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.