Reasons I am reluctant to blog

Here are two reasons I've been reluctant to start blogging again:
  1. It's embarrassing when people notice I'm wrong about stuff
  2. Blogging stats clicker-train me on what to write (which for me effectively means being clicker-trained on what and how to think)

Everyone on Twitter already knows I'm wrong about some things, so that's not a particularly robust reason to avoid writing! And it's really important to me to start sharing my thoughts publicly - to get comfortable being accountable for my thoughts. As Canadian politician Michael Ignatieff said, "If you stop saying what you think now, you'll forget what it's supposed to sound like when you finally get the chance." Over the past few years, I have trained myself out of having a firm opinion on a lot of topics. This blog isn't meant to be full of "firm opinions" in the sense that I'll stand by them forever, but I want to publish things that I stand by now, even if I cringe in 5 years.

The more interesting question is whether blogging will transform the way I think, and whether that transformation will be good.

I was talking to Mrs C last night and she said something like, "You are always training algorithms and algorithms are always training you." She was talking about how her experience of Twitter is full of kind, curious, thoughtful people when so many others experience a Twitter full of angry, tribal bickering. The conversations she chooses to engage in train the Twitter algorithm to show her more of the same kind of interesting and engaging conversations, and the type of person she chooses to mute or block or ignore teaches Twitter what she's not interested in.

But Twitter also changes her preferences - sometimes in positive ways, by showing her a hobby that she might've never experienced otherwise! Obviously it can also be in a negative way, such as tweeting only about "on brand" thoughts and experiences and constraining the way she expresses herself to be optimized for likes.

In a recent episode of the Growth Equation podcast called "Hero Worship and Performative Everything," Brad and Steve talk about how social media tends to reward extremes. People can end up optimizing their lives for extreme emotions or opinions, even if that's not what would be most fulfilling to them or what they would naturally gravitate towards. I know I'm the type to adapt to what people read and share and talk about and favourite, and trying to write more of that. So the failure mode I need to avoid is becoming a contrarian for clicks! Similarly, I am going to avoid writing about details of my personal relationships, because I don't want those to be swayed by the observer effect.

I'm hoping this blog will be a place for me to share things I haven't quite thought through yet, in order to spark productive back-and-forth, like when Richard Dawkins met Julia Galef and brought up a topic he hadn't figured out yet in order to work through it together. In that vein, I'm calling this a notebook after David MacIver's notebook blog, but I plan to publish less polished thoughts than he does. I find sharing incomplete thoughts a little uncomfortable with strangers - I feel vulnerable - but they're the kinds of conversations I'd like to have.

Location: London, UK

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