Bob likes the big audience

In response to a colleague who was a bit scared of posting some work up on the internet for all to see, Bob Carpenter writes:

I like the big audience for two reasons related to computer science principles.

The first benefit is the same reason it’s scary. The big audience is likely to find flaws. And point them out. In public! The trick is to get over feeling bad about it and realize that it’s a super powerful debugging tool for ideas. Owning up to being wrong in public is also very liberating. Turns out people don’t hold it against you at all (well, maybe they would if you were persistently and unapologetically wrong). It also provides a great teaching opportunity—if a postdoc is confused about something in their speciality, chances are that a lot of others are confused, too.

In programming, the principle is that you want routines to fail early. You want to inspect user input and if there’s a fatal problem with it that can be detected, fail right away and let the user know what the error is. Don’t fire up the algorithm and report some deeply nested error in a Fortran matrix algorithm. Something not being shot down on the blog is like passing that validation. It gives you confidence going on.

The second benefit is the same as in any writing, only the stakes are higher with the big audience. When you write for someone else, you’re much more self critical. The very act of writing can uncover problems or holes in your reasoning. I’ve started several blog posts and papers and realized at some point as I fleshed out an argument that I was missing a fundamental point.

There’s a principle in computer science called the rubber ducky.

One of the best ways to debug is to have a colleague sit down and let you explain your bug to them. Very often halfway through the explanation you find your own bug and the colleague never even understands the problem. The blog audience is your rubber ducky.

The term itself if a misnomer in that it only really works if the rubbery ducky can understand what you’re saying. They don’t need to understand it, just be capable of understanding it. Like the no free lunch principle, there are no free pair programmers.

The third huge benefit is that other people have complementary skills and knowledge. They point out connections and provide hints that can prove invaluable. We found out about automatic differentiation through a comment on the blog to a post where I was speculating about how we could calculate gradients of log densities in C++.

I guess there’s a computer science principle there, too—modularity. You can bring in whole modules of knowledge, like we did with autodiff.

I agree. It’s all about costs and benefits. The cost of an error is low if discovered early. You want to stress test, not to hide your errors and wait for them to be discovered later.

2 thoughts on “Bob likes the big audience

  1. This is super. I personally explain my code to my cat, who purrs patiently and never judges. She’s a big help.

    I have had some errors in blog posts, as well as my book, that readers found very quickly. This has been a huge help. I am in a position of unreasonable job security, so I feel like it is almost my duty to make mistakes in public, so that doing so might become more normalized.

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