Blogging can just be stating the obvious

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 the layers, years, perhaps decades after they attained level 1.

> 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 into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"

All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.

If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.

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/Curse_of_knowledge

2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.

The fact that someone makes a simple observation is probably suggestive that despite its simplicity, it doesn't stick fully, maybe it's even anti-memetic.

Perhaps repeating such simple truths is like a spaced repetition system for society

In a meta way, this blog post itself is example of that: sounds obvious that blogging can just be stating the obvious, but I still enjoyed reading it, and it served as a good reminder. I guess part of what makes it feel good is confirmation bias, but it can also be nice to read something that confirms your beliefs especially if the other side(s) are very loud online. I would also add that it is just expressing oneself, and therefore it is ok for it to be non-original thought: you are not publishing a scientific article, you are expressing your opinion, adding to the general discourse online, making your voice be heard, and also just capturing your thoughts into something concrete.

There's also a social component to blogging, right? When you post something it tells me about who you are. It helps establish my (probably parasocial) relationship with you.

And when you post something, I might be interested in it, even if I wasn't interested when someone else posted about it, because I'm interested in you and interested in what you have to say.

I think that human communication is about pure relationship socialization as much or more than it is about actually communicating information or ideas.

Thank you for sharing this observation.

I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”

I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.

At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.

Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.

Wrote something like this earlier today [1]. There was something really nice about not thinking too much about the details and letting it be rough.

[1] https://graybeard.ing/llms-are-grep-on-steroids/