Its now ten years since the first post on this blog! I remember writing that first post back in the Niagara region in Canada. I think I had some inspiration from the Software Niagara group and realized it would be a good idea to put something up on the web. Quite a bit has changed in my life since then, including moving back to Australia, but also quite a lot has changed in my interests and motivations for writing.

How this blog came into existence

Ten years ago I was living in Canada and I was at a bit of a crossroads with life. At the time some of my friends in Canada joked that I was "Canada's most skilled unemployed immigrant"¹. Around this time I started attending meetings with the Software Niagara meetup group and I was actively considering what I needed to do to make a more successful career around tech. I was slowly coming to the realization that attitudes in the west were changing, competence was progressively becoming less important for getting hired at many companies (and therefore getting paid) and being able to create a narrative about creating value was getting increasingly more important. People who could tell good stories about productivity were getting hired over people who were productive but couldn't communicate it. Canada led the world in a number of trends both good and bad.

As I've said many times before, in The West the notion of what constitutes value is determined by what other people consider to be valuable. This notion goes very deep into the culture, perhaps is even one of the core tenants of "western culture", with massive impacts on the entire structure of the civilization with huge implications for banking, economics,work and many other areas. When the notion of value is determined by what other people perceive to be valuable then the people who can manage or manipulate the perceptions of value are the ones who capture the rewards. In other parts of the world the thought process behind what's considered valuable is quite different so this doesn't apply. At least for me personally I was starting to see that telling a compelling story about what I was able to do was a large part of what would allow me to make more money in Canada. Given the societal shift away from meritocracy towards a more egalitarian structure the best way to communicate what knowledge you had was changing. There was less social friction if you could demonstrate you had knowledge without explicitly making claims that you knew things.

I'd met a lot of highly skilled people in technology that were exceedingly good at their jobs but stopped making more money as they were getting more skilled. This was something I was very keen to avoid. The drop in investment that companies were making into training and mentoring was already very obvious by the time I started this blog in early 2014. This is all a consequence of the move away from meritocracy that was occurring in the early 2000s. The move away from caring about competence was probably already apparent when I started this blog in 2014 but at that time I didn't want to see this. After spending so much time getting good at what I do it was a tough pill for me to swallow because emotionally I wanted to believe that western society cared about competence even if it actually didn't. I'm highly motivated to make use of my skills to benefit society so I wanted to believe that the hard work I did to get these skills would be valued. It was difficult to see that this wasn't the case in many places, and this was perhaps one of the largest influences on me personally in the last decade and caused a large shift in what I was writing about. On a personal level I started to become much more careful about choosing who to work with, looking to find organizations that needed competence and valued competence, the idea being that being competent would be of most value in those organizations. As I became more aware of what people were thinking regarding competence and productivity I noticed a very sinister trend where these traits were becoming a lower an lower priority in many organizations. Few people would say that they outright disliked competence but peoples actions, or what the behavioral economists would call revealed preferences, revealed something very different with regards to preferences with hiring. Ageism started to become a word I was hearing more and more, I founded a small business with an older guy who was highly competent but who was struggling a bit to get hired in roles. This was partly due to the economy not being great from 2009 onwards but it was also largely due to a societal shift where his experience was seen to be less valuable than society would have valued it were it a few decades prior. History shows us that societies that don't value competence tend to face bad times or in extreme cases outright collapse, sometimes slowly sometimes quickly. I guess I just wasn't ready to deal with this at that point in time and my understanding of the professional world was limited as a result.

From 2012 through to 2014 I'd spent a considerable amount of time writing a book about applying game theory. In retrospect a blog would have been extremely valuable back then because it would have given not just a chance to write some new materials but also to create a record of what I was thinking at the time. But retrospective bias is like this, some things look clear only later on and couldn't be known at the time. Part of the reason a blog would have been nice is to help me remember what was going on back then and why I took certain decisions that I took. There's a number of reasons why I got dissatisfied with this project, mostly that I wasn't making sufficient money from it, but I learned a lot of very important lessons about the publishing process along the way. From learning how to manage my own time and motivations as a writer through to the technical aspects of typesetting and layout I got to learn a whole lot about a whole industry. It is very likely that this blog wouldn't have come into existence without my book writing experience happening just before it. What also happened through the process of writing about game theory was that I started to develop the conceptual framework to actually understand the nature of things from a more behavioral economics point of view. I think it was around this time that I started getting deep into behavioral economics reading titles such as Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, Freakonomics, etc. The main idea behind behavioral economics is to look at how people actually behave, not how they say they behave and not simplified models of how people should behave. Too much of traditional economics works on the basis of flawed assumptions about rational behavior, but its painfully obvious if you've dealt with real people in the real world that people do not act in a perfectly economically rational way when making decisions. To deny this is a significant departure from the truth but a very common one. People would rather believe simplified narratives about how people behave rather than dive into how people actually behave. There's likely strong evolutionary psychology reasons why people believe simplified narratives over more accurate ones. Thinking about things in depth is not likely on an individual level to improve ones chances of survival or having children so there's no evolutionary pressure on the individual level to select for thinking beyond a certain depth. On the population level though things are very different, civilizations that more accurately deal with reality are much more powerful and survive longer. The infrastructure of civilization allows people to have far more children and have greatly reduced day to day risks to their survival. This means that the groups that can more accurately think about things and therefore harness more of the explanatory power from their understanding the universe end up becoming much bigger than those that don't.

