Since I managed to write a post a couple of days ago, I thought I might add another about why I haven’t been very active. The main reason is that I’m just simply too busy. I’ve taken over as head of our institute, which takes up a fair amount of my time. I’m also still teaching and, as I hope you can tell from my previous post, still trying to maintain an active research programme. I’m also doing some work with Skeptical Science, which takes up a little of my time.
Another factor is that the whole social media landscape has changed. Blogs don’t seem to be as active as they once were, and I don’t have the time, or energy, to work out what combination of linkedin, X/Twitter, tik tok, instagram, facebook, etc., you now need to use.
In addition, even though you don’t need to have an audience to write a blog, when it has been pretty active it can be difficult to keep posting as it gets less and less active. I’m very conscious that to maintain an audience you can’t keep writing the same kind of things over and over again. However, the more you diversify the content, the more you move outside your area of expertise, and the more likely it becomes that you start writing about things you don’t really understand well, and run the risk of some kind of audience capture.
To be clear, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with exploring new topics, but my impression is that most who do so are better at promoting incorrect interpretations than correcting them, especially when it comes to topics that are both complex and potentially contentious.
My preference would be to explore these topics and engage in interesting discussions about them, but that can also be tricky, partly because people can have very strong views, and partly because there’s a tendency to assume that others are not necessarily engaging in good faith. I do have some sympathy with this because it is certainly true that many who just ask questions about climate science aren’t being entirely honest about their desire to understand the answers.
I didn’t write this with any great insights to present, just some thoughts that popped up as I was writing the previous post. Maybe I’ll suddenly get some time and enthusiasm to write posts again, but then again, maybe not.
