taylor @ 2026-02-19T10:55 (+1)

I'm thinking about writing something on AI's implications for mental healthcare - e.g., within 5-10 years should we expect to benefit from much more advanced (and side-effect-free) anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication, AI-boosted meditation and CBT techniques, neurological hardwiring, etc.? Could this end up being a net negative if this leads to people with access to these becoming much more complacent about the suffering of others? I've only done a very shallow dive into this so it would probably be very quick and scrappy 

Tilly P @ 2026-02-19T11:51 (+2)

Great idea. I was wondering whether to write about this sort of angle from the opposite (pessimistic) view of if knowledge work becomes less common/disappears entirely and humans increasingly engage in less cognitively effortful forms of leisure whether this would need to be counteracted with forms of brain training. Arguably this may already be becoming an issue with people unable to commit their attention span to reading longer form text.