With one “pretty bad tempered thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003005.html going strong and evidence of “another one”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003015.html tipping over into trolldom, it may not be worth worth adding to the “already extensive body of commentary”:http://www.google.com/search?q=blogging+gender&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 about the gender gap in blogging. But fools skate without paddles on thin ice near the edge of volcanoes, etc. I hope we can keep things civil.
From the category archives:
Blogging
OMG! It’s recently been brought to my attention that I’ve only written one post for CT this whole month! That’s, like, totally weak! Under our new posting rules, I’m going to be bringing my A game, every single day. “No Scrubs” is going to be playing in my cubicle 24-7. And if I slack off, dsquared is going to subject me to ferocious Welsh discipline, of the sort handed out at the gloomy Welsh “public” school he attended starting at age 3. (I can’t go into it here, but it involves leeks. And that white jack thingy from bowls.) Let’s see…um…there must be something out there on the interweb. Here we go, something funny a straight white guy said!:
I’m glad the press is having a dance party with this, because God knows the Democrats are frozen at the steering wheel. I just saw a segment on MSNBC (which has been all over the Kerik story today, bless Rick Kaplan’s cyborg heart) pitting a Republican strategist against a Democratic one, and the Democratic spokesman–who goes by the name of Michael Brown–seemed to have washed down his weeny pills with warm Ovaltine. Instead of kicking Kerik and Giuliana between the uprights for three points, Brown fretted that vetting process for cabinet candidates was “going to far,” and that we were in danger of discouraging people from public service. Oh no, we wouldn’t want to discourage philandering, pocket-lining, deadbeat no-show bully-boys like Bernard Kerik from having the opportunity to muck around with our civil liberties in the name of “national security” and hold bigshot press conferences. I mean, if that sort of thing were to continue happening, people might start mistaking the Democrats for an opposition party and thinking that the press has an adversarial role to play, and we don’t want that to happen, it might actually lead to signs of life in that mausoleum we call the nation’s capital.
This Michael Brown wouldn’t even criticize Alberto Gonzalez for botching the background check and vetting of Kerik. I don’t understand the self-emasculation of so many Democratic strategists, what they’re afraid of, why they concede so much in advance. Give them an opening, and they close it like a silk kimono, ever so demure. What are they in politics for, the professional grooming tips?
You know, James Wolcott could be totally gay. I’m agnostic on this front. I know, I’ll ask one of my male co-bloggers! They know so much stuff, it’s awesome. Guys? Oh, and, does anyone want a coffee?
Let’s try and step on this canard before it grows wings … Oliver Kamm is quoting some writer at Fortune saying something that ain’t true about election betting markets.
The reputation of exit polls was perceptibly if unfairly damaged by the US presidential election. But, as a writer in Fortune magazine points out, another predictor was unambiguously accurate. This was the electronic predictions market: the various websites allowing punters to place bets on the electoral outcome.
As anyone who was watching the CT Election Night Special will know, this just isn’t true. The election markets, on the big day, were more or less exactly as bad at providing us with predictive information as were the exit polls. I think that we may have been the only place recording the intraday fluctuations on the prediction markets (which were massive), so maybe it’s important to summarise the facts.
I am teaching an undergraduate class this Winter called “Internet and Society”. [1] I am going to require each student to maintain his/her own blog. This poses some challenges from keeping up with the amount of written material to assuring a certain level of privacy for students (as per related federal laws). I still have a few weeks to think about the specifics and thought would see what experiences and wisdom others may have accumulated in this realm.
The course is a social science course (half the students will be Communication Studies majors, half of them Sociology majors) with a focus on exploring the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the Internet. I do plan to teach students some technical skills, but that won’t be the focal point of the course. I will provide basic installation of WordPress and then will work with students to tweak the layout and style to their liking. Those who are especially interested in this aspect will have the opportunity to personalize the blog considerably, but that will not be a requirement.
The closest analogy to requiring blogs seems to be classes where students are required to keep journals. I have only seen this done once so I am curious to hear about additional experiences (or, of course, any experiences people may have with blogs by students in particular). The idea is to ask students to comment on their readings and class discussions on their blogs. They would be required to write a certain number of entries (I am not yet sure how many). They would also be required to comment on other students’ blogs (I am not yet sure how often).
I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.
So what was wrong with the SBC?
