Yongfu's Blog

Why start a Blog?

Nov 26, 2017

There are many reasons to start a blog. I was inspired by this post and my interest in psychology.

Starting a Blog for Others

I have been reluctant to share my ideas with others (partly because I’m shy), but my interest in human evolution led me to realize the importance of learning and cultural transmission in our species1: A hard-working but not-so-smart student can do much better than a genius who never learns.

I’m a not-so-smart student and have spent a large amount of time figuring out many things that turned out to be really simple while learning. I could have learned much more efficiently if someone had shared their experience with me (So that I don’t have to start by, say, proving $1+1=2$). Now, I think I have some experiences worth sharing, and people might benefit from them.

Starting a Blog for Myself

Probably, few or no people will read any post on my blog. But as noted in the post mentioned above, writing posts is a great chance to practice skills and communicating about them. By sharing what I’ve learned through writing a post, I’m actually reviewing it. And by communicating about what I’ve learned, I can know how well I understand the topic (thinking that you understand is different from understanding itself).


  1. I think we cannot fully understand human evolution without considering the effect of culture. ↩︎