Rough Theory

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has a post up about blogging as self-experimentation, in which he notes the following effects of blogging – persumably on himself:

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?

I run afoul of the Continental philosophy effect – and am likely also to be an outlier on issues related to the greater appreciation of the directly empirical – but I still enjoyed the post and the subsequent discussion. My favourite comment thus far is this delightfully cynical observation posted by mk:

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.

Regular readers of this blog will not be much tempted to call me “terse” – although L Magee has suggested that, when I do manage a terse post, I sometimes do so artfully… ;-P But LM’s perception of terseness may have been irrevocably impaired by our recent reading of Hegel… ;-P