As I hope to convince you, all three are very much the same thing. I’ve used to be surprised to see that Welmer or Ferdinand had 700 blog posts total. This is analogous to looking up a scientist’s CV and seeing 300 papers! Wow!
But let’s hold our horses a bit. Just like blogging, science demands regularity; publish or perish is also true in the blogging world. One must post regularly or the audience is lost. Similarly in science, one must keep writing papers, doing research, or one will be forgotten and left behind. Most labs that I follow publish a paper every 2 – 3 months, for about 6 a year.
It seems that some of our readers disagree with specialization in people and particular, in scientists. My response is that everyone specializes. In white nationalism, we have different specialists: Unamused reports black crime and statistics, Paul Kersey covers black crime and sports, Steve Sailor and OneSTDV cover pop culture issues and so on. But no one does it all, indeed, no one can do it all properly.
Everything today is about creating a niche, a small area and mastering that area. Let’s take a look at a list of papers written by a famous scientist. This will help prove the point. A list of a few papers follows; I generally don’t like long lists, but this is important. I’ll just include the titles. The pattern should be obvious. Let’s choose Steven Hawking:
Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse
Singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology
Path integral derivation of black hole radiance
Black holes in General Relativity
Black holes and thermodynamics
Quantum state of the universe
Chronology protection conjecture
Unpredictability of quantum gravity
The nature of space and time
Gravitational radiation from colliding black holes
The gravitational Hamiltonian, action, entropy and surface terms
Path integrals and the indefiniteness of the gravitational action
Wormholes in spacetime
Euclidean space-time geometry
Clearly, Stephen Hawking made his name in science by working on large-scale problems dealing with gravity, especially black holes. This is how he makes his living, this is that one little topic that he is the best at in the whole world. He is also known for his series of basic science on the universe, but this is written at a level far below most of his real work. Probably any scientist with the will could put similar information to the public; Dawkins does this in biology.
There is a tremendous amount of information in the world today. Most of the scientists who have ever lived are alive right now, and there are more people on the planet today than there have ever been in all of history. A scientist and a blogger needs to contribute something unique to the world; they must increase the sum of human knowledge. To do this, one must find a narrow topic and read all the relevant books and articles. The more narrow the topic, the less data will be available. Then one simply sets one’s mind to the task and starts answering questions. There are an infinite variety of areas to choose from.
In conclusion, I am certainly aware that specialization does not make for a very interesting human being. So it seems that we have a conflict between the way things should be and what one has to do to make a living and to differentiate oneself from others, gaining a competitive advantage. Additionally, there is an optimal “size” of the world one chooses to concern oneself with – describing this is difficult. I urge all budding scientists, knowledge workers, and bloggers to absolutely master an area and only afterwards to expand and branch out, if necessary. But having a firm footing, your own little fiefdom is key to start with.
Indeed, niches are the way to go in anything, nowadays. If one sufficiently reduces the scope of his vision, one can devote more depth into his endeavors. This path makes it much easier to become a master in some particular venue or field, whatever it may be.