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:

1. Engage in a project that will not be complete in your lifetime
2. Require your current projects exhibit some payoff that is not immediate
3. 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 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
  • I will talk to Stephen about this
• Pasadena Central Park
• Investments
• Friendships
• Parents
• My body
• The city of Pasadena
• Caltech Y