One of the best ways to clarify your thoughts about a subject is to write about it, and one of the best ways to prove to yourself that you understand it is to be able to write about it clearly. Indeed, my primary motivation to write is to order my thoughts and better understand the universe I live in.

It is surprisingly difficult work, but so is lifting weights. That is precisely why I insist on doing it myself. If I let an AI write for me, it would be the same as letting a robot lift weights for me. Yeah, it would be easier, but I would not get stronger, nor would I gain the confidence and self discipline that comes from doing hard things.

I expected to disagree with this post but actually found it really worthwhile.

For my own blog [0] I usually start writing because I feel I just learned and did something cool which gets me excited to share it. I also write only about topics I'm very familiar with (graphics and performance). Very safe. And still I learn a lot by forcing myself to really examine what I write about and always leave with much better insight into something I thought I knew inside and out. And still I'm always very nervous that people will dismiss it or find huge faults in it. I've found a few issues myself after the fact, but commenters have been nice.

Maybe I should risk pushing myself into unfamiliar territory? On one side, I absolutely loathe blogs written in an expert voice by someone who is clearly a novice - and I don't want to be that person. On the other hand, people who know me often encourage me to get more technical and detailed in my posts because they recognize that my blog is very simplified (meant to be approachable) compared to what I actually do day to day. My upcoming post will definitely lean into the more low level and technical. Hopefully that will be appreciated, but I find myself really nervous about it.

[0] https://agentlien.github.io

There's a venerable tradition of writing an essay with the intention of attempting to understand a topic. People can misinterpret it; when deciding whether to support 'remain' or 'leave' in the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson wrote two essays, each steelmanning one particular point of view. Somehow, the 'remain' essay was leaked later on, leading to the accusation that he didn't believe in the cause he was espousing. I can't think of a better way to decide a personal position on a tough topic though.

I was more excited before I realized the title was imperative rather than descriptive.

We have this culture at work where people actually takes time to read and feedback on your blog posts (you post it in the chat and at least a few picks it up). This helps a lot, getting (somewhat) honest feedback. I also use LLM for spotting grammar and spelling mistakes, and have started to use it to find reasoning flaws, which is does pretty good.

Outside of colleagues and machines, I find it quite hard to get feedback. I have a shot-box and my email on ever page, asking for comments, but rarely receive any. Maybe it is just that I don't have enough readers? =)

There's a sweet spot where you know enough to ask useful questions but still remember which parts were confusing in the first place. Experts often lose that

The author states:

> every single one of my blog posts argues a point. I never publish a post that just gives some scattered thoughts on a topic, or a post that only says “yes, I agree with this other article”.

What’s wrong with posting about something interesting about the world you have discovered without arguing any point? The author seems to argue that polemics are the only valid form of writing. Even for a polemicist that seems a bit self aggrandizing.

Seeing the title, I expected this to be a blog post trying to convince me what to blog about, written by a person who does not yet understand if his perspective is correct.

I also write a lot about things I learn and not always fully understand yet. My secret worry is that one of my readers will meet me in person and quiz me verbally on the subjects of one of my articles. I would end up sounding really dumb compared to the impression made by the article!

When it comes to pretending to know something about things you don't understand, I think there's a big difference between talking and writing. Talking is bad because you're not equipped to form intelligent off-the-cuff sentences about the thing. But writing can be okay, if done with care.

Some things I would be able to talk about because I have insense opinions enough to remember (e.g. insurance purchasing decision logic), or they are easy to remember (the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm), or I wrote about them recently enough to remember (how to perform an FFT). But ask me about anything else (sloppy confidence intervals for Pearson correlations?) and I'd just stand there.

I used to do exactly this, but 99% of my blog's traffic was bots, so I shut it down.

The web is on its last legs. Why bother publishing if nobody will read it? Nowadays I just write explorative/study notes in a notebook. I retain that better than typed writing anyways.

This could lower the quality of LLM training data, so I don't think it's a good idea at this point.

Please, no. Don't blog about things you don't understand yet. We have far too many people and LLMs doing that. After you really understand it, then consider blogging.

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