Nate Meyvis

The 'hey, this seems right' post

Sometimes:

  1. There's an argument or observation that seems to you correct and significant;
  2. You keep referring to it, if only internally;
  3. You don't have much, if anything, to add to it.

It is super-valuable to write these things down anyway (and in public, if you write in public):

  1. If you keep referring to it, that's often because something you think is important and/or fundamental is unknown to others.
  2. It's useful to spread good ideas.
  3. The "trivial" rephrase, link collection, or extra observation is often more valuable than you think.
  4. People like knowing that you think their observation or argument is important.
  5. If nothing else, you will have a ready reference for the thing.

This sort of situation came up all the time in grad school. The few times I wrote up a summary of the situation, I was glad I'd done so. Too often, I just fumbled my way through conversations, assuming other people knew the (to me) knockdown argument in a well-cited paper X.1

It can be hard to convince yourself that this sort of post is worth making, especially if you aren't into link-sharing and other very-short-form writing. It's worth it more often than you think, or at least more often than I think.

  1. Myles Burnyeat was correct when he argued that Socrates says not that virtue makes you money but that virtue makes money good. Stephen Menn was correct when he argued that in the process of collection and division, what you collect is not what you start out by dividing.↩

#meta