I used to be a columnist during college. I found it very psychologically fulfilling, especially because as someone with data literacy, I didn’t fit in well at all. In my very serious opinion, I felt like if you combined Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen, and SSC into one. I liked to write contrarian pieces, I liked to defend capitalism, and I liked to sometimes troll a bit with reading graphs that made inconvenient conclusions.
I think there’s a risk to writing columns, that people will read them and you’ll fail in public. I don’t think that’s entirely a bad thing, but it can be hard to effectively cultivate an image if your worst takes keep hitting the fan.
Hence, blogging. It’s still something that people can read, and my more experimental pieces have a safe place. Those reading my archives are engaging in fan behavior, and in general I don’t think people have the patience to go through 1000+ articles to find something damning. Plus, I can always take down pages before causing trouble.
I think my more economic and professional writing I’ll be moving back to publishing in more traditional outlets, while maintaining this daily blog.
I’m learning computer science and data science on the side, so you may see me grapple with some ideas like homoscedacity, assumptions of normal distribution, and topics for the more mathematically inclined. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Isadore Johnson's Website 