Blogyear 2015 in review

My posting rate continued its steep decline, only 17 posts this year compared to 24 last year. There are many reasons for that I suppose: I have been writing a lot on private social media groups, and so-called real life has been making some demands on my time. Here՚s a review of all posts except those that were obviously trivial or transitory:

Nerds vs Feminists riffs on some of the tension between feminism and nerd culture, which I took as an excuse to go into The Kids These Days, They Have It So Easy, Why In My Day mode.

Martyrs and the Coordination of Sentiment was written in response to the Charlie Hebdo killings and relates loosely to early writings on the sacred and politics.

This May Day post briefly examines my mixed attitudes towards both the left and capitalism and identifies something I labeled “fake solidarity”, which may be worth a longer examination. And a companion piece issued on Fake Labor Day toyed with my very uninformed notions about the Marxist concept of labor, another thing that might get worth knowing more about.

Three Forms of Antipolitics is also a product of the interaction of various nerdish ideas and politics, or more precisely the efforts of the former to deny or escape from the latter. It led into a followup about the specific incident when Mencius Moldbug got banned from the Strange Loop conference.

Another massacre, another post about the political sacred. I՚m starting to be slightly embarrassed by using such events as excuses to exercise my intellectual obsessions. If I was actually profiting from it, I՚d feel guilty of exploiting tragedy.

Burning Man Politics is about just that. And now I՚m embarrassed in a different way, by the fact that I՚m focusing on the least festive aspects of a festival. Why am I so obsessed with the political dimension of things? It՚s not like I՚m some grand macho radical, or even that I feel qualified to tell other people how they should behave. I don՚t even really like most political discourse these days, which tends to be split between the virulently idiotic and the appallingly self-righteous. But somehow I feel compelled to focus on the topic, as if some obscure duty was calling me.

Then finally I emitted a long piece about play and David Graeber, which is too fresh to be reviewed. It՚s a small chunk cut from a tangled web of thoughts about big ideas like goals, activity, representation, how minds actually work, and the meaning of life. I haven՚t really had much success in squeezing those ideas into blog form.

If I could bring myself to make a conscious effort to build an audience then I՚d probably start from my all-time most popular post on human-hostile systems and try to wire myself into the current excitement about AI risk. I am pretty sure all those people are wrong, but I am not sure why I believe that, and since “all those people” includes some very smart individuals it might be interesting and worthwhile to try to figure it out in more detail.

2016 promises to be an interesting year as the US political system goes through a slow-motion implosion, climate change becomes harder to ignore, and software continues to eat large chunks of the world.

Refactoring myself

A new thing for me – I wrote a long guest post on Refactoring Agency at Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbonfarm blog. New in both the venue and the attempt to convey more of a worked-out theory than the usual ephemeral thought that goes into a post here.

I’ve gotten some nice feedback, including one commenter who praised it for its practicality. That left me a little nonplussed, and reminded me of a lesson learned at an earlier startup: if I find myself taking on the role at a company of arguing for sound business practices, then the company is in serious trouble. Fortunately the blogosphere has no real obligations, no payroll to meet, so if we are spinning castles in the air that is not really a problem.

A useful term

Handschuhschneeballwerfer means "the coward willing to criticize and abuse from a safe distance", or literally, someone who wears gloves while throwing snowballs.

Doesn't that describe most of the blogosphere?

From this list of German words with no English equivalent.

Libertardian

Libertarianism has a slick new website, funded by Cato, ie the Kochtopus. I couldn't find anything obviously mock-worthy on a quick overview, and I have to applaud their including a whole list of pointers to anti-libertarian writings. OK, so the fact that it is titled "Critics of Liberty" rather than "Critics of Libertarianism" is pretty laughable. As is the listing of Ayn Rand, Thomas Sowell, and Murray Rothbard in a list of "major libertarian thinkers"...oh well, I don't want to get started here, because I have a new place to do it.

I will take this opportunity officially launch a side-microblog I've had for a little while now, Libertardian. I started this because my obsession with libertarianism is boring but I seem to be unable to give it up, and because so many of these freedom-lovers censor comments on their blogs (anyone else who has been banned from EconLog or elsewhere is welcome to be come a contributor). I have no real excuse for this, and people are giving me a hard time about the name, but what the hell.

I also wanted to investigate what micro-blogging was all about, and I admit to being baffled, because the features of Posterous seem only slightly different from a full-blown blogging platform like Blogger. Maybe inability to percieve these niches is why I'm not a successful web entrepeneur.

Never seen in the same room at the same time

It's always been somewhat confusing to me that there are two rather good bloggers, one named John Cole and the other named Juan Cole. And now that they've both made postings that more-or-less defend Obama's selection of Rick Warren for the inaugural, I wonder if they are the same person, like Stephen Colbert and Esteban Colberto.

