I've spent the last few days considering starting a blog, but I'm encountering a moral dilemma.
I think humanity already overshares too often. I think we put a lot of half-baked thoughts in the public space, and the world consequently suffers from "information overload" where we can't figure out what to pay attention to / what is valuable. It happens in news media, social media, blog posts, and this Slack. In this Slack, the main instigator of discourse seems to be the posting of links (65% of posts in the last 3 weeks). How much time are we wasting on distracting tidbits of public information?
So when I'm drafting ideas for a blog, I'm encountering this worry that my half-baked thoughts will just be further distractions. Notice that Bret Victor, who many of us here appreciate, doesn't have a blog. He doesn't share ideas until he's sure he has a valuable, coherent message, and sometimes he spends years preparing his next message. Perhaps this is the best way to communicate.
Of course, many of us want to share ideas so that we can, in effect, "work together" on the future of programming. I think collaboration is valuable, but perhaps public communication is not the best way to do this. In a private setting, discourse is informal, and half-baked ideas can be happily lost to history. When people work together privately, they can filter through ideas rapidly, and only publish information when they have a battle-tested, coherent message.
Unfortunately, private collaboration is still most effective in person, because humanity doesn't yet have the technology to digitize the experience that physical workplaces provide. Perhaps an in-person communication style is nevertheless one we should aspire to, to prevent the dissemination of half-baked ideas. I don't know how best to achieve this, but
#two-minute-week seems compatible, at least.
It's also unfortunate that our societal structure isn't conducive to the formation of altruistic "working groups", which would be the ideal collaborative environment, but that's a whole separate discussion which we've touched on before.
Thoughts?