Marginal Revolution: Blogging as self-experimentation

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Blogging as self-experimentation

Seth Roberts writes:

“Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation,” Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He explained: “Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.”

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy. All you bloggers out there, or spouses of bloggers, what effects do you notice?

Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 12, 2007 at 02:12 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink

Comments

There's a contradiction in that statement. I'm not sure if that makes me more tolerant or not. ;)

There are so many approaches to blogging that I do agree that it is a form of self-experimentation. What it really means is anyone's guess.

Posted by: ditto at Feb 12, 2007 3:06:25 PM

In other words, it makes us more moral, more virtuous. But why?
I think because of the human interaction element. Just as Adam Smith said,
"morality comes from commerce," and I think this amounts to the
same thing.

I know I've been changed dramatically since I started blogging
one month ago. I read more blogs, and look for writing styles
I like. I think of more ideas, because I know my (phantom) readers
expect them, and I think of how I can communicate them better.

It has spilled over into my non-blogging life as well. I tutor
with a different mindset, and socialize generally in a different
way. Like you said, it's more about the bottom line, and getting
the bottom line across.

The downside is it has brought out the obsessive compulsive side of me.
I spend way too much time at this, I think.

Posted by: will mcbride at Feb 12, 2007 3:13:29 PM

The IT industry has an unusually high proportion of emontionally immature libertarians, and blogging (as a recent fruit of IT) seems to provide a strong outlet for self-indulgent reveling in one's own thoughts and self-congratulations on one's rational approach to life. Plus there are plenty of other libertarian bloggers out there to make the libertarian feel a solidarity in his or her selfishness.

Posted by: Dirk at Feb 12, 2007 3:28:58 PM

I really enjoy the fact that blog posts tend to be terse.
I think there are not enough penalties for being verbose or poorly-organized.
Most books strike me as unnecessary. Powerpoint, maybe with a 20-page supporting paper, would do a better job in most cases, I think.

One disadvantage is that blogs may not provide the most natural framework for organizing complicated arguments. But (as with books), we may simply be deluding ourselves if we believe we can understand most complicated arguments anyway.

I also feel like using a stream of text to convey structured information (a logical argument, a pattern, etc.) is probably wrong. But that's a more general problem with all textual information.

Posted by: mk at Feb 12, 2007 3:39:52 PM

Last night I was watching television with my wife and made a comment about a TV ad. She said, laughing, "you analyze everything...and figure out how you can use it in your blog!"

Totally true.

Posted by: BobG at Feb 12, 2007 3:47:43 PM

Blogging makes people quote quotations of themselves more often. Now, why is that?

Seth Roberts now should be nice and quote this post quoting his quoting of you.

Posted by: André Manoel at Feb 12, 2007 4:01:18 PM

Blogging allows me to clarify my thoughts and put them into cogent arguments well before I am called on to use them in another context. It exercises analytical writing skills by putting you through the paces of analysis on a regular basis. As a law student, I have found that is a very valuable excercise. And, yes, it does provide for a better process of self-reflection than thought alone.... by putting my thoughts down and facing them over the passage of time, I am able to more correctly identify themes in my discourse.

It doesn't help you meet chicks, though.

Posted by: Dave at Feb 12, 2007 4:05:38 PM

I wanted to develop my writing abilities when I first started blogging. I was a freshman in college when I wrote my first post and had just come to the scary revelation that I was a shitty writer. Last fall, I took my GMAT and scored in the top 80% on the writing section. There is room for a lot of improvement, but I know that without blogging, I would still be struggling to write each sentence.

After previewing this, I realize it sounds like a testimony to a new found faith in religion. I guess it should, I blog religously.

Posted by: Hollywood_Freaks at Feb 12, 2007 4:25:29 PM

I've found it makes me even more obnoxious and snarky

Posted by: younotsneaky at Feb 12, 2007 5:12:54 PM

Blogging only helps self-reflection if you actually put the effort into it. It is like Pascal's reflection that it takes more time to write a short letter than a long one.

Posted by: ditto at Feb 12, 2007 5:15:35 PM

I pay more attention to everyday stuff; and it demands more coherence in my thinking

Posted by: Luis Figueroa at Feb 12, 2007 5:27:35 PM

Actually, the most effective device for making me less patient with continental philosophy is continental philosophy. (There are some exceptions. I think Camus can be interpreted as making existentialist hoopla vanish in a puff of logic much the same way that Popper made idealist hoopla vanish in a puff of logic.)

