Blub studies is not a very good concept-handle. It’s not very clear what “blub” is. It is, however, a great meme.
In its shortest definition, blub studies is:
the study of what goes on in the guts of these boring, everyday systems–not the kind you get tenure for inventing, but the kind people actually use.
Ben Kuhn suggests “kickstarting ‘your blub flywheel’” however you can. He promises it will eventually pay off greatly.
I have an appetite for blub studies. And this sounds like a good advice to me. I will heed it. Just like I followed the “Use Vim emulation in an IDE” advice, as a person with an appetite for keyboard-dominant interaction with my computer.
I feel like there’s something missing. There must be a “blub-studies studies” level that we can rise to. At that level, we could ask and answer questions like: How to build appetite for blub-studies? How to get better at it? I don’t think I have come across this yet. Except perhaps in The Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance, or Philosophical Explanations.
(This came my way thanks to Julia Evans.)