Most blogs are not worth reading, and I have little reason to expect mine to be different. This does not feel like a negative sentiment to me. The world is full of engaging, insightful, beautiful writing, much of which is found on personal blogs, and only half of which is found on slatestarcodex.com. There is no lack of great writing, and these days it is so easy to access that most of us worry more about spending too much of our time reading than we do about being unable to find worthwhile content. But for every great blog there are many not-as-great blogs. Much of it is written by interesting, thoughtful people. I have family, colleagues, and close friends who I am always excited to engage in conversation who write blogs that I almost never read. It’s not that they’re bad at writing or that they do not have anything interesting to say. It is not that I think I can do any better. It’s just really hard to write things that rise to such a level that they demand my attention.
I have on two or three occasions written things that seemed to do well on the Internet, and which were shared around a bit by people who do not know me. This is encouraging and flattering, and at first it might suggest that for me blogging is worthwhile. But really, it just means that I now know how much time and effort it takes for me to produce something of such quality and appeal to rise above the clamor of the Internet. There are people who can write such things on a near-daily basis, but I am not one of them, and I do not expect to become such a person. It’s not that writing a decent blog is out of reach, it’s that there is so much content within the amazing blogs that merely decent blogs just aren’t worth reading most of the time.
And yet, here I am.
I am writing this blog for two reasons. The first is that I sometimes want to write things that I know are relevant to a small audience of people, and which I think it makes more sense to share publicly. For example, I might have a conversation with some friends and later feel inclined to write up some of my thoughts on whatever it is that we talked about and post it somewhere that anyone can see it and respond to it.
The second reason is that putting in the effort to think through something enough to write about it is valuable. I have changed my views on why I should or should not write a blog while writing this post. I started out thinking that it was mostly because I wasn’t sufficiently confident that I had something worthwhile to say (which is part of how this blog got its name), and now I realize that’s not quite right. I’m fairly confident that this blog will, in expectation, be of fairly low value to most people, but I think it is likely to be of high value to me, so I went ahead and registered the domain.
This does mean that I will not be putting much effort into getting people to read it. I will occasionally cross post to LessWrong or EA Forum, but I do not plan on posting everything I write on Facebook or anything like that. Still, feel free to share it. The knowledge that if I say something stupid anyone can see it is part of the reason why writing a public blog is valuable. When I do say something stupid, please feel free to share it with others, but also let me know so I can fix my stupidity.
Come to think of it, as I’m writing this I have no idea how comments are set up. I’ll sort that out later. In the meantime, you can reach me however you normally do or at underconfidence decimal blog at gmail.
Underconfidence 