Why the early writing stays

I should start with the part that is least flattering, because leaving it out would undermine everything after it.

I started writing publicly because I believed universities valued thoughtful documentation. That was the reason. Not curiosity, not some early instinct toward keeping a record — a strategic calculation made by a thirteen-year-old about an admissions process.

It is no longer the reason. But I am not going to pretend it was never the reason, because that would be the first entry in exactly the kind of tidied-up history this site exists to prevent.

What changed

Somewhere in the VECTOR documentation I stopped writing to be read and started writing to think. The rule that did it was one I adopted for engineering reasons: if I could not explain why a component existed, I did not understand it well enough to keep it.

That rule turns writing into a test with a pass and a fail. You sit down to justify a thing you built, and about a third of the time the justification does not come, and the honest response is to delete the thing rather than write a worse justification. Nothing else I have tried finds bad decisions that reliably.

Once writing does that for you, an audience becomes beside the point. The document was useful before anyone read it, and it would have been useful if nobody ever did.

The archive rule

So: nothing here gets deleted for being wrong.

Revised, yes — with the revision visible. But an essay from 2026 that turns out to be badly reasoned stays where it is, because its value is not its correctness. Its value is that a version of me believed it, and a later version can be measured against it.

Delete the early writing and you get a site where every opinion is one you currently hold, arrived at by no visible route, from a person who has apparently always been right. I have read those sites. They are useless, and slightly dishonest, and the dishonesty is structural rather than deliberate — it is what deleting produces whether you mean it or not.

Who this is for

Mostly me, at twenty-five, and then at thirty-five.

I want to be able to read what I thought at fourteen and see specifically where I was wrong. Not "I was young and naive" — the vague version is useless. I want the actual claims, in enough detail to be checked against what happened.

That requires writing things down in a form that can be wrong. Hedged writing cannot be wrong later, which sounds safe and makes the archive worthless. So I try to state things plainly, mark the ones I am unsure about as unsure, and accept that some of this will read badly in a decade.

If it does not, I will not have learned anything, and that would be the worse outcome.