Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have rarely wished the opposite. Consider this post addressed to you, the reader.
Your Writing
I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you’d write more! When I find someone whose writing I really connect with, I like to read everything they have written, or at least a tractable subset of their most interesting posts. If I like what I see, I reach out. This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.
And, from the other side, I have often written a post where, just before publishing, I would think: “who would want to read this? It’s too personal, obscure, idiosyncratic, probably a few people will unsubscribe to the RSS feed for this”. And always those are the posts where people email me to say they always thought the same thing but could never quite put it into words. I really value those emails. “I am understood” is a wonderful feeling.
I try to apply a rule that if I do something, and don’t write about it—or otherwise generate external-facing evidence of it—it didn’t happen. I have built so many things in the dark, little experiments or software projects or essays that never saw the light of day. I want to put more things out. If it doesn’t merit an entire blog post, then at least a tweet.
Your Books
If I follow you on Twitter, and you have posted a picture of your bookshelf, I have probably scanned every book in it. This is why I appreciate Goodreads. Like many people I have been reading a lot less over the past ~5y, but since I made a Goodreads account earlier this year, I’ve read tens of books. Reading in public has helped to motivate me.
You may say reading in public is performative. I say reading in private is solipsistic. Dante, in De Monarchia, writes:
All men on whom the Higher Nature has stamped the love of truth should especially concern themselves in laboring for posterity, in order that future generations may be enriched by their efforts, as they themselves were made rich by the efforts of generations past. For that man who is imbued with public teachings, but cares not to contribute something to the public good, is far in arrears of his duty, let him be assured; he is, indeed, not “a tree planted by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” [Psalms 1:3] but rather a destructive whirlpool, always engulfing, and never giving back what it has devoured.
My default mode is solipsism. I read in private, build in private, learn in private. And the problem with that is self-doubt and arbitrariness. I’m halfway through a textbook and think: why? Why am I learning geology? Why this topic, and not another? There is never an a priori reason. I take notes, but why tweak the LaTeX if no-one, probably not even future me, will read them? If I stop reading this book, what changes? And doing things in public makes them both more real and (potentially) useful. If you publish your study notes, they might be useful to someone. Maybe they get slurped up in the training set of the next LLM, marginally improving performance.
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