For the record, Warren's pick pissed me off, but think we should at least let Obama hold office for a week or two before dismissing him as a complete sell-out.

Mismanagement and grief (unhappy anniversary)

This blog got its start three years ago, mostly in reaction to the Katrina diaster. Looks like history is quite predictably repeating itself. Oh well, good luck to the people in affected areas, you will need it. At least you know what to expect from your government.

As I remarked on another blog:

Nothing like a few floating corpses to spice up convention coverage. Of course, if Americans didn’t have the attention span of meth-addicted chickens, we’d remember them from three years ago.

And as Auden remarked on September 1, 1939:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed them all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

A blogoversary is an excuse to go back and read the archives and look for common themes and try to figure out just what the hell this blog is about and whether it is worth pursuing:

• atheism, naturalism, philosophy in general


• politics


• economics, libertarianism


• doom, boom, futurism


• social networks, netarchy, solidarity, coordination, collective action


• media, the web, googlectualism, infoglut, attention management


• technology, coding, hacks, standards, knowledge representation


• right-wing loons

I'm sure these all have something to do with one another, other than occupying space in my disorderly brain.

Blogging is so over

Wow, the State Department has a blog (h/t Yglesias). As does the US government as a whole. And Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary, and a random assortment of other government agencies.

If blogging ever meant anything, it was a chance for individual voices to reach a wide audience without instiutional mediation. Somewhere along the line they became marketing tools, and now big companies and big government are using them as a friendlier form of press release. I can't tell if this is fraudulent or represents a real opening up. It sounds promising:

With Dipnote we are going to take you behind the scenes at the State Department and bring you closer to the personalities of the Department. We are going to try and break through some of the jargon and talk about how we operate around the world.

I wonder how many people have to approve a posting to one of these blogs before its allowed to go public. I also am not sure who is going to read the State Department blog other than people already involved in government dealings in some way.

Blogging == PLoS?

I'm confused by this Slate article on academic blogging. For some reason, it maintains that open-access journals like the Public Library of Science have something to do with blogging:

Perhaps the most significant challenge to the traditional peer-review practices comes from open-source projects like the Public Library of Science, which, though their journals are peer-reviewed, are available to all readers. Michael B. Eisen, an assistant biology professor at Berkeley and one of the co-founders (with Harold Varmus) of PloS, believes that academic bloggers face similar challenges to those of scientists who publish in open-source journals like his.

"One of the main issues we face in trying to convince junior academics to publish in PLoS instead of more established journals is their concern about how such publications will look at tenure time. I keep trying to convince people that, in an ideal world, tenure decisions should be made on the quality of one's work, not the venue of its publication. And there's no reason this shouldn't apply to things like blogs as well," he says.

Um, but the whole point of PLoS is (in their words):

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was formed in 2000 by scientists and physicians to make peer-reviewed research freely accessible online to the world.

So what does does this have to do with blogging? PLoS is a peer-reviewed journal that happens to have a different economic model behind it, and I presume should be treated like any other acadmic journal when it comes to assigning publishing credit. Blogging is not (in general) peer-reviewed or reviewd at all, which is why it's hard to account for it in tenure decisions. As far as I can see they have nothing to do with one another, other than both involving this new-fangled web thingy.

Arguing Economics

In olden days when the Internet was populated only by nerds, I used to have a pastime of arguing with libertarians. Sometimes these were just stupid fights, but occasionally they were enlightening, at least to me. It helped me sort out my own political opinions, and realize that my naive communitarianism was impractical and markets were an excellent tool for resource allocation, some of the time. I was not, however, converted to the culty libertarianism that was the rpevailng ideology on the net, which is essentially that markets are in every situation the best and only mechanism for resource allocation and every other social process there is.

One of the people I used to argue with was Eric Raymond, who later went on to be a famous author and proponent of the naive communitarianism known as Open Source. I don't know if arguing with me had any influence on him, but I like to think so. He's still ostensibly a libertarian despite being one of the leading proselytizers for a very successful form of socialism.

I long ago tired of arguing with ideologues, but every so often the impuslse surfaces again. Nowadays it's different thought -- I can bash on famous economists with bestselling books, rather than unwashed basement-dwelling geeks. Twice now (that makes a trend) I've had to chasten Steven Levitt, the Freakonomicist, for applying his deformation professionelle to get obviously absurd results. The latest was on the occasion of today's column in the New York Times maagazine, where he (and partner Stephen Dubner) presents his mystification as to why people should vote. I and many others take him to task for taking an inappropriate stance to this issue, and I point to Valdis Krebs' paper on social networks and voting as a more interesting and meaningful way to look at voter turnout issues. But maybe the best comment was from GamblingEconomist:

If millions of people vote and the standard economic model predicts that people should not vote, the problem is probably with the model not with the people.