The publishing industry was in the midsts of a lot of changes in the early 2000s. Traditional publishing had been massively disrupted by the emergence of the internet and as more online platforms for publishing were popping up the entire publishing industry was being disrupted. A few years ago I was approached by a publisher with the offer of a commission to write books about the python programming language. I think that offer was only made because I'd established through my blog some proof that I knew the topic area and that I'd actually be able to follow through and complete the book. This sort of thing happens so much these days as to not be noticeable but this very offer shows the massive power shift in publishing that has occurred recently. My writing on my blog was the thing that opened the door to getting an offer to writing a published textbook. Or in other words my self published work was the thing that led me to get an offer of a commission to write a traditionally published textbook. The money offered wasn't enough to make the project worth it though, the financial rewards would have had to have come from secondary factors like the reputation benefits from the book leading me to get better work. All in all I wanted to write these books but the cost/benefit analysis just didn't seem to make it worth it for me. Part of what struck me was that getting more qualified wasn't leading to better jobs so taking on a commission to write a book would only make sense if I was running my own consultancy business and could get more clients from this. After this commission offer came up I started to meet more writers. I went to writers meetup groups and started to meet other writers and authors, this was a great experience. I started to notice that many people like my friend Steph were going down the self-publishing route and had groups of friends who were also writing their own content. With the creation of things like print on demand books that you could publish via large e-commerce platforms like Amazon the whole economics of publishing had changed. Self-publishing used to have a stigma as something that only rich people did as vanity projects, because in the early days of publishing self publishing a work was only available to the wealthy. As time has gone on technology has made sharing information progressively cheaper which has meant declining profit margins for traditional publishing, there's some holdouts like academic journals, but broadly speaking traditional publishing is in decline. This has meant that anyone with sufficient motivation can now publish a book and the stigma about self publishing is going away due to relentless market forces changing the culture and perceptions around it.

The form that the publishing industry existed in for many decades was the result of economic, cultural and social forces. The spreading of information used to be multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than it is today. The speed information can now be spread with minimal cost is entirely new and has never been seen before. The rise of Information Technology, a term that ironically has fallen out of favor, has given us technology that allows for the transmission of information in ways that simply were never possible before at scales not possible before and all at speeds that were also never possible before.

A crucial part of the change in the landscape was the introduction of the blog. It didn't seem like much at the time but this change had extremely huge impacts on the internet and the world. Blogs allowed people to write articles organized by date and publish them on their own personal sites. It may seem strange now but the idea of arranging a series of posts by date wasn't a mainstay of the early internet. The original internet was a collection of pages arranged by topics and links. The internet has increasingly moved away from the organization of information by topics to the point now where that mental association isn't even made anymore by the regular person when browsing the web. The start of this change in how content was organized on the internet was the introduction of the blog.

When I was younger the concept of a blog just didn't exist in the mainstream. These days there's so many blogs that the Wordpress platform is now responsible for powering a very large percentage of the worlds websites. The early iterations of the internet had a bunch of "home pages", which were webpages were someone would put some content up. Sometimes this would be about them and sometimes things about their interests. The structure of personal pages on the early internet very much revolved around webpages with hyperlinks that would connect various pages to each other. I had worked with websites before the blog experiment so I knew the technical side of the job reasonably well. But the writing part of it was something I was less adept at.

The blog format is more akin to writing a column or a diary, each page has a title and a date that things are published. This is quite different from the original notion of pages and hyperlinks that the early web was all about. From a content creators perspective the blogging platforms make it very easy to publish content. The hard part is making the content.

Getting a commission to write a book is increasingly getting hard. Somewhat counterintuitively this has happened because publishing has never been easier. The economic niche of traditional publishing has been mostly disrupted by technology in such an extreme way that the economics behind the original publishing model no longer make any sense. Blogs like this can now be set up fairly easily.

Over these last 10 years I've found that writing has greatly improved my ability to understand and process some complex topics. It's one thing to try to understand something on your own and something else to try to explain it to other people. When you are attempting to explain a concept if you are lacking understanding it tends to get exposed. As I have come to learn more about many topics I've found that the common narratives are often very inaccurate. A great difficulty is that low quality information often spreads much faster than high quality information. This is due to an asymmetry in the pools of people who have expertise. Anyone can create a story and spread it around, far fewer people know what they are talking about. Social media amplifies this so much that there's many topics, like financial advice, where there's vastly more crap information than real information being spread around. So from the perspective of trying to convince people to see the truth of a matter you are often now fighting an uphill battle. To this end I've found that writing about some of these topics has allowed me to have the clarity to start to overcome some of the crap information. Without writing I don't think I'd have the clarity and organization of thoughts needed to actually communicate about some of these topics.

An example of where this turned into a series of posts was when I was doing a deep dive into monetary policy. I noticed that most people in the western world have no idea what money actually is. Either in a practical sense or a more philosophical one you'd be hard pressed to find people who could give you a solid definition of what money is these days. Before I did a bunch of research and writing I'd have struggled to put it into terms that were approachable myself.