I must confess that initially I was entirely resistant to the idea of blogging. There is enough garbage on the internet without my help. Does the world really need another person to pollute the world with their under thought, over pious, trash? In the service of making Large Language Models such as ChatGPT less effective1, then perhaps my services could be useful, but in regards to the good of humanity I do not think my contributions would be at all helpful. However that changed when I read this blogpost which was surprisingly persuasive. In essence it walks through all the benefits of blogging, and that it’s not all vanity, "Ooo look at me."" For the record I do not expect this blog to be anything beyond close friends who read it, and the occasional work colleague who stumbles upon my personal website and snickers through my essays.
Yet, at some level I do feel like I’m channeling my inner Nicholas Nasseem Taleb. (Who would probably ridicule me if he read anything I wrote aside from things openly praising him, but even then he’d probably still ridicule me.) This blog requires minimal work on my end, and if I avoid posting insanely controversial things that are blatantly offensive, there’s minimal downside. But, in the 1 in a 1000000 chance it takes off, that could be quite the positive pay off. His ideas in the Black Swan are essentially, you cannot predict the future and its in your best interest to mitigate losses, but try to expose yourselves to significant gains. In general most blogs manifest this space, in the sense they require little input, but have the potential to be significant. But once again, that is extremely improbable, and this is more-so a space for me to think out loud and perhaps have stimulating conversations with my friends. As far as what this blog will be, it’s difficult to say. One of the more convincing points I had discussing this point with a friend (who at the time of me writing this still doesn’t have a blog), is that having a blog can have two big benefits:
I think that point 2 is particularly potent when I contemplate research. There is no incentive for publishing incorrect research. You don’t get grants for it, there’s no prestige in publishing negative results. There’s also a lot of ways to be wrong, so you might be wrong for the wrong reasons even. That being said, this graveyard of ideas is a blackhole in the truest meaning. It is something that cannot be seen, and sucks light into it. There is a wasteland of ideas out there that have been tried, failed, and for future researches they have no idea bout them. So they in turn might make the same mistakes, whereas if they had known (in the same way a colleague helps you avoid common pitfalls in a certain task), they could’ve avoided that fate.
To conclude, I want to get more serious about writing out and thinking through my thoughts. Putting them on a public forum is less about me thinking my ideas are so good the world needs to hear them, but moreso they might be helpful for (a few) others to read, or it might drum up a good conversations that might not have happened otherwise.
1. Think of it this way, if the internet was full of answers that were wrong 70% of the time, ChatGPT would be less likely to give correct answers, and therefore minimize its utility. That's actually an interesting idea, what if there were camoflauge programs that basically threw out a bunch of garbage that messed with the algorithms that dictate what we do and don't see?↩