Blog about things you don't understand yet | Hacker News Reader

Blog about things you don't understand yet

seangoedecke.com

169 pointsgfysfm49 comments

One of the best ways to clarify your thoughts about a subject is to write about it, and one of the best ways to prove to yourself that you understand it is to be able to write about it clearly. Indeed, my primary motivation to write is to order my thoughts and better understand the universe I live in.

It is surprisingly difficult work, but so is lifting weights. That is precisely why I insist on doing it myself. If I let an AI write for me, it would be the same as letting a robot lift weights for me. Yeah, it would be easier, but I would not get stronger, nor would I gain the confidence and self discipline that comes from doing hard things.

Having it generate the argument is like letting the robot lift the weight. Having it poke holes in an argument you wrote yourself is more like having a spotter

Be careful you don't blindly follow what it says though. Maybe ask it for just one rebuttal?

I think a better way to understand is talk and discuss it rather than just write about it. AI can be useful for this, like instead of it lifting for you, it is holding the punching bag instead in your metaphor.

Yes, writing clearly makes you understand your thoughts etc. But it is one of the methods and we shouldn't extraploate how much a person understands things based on whether they write or not.

Arguments and discussions are still superior form of learning to me than just purely writing and thinking.

You raise an interesting point. I agree that discussing a subject with a knowledgeable mentor, AI or otherwise, is a great way to learn. But I think back-and-forth discussions are limited as a means of testing your mastery of a subject. Especially with complex and nuanced subjects, being able to organize them in your mind is an essential part of mastery. You will not know if you have mastered them unless you can generate a clear and coherent description of them entirely on your own. With a mentor prompting you, step by step, you are relying in part on the mentor’s understanding of the subject to guide your thinking.

It is like the difference between multiple-choice and essay exams. In the former, the questions you are asked reveal much about the structure of the subject to be explored and of the relative importance of its facets and the many nuances within. In the latter, you are on your own: you must conceive of a coherent map, render its form onto a blank sheet, and populate it with what is important, with everything being sensibly connected.

One is getting guidance and another is using that guidance. They are not substitutes.

Zen teacher talks with students, but then the students work on their own. They cannot get that knowledge in a dialogue. In Zen the situation is clearest, but it is same everywhere, e. g. in math.

The problem with talking and arguing is that many people push/flood the discussion with low-quality arguments. This puts it back on the person trying have a good discussion to keep correcting or defending.

A public example of this is Trump who just overwhelms any discussion with bullshit. It's impossible to have a conversation where anyone learns something.

Writing lets all participants operate at their own pace, and the type of person who tries to overwhelm a discussion with bullshit often doesn't write very much.

Having it write the initial draft can be educational if you read through as an editor and research and/or ask questions on everything you don't understand (and also work to eliminate slop construction and tics). Certainly not the same as doing the initial draft yourself, but there's still an active process to it.

I expected to disagree with this post but actually found it really worthwhile.

For my own blog [0] I usually start writing because I feel I just learned and did something cool which gets me excited to share it. I also write only about topics I'm very familiar with (graphics and performance). Very safe. And still I learn a lot by forcing myself to really examine what I write about and always leave with much better insight into something I thought I knew inside and out. And still I'm always very nervous that people will dismiss it or find huge faults in it. I've found a few issues myself after the fact, but commenters have been nice.

Maybe I should risk pushing myself into unfamiliar territory? On one side, I absolutely loathe blogs written in an expert voice by someone who is clearly a novice - and I don't want to be that person. On the other hand, people who know me often encourage me to get more technical and detailed in my posts because they recognize that my blog is very simplified (meant to be approachable) compared to what I actually do day to day. My upcoming post will definitely lean into the more low level and technical. Hopefully that will be appreciated, but I find myself really nervous about it.

[0] https://agentlien.github.io

What's your opinion on github.io?

I like it. It's not complicated, it's tied to a git repo, it won't struggle if I ever get a popular post.

I even have my own domain and I still ended up choosing to have my blog on GitHub because it was so smooth an experience.

What do you think about putting your blog in Microsoft's hands?

As long as the only copy of the blog doesn't exist on Github, it really doesn't matter IMO.

True. I am happy with Codeberg's new Codeberg Pages codebase, which is easier and more robust than the old system.

There's a venerable tradition of writing an essay with the intention of attempting to understand a topic. People can misinterpret it; when deciding whether to support 'remain' or 'leave' in the Brexit referendum, Boris Johnson wrote two essays, each steelmanning one particular point of view. Somehow, the 'remain' essay was leaked later on, leading to the accusation that he didn't believe in the cause he was espousing. I can't think of a better way to decide a personal position on a tough topic though.