A couple of days ago, I got into a bit of a “back-and-forth”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002980.html with Stephen Bainbridge about his interpretation of a Jonathan Chait piece. While I still think that he should have been more generous in his interpretation of Chait, I was less generous still in my response, and believe on reflection that I owe Prof. Bainbridge an apology. God knows, a bit of snarkiness here and there enlivens discussion in the blogosphere, but it also tends to drive out proper argument in favour of the venting of spleen on both sides. I think we could have had a proper argument here. My bad.
Apropos of Dan’s “post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002988.html below, it’s interesting how unconcerned Jim Lindgren and many other “critics”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_07.shtml#1097679747 of European anti-semitism appear to be when it’s “European Muslims”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_12_07.shtml#1102869137 who are at the receiving end of the jackboot. Lindgren links approvingly to a ‘fascinating’ (read: bizarre and very possibly deranged) “article”:http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200412100841.asp by Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online about the ‘Ents’ of Europe. Apparently, Europeans, like Ents, have slumbered through the threat from Islamofascism. Hanson hopes that the Dutch Ents at least are waking up to the dangers that they face from the Islamists in their midst, and finishes by calling for a European Demosthenes who will ‘soberly but firmly’ demand an end to multiculturalism and the internal threat from radical Islam. It’s quite unfair to note in this context that the leader of the racist Belgian Vlaams Blok party has just “called”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1370599,00.html for the European far right to join forces to combat the ‘Islamization of Europe.’ But it’s not at all unfair to see something disturbing and even disgusting in the way that Hanson glides over the mosque-burnings and racist and religious violence that have happened over the last several weeks as a consequence of the ‘waking up’ of the Netherlands. As I’ve “mentioned before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001401.html, I much prefer it when the more ignorant members of the American right-wing commentariat limit themselves to attacks on European anti-semitism, even if they grossly exaggerate its extent and effects. It’s much more disturbing when they praise Europe than when they damn it – they invariably latch onto the nastiest and most atavistic aspects of European politics and policy.
Nominations are now open for the “2004 Koufax Awards”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/archives/001502.html. If you think we deserve it, head over and nominate CT for any or all of *Best Blog*, *Best Group Blog*, *Best Writing,* *Best Post* and *Best Looking*. I think that last one is a category.
There’s been a lot of hubbub, both here and elsewhere in the blogworld, about the Becker-Posner blog. But if it’s intellectual firepower in a group blog you’re after, you should be reading “Left2Right”:http://left2right.typepad.com/. Here’s its “mission statement”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/why_left2right.html, which should be good for setting off a round of debates.
bq. In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from conservative critiques of those values? Are there conservative values that we should be more forthright about sharing? “Left2Right” will be a discussion of these and related questions.
bq. Although we have chosen the subtitle “How can the Left get through to the Right?”, our view is that the way to get through to people is to listen to them and be willing to learn from them. Many of us identify ourselves with the Left, but others are moderates or independents. What we share is an interest in exploring how American political discourse can get beyond the usual talking points.
The contributors so far include “Elizabeth Anderson”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/what_hume_can_t.html, “Kwame Appiah”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt.html, “Josh Cohen”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/the_moral_value.html, “Stephen Darwall”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/school_resegreg.html, “Gerald Dworkin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/less_contempt_m.html, “David Estlund”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/the_first_data_.html, “Don Herzog”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/public_private_.html, “Jeff McMahan”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/supporting_our_.html, “Seana Shiffrin”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/11/being_forthrigh.html, and “David Velleman”:http://left2right.typepad.com/main/2004/12/debunking_a_dea.html. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.
