Almost four years ago, after having just developed and taught a course on critical reasoning, I began writing occasional blog posts. This began as a mostly impulsive exercise — my first post was driven by frustration with a sloppy self-help book — and developed into a somewhat more academic pursuit, replete with figures, equations, and so on. Yet I never really wrote these posts for my academic peers. This was mainly an exercise to clarify what topics most excited me. In this sense, the blog experiment was a success. I learned a lot by letting my interests guide my choice of topics and writing style. As I was working a job focused on using machine learning methods to predict suicide attempts, I realized that my spontaneous self still longed to think about philosophy, probability, decision-making, game theory, and — in what would prove a pivotal insight for my life’s trajectory — the law.
While I could have realized some of this through introspection alone, the insights would’ve been more superficial. I couldn’t have predicted, for example, that so much of my thinking revolves around selection bias or the softmax function. It turns out that, for better or worse, there are certain signature methods of seeing the world and writing about it that I come back to time and time again. Meanwhile, it has been illuminating to note the topics I didn’t write about, but I might have expected to prior to starting the blog. For example, despite my past interests in philosophy of mind and perceptual cognitive science, I didn’t feel compelled to weigh in on consciousness. And I never once wrote anything resembling a literature review of a topic I’ve researched in the past. It turns out that it’s relatively easy and fun for me to explain or argue about logical or statistical ideas, whereas it feels much more effortful to summarize and synthesize a large body of academic work, even if it’s about a subject matter I follow.
Looking forward, I hope to build a professional life where this style of writing is rewarded and used to help others arrive at more accurate views of probability, incentives, and so forth. Hopefully, law school will give me more than enough opportunities to practice doing this, while I also learn entirely new approaches to reasoning. And so, I’ll be ending the blog experiment for now. Thanks for reading!
