How can I produce Long Content?
I have been thinking about applying the idea of the Long Now, inspired by the About page of gwern.net:
Knowing your site will survive for decades to come gives you the mental wherewithal to tackle long-term tasks like gathering information for years, and such persistence can be useful–if one holds onto every glimmer of genius for years, then even the dullest person may look a bit like a genius himself.
The above is specific to essays/personal sites. Kevin Kelly has advice on ways to apply such long-term thinking more generally:
- Engage in a project that will not be complete in your lifetime
- Require your current projects exhibit some payoff that is not immediate
- Create things that get better over time (“a seedling grows into a tree, which has seedlings of its own”)
I’ve found it difficult to come up with good ideas! Some brainstorming:
- Having kids is an obvious example; they will not be “complete” within a lifetime
- My plan to start a microschool & teach my/friends’ kids will have a payoff that is not immediate (though a future “payoff” is not why I am doing it)
- Building a learning/creative coworking community akin to Fractal/Socratica
- Starting a microgrants program to fund interesting people/ideas
- Improving public goods like parks
Notably none of the above are improved by time (#3 in KK’s advice). They are all either projects that won’t complete in my lifetime or projects with non-immediate payoffs. The gwern.net About page has one suggestion here – predictions built into posts/essays that resolve in the future. I think to be able to be improved by time, projects need to interact with the world in some way. An isolated thought, blog post, book that doesn’t interact with the world is necessarily static.
So how might normally static pieces of content become Long Content instead?
One answer that comes to mind is using AI agents + protocols to interact with the world to improve something over time. The basic version of this amounts to “query the corpus of human knowledge continuously and see if anything relevant has been added”. The piece of content accumulates new relevant information from the world as it becomes available.
A concrete example might be research papers. From this article:
But this will evolve to a demand-side system where “papers” are accompanied by a platform of all the tools used in the process, and the reader will ask their AI their “what if we did X instead of Y, does that change the estimate?” Like if I were reading an experimental chemistry paper, and it came with a pre-set lab with all the ingredients, a lab director and assistants, and I could ask them as I read the paper, “what if we tweaked the proportions by X?” and they did it right there in front of me and together we saw the outcome.
If research papers are instead a suite of tools and data, as people ask their own questions of the same data, the “paper” can be updated with the new results.
Misc notes:
jun 2026
This thread is a more general case of How can I allow my thinking to accrete over time?
One of the big shifts from working to not, over the last couple years, has been an extension of the length of my Now. Before it was more like a week, now it is closer to a month/year. Shifting it to decades appears to be the next natural step I am moving toward.
What are things in my life/around me that WILL survive for decades & therefore small improvements compound, I can take a Long Now view, etc?
- Marriage
- Kids
- My brain/my thinking (externalized via this site)
- CPV garden
- Clear area where I could think of a project that actually gets better with time, is improved by time; I’m sure I can think of something if I take an ecological lens
- Pasadena Central Park
- Investments
- Friendships & relationships generally
- Parents
- My body
- The city of Pasadena
- Caltech Y
oct 2026
Feeling a need to re-focus on Long Now style work & thinking, especially after happening to read this article:
It seemed like Alan was asking me to pick: how benevolent do you actually want to be? Or are you just looking to seem benevolent? What’s your time horizon? Are you looking to make a small incremental improvement? Or are you looking 10 years out to build a better future for your children? Or are you looking to the 22nd century to ensure that our grandkids’ kids will be better than we are? Or are you thinking about the far future of not just humanity but all conscious beings, and how to build a thriving multi-planetary society for millions of years to come?
Right now, I feel that my efforts are coalescing around looking 10 years out to build a better future for my children (eg with microschool), but not much further than that.
The students I’m working with in my project mentorship program are relevant here too. I would strongly prefer charging less so I could keep working with a kid over a much longer period of time vs finishing at some preset date. It’s much more of a relationship in that case, as we can both collaborate to figure out the right ends of their education, etc, rather than necessarily being done when a particular project is done. I wonder how I would approach things differently if I saw them as my own kid who I will be in contact with for decades?