Why I Keep a Research Blog

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!

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.

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.

The more you know, the more you realize how little you know.

[0] https://www.azquotes.com/quote/721037

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 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 bravery. 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 very afraid of being wrong.

As an aside: I still get nervous every time I publish a post on my own blog.

(Emphasis mine)

You could write an entire book on this.

Thanks for the great read and for helping to kick off my software engineering career!

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.

I still write 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.

If you don’t see that what you are working on is almost obvious, then you are not ready to work on that yet.

reminds me of

Live in the future, then build what's missing

http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

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.

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.

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.

One quote that stood out to me was this one

> I appreciate that most of my writing is me, like an ant, simply following someone else’s trail.

I think you could apply that to most things in programming/computer science too

"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."

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.

Maybe I was trying to use it for the wrong things?

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.

The answer is: "no."

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.

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.

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.

If anyone else has some thoughts on how I might handle these things, I'd very much appreciate it.

1. The author must be young. That's a really small font.

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.

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?

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