Why I keep these notes in public
Not for an audience. For the version of me who has to make this decision again in three years and won't remember why.
I keep a private notebook and I keep this one. They do different jobs.
The private one is for thinking that isn’t finished. Most thinking isn’t finished — it’s fragments, half-arguments, things I read that snagged on something.
This one is for the moment a fragment turns into a position I’d defend. Publishing forces a specific kind of honesty: I can’t wave at a claim and move on, I have to support it or drop it. I drop a lot of them at that stage. That deletion is most of the value. The audience is almost incidental; the discipline is what I’m buying.
The second reason
Memory is worse than we admit. I have re-derived the same conclusion three separate times across five years, each time convinced it was new. Writing it down properly, with the reasoning intact, means that next time I get to start where I finished instead of from scratch.
A note without its reasoning ages badly. “Don’t do X” is nearly useless later. “Don’t do X because Y, and here’s what would change my mind” still works when the world has moved.
So every note here tries to carry three things:
- What I actually believe
- Why — the mechanism, not just the outcome
- What would change my mind
The third reason, quietly
Writing in public occasionally finds people who have thought harder about the thing than I have, and they tell me. That has been worth more than any amount of reach — a slow, low-volume, high-quality channel. I’d take it over a large audience every time.