As Eszter notes, the “Becker/Posner Blog”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/ has solved whatever collective action problems it was having earlier in the week and now the first two substantive posts are up, both on the topic of preventive war, one from “Becker”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_war.html and one from “Posner”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html. Right now, my working theory is that the blog is an elaborate hoax. How else to explain stuff like this:
bq. Should imminence be an absolute condition of going to war, and preventive war thus be deemed always and everywhere wrong? Analytically, the answer is no. A rational decision to go to war should be based on a comparison of the costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms) to the nation. … Suppose there is a probability of .5 that the adversary will attack at some future time, when he has completed a military build up, that the attack will, if resisted with only the victim’s current strength, inflict a cost on the victim of 100, so that the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), but that the expected cost can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further that at an additional cost of only 5, the victim can by a preventive strike today eliminate all possibility of the future attack. Since 5 is less than 35 (the sum of injury and defensive costs if the future enemy attack is not prevented), the preventive war is cost-justified. A historical example that illustrates this analysis is the Nazi reoccupation of the Rhineland area of Germany in 1936 …
The real Richard Posner is one of the preeminent legal minds of our time, so he can hardly be responsible for this. For one thing, parody of this quality is pretty difficult to write and I don’t think he has the time to devote to the task. Notice how the eminently reasonable introduction by “Posner” (as we shall call him) leads the reader to expect some sort of informed analysis — “a comparison of costs and benefits (in the largest sense of these terms).” But once this hook has been swallowed, within a paragraph we are in a fantasy world — “the expected cost of the attack is 50 (100 x .5), … can be reduced to 20 if the victim incurs additional defense costs of 15. Suppose further …” Suppose further! Quite brilliant stuff. The sudden _non-sequitur_ about the Nazi occupation of the Rhine caps the piece with Godwinesque cheek. After the lead-in sentence, “Posner” is careful not to mention again the war being prosecuted in Iraq. This is a nice move, reminiscent of the best UseNet trolls. When angry bloggers complain that neither the cost-benefit thing nor the analogy to Hitler make any contact with present reality whatsoever, or suggest that the post sounds like it was written in the Autumn of 2002 — or maybe the Winter of 1990 — they’ll have unwittingly set themselves up for a fall: after all, “Posner” was only considering the justifiability of preventive war _sub specie aeternitas_, not the actual costs and benefits of any particular war the U.S. might or might not be engaged in at present.
Speaking of which, “Posner’s” strategy neatly avoids the sticky business of having to work out a real cost-benefit calculation using available numbers — ones like, e.g., the cost of war to date in real dollars, N Combat Fatalities to date, skill-adjusted dollar value of Generic U.S. service person, “QALY”:http://www.evidence-based-medicine.co.uk/ebmfiles/WhatisaQALY.pdf adjustment for each of N Injuries sustained by U.S. service people, Expected Number of Fatalities in an Iraqi-sponsored WMD attack on the U.S. Mainland, productivity losses to an Iraqi WMD attack, probability that Saddam Hussein had WMDs of any sort, likelihood that they could have been delivered to the U.S., etc, etc. Those last two quantities are now known with a high degree of confidence to approximately equal zero, by the way. This might make it easier to calculate the right-hand side of the equation after the fact. (If you worry that having this calculation _before_ the fact would have been more useful, but think it would have been extremely difficult to do in any precise but still sensible way, congratulations on your perspicuity.)
Elsewhere on the blog, the “absurd suck-up comments”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2004/12/preventive_warp.html#trackbacks from law students are a further indication that the reader is being gamed. Take this one from “Charles”, for instance:
bq. Dear Justice Posner, I am a 2L at DePaul and I just wanted to say that I think all of your legal decisions are brilliant. I think that you and Dr. Thomas Sowell are the most insightful economic minds in the world today.
Part letter to Santa, part backhanded swipe at Gary Becker — guess you’re the second string econ guy, Gary! — I’m surprised he didn’t mention he’d been a good boy all year and go on to ask for a Train Set and a copy of Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline. But that might have been painting the lily. All in all, I look forward to future entries, which may provide further clues as to who the deadpan genius behind this blog really is. The “Medium Lobster”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/ perhaps? The “PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ maybe? I await further developments with interest.
Update: Sentence edited for clarity about probabilities.
I’ve been meaning to post about the blogging software WordPress and a recent announcement from our hosting service Dreamhost now gives me even more reason to do so. WordPress is a great free blogging software that I decided to use for my own blog back in the summer when I was upgrading various parts of my site. It is free both in the sense that you don’t have to pay for a copy and in the sense that you have the freedom to modify its code. It is filled with wonderful features such as no rebuilding when making changes to your template and efficient ways of dealing with comment spam. WordPress is committed to offering cool features of other programs such as MT’s Trackback. It also offers importers for Movable Type, Greymatter, Blogger, b2, and Textpattern with others forthcoming (Nucleus and pMachine). Moreover, it is quite easy to install, definitely much more straight forward than some other programs such as Movable Type. When they say it takes five minutes they aren’t kidding (granted, some more general prior technical knowledge can be very helpful).
But wait! If you don’t have five minutes to spare (and perhaps you’re lacking some of those technical basics) then Dreamhost is the way to go. A few days ago they announced automatic installation of WordPress on Dreamhost accounts. We at CT use Dreamhost for our hosting service as do I for my own sites. I highly recommend them. Their prices are extremely reasonable and the services just keep getting better.[1]
Once you are done with the installation, all sorts of styles are available to alter the default one. For those just a tiny bit more ambitious but without the necessary prior knowledge, it’s possible to pick up the requisite PHP and CSS know-how within an afternoon (okay, based on prior HTML skills and a certain amount of geek determination) to make additional changes to the designs. All-in-all, I’ve been very happy with WordPress having used it for about three months now. And the Dreamhost install option is awesome.[2]
fn1. Full disclosure: if you sign up for their services through the above link, CT will get a referral fee.
fn2. I will be setting up blogs for about thirty students in a month so I welcome any feature that assists the process.
