Blogging technical material at a level where it won’t embarrass you can be a pretty demand and time-consuming task (especially if you want to provide any sort of graphs or visual accompaniment, and equations aren’t hugely better either since you’re not writing PDFs).
What makes you think that blogging wouldn’t crowd out high-level contributions, and that the elites are not elite in part because they don’t blog?
Blogging technical material at a level where it won’t embarrass you can be a pretty demand and time-consuming task (especially if you want to provide any sort of graphs or visual accompaniment, and equations aren’t hugely better either since you’re not writing PDFs).
I still think that many people could do more at the margin without great cost to themselves.
What makes you think that blogging wouldn’t crowd out high-level contributions, and that the elites are not elite in part because they don’t blog?
I agree about there being opportunity cost, but I think that at the margin there should be more of an effort to put things in the public domain.
Cost needs to be thought of as relative to benefits, and the public externality benefits may not be salient to them.
No, it doesn’t need to be thought of that way when you are asking why private agents do not engage in privately-costly public-goods. Who is paying or otherwise rewarding these cognitive elites into taking the substantial time and effort to write up their thoughts and engage with the many low-quality commenters etc? Has anyone ever gotten tenure for a blog post, or any number of blog posts?
That would be nice, but the software to do steps two and three doesn’t exist yet. Modern spellcheckers more or less fail at parsing math without serious mucking about.
Writing good popular essays on technical material still takes many hours of thought and work. These kinds of steps could be somewhat helpful for people who were very technically illiterate or who wanted to use a lot of pictures or equations, but even then they’re still a long way from fixing the problem.
The costs of blogging this way would not be reduced to zero, but still could be reduced significantly, and that could make a difference between blogging and not blogging to some poeple.
Don’t underestimate the inconvenience of setting up and maintaining a website. Especially if someone is not in a web programming business. For many people just setting up an open-source blog software is too much of an obstacle.
There could be people for whom hours of thought and writing of the article are fun, but all the remaining web-related work is an obstacle.
I disagree in the general case, though I grant that it could possibly be true for extremely computer-illiterate people. Creating a Blogspot account and using it is already much less work than setting up a custom blog.
Creating a Blogspot account and using it is already much less work than setting up a custom blog.
It is not just how much time you spend creating the account.
First, there are decisions involved (what service to use, what design to use, whether customize the design, how to call the blog,...), which would all be removed by someone telling you “send me the document, I will publish it; see, other people are using this service too”.
Second, by creating a blog you kind of precommit to moderate spam and trolls in your comments. Unless you want to have one of those blogs where the first 10% of the page is the article and the remaining 90% is spam. But even if the discussion is reasonable, you kind of precommit to read it and to respond.
Blogging technical material at a level where it won’t embarrass you can be a pretty demand and time-consuming task (especially if you want to provide any sort of graphs or visual accompaniment, and equations aren’t hugely better either since you’re not writing PDFs).
What makes you think that blogging wouldn’t crowd out high-level contributions, and that the elites are not elite in part because they don’t blog?
I still think that many people could do more at the margin without great cost to themselves.
I agree about there being opportunity cost, but I think that at the margin there should be more of an effort to put things in the public domain.
Why do you privilege your view over theirs? They know how much technical writing costs them.
I’d recur to my remarks about inertia and adverse selection.
Cost needs to be thought of as relative to benefits, and the public externality benefits may not be salient to them.
No, it doesn’t need to be thought of that way when you are asking why private agents do not engage in privately-costly public-goods. Who is paying or otherwise rewarding these cognitive elites into taking the substantial time and effort to write up their thoughts and engage with the many low-quality commenters etc? Has anyone ever gotten tenure for a blog post, or any number of blog posts?
Incentives matter.
This could be fixed by someone providing infrastucture to blogging experts. A service that would do the following:
receive the article in whichever form (word, latex, e-mail, paper)
convert it to HTML
check spelling
publish the article online
moderate the forum
send relevant feedback (individually, or daily digests) by e-mail to author
publish the author’s response
This way the burden to authors could be kept at minumum. And it could be done by a few volunteers.
So, basically—a journal.
That would be nice, but the software to do steps two and three doesn’t exist yet. Modern spellcheckers more or less fail at parsing math without serious mucking about.
aspell handles tex just fine.
No, it doesn’t. Specifically, it fails on words that have accents.
Rather, I meant that it works fine with math mode.
It doesn’t yet understand tex accents, but if you set the encoding using the tex package, you can directly enter è, é, ê, …
Writing good popular essays on technical material still takes many hours of thought and work. These kinds of steps could be somewhat helpful for people who were very technically illiterate or who wanted to use a lot of pictures or equations, but even then they’re still a long way from fixing the problem.
The costs of blogging this way would not be reduced to zero, but still could be reduced significantly, and that could make a difference between blogging and not blogging to some poeple.
Don’t underestimate the inconvenience of setting up and maintaining a website. Especially if someone is not in a web programming business. For many people just setting up an open-source blog software is too much of an obstacle.
There could be people for whom hours of thought and writing of the article are fun, but all the remaining web-related work is an obstacle.
I disagree in the general case, though I grant that it could possibly be true for extremely computer-illiterate people. Creating a Blogspot account and using it is already much less work than setting up a custom blog.
It is not just how much time you spend creating the account.
First, there are decisions involved (what service to use, what design to use, whether customize the design, how to call the blog,...), which would all be removed by someone telling you “send me the document, I will publish it; see, other people are using this service too”.
Second, by creating a blog you kind of precommit to moderate spam and trolls in your comments. Unless you want to have one of those blogs where the first 10% of the page is the article and the remaining 90% is spam. But even if the discussion is reasonable, you kind of precommit to read it and to respond.