Essay can literally mean "attempt": https://www.etymonline.com/word/essay

cf. [Montaigne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_(Montaigne))

BoJo is a well-established liar, manipulator, and narcissist, so in his case it's natural to suspect duplicity.

His sister wrote an article where she describes reading both columns at the time and recently rereading them both: https://www.newsbreak.com/the-independent-517119/47045597742...

Her take on his motivations are nuanced and compelling imo:

> It was not so much indecision; it was anxiety about being disloyal to his boss. It was also anxiety about advocating a course of action that could hole the good ship Britannia below the waterline unless some rapid free-trade agreements were struck

Hmm. Great post, not so sure about the title.

I'd say (and I think this is actually compatible with the article itself, if not the title) that a better rule is to write about things that you've only just started understanding. The OP is, I think, correct that you might write a better introduction than an expert for whom it's all obvious if you've just been through the struggle of learning it, because the journey is fresh in your mind.

The risk of sounding more knowledgeable than you actually are is a real problem, though, and I'm glad he mentions it. It's really tricky to strike the right balance between making it clear that the topic is new to you, and hedging so much that you sound like ChatGPT on a bad day.

I was more excited before I realized the title was imperative rather than descriptive.

I think you’re looking for https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

Sean Goedecke's blog generally is pretty intellectually stimulating, though.

I used to do exactly this, but 99% of my blog's traffic was bots, so I shut it down.

The web is on its last legs. Why bother publishing if nobody will read it? Nowadays I just write explorative/study notes in a notebook. I retain that better than typed writing anyways.

Genuine question, did you put work into distribution so people knew about it first?

I've known a bunch of people who have said 'blogging is dead' but that's often shared with a lack of sharing the work in the first place or sharing it.

>Why bother publishing if nobody will read it?

The vast majority of blogs go unread, even back on the old web. I used to blog almost every day, for years, back in the early 2000s, and probably no one noticed.

But the fun was in the activity and the self-expression, both in blogging and discovering blogs. And if someone happened to come along and say hi it was a bonus. I'm trying to recapture some of that fun but it's difficult.

If I may, one reason to write about it is to understand it more clearly. Even if nobody reads something I wrote, at least I got better at it.

I think he means publishing isn't worth the effort,since he has an offline notebook for writing still.

Unless you think actually going through with the work of making something online is worth the effort.

In my experience, it's the act of writing for someone else that makes me learn the most. It helps clear out the assumptions I had which I had been satisfied with but didn't actually have the evidence for. When writing for myself, I don't think about the assumptions as much, but when writing for others they become a lot more evident to me.

I can't speak for everybody, but it's different for me if there's a chance somebody can read it. I have notebooks offline, too, that nobody will ever see, but they don't get the same fine-toothed comb treatment.

WOAH ITS HIM

> Why bother publishing if nobody will read it?

Because you want the thing to exist. I make music I don’t expect anyone to ever listen to, I just want the thing to be and I feel good uploading it somewhere I can link to in the future if I want to. Same with a lot software projects people publish on GitHub or other places. It’s also nice to look back at the online archive you built over time. It’s really for myself

What do you think about something like Gemini protocol?

https://geminiprotocol.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

There's a sweet spot where you know enough to ask useful questions but still remember which parts were confusing in the first place. Experts often lose that

As with anything, there is a lot of nuance to be considered here. Some scenarios;

1) You don't know anything about the topic i.e. you have not read even some basic papers/articles/books on the topic, do not blog.

2) You have put some effort reading about the topic, have understood something but a lot still remains to be read and understood. Blog, but make sure to let people know your depth so that they are not dismissive of you. You are trying to elicit some good discussions and receive feedback from people who know the subject better than you, which is a great help in planning your further studies and can short-circuit your learning curve. This is called "casting a brick to attract jade" in the Chinese work "Thirty-Six Stratagems".

3) You know the subject very well; Blog with a clear preface note as to whether it is intended for beginners/intermediates/experts in the field.

Finally, please do not be superficial/obvious, try to give as many references as you can and also your motivation for what led you to think on the lines of the post.

We have this culture at work where people actually takes time to read and feedback on your blog posts (you post it in the chat and at least a few picks it up). This helps a lot, getting (somewhat) honest feedback. I also use LLM for spotting grammar and spelling mistakes, and have started to use it to find reasoning flaws, which is does pretty good.

