“I’m thinking of starting a blog.” I announce over dinner.

My family is unsure what to make of this idea.

My wife seems to be against it. She expresses concern that it may be just one more distraction. (From work? From her?). She suggested I should think about whether I really have, or want to make, time to post regularly. I am sympathetic to this view.

My daughter tells me I should assess this decision using formal decision theory. What are the possible outcomes if I do or don’t start a blog? What is my utility for these outcomes? Again I am sympathetic to the view, but it seems like more work than I was planning. I thought I would just start a blog and see how it went.

And so that is what I am doing.

But in deference to my family’s opinions, I feel I should at least give some rationale, and set some expectations.

First, I’m not posting every day. Or even every week. Just when I have something to say that seems suited to the outlet. I have about six things on my mind right now that might merit a post. Maybe when I’ve done those this blog will just dry up? I’ll have vented and it will have served its purpose. Or maybe I’ll get some new ideas (stranger things have happened!) and this can become a more extended project.

Second, I’m doing this because I feel it might be useful to have a lighter-weight outlet for ideas than peer reviewed papers. At the same time I have to confess some nervousness at this. I’m generally pretty careful about what I write. For many of my papers I recall sweating over every paragraph, every sentence, every word. From start to finish. Over and over. Sure, some of my papers are written by my collaborators, and I have my name on them because I contributed to the planning or ideas to the analysis. But the papers where I play a substantive role in the writing… I can really agonize over them. I like to think - for a long time - before setting ideas down in writing. I’m not sure this suits me to blogging (or tweeting) so much. (And now I find myself agonizing over that last sentence, wondering whether it could offend some of my blogging tweeting colleagues.) On the other hand, the way to get better at writing is to write… And maybe sometimes it is more important to be interesting than to be right?

Finally, I’m doing it because I have a new project that I’m super excited about, which is going to involve trying to build new communities and trying to change some of the ways that statisticians and data scientists operate - and for which I feel that, maybe, having a blog could be useful way to kickstart it. More on that tomorrow….