is it worth writing blog posts about “obvious” things? i’ve been doing a lot of writing recently, and i frequently finish writing something, and i look at it, and i feel like it’s so obvious that all readers will either already agree and not learn anything, or disagree so fundamentally that changing their mind would require diving much deeper into fundamental beliefs.
One of the benefits of occasionally talking to people is that you get an indicator of what things are obvious or not, based on what you find yourself repeatedly explaining or arguing for. (I use 3 times as my own threshold.)
There are a lot of claims with which I would agree with if you ask me but I wouldn’t use them in a reasoning chain on my own because they never crossed my mind.
A lot of complex reasoning rests on having reliable basics on which you can reason.
When I’m talking about BPC-157, then being trained I bioinformatics it feels pretty obvious to me that if BPC-157 is a real peptide that’s part of a protein called BPC I should be able to look up the gene for BPC sequencing databases. There’s the dogma of molecular biology, proteins come from genes.
If I would ask anyone at the bio-hacking about whether they agree with the dogma of molecular biology and that this means that there should be a gene to look up the probably would say they agree. Yet, somehow the argument does not convince people who believe in BPC-157 that it’s bogus.
Explaining the dogma of molecular biology and our great success at gene sequencing that actually sinks in isn’t easy.
If you find yourself writing something very obvious, it becomes more important to ask: “How can I make this point in a similar way that really sinks in so that the reader can actually use it and rely on it?” instead of just “Have I made a clear logical argument for it?”.
At the very least, you’re testing whether the model that predicts this is accurate.
i feel like it’s so obvious that all readers will either already agree and not learn anything, or disagree so fundamentally that changing their mind would require diving much deeper into fundamental beliefs.
The default advice blogging advice I’ve heard is that “obvious” topics often make for good posts because they are often non-obvious to readers, so one should strongly default towards posting if the concern that it is too obvious.
But maybe you’re making this judgement even with that prior in mind? I’d be curious to see one of these “obvious” posts.
In addition to verifying obviousness by posting like Gwern mentioned, which in my experience is a frequent source of surprise, there’s the advanced version of this that e.g. Toby Ord has done most of his career by his own lights. This does require taste at picking topics “at the border of the trivial and the profound” to quote him, but taste is pretty clearly something you have aplenty.
Obvious facts nobody would disagree with when explicitly stated can still be underappreciated and not paid enough attention to, so they can still be worth spelling out for that reason. Although I must say when I get tired hearing of something obvious too many times, I get a pathological contrarian urge to argue against it.
is it worth writing blog posts about “obvious” things? i’ve been doing a lot of writing recently, and i frequently finish writing something, and i look at it, and i feel like it’s so obvious that all readers will either already agree and not learn anything, or disagree so fundamentally that changing their mind would require diving much deeper into fundamental beliefs.
One of the benefits of occasionally talking to people is that you get an indicator of what things are obvious or not, based on what you find yourself repeatedly explaining or arguing for. (I use 3 times as my own threshold.)
There are a lot of claims with which I would agree with if you ask me but I wouldn’t use them in a reasoning chain on my own because they never crossed my mind.
A lot of complex reasoning rests on having reliable basics on which you can reason.
When I’m talking about BPC-157, then being trained I bioinformatics it feels pretty obvious to me that if BPC-157 is a real peptide that’s part of a protein called BPC I should be able to look up the gene for BPC sequencing databases. There’s the dogma of molecular biology, proteins come from genes.
If I would ask anyone at the bio-hacking about whether they agree with the dogma of molecular biology and that this means that there should be a gene to look up the probably would say they agree. Yet, somehow the argument does not convince people who believe in BPC-157 that it’s bogus.
Explaining the dogma of molecular biology and our great success at gene sequencing that actually sinks in isn’t easy.
If you find yourself writing something very obvious, it becomes more important to ask: “How can I make this point in a similar way that really sinks in so that the reader can actually use it and rely on it?” instead of just “Have I made a clear logical argument for it?”.
Yes, I think so. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/thXohzXrWCA2EhZCH/mateusz-baginski-s-shortform#MRNSMcFxFuW6kZbap
At the very least, you’re testing whether the model that predicts this is accurate.
The default advice blogging advice I’ve heard is that “obvious” topics often make for good posts because they are often non-obvious to readers, so one should strongly default towards posting if the concern that it is too obvious.
But maybe you’re making this judgement even with that prior in mind? I’d be curious to see one of these “obvious” posts.
In addition to verifying obviousness by posting like Gwern mentioned, which in my experience is a frequent source of surprise, there’s the advanced version of this that e.g. Toby Ord has done most of his career by his own lights. This does require taste at picking topics “at the border of the trivial and the profound” to quote him, but taste is pretty clearly something you have aplenty.
Obvious facts nobody would disagree with when explicitly stated can still be underappreciated and not paid enough attention to, so they can still be worth spelling out for that reason. Although I must say when I get tired hearing of something obvious too many times, I get a pathological contrarian urge to argue against it.