
Why I Keep a Research Blog - gwgundersen
http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-blog/
======
agentultra
_" Writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is"_ [0]

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](https://www.azquotes.com/quote/721037)

~~~
loceng
Re: "Writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is"

This is why I dislike the down voting capability on sites. There's an impulse
the person dislikes what they read or from how they interpreted it, and then
they are able to quell that feeling with a single action vs. having to put the
effort into thinking and articulating into words what they're feeling, why
they are feeling it, and allow it to be publicly scrutinized - hopefully with
respectful responses. This allows not only scrutiny and discourse to occur,
however it also offers an opportunity for OP to potentially learn something -
whether that their language wasn't articulated clearly enough and so
interpreted how they didn't expect or other.

~~~
rytill
What forum rules would you like to see experiments with?

~~~
loceng
The easiest one would simply be removing the down vote mechanism. If with an
existing site then can compare with the years' prior stats - assuming they've
been recorded; I don't know if HN does. There are a number of things you could
monitor - would be interesting to see if any sets of people with the same
behaviour change their behaviour more than just down voting, like if they stay
on the site more or less, if they comment more or less; perhaps doing word use
analysis on these different sub sets before and after the down vote change,
what language are people who are prone to down voting using vs. those who only
comment or only up vote but don't down vote, etc.

~~~
aneesh297
So like Facebook or YouTube comments (downvotes on YouTube don't really do
anything) ?

~~~
rewq4321
Do you have evidence for this? It doesn't change the publicly displayed
number, but I was under the impression that it does change the ordering. That
did seem to be the case last time I experimented with this. On a video with
only a dozen or so comments I downvoted a comment with no upvotes, and then
opened the video page in an incognito tab, and the comment I downvoted was
right at the bottom. Could have been a coincidence, but the probability of
that seemed low at the time.

------
cushychicken
I absolutely love this. It's a great distillation of many of the reasons I
myself keep a blog. It's a means, and an end, of learning more, and keeping
yourself accountable to your knowledge.

 _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.

~~~
pjc50
I don't have a blog, but I find it much, _much_ easier to write comments here
on HN. And I greatly improved my electronics knowledge through answering
questions on electronics.stackexchange. There are some important questions
which are easy to phrase but hard to answer. One day I want to write the a
canonical introduction to electron flow models, provisionally titled "Lies you
have been told about the electron".

I also plan to dig out my highest-rated HN comments and turn them into blog
posts or even an ebook some day. There's probably 10-100k words I've written
here already.

~~~
cushychicken
_One day I want to write the a canonical introduction to electron flow models,
provisionally titled "Lies you have been told about the electron"._

Ha! I'm just starting to grasp that - been going through chapter 8 of _Art of
Electronics, 3rd Ed_. Getting a hard and fast education on noise. Shot noise
is fascinating. I still don't have a great mental model to compare it to. The
closes I've come is dripping water vs a continuous stream of water.

 _I also plan to dig out my highest-rated HN comments and turn them into blog
posts or even an ebook some day._

I had this same notion the other day. It's neat how an internet post can
inspire such clarity of thought.

~~~
freehunter
If I get into a long conversation on HN I usually turn it around and make it
into a blog post, cleaning up the arguments and discussion. I only write for
myself and don’t publicize my personal blog but I’ve had some of those then
turn around and be posted back to HN by someone else which becomes an
interesting lifecycle of internet arguments :)

------
dlkf
> I hypothesize that jargon is especially susceptible to this kind of misuse
> because an expert listener might infer a mutual understanding that does not
> exist. _This feeling of verbal common ground can even be gamed._ Many of us
> have done this on exams, hoping for partial credit by stitching together the
> outline of a proof or using the right words in an essay with the hopes that
> the professor connects the dots for us.

(Emphasis mine)

You could write an entire book on this.

------
sciencewolf
Off-topic, but Gregory - I was a participant in your C4Q Python workshop
several years ago! So good to see that you're doing well in academia, and
great article. Agree with many of the points you've made regarding writing--
as an example, one trick I've found for getting better at technical interviews
was creating walk-throughs of problems I struggled with.

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

~~~
gwgundersen
Hey, it sounds like you're still programming. Glad to hear it's going well!

~~~
TurkishPoptart
Are you still putting on that workshop?

------
kingsara
Great article and very concise. I've found myself and my writing "addiction"
represented. There are many concepts I couldn't grasps until I tried to put
them to paper.

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.

~~~
jimbo1qaz
This seems to be a static site generator.

[http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-
blo...](http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-blog/) has a
HTTP header last updated on 01/13/2020 04:34:31.

[http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2019/12/23/random-
fourier-f...](http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2019/12/23/random-fourier-
features/) is 01/13/2020 04:34:30, or 1 second earlier.

Also the source code has a link to
[http://gregorygundersen.com/css/markdown.css](http://gregorygundersen.com/css/markdown.css)
which 404's.

~~~
pdm55
For his css files try
[http://gregorygundersen.com/css/](http://gregorygundersen.com/css/) Better
still try his GitHub
[https://github.com/gwgundersen](https://github.com/gwgundersen) especially
his notebook software
[https://github.com/gwgundersen/anno](https://github.com/gwgundersen/anno)

------
chubot
Fantastic article! All true and well-explained. This Grothendieck quote

 _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](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.

