Writing as thinking in public

There is a particular kind of paralysis that comes with doing a PhD. You read enough to know that almost everything you might say has been said better by someone else, and you learn, correctly, that being wrong in print is expensive. The natural response is to say nothing until you are certain. The problem is that certainty rarely arrives, and when it does it usually arrives because you said something and someone told you why it was wrong.

So this site is an experiment. I am going to write here before I am finished thinking.

The two kinds of writing

The writing I do for journals is what you might call settled writing. It reports a conclusion. Every sentence is defensible, every claim has a citation, and the argument moves in a straight line from question to answer. It is enormously useful, and it is also a terrible record of how the work actually happened.

The writing I want to do here is working writing. It is what a research notebook would look like if a notebook could talk back.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

That line gets quoted too often, but it points at something real: the useful part of research is the period before the ideas resolve, and that period is almost never written down.

What this means in practice

A few rules I am setting for myself:

Publish at seventy percent. If I wait for ninety, I will publish once a year.
Date everything. A dated note is an honest note. It says “this is what I thought then,” which is a much easier claim to defend than “this is true.”
Revise in place, and say so. If I change my mind, the note gets updated and the update gets a date.
Separate the essays from the notes. Some things deserve a slow argument. Most things deserve three paragraphs.

The obvious objection

The obvious objection is that half-formed public writing is how people acquire reputations for being sloppy. I think this is true, and I think it is worth the risk, for a reason that has less to do with reputation than with attention: writing for an audience, even a hypothetical one, forces a level of precision that writing for yourself does not.

You can be vague in a private notebook forever. You cannot be vague in a paragraph you expect someone to read.

That is the whole argument, really. The audience is a discipline. Everything else is a side effect.