I’ve been getting into the weeds recently, which has earned me some omphaloskepsis. Just over two months in, I’ve been thinking about what I get out of my blogging practice. The answer is multidimensional, so it is a good fit for what, in theory, this blog’s about anyway.
There are five reasons. Listed from personal to worldly:
To cultivate virtue
To organize my thoughts
To have a pointer
To take part
To audition
I’ll say a few words about each, then a few more on how they interact with each other.
To Cultivate Virtue
I place value in thinking clearly and rigorously, and writing stuff down publicly is a good way to do that. I care a lot about writing in general: I write tons of fiction, and take a lot of pleasure in a well-built sentence. So there’s a lot of value for me in maintaining a writing practice.
I’ve done a lot of professional editing over the years, mostly feedback for various effective altruism and rationalist posts. But I haven’t actually done that much writing in that space until recently. It seems virtuous, as a long-running spectator, to actually put myself into the ring. This side of the feedback is harder than it looks!
To Organize my Thoughts
Closely related to the first reason, writing down thoughts is a great way to clarify them. The brain makes a lot of shortcuts when idly speculating, that it can’t make textually. So to some degree, writing a blog post helps me churn through my thinking on the relevant topic, and come away with a clearer picture of what I really think.
To Have a Pointer
I like thinking about complicated stuff, and complicated stuff is hard to express in a conversation. But once I’ve written a blog post, I can link to it in the future, and thereby express the full nuance of my opinion. I think this is an underrated reason to blog, actually: sharing crystallized thoughts with friends and family is really nice, especially about advanced topics that are hard to muddle through in the moment.
To Take Part
My intellectual life mostly takes place in reading various blogs. I don’t like the idea of fame, and the notion of having thousands of followers kind of creeps me out, but I would enjoy being one of the blogs in the conversation. The dream here is to get a few comments on a typical post from interesting, in the know people, and to get linked to by, say, Tyler Cowen once every several months.
It also just sounds nice to contribute to the intellectual community I get so much out of. I’m really inspired by Zvi here: he just goes out there, consumes primary sources, and shares their content with everyone. I can try that, too!
To Audition
I work in software, which is a volatile industry. Also, I’m very interested in fields like AI and AI safety, which largely exist online. If, by blogging, I can prove that I have certain desirable properties, it could open up opportunities for me in the future. Of course, this could also backfire - in trying to show my knowledge, I also definitely show my ignorance! But it loops back to virtue: seems best to simply try.
Interactions
There’s a temptation to claim that the first two reasons are the real ones, and everything else an afterthought. And indeed, I think there’s value in having an inner locus of control, of doing intellectual work for its own sake and not for the approval of the masses, or, worse, of an inner ring.
But actually, I think a blog that was truly just for its own sake, where who read it and what they thought didn’t matter at all, wouldn’t serve those first two purposes so well. I organize my thoughts better - and, perhaps, more virtuously - when I have the added incentive to have some work I’m proud of to point back to. And what’s the point of pretending that an activity can’t possibly help provide social benefits, when, in fact, it can? Talk about sour grapes!
There are definite pain points, however, focusing on the last two purposes. For one, most blogs have close to zero readership, and wanting to have a place in the conversation thus entails wanting to be exceptional. Similarly, the thing about auditions is that most are failures. Plus, blogging to be noticed creates a strong incentive to do some form of marketing, to try to put myself out there even more than simply by writing posts. Do I link to my posts on Twitter, a platform I don’t actively use, knowing that most links will get zero engagement? On Tumblr, which feels like not really the place? Do I crosspost to LessWrong? (Yes. Sometimes.) So it really is tempting to just say no, I don’t care, this blog is only for the close friends and family who happen to follow it, and, most of all, for my own interiority.
I’m not sure what weight I put on each of the reasons. Maybe 30% for each of the first two, 15% for the next two, and 10% for the last? But it’s ephemeral, ever shifting.
I will say this. To you, reading, it means a lot. And I hope you’ll stick around. Myself, I plan on it.