I like this post, because I have always been nervous expressing opinions online, and have kind of had to work up to it. The ideas in here sound like good steps. I’m getting a little bit past the ‘be secretly wrong’ stage at last now, and one helpful step beyond that can be to get a tumblr or similar throwaway blog and just experiment, starting with topics you feel reasonably comfortable talking about. Then slowly crank up the bold claims quotient :)
Another thing you can do is, once you’ve secretly articulated your bold claims, and in that space figured out which you believe and to what extent, publicly express your more endorsed, moderated judgment. It’s often important to have some workspace where you make bold but dubious claim X, in order seriously consider it as a hypothesis and explore what the evidence is and what it predicts. But this can help you figure out what qualifiers to add, or at least be able to confidently say something like, “I’m not sure this is right, but if it’s wrong, I have no idea how or in what direction.”
I like this post, because I have always been nervous expressing opinions online, and have kind of had to work up to it. The ideas in here sound like good steps. I’m getting a little bit past the ‘be secretly wrong’ stage at last now, and one helpful step beyond that can be to get a tumblr or similar throwaway blog and just experiment, starting with topics you feel reasonably comfortable talking about. Then slowly crank up the bold claims quotient :)
Another thing you can do is, once you’ve secretly articulated your bold claims, and in that space figured out which you believe and to what extent, publicly express your more endorsed, moderated judgment. It’s often important to have some workspace where you make bold but dubious claim X, in order seriously consider it as a hypothesis and explore what the evidence is and what it predicts. But this can help you figure out what qualifiers to add, or at least be able to confidently say something like, “I’m not sure this is right, but if it’s wrong, I have no idea how or in what direction.”