Learning in Public
The most useful things I have read online were not written by experts explaining what they know. They were written by people in the middle of figuring something out.
There is a quality to mid-process writing that finished, polished writing loses: the confusion is intact. You can see where the person got stuck, what they tried, why it did not work. That is where the learning actually lives.
The problem with expertise
When experts write for beginners, they often strip out the wrong turns. The final explanation is clean and correct — but it does not reflect how understanding actually develops, which is messily, with backtracking.
The map is not the territory. The finished explanation is not the learning process.
If you are new to a topic and you read an expert's polished explanation, you might understand it conceptually while still being unable to apply it. The expert has edited out the exact moments of confusion that would have told you how to get unstuck.
What learning in public means
It means:
- Writing about what you are trying to understand, while you are trying to understand it
- Being honest about where you are confused
- Sharing your attempts, including failed ones
- Updating your writing when you learn you were wrong
It does not mean:
- Performing confusion for engagement
- Publishing sloppy work and calling it "learning in public"
- Requiring external validation to continue learning
The point is to create an accurate record of how understanding develops — for yourself, and for people at similar stages.
The unexpected benefits
You learn more. Writing forces a kind of clarity that thinking alone does not. When you try to explain something in writing and it comes out confused, that confusion is information — it tells you something you have not actually understood yet.
You create useful resources. Beginner-level confusion, documented honestly, is valuable to other beginners. There are plenty of expert-level resources. There are fewer resources that say "I was confused about X and here is how I thought through it."
You build in public. People who follow your learning get to watch the process, not just the outcome. Some of them will help. Most will at least appreciate the honesty.
A note on being wrong in public
The inevitable objection: what if you publish something incorrect?
Publish a correction. Update the post. Note what changed and why.
Being wrong, acknowledging it, and updating your understanding is itself a model worth demonstrating. Most people who read your correction will respect it. A few will be unkind — that is true of everything on the internet.
The risk of being occasionally wrong in public is much smaller than the cost of waiting until you are certain enough to share anything.