What have I learned in the last 2000 posts?
- I'm not a mass-consumption author. I not only hold only minority positions, but I don't even hold any of the minority positions as a true-believer. Rather, my line is semi-universally: the opposition has a good point. If you're not acknowledging it, you're suffering from pep-rally brain, and are no longer capable of thinking. Aumann/Hanson/Cowen agreement hardcore. NO ONE likes that line.
- However, there is a (small) market for the kind of crazy contrarian idea-stuff I peddle.
- If I wanted to be a high-readership blog, given my skillset, I'd have to pick a topic (education), write about it every day, maybe multiple times a day, schedule posts, and edit them...rather than just writing on all topics, all over the map, as the topics arrive. Someday, I might try that.
- I've improved my ability to communicate in a written fashion substantially over where I was 2.8 years ago. I still have a long way to go before I'm a good writer. (though leaving off the parentheticals would be a good start).
- A huge chunk of my total traffic has come from my opposing two contrarian thinkers with large-ish followings among the 2+ Sigma crowd: Moldbug and Yudkowsky.
- While my positions had been semi-stable from the time I left the Objectivist & Extropian movements near 2000...I've shifted moderately substantially in the last 3 years.
- However, as it has been since 1990-ish, my areas of interest remain mostly the same: Education, Epistemology, Evolutionary systems (including Econ), Ethics.
- On the other hand, I've developed a few new areas of interest as well: Error, Feedback Systems, Monkeybrains, Leftist concerns.
- I am very deeply a theorist who has theorized that theory in general is iffy...a teacher who teaches that teachers are barely useful.
- I can summarize my core position in an elevator-speech now, or even a one-liner: Hume, Deming, Hayek, and Hanson -- We're all wrong; we're wrong a lot; On complicated stuff, we're guaranteed to be wrong; and theory CAN'T help us without experimentation.
Thank y'all for hanging out here.
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2 comments:
Hey, congratulations on reaching the milestone.
Congrats. And fantastic job. You are one of the most consistently interesting and thought provoking people I've run across. Please, don't focus on one topic. You will end up repeating yourself to no purpose. (And I don't mind the parentheticals. (It's like reading someone whose native language is Lisp.))
I've always had a secret thought that despite your facility with bullet lists, you are the anti-powerpoint blog. If you did up, say, your climate post as a powerpoint deck with all the cheeseball clip art, it would make people's heads explode.
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