Outside of colleagues and machines, I find it quite hard to get feedback. I have a shot-box and my email on ever page, asking for comments, but rarely receive any. Maybe it is just that I don't have enough readers? =)

I was thinking that his views were those of a philosophy student even before I got to the point, early on, where he said he was a former philosophy student.

To the extent my views are similar, they were first developed in philosophy classes as well. In particular, my most influential paper assignment from college -- by far -- was from a Philosophy of Religion course: "Choose an argument from your previously assigned readings, and disagree with it."

Seeing the title, I expected this to be a blog post trying to convince me what to blog about, written by a person who does not yet understand if his perspective is correct.

The author states:

> every single one of my blog posts argues a point. I never publish a post that just gives some scattered thoughts on a topic, or a post that only says “yes, I agree with this other article”.

What’s wrong with posting about something interesting about the world you have discovered without arguing any point? The author seems to argue that polemics are the only valid form of writing. Even for a polemicist that seems a bit self aggrandizing.

I read that passage a little differently. He explicitly says other kinds of blogging are fine; the "argue a point" rule seems more like a constraint he imposes on himself because it forces him to investigate the subject more deeply

Rather than blogging about new topics, I wonder if the author has considered joining a forum. Creating a forum thread is typically simpler and less formal than a blog post. Forums are also designed for topical discussions, unlike blogs which encourage a one-way communication

This could lower the quality of LLM training data, so I don't think it's a good idea at this point.

I was hoping for a blog about things I don't understand yet.

I also write a lot about things I learn and not always fully understand yet. My secret worry is that one of my readers will meet me in person and quiz me verbally on the subjects of one of my articles. I would end up sounding really dumb compared to the impression made by the article!

When it comes to pretending to know something about things you don't understand, I think there's a big difference between talking and writing. Talking is bad because you're not equipped to form intelligent off-the-cuff sentences about the thing. But writing can be okay, if done with care.

Some things I would be able to talk about because I have insense opinions enough to remember (e.g. insurance purchasing decision logic), or they are easy to remember (the alpha-max plus beta-min algorithm), or I wrote about them recently enough to remember (how to perform an FFT). But ask me about anything else (sloppy confidence intervals for Pearson correlations?) and I'd just stand there.

Please, no. Don't blog about things you don't understand yet. We have far too many people and LLMs doing that. After you really understand it, then consider blogging.

I largely agree, with one huge caveat.

One of my favorite blogs[0] is interesting because the author, Julia Evans, often writes about her learning experiences and is very transparent about mistakes made and where she still doesn't understand things. It becomes very fun, driven by curiosity, and not pretending to be an expert at everything she touches.

[0] https://jvns.ca/

I often do the same, I write the hell about things I'm learning as it forces me me to understand the topic better and it points out my weaknesses. But when I "publish" I'm usually clear about the fact that I'm studying the topic.

I think that would make her very good at learning (not the things she is learning) and that is why she talks about things from a learning perspective. That would qualify her for the other commentor's bar.

> Please, no. Don't blog about things you don't understand yet.

Do you really mean this? Or do you mean "When you blog, be honest. Don't pretend to understand things you don't."?

Blogging about things you are learning about, especially if you invite feedback, is a great way to learn and to build a shared understanding within a larger community.

But I agree 100% on the fake-it-till-you-make-it posts on blogs and LinkedIn. That stuff is a blight on the web.

ADDED a concrete example: Consider this post: https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2026-07-23-on-the-nature-and-.... Do you think that posts like this are useful? Or net harmful?

"Honesty is a skill most people don't appreciate." This phrase starts an excerpt from a Piter Ralston interview that was one of turning points for me. I was caught by the word "skill"; not "virtue", as honesty normally called, but "skill", something from an entirely different area, as I thought. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TvZlpKT2ag).

I agree as long as you are very upfront about it being a learning/stream of conciousness blogpost, then it should be fine to watch how someone's learning journey progresses.

The author does outline the steps they take to make it clear

> Third, I try to make it clear on my blog who I am and what my credentials actually are. Even if it’s not explicitly described in the post, I have my real name and resume available on my /about page, so I don’t think a careful reader could be easily fooled into thinking I’m an expert on 19th-century England or space physics or LLM economics or anything like that.

If however that part is hidden and it is some confidently incorrect or pseudo guru type of post that is polluting the web with misinformation, then that is a different story.

Maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio is important to some people, and they may completely disregard the musings of people outside their field of expertise.

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