Ben Thomas

The vast majority of long-form writing is not even worth skimming. That said, I spend a large chunk of my time online reading others’ thoughts, which inevitably makes me want to respond with some of my own.

The question at hand, then, is this: how do you publish long-form writing online that is worth reading?

What I’ve come to is that good long-form blog content (and even some twitter content) is fundamentally not that different to academic research. It’s just… far cooler. And yes, I think that even includes my friend Gio’s writing about his travel fellowship.

To grossly simplify, academic research basically functions like this:

1. You start by picking a “niche” within your field, almost always informed initially by whatever your PI (principal investigator) does
2. You learn enough to get to the “frontier of knowledge” on that subject & understand the primary open questions. In some lanes it’s relatively easy to get to this point. In others, it might take decades
3. After you get there, you try your hand at answering one — or really, just adding one new data point into the conversation — with a novel method of attack
4. It either bears fruit or it does not. You rinse and repeat. Everyone goes home happy with their citation counts increasing with every new publication

This process is the foundation of a great deal of our world. I cannot say enough good things about the fact that this exists. But it’s far from perfect.

It’s quite limiting for researchers. The bounds of your research are initially determined by whatever your PI is interested in, and later determined by whatever you are able to get grant funding for — a decent, but not perfect, signal for what is actually meaningful.

It’s usually bland. There is understandably a strong incentive to avoid making falsifiable statements in your academic research. But what that often results in is a world where academic writing totally understates the “why you should be excited” factor (and thus has zero sauce).

It’s pretty removed from the real world. For better or worse, academic research typically avoids weighing in on specific policy or business questions in favor of more abstract framing. Many of those questions are important and could use the same level of rigor that is given to grant-funded questions. Many practical applications of basic scientific research could have a huge impact.

It takes forever — there is a huge lag between when something happens on the ground and when there is a response from academics.

Escaping the limitations inherent in academic research does not mean that we have to stop doing the boundary-pushing thinking and experimenting. And that’s really what you see in the best twitter users and long-form blog writers.

Casey Handmer is the founder of Terraform Industries — an insanely cool startup. And his blog is really just him leaning in on frontier questions on energy, climate, and space but in an incredibly bold way. (His write-up on using desalination to revitalize the Salton Sea is a particularly fun read.)

Nate Silver is another perfect example. His contributions to the field of political statistics and forecasting are beyond basically all tenured academic political scientists. While the model output itself is immensely valuable, the “thinking in public” he provides on X about how his model works (e.g., how much do polls matter at different stages in a presidential race?) is potentially even more important in the long run. Plus, it’s kinda fun to see all the disagreements in their full gory detail.

Even people like Noah Smith or Matt Yglesias — bloggers who cover an incredible range of topics — are functionally doing frontier research. It just so happens that they are doing it across a variety of topics that are generally easier to “get,” though I really should not downplay the amount of depth that they occasionally dive into.

All of these folks are doing frontier research, guided by a serious level of engagement with what others have tried and thought as well as their own years of thought. But unlike most academic publications, their frontier research is engaging, timely, heavily tied to the real world, and covers the gamut of things they are interested in.

And so that’s really what I’m hoping to do with this blog. Bring an interesting and well-formed perspective to “frontier” questions I’m interested in while avoiding the problems that turned me away from academia.

We’ll see how this one goes. I definitely do not have Casey Handmer’s background in physics, Nate Silver’s years of statistical forecasting experience, or Noah Smith’s Econ PhD. But I DO have a bit of a research background, have spent years as a sponge on Econ / YIMBY / tech twitter, and (finally!) have the time and energy to put in some work and get back into the ring.

My promises to you, the reader:

• I will focus content here on frontier questions across a variety of buckets I find meaningful, including but not limited to (1) the future of energy; (2) building housing and infrastructure in the US; (3) navigating startup land to build cool shit; and (4) other personal reflections / hobbies
• I will do so in a way that unpacks the complexity of those questions while explaining the implications / hopefully having more sauce than your typical research publication. In some cases, I may do some actual stats work, in which case I will publish all of the code & source data
• I will welcome your thoughts and opinions on my analysis — and would be more than excited to play good-faith ping pong in the comments section
• I’ll also write up / point to the things that I’m reading / seeing that truly advance the conversation and thus deserve our attention, and why
• I will have some fun with it — and hope that you will too 🙂

That’s all for now. Talk to you soon.