<i>"Writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is"</i> [0]<p>Writing is my primary tool. I keep a blog... and journals. I keep a journal for my reading: what I've read, what I thought about it, choice things I'd like to recall. I keep a journal of my mathematical reading, thoughts, and work. Programming too!<p>Keeping your writing in a blog and sharing it with others puts a bit of pressure on you to keep a public persona but it's worth doing, as the author points out, to keep one honest. It has taken a while for me to learn this as evidenced on my blog but I have taken it more to heart in recent years.<p>Be careful writing with an authoritative voice if you yourself have not researched the topic deep enough to convincingly defend your findings! It's much easier for your audience to accept your work if they know you're in the process of discovery when they find an error or omission. It makes you more credible as well.<p>The more you know, the more you realize how little you know.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.azquotes.com/quote/721037" rel="nofollow">https://www.azquotes.com/quote/721037</a>
I 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.<p><i>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><p>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 <i>bravery</i>. 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 <i>very</i> afraid of being wrong.<p>As an aside: I still get nervous every time I publish a post on my own blog.
> 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. <i>This feeling of verbal common ground can even be gamed.</i> 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.<p>(Emphasis mine)<p>You could write an entire book on this.
Off-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.<p>Thanks for the great read and for helping to kick off my software engineering career!
Great 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.<p>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.
Due to some frustrating policies of the company I work for, I was told that I can't blog about anything technical, without the risk of being fired and possibly even sued due to some ridiculous non-compete that I really shouldn't have signed.<p>I still <i>write</i> the posts, they just live on a hard drive in my basement, because there's still value in writing. I just wish I could give back to the community and/or benefit from people auditing what I'm doing wrong.
Fantastic article! All true and well-explained. This Grothendieck quote<p><i>If you don’t see that what you are working on is almost obvious, then you are not ready to work on that yet.</i><p>reminds me of<p><i>Live in the future, then build what's missing</i><p><a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html</a><p>The way I see it, both are saying that if you want to be creative, then you can't just think, study, or hope for inspiration. You have to immerse yourself and your mind in a different environment, in a different frame, and then new problems and solutions will be in plain view.<p>Another way to say it is that half of the problem is choosing the problem, or formulating the problem. But if you start from the same situation or frame, then you're likely to come up with the same problems as everyone else.
"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.
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks.<p>While I'm no way near mathematically capable (yet) of understanding the jargon the author uses later on in the post (e.g. "randomized singular value decomposition"), I'm glad he puts links to at least show he's not bluffing.<p>One quote that stood out to me was this one<p>> I appreciate that most of my writing is me, like an ant, simply following someone else’s trail.<p>I think you could apply that to most things in programming/computer science too
I don't understand any of the specialized concepts in this blog post but I am no stranger to this:<p>"Under pressure, my mind, like a cart on a well-worn path, finds the same old ruts. Once again, writing breaks this cycle because it requires more active participation."<p>Being in medicine, I sat on a paper for over a month because I knew that on the last week I would be able to just jump-start writing in the same way I have done so for the last few years. It is embarrassing to think that in any realm of science there is this autonomic system that just takes over when the deadline draws near and poorly thought and researched concepts full of jargon fill the pages.
I've not found it super useful myself.<p>Maybe I was trying to use it for the wrong things?<p>It seems like a good way of creating better understanding for yourself, a less good way of building a community. That seems to be best done off-line.
Thank you very much for sharing this. This answers a very specific question I've had for awhile now: do I understand what I think I understand?<p>The answer is: "no."
I deeply appreciate the main concept here, and I've tried several ways to get the benefits of writing.<p>I have two hangups, one makes blogging hard, and one makes keeping an organized notebook hard. If anyone has some thoughts/philosophy about it, I'm very much interested.<p>The first hangup for blogging is that I find it very difficult to choose a 'technical background cutoff'. I very much like ELI5 attitudes but the issue (that everyone has to deal with) is choosing which topics not to explore. It's difficult not to wander off on tangent "pre-req" topics not only because I want clear explanations, but also because of my second hangup. I tend to "overthink" things and when you question deeply enough, you always wind up at something too difficult to figure out in a day/week/month. Repeating that 10x times per 'blog post' just doesn't work.<p>One possible work around that I've gleaned from this discussion is to have blog posts presented as WIPs, and work on them progressively almost like a notebook.<p>If anyone else has some thoughts on how I might handle these things, I'd very much appreciate it.
"Writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is"
This is exactly the reason that I have started a blog recently. Before, I have only read the material and got a feeling of understanding while it is far from the truth. When I start writing, I know I can gain a deeper layer of understanding in a way that is not impossible with just reading. Really appreciate this.
Wow, I'm very glad to have discovered your blog as of today. I'm really enjoying your posts and clear writing style. I just read your "Proof of the SVD" blog post. I can tell I am going to learn a lot already. Thanks for putting in so much effort!
I don't blog (anymore), but I keep a personal diary and "guides". The diary is to note down various insights and random thoughts. My guides are consolidated learning around a particular topic and key information that I will know I will need to come back and refer to. I make guides for anything, principles of design, languages, frameworks, specific tools, specific websites, books, and games. Some are purely informational, some capture my thinking about something
As I was reading this, I had two thoughts:<p>1. The author must be young. That's a really small font.<p>2. The same could be said for teaching a class. No matter the class, even a basic undergrad class, I always try to work a few new research results (not necessarily my own) into the lectures. Edit: I was specifically referring to "Learning with intention" in this part of my comment.
I have been looking for a blogging environment for this kind of topics for some time. So, my question to the author:<p>What kind of software / tools /styles are behind this blog in the technical sense? I see mathjax, probably some static site generator(?), what else are you using?
getting feedback from people smarter than me is another reason to publish<p>hearing 'you're wrong' publicly from a world-class expert on my topic is the fastest way to advance my knowledge on a topic -- it's basically free college