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Blogging can just be stating the obvious

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#71

Post by mdemare »

dchftcs wrote: post #22
Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

"I know this" is different from "I know you know this", which is different from "You know I know this", which is still different from "you know I know you know this"

“When everybody knows that everybody knows” by Steven Pinker is about this.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#72

Post by foxglacier »

foo42 wrote: post #67

People already know a lot of things. But which "know"? There's seeing something and recognising it as something you've seen before. There's being able to recite it without seeing it. There's being able to explain it. There's _knowing_ it. Where your life is an active demonstration of having made it _part_ of you. To the extent we obtain wisdom with life, it's usually a progression of things progressing deeper down th…

I'd insert another important level of knowing which I feel deserves the name "understanding" and that's knowing its relationships to other thing you also know. Perhaps even that's almost all there is in knowing something. The more relationships to it that you know, the deeper your understanding of it.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#74

Post by reddalo »

dgudkov wrote: post #45
nate wrote: post #4

A couple other versions of this that have always stood out to me: 1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I knew which one it was even before clicking.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#75

Post by lnrd »

Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

I think this is some sort of modern academia bias. What you say it is true in academia, most things have already been thought and studied and that's why any academic book or paper has a citation in every sentence. I understand why this rigor is important in academia, but is it in the rest of the world?

If I have an interesting thought about a topic and I share it with an audience that is not PhDs, to them it might be interesting and insightful and provoke new thoughts. Most likely yes, someone in the 70s somewhere in the world already wrote a paper about this idea or even a book. Does it matter though? Sharing ideas gets people thinking and the fact that someone else already extensively thought about something doesn't make my thoughts less relevant. If anything, by sharing it I could get a comment pointing me to a book or paper that would help me understand better the topic or expand my ideas further.

I don't think that what's worth sharing are only documents that quote everyone else that already talked about it and their thoughts. That might work if I want to prove that my work is at boundaries of human knowledge or that is the most plausible explanation for something, but if I just want to share ideas then I find it limiting. Not just because it limits the people with the knowledge to write anything to a handful, but also because for those people there is this anxiety of "not worth it, wasting people time" if it's not researched for months like you mention. Share your thought, if some expert will find it wasteful or naive they will not read it, but someone else might and it might open their mind.

This makes me think about philosophy, if you really dig down into it virtually all philosophy ideas were already discussed first by Plato and Aristoteles. You cannot find a modern philosophy thought that isn't in some way already discussed by those two. Should then all philosopher in history not write anything because it was not really an original thought?

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#76

Post by Paracompact »

zephen wrote: post #47
Paracompact wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing. Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes. > Maybe yo…

> Not sure how you mean "style," You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so." > Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social,…

> You essentially coupled "I used to do this thing, and now I'm really credentialed but I don't do this thing any more" with "the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so."

I'm not claiming it's a good or rational thing that I'm not motivated. (I'm also not claiming this happens to everyone with credentials.) I'm very nostalgic for that unembarrassed enthusiasm I once had, because, were I to possess it now, at least I would have a shot at producing something of value.

You may have gotten the wrong impression when I coupled this rueful sentiment with a criticism of the verbosity and redundancy of blogs and self-help books. These two things are in tension with each other but not strictly contradictory. "I am large, I contain multitudes."

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#77

Post by PetitPrince »

joshuamcginnis wrote: post #19
Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

How the information is shared can be as important as the act of sharing it in the first place. You might have a particular voice and style for communicating these ideas, but your audience may have otherwise passed it over without your unique approach.

Yes, for instance science communication is a whole field. Otherwise we wouldn't hold Carl Sagan et al. in such high regard.

Re: Blogging can just be stating the obvious

#80

Post by Paracompact »

directevolve wrote: post #59
Paracompact wrote: post #6

> So it must be that a key ingredient to blogging is simple: have a willingness to state something that seems obvious to you but nobody else is saying it. Or if someone else is saying it, just link to them and say, “Yes!!! This!!!” As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted in…

> Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain You have an audience willing to give you the benefit of the doubt to learn something they’re unfamiliar with. It’s specifically the fact that you chose to highlight a topic that makes your audience pay attention. Perhaps nobody else could have gotten their attention and adjusted their persp…

> If this post or your comment hadn’t been here, I’d have been doing and thinking about something else. Is that good or bad? I don’t know.

Indeed the consequences are not thought about often. My motivations for commenting are for catharsis and parasocial connection, and (if you're like me) your reasons for reading are for entertainment and parasocial connection. I believe most of the dressing up as "being accurate and helpful" or "learning new things and growing" are just negotiations that make it palatable to our conscious sensibilities and self-image.

> The human tendency to be receptive to convenient information sources, regardless of their novelty or whether they’re of maximum quality, may be adaptive.

And that begins to touch on another aspect of my demotivation, which is, "Why bother creating value? It won't help the reception." Unless you're contributing some huge objective boon to humanity, the reception largely boils down to marketing and dumb luck. I've seen too many of my life's works languish in obscurity to put any more emotional attachment into the thing. One must labor only for one's own inner satisfaction, but what if that means one is left with no motivation to labor at all? Then, I suppose, that's just the death of a laborer and the birth of a slacker.

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