What Stops Me from Posting Publicly
What Stops Me from Posting Publicly
是什么阻碍了我公开发布内容
What stops me from writing and posting something publicly? Probably the same thing stops you, too: the belief that it is not novel enough. I think it comes from the belief that we do not have good enough content to share. 是什么阻碍了我去写作并公开发布内容？可能阻碍你的原因也一样：认为自己的内容不够新颖。我认为这源于一种信念，即我们没有足够好的内容可以分享。
When we read highly cited or widely shared articles online, we usually find something novel in them. So, when it comes to writing and sharing our own ideas, we judge them from the perspective of novelty and tend to undervalue them. Because most of the ideas that come to us exist within our informational bubble, we genuinely believe they are common sense and that there is nothing worth sharing. So, we decide they are not worth writing about or posting. 当我们在线阅读那些高引用或广为流传的文章时，通常会发现其中有一些新颖之处。因此，当我们要写下并分享自己的想法时，我们往往会从“新颖性”的角度去评判它们，从而倾向于低估其价值。由于我们产生的大多数想法都存在于自己的信息茧房中，我们真诚地认为这些想法是常识，没什么值得分享的。于是，我们便认为它们不值得去写或发布。
There is research behind this intuition. The effect is known as the curse of knowledge: once something feels familiar to us, we tend to overestimate how widely known it is. The original experimental work on the effect showed that better-informed people struggle to ignore what they know when predicting the judgments of less-informed people (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989). More directly, a later series of experiments found that people were more likely to judge information as common knowledge when it was easy for them to recall, even when others were unlikely to know it (Birch et al., 2017). 这种直觉背后是有研究支持的。这种效应被称为“知识的诅咒”（curse of knowledge）：一旦某件事让我们感到熟悉，我们往往会高估它的普及程度。关于该效应的原始实验表明，当知识渊博的人去预测知识匮乏者的判断时，很难忽略自己已知的信息（Camerer, Loewenstein, and Weber, 1989）。更直接地说，后来的一系列实验发现，当信息容易被回忆起时，人们更有可能将其判定为常识，即使其他人很可能并不了解这些信息（Birch et al., 2017）。
Ask someone outside your bubble. The next time you are about to discard an idea for something you want to write, ask someone else whether they think it is common sense. Ask someone outside your bubble. Then write your article anyway. Write it and post it for yourself. 问问圈子外的人。下次当你打算放弃一个写作灵感时，问问别人是否认为那是常识。问问那些不在你信息茧房里的人。然后，无论如何都要写下来。为了你自己去写，为了你自己去发布。
People have been fundamentally alike for centuries and millennia. We share the same problems, although different people may have distinct or similar opinions on the same matter. You may have noticed, if you have read enough self-help or personal-development books, that there is a limited number of ideas and principles underlying almost all of them. There is nothing wrong with offering your own interpretation or your own perspective on the same idea. 几千年来，人类在本质上是相似的。我们面临着同样的问题，尽管不同的人对同一件事可能有不同或相似的看法。如果你读过足够多的自助或个人成长类书籍，你可能已经注意到，几乎所有书籍背后的核心思想和原则都是有限的。对同一个想法提出你自己的解读或视角，并没有什么错。
A simple idea can still resonate. This happened to me this year. I had a simple idea that I could post on my blog. I almost discarded it. Then I read an article that was at the top of Hacker News. It was simple but touching. The fact that many people engaged with it made me believe that, when you write and share something authentic, it can still be well received even if it is not something brand new. 简单的想法依然能引起共鸣。今年我就遇到了这种情况。我有一个简单的想法，本想发在博客上，但差点放弃了。后来我读到了一篇登上 Hacker News 榜首的文章。它很简单，但很动人。许多人参与讨论的事实让我相信，当你写下并分享真实的内容时，即使它不是什么全新的东西，依然可以大受欢迎。
So I wrote my post, published it on my blog, shared it on Hacker News, and forgot about it. Then, one morning, I saw messages from my friends telling me that my post had reached the front page of Hacker News. It was a post about a small trick I use to save my evenings (sometimes, hehe). I had not invented anything new. You can read comments from people who do similar things, and some people even shared links to well-known techniques that describe the same idea. So, it was not novel, but somehow it was well received. I do not really understand why or how. I think it was mostly luck. But for me, it was a strong confirmation that novelty is a powerful self-filter that makes us discard potentially good posts. 于是我写了那篇文章，发布在博客上，分享到 Hacker News，然后就没再管它。后来的一天早上，我收到朋友们发来的消息，说我的文章上了 Hacker News 的首页。那篇文章写的是我用来拯救夜晚（有时是这样，嘿嘿）的一个小技巧。我并没有发明什么新东西。你可以看到评论区里有人做着类似的事情，甚至有人分享了描述同样想法的知名技术链接。所以，它并不新颖，但不知为何却很受欢迎。我并不真正理解原因或方式。我想这多半是运气。但对我来说，这有力地证实了：新颖性是一个强大的自我过滤机制，它让我们丢弃了许多潜在的好文章。
Final thoughts: If you have recently thought of something but self-filtered and discarded it because you believed it was common sense and there was nothing worth sharing, bring it back to life. Take a pen and paper, spend 60 minutes on it, post it somewhere, and share the link in the comments. 最后的话：如果你最近想到了什么，却因为认为那是常识、没什么值得分享的而自我过滤并放弃了它，那么请让它重见天日。拿起纸笔，花 60 分钟写下来，发布在某个地方，并在评论区分享链接。