fling93 loves fishies

A Culture That Rewards Inaccuracy

I know it’s been slow lately. A big reason is that I am very loathe to post anything until I’ve researched it well enough to know there aren’t any obvious weaknesses or holes in my argument and that I’m covering all the bases (and this post is no exception). This means it takes a long time for me to organize and write a post, so I always end up with several partially-completed blog posts stacked up.

This has a double-whammy effect on my traffic because: 1) my posts are much less frequent (if you want a lot of blog traffic, posting at least daily is a huge plus), and 2) a completely argued post is less likely to provoke responses in the form of comments and links from other bloggers.

This point is expanded by Matthew Yglesias (via Brad DeLong):

…the tragedy is that we have a systemic bias in our media culture that rewards people who make over-the-top and/or inaccurate attacks on their political opponents. To take myself as an example, early on during my Prospect career I came across a Rich Lowry article on NRO…. I responded with a Tapped post…. Normally, things would have just ended there. Fortunately for me, however, the post contained a factual error that, while not crucial to the argument, was a really clear case of error.

As a result, Lowry had a good hook to write a column in response to my post, noting the error and suggesting that the argument as a whole was every bit as slipshod as the one assertion. I then wrote a counter-response column, apologizing for the error, noting some problems with Lowry’s argument, and making the (entirely correct) case that my point stood on the merits despite my mistake. The result was many readers for things I’d done and, in general, a raising of my profile.
…
By contrast, I’ve written many, many, measured and (in my humble opinion) totally unimpeachable attacks on various folks out there that have simply died on the vine. The trouble is that when you write something really good, in the sense of being sober, on-point, factual, and tightly argued, your targets would do well to simply ignore you. And so they do.

And for a recent example of that, note Eugene Volokh’s post on why he’s not going to blog on the torture memo. I’m sure many conservative bloggers are downplaying it or ignoring the issue altogether, so he deserves credit for at least admitting he’s ignoring it while attempting to defend the decision. Of course, Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber calls bullshit on Volokh’s professed reasons. Of course, Volokh completely ignores it (and I don’t know that Healy is really lower on the food chain). Probably shouldn’t be surprising, since Volokh already said he was planning to ignore the issue, not to mention that The Volokh Conspiracy doesn’t have comments or trackback pings turned on.

Now I don’t know that I’d attribute this effect to our media culture. I think it has more to do with human nature. After all, nothing draws attention like conflict, and nobody ever likes to admit they’re wrong (and I think this is true of almost all cultures, not just our own). You hardly ever see a discussion end where one party concedes the point. Typically, the closest thing you’ll see are both parties “agreeing to disagree,” but it’s just a way for both parties to gracefully extract themselves from a conversation without really conceding anything (kinda like settling out of court).

If someone you disagree with makes a point that is hard to refute, your tendency is probably to just drop it. In real life conversations, you’d change the subject or leave, whereas on the Internet, you just don’t respond, as if you’re pretending you never saw the message. Of course, at this point, no matter how compelling that point was, you’ve probably vested so much in your original point of view that there’s no way you’ll ever admit you might have been wrong, even to yourself (I’ve previously discussed the importance of fighting the human tendency to filter out useful information).

Enhancing your reputation

And of course, a similar line of thinking usually applies to the decision on whether to initially engage someone with whom you disagree. After all, people generally don’t enter into arguments unless they think they can win, or at least, acquit themselves well enough to enhance their reputations.

As Brad DeLong pointed out, the self-serving aspect of this was brought up several years ago by Virginia Postrel:

This is the way the professional media world is. You become prominent, first and foremost, by knowing the right people and then, secondarily, by attacking or crediting people more prominent than yourself. (They stay prominent by not responding to you by name, a tactic well-honed by neocon intellectuals who almost never identify, much less quote, the objects of their criticism. Exhibit A: Francis Fukuyama.) If you must mention someone less prominent than you are, make sure it is someone much less well known, so you can be recognized for your wide reading or noblesse oblige.

In short: Promote your friends. Mention your (more famous) mentors. But don’t be a fool. There is no career-enhancing reason ever to cite someone who might prove a competitor, make a cogent argument against you, or get credit for an idea you could have claimed.

So, as DeLong notes, Matthew’s observation indicates that you can take advantage of this and help yourself move up the food-chain if you “bait those higher on the food chain than you into counterattacking by committing a clear (but minor) solecism in your original up-the-food-chain attack. That way those higher up can be lured into thinking that a quick counterattack will be easy and reputation-preserving — but they will, of course, be wrong!”

Indeed, I’ve noticed that I myself am much more likely to link to another post if I disagree with it and have a compelling response. I will occasionally link to something I agree with where I have little or nothing to add, but hardly ever link to something I disagree with but don’t (yet) have a response to.

So I don’t doubt that this tactic would probably be quite effective. And it’s not a new idea to me, as my wife has often pointed out that I’d probably get a lot more comments and links if I at least left more of an opening in my posts instead of arguing my points so completely. And I know she’s right, but I’ve never been able to willfully do this. Perhaps this is just a rationalization, but I like to think that I’m not in this for the traffic, and that it’s not likely that I could ever paid for this (and even if I could, probably not nearly enough to consider a career change — besides, I’d probably be able to provide more objectivity if I eschew ads and not ever get paid for my writing).