“Eugene Volokh”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_11_28.shtml#1101750671 points us to a new “blog”:http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/misc/index.html (no entries yet), which will be co-written by Gary Becker and Richard Posner. This provides a nice opportunity for casual empiricism in the cause of predictive social science. As perusors of the academic blogroll may notice, there are huge disparities between different disciplines (some of this is surely sampling error, but only some). There are lots and lots of philosophy blogs and law blogs, but many other academic disciplines, including economics, seem surprisingly under-represented in the blogosphere. I suspect that one of the important causal factors is legitimation. Junior academics may be unwilling to get involved in blogging. Not only is it a time-suck, but it may seem faintly disreputable – senior scholars in many fields of the social sciences take a dim view of ‘popularizing.’ However if there is a well known senior scholar in a discipline who blogs, it’s much easier for junior people in that discipline to dip their toes in the water without worrying that it’ll hurt their tenure chances. I suspect that this helps explain the explosion of philosophy blogs – the fact that Brian Leiter (who is responsible for a hugely influential ranking of philosophy programs) blogs lowered the entry costs for other philosophers; so too with law and the Volokhs. If I’m right, we should see an explosion in economics blogs over the next twelve months, now that Brad DeLong and other blogging economists have been joined by Becker, who’s as close to a household name as you can be in the dismal science.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion among academic bloggers about whether blogs count for the purposes of vitas and if so how. The maximalist position (so far not put forward seriously by anyone as far as I know) is that each blog post is a separate publication. The minimal claim is that blogs are a form of community service, like talking to school groups and similar. A good place to start, with plenty of links to earlier contributions, is this post by Eszter.
Rather than engaging directly with the arguments that have been put up so far, I want to claim that the question will ultimately be settled by the way in which blogs are used and referred to. In this context, I have a couple of observations.
First, I’ve had one reader tell me that he’s cited one of my posts in an academic work, and I think this is not unique. Clearly, the more this happens, the more conventions for referring to blog posts will be developed, and the more easily they can be incorporated in vitas and so on.
Second, I had an interesting recent communication from the Senior Secondary Assessment Board of South Australia, which sets school examinations. They used this post in an exam paper for Year 12 politics. They wrote asking for copyright permission to print it in their set of past papers[1].
I realize this topic has been discussed here (e.g here, here, here, here, here, here) and elsewhere (e.g. Brian Leiter, but also in the mainstream media: e.g. The Guardian, Chicago Tribune) numerous times already. I am bringing it up because I have been asked to speak to a campus-wide audience about academia in a digital world and I have picked as my topic: “Can blogs revive academic debate?” I only have about fifteen minutes to talk and I want to touch upon several points. What better way to prepare for such a talk than to try out some of the ideas on a blog? There are two main points I want to address and thought I’d discuss here a bit. I welcome your feedback. First, I want to talk about blogs as a great medium for debate of all sorts that does not always seem possible in one’s immediate physical surroundings. Second, I would like to consider how the material posted and discussed on blogs relates to published material and whether there is any potential for such contributions to count toward one’s academic achievements and service. I elaborate on the second point below. There seems to be some amount of disagreement in the blogosphere on this issue and I wanted to bring it up for some more discussion.
A request aimed at those out there with halfway decent coding skills – somebody, somewhere, should write an MT-Disemvowel plugin for Movable Type. For those not familiar with the concept, disemvowelling, pioneered by “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, is the most effective troll-repellent yet invented. You leave the troll’s comment up, but remove all the vowels from it. It can still be read by anyone who has a bit of patience, but makes the troll look rather ridiculous. So far, on the very few occasions I’ve had to use it, it’s worked absolutely perfectly. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a nuisance – it takes a couple of minutes to remove the vowels manually from the longer harangues. Seems like something that a not-very-complicated .cgi script could accomplish in a flash – anyone out there up to the task?
Update: gratitude and kudos to Novalis, who within eight minutes of the request reheated some previously existing code to create the “Dsmvwllr”:http://novalis.org/cgi/vowel.cgi.