Revising in Public

An argument is rarely right the first time it is written down. The usual remedy — quietly editing the page until it says something else — throws away the part a reader might learn the most from: what the writer used to think, and what changed their mind.

So this piece keeps its drafts. This is the second, and it exists because the first assumed its own conclusion.

The claim

Publishing a revision is cheap. Publishing the record of a revision costs something, because it commits the writer to having been wrong in public — and that cost is exactly what makes the record worth reading.

What the first pass missed

A draft is not only an earlier version of the text. It is evidence about the argument: which parts survived contact with a reader, and which were quietly dropped once they could not be defended.