Posted by: isonomist at Feb 12, 2007 6:43:09 PM

I can't go anywhere or do anything without mentally composing a blog post in my head about it.

Posted by: Jacqueline at Feb 12, 2007 6:43:11 PM

I recently started blogging. I'd say it makes me question my own knowledge more as I analyze others. We all agree that we can be more critical of others, which is missing in a large segment of the popualation. On the other hand, having to see your own bullshit in writing goes a long way for self-awareness.

Posted by: Paul at Feb 12, 2007 6:52:47 PM

Getting more and more new ideas from blogging.In Greg Mankiw's blog, I commented that in India snob and bandwagon effects can very well co-exist because of joint families and homogenous groups living without interaction.If I make it in the form of a model,Iam sure, no journal would publish it.Blogging gives freedom to invent ideas and to share the empirics of everyday living.

Posted by: GVV at Feb 12, 2007 7:15:53 PM

Hmmmm. How does blogging change bloggers? From this discussion it
appears to generate a tendency toward hyperbole. It (blogging) seems to
encourage or provide a forum for narcissism.

Posted by: Robert Cavazos at Feb 12, 2007 10:08:49 PM

Robert: Looking at the same face in the mirror every day seems to encourage narcissism as well.

Posted by: Paul at Feb 12, 2007 10:37:13 PM

I hate to say it, but I think blogging generally turns reasonable people into screeching and boring partisans. Present company excepted, naturally.

Posted by: Pithlord at Feb 13, 2007 1:02:17 AM

You scored in the top 80% ?! That doesn't tell us very much. :)

Posted by: J. Goard at Feb 13, 2007 1:22:59 AM

I scored in the top 100% on all three parts of the GRE.

But I took it before blogs existed, so maybe there's room for improvement now.

Posted by: bartman at Feb 13, 2007 4:54:34 AM

GVV: Blogs also give space for novel punctuation schemes.Like this one,right?

Posted by: bartman at Feb 13, 2007 4:58:31 AM

Har har. I'm probably not in the top 1% because of novel mistakes.

Posted by: Hollywood_Freaks at Feb 13, 2007 7:37:56 PM

How is "less patient towards Continental philosophy" inherently a good thing? What are the advantages/disadvantages of an "intellectual bottom line"? A bottom line for whom? Who's investing, who is getting the dividends? If you're going to use the metaphor and then from it make rather large claims, you'd be well to explore what you are saying a little more deeply.

Blogging also allows people to feel self-satisfied with their own witticisms and jump too quickly at seemingly impressive statements, when really they only exhibit gloss.

Posted by: sps at Feb 14, 2007 1:04:38 PM

I saw this entry linked on both kottke.org and Ben Casnocha's blog. While I get the gist of what you're saying, I'm really curious what you mean about intolerance towards Continental philosophy. For me, blogging helps me get in touch with the core of my life: the experience. I meditate on that experience, ponder that experience, and write on that experience--what we call blogging. How does this process undermine the claims of Continental philosophy, especially the subject's focus on human experience and phenomenology?

Posted by: Jesse at Feb 14, 2007 3:51:29 PM

The very fact that you can write 'less patient with Continental philosophy' as if it were a single homogenous dogma shows that you probably don't know enough about it to dismiss it. Most people are only familiar with the caricature of continental philosophy (frequently perpetuated by bloggers who haven't done their reading) which claims that it 1. is deliberately incomprehensible and 2. commands you to abandon science, morality, law etc. Neither, of course, is true. And the difference between the intellectual projects of e.g. Camus and e.g. Derrida and e.g. Baudrillard is so great that it would be utterly absurd to lump them together for almost any purpose. Imagine if someone wrote that 'blogging makes you less patient with English-speaking philosophy'...

Posted by: Ned at Feb 14, 2007 4:04:02 PM

re: Ned: somehow I seriously doubt that either the author or anyone reading or writing these comments has any clue what connotations Continental philosophy holds in the larger canon of Western thought.

Posted by: ryan at Feb 14, 2007 7:15:55 PM

::raises hand::

I'm fairly familiar with it, Ryan. Enough that I feel like I can adequately hold my own in a discussion of most of our fabulous postmoderns, at least. Of course, I'll be headed off to grad school for philosophy/critical theory in the not-so-distant future...

