You Should Consider Starting A Blog

Blogging is underrated

I was never planning to start a blog before I did it! It was a spontaneous decision, and like many who make spontaneous decisions that bring things into the world, I was really only in it for short-term satisfaction.

More precisely, it began when Michael Huemer wrote a blog post about why he wasn’t a utilitarian. I disagreed with it, but found the objections raised by his commenters to mostly be unconvincing. For that reason, I thought I’d write a reply. The reply ended up being ten parts and written in two days. You can find it in the archives—it wasn’t great, though in my defense, I was in high school!

But after this I realized: I had more things to say! I had more thoughts. So I started writing more. I wrote essays about utilitarianism, factory farming, and more. I eventually wrote a 44-part blog series defending utilitarianism. I quite enjoyed blogging! And though for a while not very many people read my blog, that was fine by me.

I think that there are a lot more people who should start blogging. There are both moral and prudential reasons to blog, many of which aren’t obvious.

A first reason to blog is simply: it’s an easy way to spread high impact ideas. Probably by far the most positive impact I’ve had on the world has come from blogging. If you say repeatedly things that you think are important and true, sometimes people listen. Sometimes you convince people to give enough money to help hundreds of millions of shrimp! Blasting good ideas into the ether often is remarkably effective! Apparently nine people who took the Giving What We Can pledge cited my blog as a major influence.

Often the returns aren’t immediate. You don’t normally hear when you change a person’s mind and get them to change their life in some way. But if you write articles that reach thousands of people, you will likely change some of their minds and influence some of their behaviors.

Think about any intellectual you know who reach people largely by blogging—Michael Huemer, Scott Alexander, Brian Caplan. It would be hard to precisely trace the positive impact that these people have had on the world. But clearly, they’ve had pretty major impacts. If you bring ideas into the zeitgeist which get mulled over by large numbers of people, that’s a recipe for making the world a better place.

A second reason to blog is that it’s a good way of establishing yourself as someone serious. If I didn’t blog, no one would have ever heard of me or take me seriously. Eliezer Yudkowsky would not be a known figure with influence, who sometimes gives Ted Talks, if he hadn’t done lots of blogging. Scott Alexander would probably have remained an anonymous psychiatrist.

Blogging is a good way to be taken seriously. Now, obviously this won’t be that important if you’re already influential. Peter Singer didn’t start being taken more seriously after he started a blog. But if you don’t have influence on the world and would like to, blogging is a good way of doing that.

A third advantage of blogging: it’s a good way to be more informed. You learn a lot more about a subject from blogging on it than from reading a book on it. I’ve read two or three books about Henry Kissinger. I’ve read zero books on fish pain. But I know way more about fish pain than about Henry Kissinger. As for Henry Kissinger, I have only the faintest memory of him having done a bunch of war crimes (bombing Cambodia, for instance), while I could describe in some detail the arguments on both sides of the fish-consciousness debate. I’m also confident fish committed no war crimes.

Putting ideas in your own words and writing digestible summaries forces you to understand ideas and makes them vastly more memorable. If you forget what you think about a subject, you can read your old writings on the subject. If you want to learn about a topic, don’t just read about it—write about it, and see what objections people raise.

If I’d never started a blog, there would probably be fewer than half as many subjects that I would know well enough to competently argue about. This is one of blogging’s most underrated benefits. If you want to be the kind of smart, well-read person who impresses people at dinner parties with your knowledge of Byzantine history, write a few blog posts about Byzantine history!

A fourth benefit: it’s surprisingly fun. I always found writing to be a chore in school. But that was because I was forced to write about whatever uninteresting subject I was assigned. When you blog, you can write about whatever you want. If some subject is important, you can just write about it. If someone is wrong on the internet, you can write a devastating takedown with the force of a nuclear bomb, that leaves their descendants cursed for the next ten generations.

When you can write whatever you want, and thoughtful people read and comment on it, writing is fun! If you read a piece that you think is bad and wrong—e.g. one from Lyman Stone—you can rip it to shreds with extreme firepower. If you think some idea is important, you can write a maximally persuasive defense of it and spread it to thousands of people.

Writing about a dull topic that has no impact on the world is a particularly monotonous kind of drudgery. But when you can write about what matters and have an impact—all without needing to go through any editor before publishing—writing is unbelievably enjoyable. Even if you consistently hated writing when you’ve had to do it, you might very well enjoy blogging.

When you blog, sometimes you randomly get influential people who you’ve taken seriously for a long time to start reading your blog. I still sometimes cannot believe that Sam Harris, Michael Huemer, Scott Alexander, and Nate Silver all read my blog. One of the great joys in life is being taken seriously by those you look up to—blogging is a good way of doing that!

I’d say the two best predictors of writing a good blog are:

1. Not having too high standards—being willing to write things without doing a month of research.

and

2. Having lots of ideas. If you have lots of thoughts interesting enough to turn into blog posts, then you can probably maintain a decent blog.

If either of those apply to you—or even if neither do—I’d recommend you try your hand at blogging. Worst case scenario, after a few mediocre posts, your blog peters out. Best case scenario, your blog ends up being read by millions of people and you become a profoundly influential political force.