My style of online participation has been shaped by 2 ideas:
1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia
2. Writing is rewriting.
I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.
Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.
I do the same, except mostly I delete the responses. The writing was important to me, but the reading is rarely important to someone else. It would be wasting their time.
I would guess I post about 40% of the comments I write.
It's so bizarre to me that this works and I can't say I believed it until I tried. I shouldn't be surprised that it's so easy to trick our brains.
I assume the phenomenon where I write 90% of an email, save it as a draft to finish later, never remember to finish it, get asked about it and have irrefutable certainty I sent it, then finally discover it as an unfinished draft is a facet of the same trickery. Stupid brain... Grrr.
I think one of the drivers of arguments is we are trying to understand something, and the argument is subconsciously a way to not just bash their ideas, but test the strength of our own.
In the effort to create a written response we:
1. Find it takes more effort than we imagined to nail down our views, and describe them well.
2. Often have to adapt our own ideas more than we expected to make a clear description possible. Achieving a "better understanding of ourselves" is almost always a reassuring euphemism for "fixing our own surprisingly under-developed/under-coherent ideas".
3. This puts in a more humble mood.
4. Realize the issue is more nuanced than we imagine, and better assess the depth of conversation that even the most constructive engagement would require.
5. Realize we don't have energy left for that.
6. Feel good about having put our ideas to the test and "understanding them better". So a good place to stop.
The practical need to argue (test our ideas in battle) was real, we just didn't need the other person to have the argument. Their imagined pushback forced us to improve our thinking, probably more than we acknowledge.
When preparing for a race, the best thing anyone can do is tell you your opponent is achieving better times than they are. You will achieve more gains by competing with an imaginary competitor, who always sees all your weaknesses, than a real one who likely would not.
Journaling sounded stupid to me, until I tried it; and then the whole “do you really think that?”, “is that true?”, “what about this?” and “why are you lying to a sheet of paper?” started happening and I was like, “oh I get it.”
Come to think of it, that’s a major reason why fully agentic coding doesn’t resonate with me and/or feels like I’m not growing or learning. I’m short-circuiting the “journaling” step where I mentally attack my own thoughts and assumptions.
You should try writing a design doc with the AI before you have it write the code. It will make random extrapolations from your first prompt, some good and some bad. Then you get a chance to argue back and forth with yourself with the robot as a helper.
I wrote an email to my titanically incompetent leasing office mostly to vent emotions, then sent it anyway so I could receive proof that they had read it in writing for any future issues. It was quite cathartic.
1. I rarely fully understand my own positions on minutia 2. Writing is rewriting.
I write forum posts to solidify my understanding of my own interests, beliefs, and reasoning. I often edit them multiple times before moving on and ignoring the responses thereafter. I can reference them and have to other people who ask my opinion. Sometimes I do respond back to replies immediately, and sometimes I revisit days later, after I've had time to put it in my day-to-day context. It's not a hard and fast rule.
Posting stopped being about convincing someone else maybe 20 years ago (around age 30). I do post to look back and understand myself. To others, I'm sure this sounds like existential navel-gazing and self-centered blathering, but I don't mind.