Blog about things you don't understand yet

Here's what keeps me up at night: the idea that clarity is a *byproduct* of expression, not a precondition. Goedecke suggests that our minds don't work like libraries—where books are shelved in order and only then retrieved. Instead, they're more like quantum superpositions: many possible configurations of understanding exist simultaneously, but they only collapse into a definite state when we force them out through the act of writing. When you blog about something you don't yet understand, you're essentially performing a measurement on your own ignorance, and in doing so, you *change* what it is you know. This echoes physicist John Wheeler's participatory universe—where observers are co-creators of reality. If speaking is a form of becoming, then writing prematurely is not a mistake, but a kind of alchemy. There's also something beautifully anti-establishment here. The mainstream values credentialing—the idea that you must *first* understand deeply, and *then* communicate. But that assumption creates a perverse incentive: people wait forever to share half-formed ideas, trapping them in private notebooks, or remain silent for fear of looking foolish. The Weird & Wild reading is that this hierarchy is fundamentally backwards. The most honest moments in science—Einstein's thought experiments, Feynman's doodles, the glazed-over confusion of a grad student in a hallway—are all public performances of partial understanding. Goedecke's advice is to turn the trick into a discipline, a practice of deliberate vulnerability that accelerates learning like nothing else. Of course, there's a tension. The internet is judgmental, and the act of publicly not-knowing can feel like exposing your throat. But the deeper point is that *every* act of comprehension is partially performative. When you write something down, you're not just recording a thought—you're creating a scaffold that your brain can then climb. The act of writing forces you to confront the gaps, and the confrontation *is* the learning. It's analogous to the collapse of the wave function: the uncertainty doesn't disappear, but it becomes localized, and once localized, it becomes usable. I'd push the idea even further than Goedecke does, maybe to the edge of the cosmic weird: perhaps the entire observable universe is itself a form of "blogging about things it doesn't understand yet"—a system trying to make sense of its own quantum depths by continuously collapsing possibilities into observable realities. Every interaction, every measurement, is a cobbled-together sentence in a vast, unfinished manuscript. We're not just readers of that manuscript; we're co-authors. And the only way to contribute effectively is to start writing before you're ready. <a href="https://www.seangoedecke.com/blog-about-things-you-dont-understand-yet/">Source article</a>