An earlier posting of Levitt's dealt with Peak Oil and energy issues (inexplicably vanished from his site, link is to Google cache), which he dismissed with the wave of the magic wand of the markets -- prices will rise, demand will drop, equilibrium will be achieved and all will be well. I pointed out that the speed at which this happens matters a lot -- slow changes in prices allow time to adjust, rapid price increases will cause a lot of pain. Actually it was my attempt to respond to this that ended up in the creation of this blog, so I guess I owe them.

OK, my critiques are not exactly flashes of genius, more like flashes of common sense. Still, it would be nice to know what Levitt's response to them would be. I haven't seen that, because blogs+comments are really not the kind of conversational mechanism that mailing lists and usenet are/were. This is a peeve of mine about the blogging medium, it doesn't really support conversations that well. Comments generally suck -- there are too many (or in some cases not enough), no structure, no quality control, and no conversational structuring.

Partly it's the power-law effect -- the network in the old days was a flatter space, where anybody could wade into the conversation and get an argument going. Now that the web is a reflection of the outer social world, we are back to having celebreties and nonentities, although the barrier between them is perhaps more permeable. There is no way that Levitt could respond to all the people who would like to argue with him even if he wanted to.

Well, maybe the answer for me is to stop trying to debate people who are both a) too high up the curve and b) aren't really saying stuff that's new/relevant. For an amateur political economist, the folks over at Crooked Timber, ie, are both more accessible and more interesting.

Attention seeking

So here's an Atrios post where he chimes in on a dustup between blogger Richard Cranium (who was instrumental in drawing media attention to a missing non-white woman) and columnist Noel Weyrich (who thinks bloggers are callow attention-seekers).

He hits on Weyrich's version of the Prime Pundit Fallacy- since he's in it for the attention and media adulation everybody who ever puts themself out there is in it for the same reason. ... what should be obvious is that people who blog behind pseudonyms aren't, in fact, doing it for fame and fortune (why anyone thinks one who desires fame generally would turn to blogging I do not know). The main reason people start blogging is that they want to, in some small way, occasionally have an impact on the public discourse.

So here's the dilemma, for an obscure blogger like myself -- to have an impact on discourse or anything else, you have to get some attention. Not necessarily from the MSM, but at least from people on the nets. So blogging becomes a mix of high and low motives, or idealistic and cynical -- there's the social goal, and then there's the selfish goal.

I am not naturally an attention-seeker, in fact I seem to have a talent for not getting attention and credit for things I do, but every so often I find myself forced into scrabbling for it. In the blog world, that means shameless linkwhoring and generally advertising yourself. Definitely goes against my nature, but sometimes it's good to go against your nature.

Just about any action is going to have this mix of motives, and navigating the mix is one of the jobs of moral philosophy and political philosophy. Some people who can't handle complexity become Randroids and loudly proclaim their devotion to selfishness exclusively. Most of us muddle through, using our embeddedness in real-world social networks to guide our actions so they aren't exclusively self-seeking.

I am suspect of my own motives in writing this blog. Am I trying to change the world, or just barking at it? I don't have a social agenda, although I'm as much in favor of truth, justice, and the real American Way as anybody, not to mention turning the Republicans out of power as soon as possible. Mostly what I'm trying to do is unclog my brain, by forcing me to organize and externalize the clound of random ideas that flit through it. Whether this does me or anybody else any good remains to be seen.

BTW Atrios and Cranium are clearly right in this particular case -- a blogger had a clear social goal, went ahead and did something about it, achieved some success (and attention), absolutely nothing wrong with that, Weyrich is indeed a wanker.

Link Gumbo

I'm still feeling out this blogging medium. Here are a bunch of random yet worthwhile links:

Excellent kids-say-the-smartest-things story, and this guy wins the I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that-blog-title-and-especially-the-subheading award.

Speaking of I wish-I'd-though-of-that, I did think of the idea of having a website that tried to build social networks around books, reviews, and book chat. Never got around to doing anything about this fairly obvious idea, but somebody finally has.

I'm discovering all sorts of wonderful blogging/tagging/etc sites. It's a Cambrian explosion of software out there, and I sure don't have time to keep track of it (fortunatly there are plenty of others who do). Here is one that I like a lot, Tagcloud, which gives you a sort of terminological overview of what's going on in your personal blog collection. Here's mine., and here's another of mine that's built around the more technical/scientific blogs I read.