Posted by Curiositry 19 hours ago
My personal example: I had to do a lot of research, distillation of sources, and so on, in about 2001, to figure out the answer to a simple question:
Can a person truly be a professional poker player--that is, be able to profit consistently in a proveable way, not some kind of lucky tournament win and then you masquerade as a pro--or is that a bullshit dream held up by a few desperate gamblers?
I recall it took about a week before I felt confident about my answer and I had to overcome my own bias.
Just say it.
I recently gave a talk about lessons learned in the past, and it felt really awkward, like, "who am I to tell people what to do?". A few days later, a student walked up to me and thanked me for it, because he adopted a practice I had suggested and thought it was useful. And I had troubles sleeping before the talk because I kept thinking about how plainly obvious it was going to be.
I started blogging again when I discovered that indeed, even if it's only me who finds this useful, it makes sense to write about it. As an exercise in writing, or in case there's at least ONE person on the internet who finds it useful.
I find it extremely sad that blogging shifted from personal writing to a performative act - we can feel ashamed stating something obvious because the expectation is to get approvals and shares, rather than us writing something we find intriguing, interesting or worth writing down.
personal domain blogs survive faster than medium.
Google has been aggressively de-indexing websites in the last few months
It's why I follow Scott Manly or PBS Space Time specifically. There's lots of the same content on other channels/mediums. But I like them specifically, so why not?
Continuing to state the obvious, this is why you specifically should write if you have opinions you'd like to get out.
In that sense, my personal problem is that no one visits my homepage (www.makonea.com). Ultimately, I think conveying thoughts on such topics also depends to some extent on reputation.