Blog as organizer

But another reason/rationalization is that a big reason I decided to blog was to record and organize all my thoughts and ideas and to nail down the reasons for my beliefs so I can separate conclusions from assumptions. This can be surprisingly hard to do in your head, because it’s too easy to forget how you first came to believe something. Anyone who’s seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Memento knows that human memories are very unreliable and impermanent. Indeed, Delong has another post revealing that he sometimes blogs something just so that he could easily find it later (leveraging Google), which I thought was a fascinating idea.

Although most people think of a web page or blog primarily as a way of communicating with others, the structure of linking documents together and organizing them by category and date makes it a pretty useful tool to use for the above purposes. A blog is far from an ideal way to do this, as it takes quite a bit of time and effort to create and modify entries, but it’s the best I’ve found so far.1 And it’s a plus that the blog is on a server that is regularly backed up and is accessible from any machine with Internet access. That it doubles as a body of work that others can read and (hopefully) benefit from is a nice bonus. But the real value is that others all over the world can link to it (not that anyone actually does, but at least the possibility is there).

Blog as global brain (mmmmm, brains!)

To extend this even further, note that Nova Spivack has a very interesting and thought-provoking essay about how the Internet is evolving to help the human race become a global mind, where each blogger acts like a brain cell and blog pages act like memories (it might be helpful to first read his post explaining the Metaweb term). Personally, I’ve long thought that the real power and potential of the Internet is as a medium to record and exchange ideas to help further the knowledge of the human race. And I also think blogging is a huge step forward in that direction.

The limitation of most other forms of media is that they typically present a limited point of view. People reading a book or an academic journal can’t readily access its criticisms without having to look them up themselves (often involving a good deal of legwork). The effect is even more pronounced with television or radio shows, which encourage much more passive behavior from their audiences. Although some content producers strive to overcome this limitation by providing balance and surveying several different viewpoints, most have their own agendas to promote.

The importance of trackback pings

On the Internet, where content can be dynamic, the potential is for readers of a webpage to immediately see alternate viewpoints. This would leverage the true power of the Internet — connections. Of course, the main problem with the current Internet is that connections are one-way. A link takes you somewhere else, but that somewhere else typically can’t take you back where you started from because it doesn’t know that it’s being linked. This forces browsers to remember history and have “Back” buttons, and also means readers of the page have no way of knowing which other pages have linked to it. This one-way property is also the source of linkrot (when pages move or disappear, but the links to them don’t update and become broken).

Plenty of people are working to figure out how to upgrade the Internet to address this, but in the meantime, blogs with inline comments and trackback pings2 are a partial workaround (they don’t address the linkrot issue). The problem is that bloggers high on the food chain have little incentive to allow readers to see dissenting viewpoints, and either delete comments/trackbacks that are hard to refute, or have trackbacks or comments turned off completely. This allows them to more easily ignore attacks from lower in the food chain to help maintain their reputation while shielding readers from material that might dissuade them from the opinions that the bloggers are trying to promote. Disingenuous, yes, but also human nature.

This needs to change if we want to raise the level of debate in the blogosphere and allow the Internet to realize its potential as a better vehicle for exploring thoughts and ideas. Ignoring should cease to be a rewarding tactic. I don’t yet have any obvious answers on to how to do this, as we need to balance this need with allowing bloggers to control comment spam. Part of the issue might simply be technical, as some bloggers without comments or trackbacks might simply not know how to enable them or are displeased with how they currently work.3 But there are some technically savvy bloggers for whom this is not an excuse. So there may be no easy answers, but maybe I’ll explore some possible ideas in a future post.

But hopefully, I assume academics and intellectuals already discourage the practice of ignoring arguments4 and presumably bestow the appropriate status to those who actually care more about adding to the knowledge of humanity than about polemicizing a particular point of view or enhancing their own reputations. For now, I can only hope the blogging community will eventually do the same.

¹ Brad DeLong has yet another post linking to a Macintouch page discussing information organizing Mac applications that might be easier to use than a blog, but I haven’t tried any of them yet — and my iBook is not my primary machine anyway (and I am a bit uncomfortable with the idea of having such an important database on a laptop). Plus I obviously suffer from delusions of grandeur in believing others might find my thoughts useful. Return

² Comments are when readers can quickly post messages on a blog post, just like on a message board. Trackback pings are when one blog post links to another and sends a “trackback ping” to that post whose blog now knows it’s being linked to and can display the linker’s site. Inline means the comments appear on the same page as the post, and not in a popup window. Most blogs use popup windows because they employ static pages, and inline comments/trackbacks would require a rebuilding of the page for every comment/ping. Dynamically generated pages (like PHP) can handle inline comments automatically at the price of higher server load. Return

³ The current implementation of comments and trackbacks are extremely crude by current message board standards. No doubt, blogging software will eventually improve performance, support comment threads better, allow easier management and moderation, support automatic updating of trackbacks, and perhaps add even some sort of Slashdot style rating system to have better comments/trackbacks float to the top. And maybe more blogging services will support comments/trackbacks straight out of the box. Return

⁴ My suspicion was that peer pressure would be enough because the target audience of academics consists of their peers, which is a relatively small community, especially compared to the target audience of most blogs and web pages. Not to mention an audience that is, presumably, much harder to manipulate. I am not in academia, so have no idea if this is true or not. But my wife tells me it seems to her that the tendency to ignore inconvenient arguments is actually even more prevalent in academia, which is disappointing and depressing. Return