Discover more from Overcoming Bias
I continue to have doubts about whether to blog. As I explained in February, my main doubt is whether this will accumulate:
A newspaper or magazine article will be read by thousands, while one is lucky if ten people read an academic paper. So if you want influence, write for the popular media, right? Well, those thousands of newspaper readers will soon forget everything you said, but a few academic readers may well write papers influenced by your paper. People almost never look up ten year old newspaper columns, but they do often read ten year old academic papers. So an academic paper may still have a better chance at long term influence than a newspaper column.
Yes, we get over a thousand readers a day here, and those readers must be influenced somehow. But do those influences add up to a long term net effect?
Consider that before the farming revolution humanity’s knowledge accumulated very slowly. Each person learned a great deal over the course of his lifetime, both by discovering new insights for himself and by listening to others. Nevertheless, the distribution of knowledge in the population hardly changed; each new generation had to rediscover and relearn the same insights all over again.
So the fact that each blogger and reader today feels like he is slowly gaining insight does not mean we are part of a process by which humanity accumulates insight. We could just each be relearning and re-expressing what many of our ancestors knew. Of course parts of academia may also fall victim to the same syndrome. But it seems that at least some parts of academia do manage to accumulate insight via modularity. As I said:
A key difference is that academics organize into a network of specialists with social norms requiring them to cite related previous work, and to situate their publications so that they can be found by others working on similar topics.
The joy of blogging for me is taking just an hour to pen and distribute an apparently powerful insight. But this joy is illusory if my insights never join a process of accumulation where others build on my insights and integrate them effectively into a larger body of thought. If I’m mainly the equivalent of a newspaper columnist, rather than a part of a community of modular thinkers, this is to me a waste.
So, given that these are my goals and concerns, should I quit blogging in favor of more traditional academic publications?
Blogging Doubts
Blogging can be a part of the "process of accumulation" in several ways:
1. Bloggers document history in making which can be invaluable for researchers who later try to make sense of an happening or a period of time.
2. Insights from blogosphere, at least in some areas, coalesce into an accepted body of wisdom fairly quickly. For example, the debate about desirability of DRM. Such debates could influence outcomes.
3. Debates about emotional topics, like existence of God or abortion rights, would likely make people veer to rational viewpoints, as progressively younger population see viewpoints otherwise disapproved by their religion or family.
4. More nuanced understanding of phenomena like terrorism, that affect large populations whose opinions drive the way their governments or other institutions act.
Together with easily accessible and constantly evolving wiki content or social booking marking, it could well be the most powerful process of accumulation ever seen in the history of mankind.
As a reader, you must realize that I am biased towards hoping you continue to blog. That said, here is my response.
1. Do you want credit for your ideas? Academic papers will assure that your influence will be traced back to you. A blog may inspire many people (Some of whom may even write academic papers), and your insights may spread without giving you credit (I think this occured with respect to you and prediction markets already). If you want certain credit from future scholars in your field then you should concentrate more on academic papers. If you want to maximize your long term influence then a blog, though higher risk, is probably the better way to go about things. I say it is higher risk because there is a large track record of academic papers influencing others. Blogs haven't been around, so they don't have the track record. Therefore, even if many ideas have been generated by blogs, there haven't been many major changes which are traced back to an original blog post.
2. As other people said, it shouldn't be "or". You should look into even more ways to influence the future. Books are also read long after they are published. In terms of spreading long term ideas, there are people who read books who don't read blogs or academic papers. If you get the ideas spread widely enough then you are more likely to cause a long term change. You can start writing your blog in a way such that it will be easy for you to incorporate ideas from blog posts into a future book. The blog could also help create enough of a stir around the book such that it would be more likely to be considered important 10 years from now. That said, if you stopped blogging, you have enough friends who do blog that the advertising point isn't too relevant.