What My Unpublished Article Drafts Are About

A fairly comprehensive list of my unpublished thoughts

Bryan Caplan

a while ago wrote:

In high school, I was clearly dumber than my four best friends.

In my Princeton Ph.D. program, I considered my intelligence average at best.

Yet I basically never met anyone who seemed more creative than me. I have far more ideas than even the most workaholic version of myself could ever actually write up. New ideas come so quickly that I’m in grave danger of forgetting most of them.

Which is why I rush to write my ideas down lest they be lost forever.

Isn’t that distracting? Sure, but I usually just jot down a title. If you want get the most out of your creativity, I highly recommend the practice. Create a queue of original ideas worth exploring. If, in hindsight, your idea sucks, let it languish. No one will ever find out.

This really resonated with me. In high school, I was also dumber than Caplan’s four best friends.

I definitely have a lower raw IQ than my best friends—with each of them scoring at least 100 points higher than me on the SAT. But in terms of creativity—ability to come up with new arguments for positions and ways of expressing those positions—I have them pretty clearly beat. Other than perhaps Bryan Caplan, I don’t know of anyone else who has multiple ideas that could be articles every day, plus a few things that wouldn’t be blog posts but only because my readers have unrefined tastes and don’t want to read another piece making the case for the self-indication assumption.

I have a LOT of unpublished article drafts.

A truly staggering number. I probably have more unpublished article drafts than published articles (some of the things officially included in drafts aren’t really article drafts but class notes, humorous poems, and such). Many of these are just a title, though some have a bit of substance.

Unfortunately, even with my frenetic daily posting, I cannot bring most of these to fruition. Three blog posts a day would be quite a challenge. So inevitably, my article backlog continuously grows.

However, just because I can’t write full posts about all my half-baked ideas doesn’t mean I can’t say anything about them. You can probably get more than half the substance from a single-paragraph summary of a blog post than from the full post. In light of this, I thought I’d write a roughly one-paragraph summary of a bunch of unpublished blog posts that are unlikely to ever see the light of day. A one-paragraph summary of many of the things I’ve thought in the last few years is pretty high bang for buck!

You can hear about new forms of government, why verificationists should be theists, a new argument for accepting the repugnant conclusion, and a new way to fortify the liar, lunatic, lord argument. Also beneath the paywall is a comically bad song parody that I never published for reasons that will be extremely obvious once you read the horrendously bad rhymes!