If I didn’t blog it, I didn’t think it. Nonsense, right? Well, let’s rephrase the ancient question “if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?” Of course this is true:
tree makes sound –> someone hears
where –> indicates causality. X –> Y means X causes Y.
But what about
someone hears –> tree makes sound?
This had always struck me as boring. Who cares? But I am noticing that while this is obvious
I think of something –> I blog about it
this is not so obvious, but true:
I blog about it –> I think of something
Because I blog about my thoughts, I have more of them. I blog, therefore I think.
This post and others about blogging, for example. Posts about the twilight of expertise in areas other than science. I’d be doing omega-3 self-experimentation blog or no blog but blogging about it divides the research into small and more doable parts (making the graphs, for example). It is encouraging to get feedback and have others, such as Tim Lundeen, contribute their observations. Blogging is a kind of tinder. It doesn’t create the initial spark but it amplifies it.
In terms of book and scientific-paper writing, blogging plays the role I give art in the growth of technology: It provides a slope in place of a step. It divides a big task into tiny tasks.
The more logical rephrase of
“if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound?”
is
“if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does the tree even exist?”
or maybe, the web version:
Does it exist if google does not find it?
Shortly after you wrote that, Sam, I discovered that Google was no longer indexing all of my blog posts. Terrible!