Now only if Tyler would weigh in and give us some insight...

Posted by: Jesse at Feb 14, 2007 7:25:27 PM

::raises hand, too::

Jesse, Ned, Ryan, etc.,

I'm halfway through a PhD in philosophy; I have a master's in philosophy and another in theology (which was actually earned by reading French philosophers). I spent 6 years reading everything from 'les trois H' (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) to the old French (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas), the new French (Badiou, Ranciere), the High Germans (Habermas, Adorno, Horkheimer, even Luhmann), and so on...

...and at the end of all that, I've reached the following tentative conclusions:

1. Analytic philosophers usually make definite progress by taking precise but very teeny baby steps (much like the hard sciences). "Continental philosophers" often make little or no progress by attempting to very vaguely reinvent what counts as a step.

2. "Continental philosophy" doesn't exist. As a matter of fact, most of the practicing philosophers in France and Germany write and think along lines identical to how philosophers write and think in the US, UK, and Australia (that is to say, "nous sommes tous les Analytiques"). Another fact is that the living French/German/Italian representatives of "Continental philosophy" (for instance Badiou, Negri, Agamben) are more highly regarded in the US than in their home countries, which seems odd. Ned's comment is exactly right - it is absurd to lump them together, and each "Continental" philosopher should have to compete for our attention against every other philosopher, just like all the others do. Most wouldn't survive the disbanding of the guild.

3. Some of those people are good philosophers. I dare you to read Hegel's Science of Logic. Husserl and that analytic scion, Frege, share more than Husserl does with, say, Derrida. Badiou understands logic and the philosophy of mathematics (nevermind where he tries take them). Various German political philosophers are obviously legit - Habermas, Honneth, Schmitt. There are certainly others I'm not thinking of right now.

4. The rest should be filed under "prose poetry," "literary criticism," "theology," "cultural studies," or "Please Recycle."

5. The cliches about analytic philosophy being more rigorous, difficult, and austere are true more often than not.

6. "Anything you can do, I can do better"; I don't know of any Continental insight that wasn't either thought of first or hasn't been better defended, or both, by a non-Continental. As for "the subject's focus on human experience," [Jesse] I think logic and modest investigation is more helpful in making sense of human experience than well-turned phrases and neologisms. Phenomenology is great, but it's worth noting that the best phenomenology is now being done either by or in conjunction with people who do philosophy of mind.

I don't understand at all the claim that blogging has any effect on one's philosophical preferences.

Apologies in advance for any pedantry; thanks for your indulgence.

Posted by: Jared at Feb 14, 2007 10:48:58 PM

Jared, this is a rather personal interpretation, but I'm finding that more and more of the blogging atmosphere is not just hellbent on experience, but on much more postmodern things like approaches and worldviews and culture. I'd ask you to point me towards "intellectual bottom lines" that are produced in the hyper-syllogistic approaches of the moderns in today's blogging culture. I think they are few and far between.

One last question for you, Jared. Would you consider Wittgenstein to be a Continental philosopher? I found the conclusion to his Tracatatus to be rather insightful as far as setting the stage for the postmodern approach. What's your take?

Posted by: Jesse at Feb 15, 2007 10:14:04 AM

I've been blogging for a few months now and find many of the above comments about the practice to ring true (including the ones which make me wince). However perhaps the most striking result of it for me is that I just read, with interest, a description of a field about which I have never previously thought for even one moment. Cool.

Posted by: Paul at Feb 16, 2007 12:12:32 AM

I don't mean to be obtuse, but I don't understand what this means: "point me towards "intellectual bottom lines" that are produced in the hyper-syllogistic approaches of the moderns in today's blogging culture." If you mean: show me some good philosophy blogs, well that I can do. Here's two links, I suspect 3 or more will get me tripped up by spam filters:

http://tar.weatherson.org/
http://metaphysicalvalues.blogspot.com/

As for Wittgenstein: if Frege, Meinong, and the Vienna Circle are "Continental philosophers" then so is he. But then the category is vacuously all-inclusive. Otherwise, no. I mean even the later Wittgenstein seems closer to pragmatism and Frank Ramsey than he does to any typically Continental approaches. I would think that membership in the guild of Continentals requires more than one throwaway mystical sentence about silence. Cheers-

Posted by: Jared at Feb 16, 2007 7:23:32 AM

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