------
tombert
Due to some frustrating policies of the company I work for, I was told that I
can't blog about anything technical, without the risk of being fired and
possibly even sued due to some ridiculous non-compete that I really shouldn't
have signed.

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.

~~~
aliceryhl
You should probably quit.

~~~
tombert
You're probably right, but these kinds of insane, all-encompassing non-compete
clauses are pretty common in most large corporations (at least in my
understanding), and if I were to leave I'd be sacrificing all my stock grants
and the like. There's no point in me quitting if I don't think I can get
something better.

I could of course go to a startup or something, but I have a wife in school
and a mortgage to pay. I don't really mind upheaving my life to take a bit of
a risk on a startup, but I think it might be a bit selfish if there's a risk
of it causing problems for other people.

~~~
aliceryhl
There may be many that have non-competes, but I think you will find that many
of them would allow blogging (or at least be willing to make an exception).
Stopping engineers from blogging is typically not the reason they have the
non-compete.

Alternatively you could try to convince your employer to add an exception to
the non-compete. It's not unthinkable that they would allow it, if it's just
for blogging.

~~~
tombert
They make it pretty clear that I need to get approval to do anything code-
related outside of work. I had to go through a ton of forms to get permission
to teach coding at a public library here.

That said, you're not wrong; I probably could harass someone to be allowed to
blog, but after being declined twice from contributing to open source (both
taking around 4-5 hours of talking to legal teams and managers), I'm just a
bit burnt out from the experiences.

I should probably find another job once a bit more stock vests.

------
mikece
"Learning with intention" sounds like a reworded way of saying "deliberate
practice" which is something highly motivated people have been doing from time
immemorial (one notable example being Ben Franklin's rule of spending one hour
per day reading or learning something new). It's excellent legacy advice
because it works.

~~~
closed
Just a small nit pick here--your example does not match the definition of
deliberate practice.

In general, deliberate practice is about how you practice (e.g. focused on
most useful things; w/ quick expert feedback), rather than how often.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_(learning_method)#Del...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice_\(learning_method\)#Deliberate_practice)

[https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-making-of-an-expert](https://hbr.org/2007/07/the-
making-of-an-expert)

~~~
criddell
This is my understanding of deliberate practice as well.

Interestingly, The GP mentioned Ben Franklin and Franklin _did_ use deliberate
practice to improve his writing:

[https://www.anecdote.com/2010/08/benjamin-franklin-
deliberat...](https://www.anecdote.com/2010/08/benjamin-franklin-deliberate-
practice/)

------
djhworld
Really enjoyed reading this, thanks.

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

------
AbitofAsum
I deeply appreciate the main concept here, and I've tried several ways to get
the benefits of writing.

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.

------
sam537
I don't understand any of the specialized concepts in this blog post but I am
no stranger to this:

"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.

------
eb3c90
I've not found it super useful myself.

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.

------
bovermyer
Thank you very much for sharing this. This answers a very specific question
I've had for awhile now: do I understand what I think I understand?

The answer is: "no."

------
toantruong95
"Writing is Nature's way of showing you how sloppy your thinking is" This is
exactly the reason that I have started a blog recently. Before, I have only
read the material and got a feeling of understanding while it is far from the
truth. When I start writing, I know I can gain a deeper layer of understanding
in a way that is not impossible with just reading. Really appreciate this.

------
KennyCason
Wow, I'm very glad to have discovered your blog as of today. I'm really
enjoying your posts and clear writing style. I just read your "Proof of the
SVD" blog post. I can tell I am going to learn a lot already. Thanks for
putting in so much effort!

------
keithnz
I don't blog (anymore), but I keep a personal diary and "guides". The diary is
to note down various insights and random thoughts. My guides are consolidated
learning around a particular topic and key information that I will know I will
need to come back and refer to. I make guides for anything, principles of
design, languages, frameworks, specific tools, specific websites, books, and
games. Some are purely informational, some capture my thinking about something

------
bachmeier
As I was reading this, I had two thoughts:

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.

------
mbeex
I have been looking for a blogging environment for this kind of topics for
some time. So, my question to the author:

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?

~~~
thiagomgd
If I can give my 2 cents, think about how you would like to write and publish,
and where do you want to focus. I've tried to use static site generators
(mostly Hugo), but in the end, I've realized that I spent way more time making
little tweaks to my theme, creating short codes "to help me create content",
than actually writing.

Now, I plan on just having a blog to myself, to post what I've been reading,
with some highlights/notes, and for that, a free wordpress.com is way better
than anything else, as it's very easy to add different types of media/embed
content without a worry, and to use their android app to write on the go if I
want.

So really, whatever you use, first decide on your ideal workflow, and then
find the solutions :)

~~~
gwgundersen
I didn't want to make the post overly long by adding a section on "failure
modes," but certainly one of them is: spend a long time building and tweaking
a blog rather than writing. I've done this too and work to avoid it.

------
arnold_palmur
Remarkable stuff Greg - no surprise to see your work on the front page of HN -
always inspiring.

~~~
gwgundersen
Thanks Chris!

------
toantruong95
What are the software/tools to use to write notes/journals? I personally use
github.io but it does not seem to be efficient.

------
awinter-py
getting feedback from people smarter than me is another reason to publish

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

