Three Years of Argmin

My annual navel-gazing post.

My argmin.md file compels me to write a blog about blogging every July 1st. It’s my official Substack anniversary, and we’ve made it through year three. The process here is, for better or worse, set in stone and could be written as a skill file for an LLM agent. I listed the rules last year, and they haven’t changed since. I don’t expect them to change this year either.

In fact, going back over my posts, it seems like the most novel change was adding a new kind of content that got decidedly mixed reviews: football blogging. Of all the topics I’ve dabbled with on this Substack, there is none more polarizing. Some people really liked it! Others, let’s say, did not. I’m waiting until training camp gets going before I decide whether I’ll commit to another season of yelling about the absurdity of win probability.

The football blogging is related to one of the trickier things I haven’t been able to figure out in three years writing this blog. Argmin is a periodical with different authors. Those authors just all happen to be me. I realize you receive a notification from me whether I’m writing about a topic you care about or not. This is a problem I don’t really know how to address, but I suppose it is an issue with all Substack subscriptions. I don’t want to take on the bother of splitting this into four different Substacks, which I think would annoy you even more than it would annoy me. I hope the disclaimers at the top of the posts help you decide if you want to keep reading. I would love feedback on how to make that signposting clearer.

Relatedly, commenters are increasingly asking questions about things I’ve already talked about. This is totally expected, as I know I write more than anyone likely cares to read, but I worry about repeating myself—thus alienating a different collection of readers—when addressing them. The balance between repetition and clarity is delicate. Apoorva Lal said my blog has its own private dialect. If I don’t repeat myself somewhat, filling in the context of what my brain thinks obvious, the content will be even less approachable, and no one wants that.

Moreover, sometimes the only way to iron out a nonobvious point is by repeating it until it’s clear. I wrote in the afterword of The Irrational Decision that I used this blog “as a sketch pad, where I first workshopped much of the text that you read here.” This newsletter remains a place for me to play and write out first drafts. I get a lot out of putting ideas out there, even when they are way underbaked. “Talks and blogs are ephemeral, but interactions with the audience helped to shape and hone my arguments. All of those early interlocutors, in person and online, helped shape this final archival form. I’m thankful to all of you.”

In the spirit of learning from the audience, we can use this year’s reflection post as a chance for you to tell me what you’d change about the argmin magazine. Do you want more of any topic? Would you prefer a different format or cadence of posts? You can email me if you’d prefer not to comment (my berkeley.edu address is fine for that).

In the meantime, I can give you a preview of what to expect over the next year. There will definitely be more live course blogging. In the fall, I am planning an unhinged new class on forecasting, the tools we use to do it, and why we’re so obsessed with it. That should be a fun one. In the Spring, I’m apparently signed up to teach undergrad probability. This is for engineering students and based on the excellent text of Bertsekas and Tsitsiklis. Since it’s about engineering, we’ll have to grapple with some of the complicated metaphysics of what we think these probabilities mean in the context of building things. You, me, and the undergrads will all get confused together.

As for the remainder of this summer, I want to finish this series Against Optimaxxing. I’ve been talking about writing this forever, and I need to put in the effort to finish it. It would be an attempt at writing what Henry Farrell calls speculative nonfiction, seeking a reasonable language to imagine a future free from the vulgar positivism that runs our culture, politics, and industry. This blog series will try to establish a necessary vocabulary. My draft writing on this particular topic might lead nowhere. It might remain a private dialect. But I want to try to write it down.