Why did I Start a Blog?

When I started this blog for the 2020 New Year, I mostly cited a desire to have a ritual, a creative outlet, and a way to put down my thoughts in the same niche that a journal might fill, but a little higher stakes. At least I think those are some of the reasons, I can't be bothered to look, which was always a dynamic that hurt how satisfying I could find it. If I didn't put effort into crafting my sentences and researching my topics, then I wouldn't be satisfied with the work as a creative outlet. But it takes time to look into every point, especially when the blog was called "Daily Anything", and that time commitment every single day drove away other things that I wanted to spend time doing and becomes a pretty shit ritual.

I still had the journal aspect of blogging that appealed to me. A chance to make my thoughts more concrete and trackable. I've journaled for fairly long spans before, but eventually it stops scratching the itch. I wanted to be able to engage more serious topics and actually feel like I was getting somewhere. More than that, I think it's indisputable that I wanted other people to feel like I was getting somewhere too. In the wide world of useful insights I wanted to unearth a few and feel good about it.

This is where I link to the most recent post from Astral Codex Ten, which spells it out better than I could, and without THAT many redundant sentences.

If you aren't familiar with Astral Codex Ten, I'll summarize it by saying that it's exactly what I wanted to do but much, much better. And the fact that I didn't know much about it until the last few months is almost comical. To most people, that's pretty dry humour, but I'm sure more than one passionate blog reader could have seen my shilling for Julia Galef and Rob Wiblin and wondered when I would finally take the time to read some ACX. I had spent a long time in this orbit, but the amount of time to read long-form blogs had always scared me away whenever I heard someone mention this guy named Scott Alexander (the blog's author).

Where things sit, I'm much happier to have discovered and be reading an outstanding blog than writing a mediocre one. That said, I'm curious what position I could still play in the epistemic minor leagues (read the link). Recently, I have mostly blogged to think through an idea. In the future, I'm still interested in writing the kind of thing I could share more widely. Some thoughts for what that could entail.

1. Predictions, and their outcomes (smorgasbord, fun, possibly bets)

2. Data accumulation or analysis of municipal policy projects

3. Applications of Georgism to Canadian politics, especially local

4. Predictions specifically of Chemistry fields

If you don't understand what I mean by each of these points, that's fine. I'll have to figure out what they mean myself. The first three entail varying levels of effort, but are mostly things to share with friends or possibly motivate a letter to a local politician. The last I would take more seriously. Depending on the direction that I wanted to go, that might even require a spin-off website to keep it clear from politics and religion stuff in the back catalogue, but I'm getting way ahead of myself.

For now, I think I can keep including random hiking photos at the end.