Why I Keep a Research Blog
gregorygundersen.com
Why I Keep a Research Blog
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Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#2"Learning with intention" sounds like a reworded way of saying "deliberate practice" which is something highly motivated people have been doing from time immemorial (one notable example being Ben Franklin's rule of spending one hour per day reading or learning something new). It's excellent legacy advice because it works.
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#3"Learning with intention" sounds like a reworded way of saying "deliberate practice" which is something highly motivated people have been doing from time immemorial (one notable example being Ben Franklin's rule of spending one hour per day reading or learning something new). It's excellent legacy advice because it works.
Just a small nit pick here--your example does not match the definition of deliberate practice.
In general, deliberate practice is about how you practice (e.g. focused on most useful things; w/ quick expert feedback), rather than how often.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del...
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#4I absolutely love this. It's a great distillation of many of the reasons I myself keep a blog. It's a means, and an end, of learning more, and keeping yourself accountable to your knowledge.
It is difficult to know what you should know when you have a lot to learn and are in an intelligence-signaling environment. A side effect of having written detailed technical notes is that I calibrate my confidence on a topic. If I now understand something, I am sure of it and can explain myself clearly. If I don’t understand something, I have a sense of why it is difficult to understand or what prerequisite knowledge I am missing.
I like this passage in particular, and I divine a second meaning between the lines, and that is: developing understanding, and then putting it out for the world to see, requires bravery. The more you do it, the bolder you become. It gives you some skin in the game. You can't just deceive yourself that you know something. And, if you're doing fundamental research (like the author), you gotta be brave - because there's a good chance you could be wrong. Many people are very afraid of being wrong.
As an aside: I still get nervous every time I publish a post on my own blog.
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#5> I hypothesize that jargon is especially susceptible to this kind of misuse because an expert listener might infer a mutual understanding that does not exist. This feeling of verbal common ground can even be gamed. Many of us have done this on exams, hoping for partial credit by stitching together the outline of a proof or using the right words in an essay with the hopes that the professor connects the dots for us.
(Emphasis mine)
You could write an entire book on this.
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#6Great article and very concise. I've found myself and my writing "addiction" represented. There are many concepts I couldn't grasps until I tried to put them to paper.
On a different note: does anyone happen to know if that's a standard Wordpress theme? I've been looking to find a simple theme and this (or something similarly minimalist and text-focused) would be perfect for my needs.
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#7Great article and very concise. I've found myself and my writing "addiction" represented. There are many concepts I couldn't grasps until I tried to put them to paper. On a different note: does anyone happen to know if that's a standard Wordpress theme? I've been looking to find a simple theme and this (or something similarly minimalist and text-focused) would be perfect for my needs.
This seems to be a static site generator.
http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-blo... has a HTTP header last updated on 01/13/2020 04:34:31.
http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2019/12/23/random-fourier-f... is 01/13/2020 04:34:30, or 1 second earlier.
Also the source code has a link to http://gregorygundersen.com/css/markdown.css which 404's.
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#8"Learning with intention" sounds like a reworded way of saying "deliberate practice" which is something highly motivated people have been doing from time immemorial (one notable example being Ben Franklin's rule of spending one hour per day reading or learning something new). It's excellent legacy advice because it works.
Just a small nit pick here--your example does not match the definition of deliberate practice. In general, deliberate practice is about how you practice (e.g. focused on most useful things; w/ quick expert feedback), rather than how often. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del... https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert
This is my understanding of deliberate practice as well.
Interestingly, The GP mentioned Ben Franklin and Franklin did use deliberate practice to improve his writing:
https://www.anecdote.com/2010/08/benjamin-franklin-deliberat...
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#9Off-topic, but Gregory - I was a participant in your C4Q Python workshop several years ago! So good to see that you're doing well in academia, and great article. Agree with many of the points you've made regarding writing-- as an example, one trick I've found for getting better at technical interviews was creating walk-throughs of problems I struggled with.
Thanks for the great read and for helping to kick off my software engineering career!
Re: Why I Keep a Research Blog
#10I absolutely love this. It's a great distillation of many of the reasons I myself keep a blog. It's a means, and an end, of learning more, and keeping yourself accountable to your knowledge. It is difficult to know what you should know when you have a lot to learn and are in an intelligence-signaling environment. A side effect of having written detailed technical notes is that I calibrate my confidence on a topic. If…
I don't have a blog, but I find it much, _much_ easier to write comments here on HN. And I greatly improved my electronics knowledge through answering questions on electronics.stackexchange. There are some important questions which are easy to phrase but hard to answer. One day I want to write the a canonical introduction to electron flow models, provisionally titled "Lies you have been told about the electron".
I also plan to dig out my highest-rated HN comments and turn them into blog posts or even an ebook some day. There's probably 10-100k words I've written here already.