On publishing what you learn

A short argument.

A lab that ships products has every reason not to publish. Writing is slow. It gives away ideas. It invites people to tell you that you are wrong.

We publish anyway, for three reasons.

Writing forces the thinking. You find the holes in an argument when you try to write it down. Half of our research is discovering that we did not understand the problem yet.

It compounds. A note written once gets read by people we will never meet, and some of them become the people we work with. A pitch does not compound. A clear note does.

It keeps us honest. If we have to state a claim in public, we are slower to make one we cannot defend. The move we distrust is the confident sentence with nothing under it.

None of this means publishing everything. The work that becomes product stays quiet until it ships. But the thinking — the part that is only thinking — is better off in the open.