The curious case of blogging: Finding purpose through experimentation.

As an economist, I’m always thinking about incentives. So when it comes to blogging, I have to admit that I’m not entirely sure what the point is.

Sure, when I was hiring a lot of people, it made sense to have a blog as a way to attract potential candidates and showcase our company’s culture and values. But now that I’m not in that position, I find myself wondering why I’m still doing it.

That being said, I have found some value in blogging as a way to learn new things. For example, I’ve been using my blog to experiment with LLMs (that’s “Large Language Models” for those who aren’t familiar). It’s been a great way to get hands-on experience with these cutting-edge tools and see what they can do.

Plus, I’ve been able to streamline the process of generating my blog posts and images. The code I use is in GitHub. It’s not fully automatic yet, but I’m getting there.

In fact, if I could figure out what my ultimate goal is with blogging and what levers I could use to achieve it, I would love to try using reinforcement learning to make the whole process completely automatic. Who knows? Maybe that’s the future of content creation.

So while I may not have a clear answer to the question of why I blog, I do know that it’s been a useful tool for experimentation and learning. And who knows? Maybe I’ll figure out the bigger picture someday.