On a scale of 1 to 10, with how much certainty do I present the articles on this website? Highest confidence gets the value 1, and the lowest confidence gets the value 0.
Fighting bias with yourself
I learn a lot of things, and being a jack of all trades is dangerous when you deliver it to someone who is in pursuit of becoming an ace.
Whatever article I present here, I present to satisfy three purposes:
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Developing a knowledge repository that grows over time
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Forms as a knowledge hub for the internet to use instances of my findings and observations, and build cool things on top of it
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Making the information indispensable and indestructible for the future
All three categories have one similarity: they try to preserve information and channel it towards the world. But then, there is one flaw in each point: the perceived confidence differs.
1. Developing a knowledge repository that grows over time
First, I write it for myself.
It is a learning in progress. So initially, the way I intake information is based on my own learning point of view. The utility of such information to a large extent is for my own purspose. Obviously, I would be highly confident in my own frame.
2. Developing a knowledge repository that grows over time
In the second, I write for the people.
By nature, the reader assumes that not only do I know fully what I am going to present here, but also that I am very rightly presenting the content with high confidence. But the utility of the presented content remains with the reader’s own frame. I might make mistakes due to less experience or knowledge, unknown to the reader.
3. Making the information indispensable and indestructible for the future
In the third, I write for the future.
I want the piece to be useful1 today as well as tomorrow. With chaning time and the viewpoints, the future would surely disagree with many of the content present here. If I don’t, then that means I am probably not learning as much as I should.
Probably, other people and I — from the present and future — would need a metric to realise how much to believe the words I present here.
In summary, it’s more like how much you would like to trust the work I present here. The higher the value, the higher the trust level. The lower the value, the lower the trust level.
Footnotes
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though, a better word would be relevant, because relevance is a subjective and time-independent phenomenon ↩