And why you should too.
There is a painful non-convexity in academic research. Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good. Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper. Knowing that most ideas are unlikely to pan out there is an incentive not to experiment on new projects.
Blogging bridges that gap in a way I didn’t expect when I started. Blogging means that half-baked ideas have scrap value: if they are not publishable you can at least write about them on the blog. This means that you are more likely to recoup some of those costs of experimentation and you undertake more projects ex ante.
So, readers, don’t thank me for blogging (not that I thought you had any good reason too.) I thank you for wading through the scraps.
Cheap Talk 
13 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 24, 2010 at 5:21 am
itovertakesme
Glad there is plenty of surplus to go around 🙂
September 24, 2010 at 12:39 pm
woodka
You never know where the good idea will come from….
September 24, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Jake Seliger
There is a painful non-convexity in academic research.
I’m starting my third year of grad school in English lit at the University of Arizona and may write about signaling and status in novels. My interest in the issue arose partially because of Robin Hanson’s relentless focus on signaling in his blog, Overcoming Bias. Others have contributed to that as well, leading me towards books like Codes of the Underworld, which is an obvious way to help interpret novels like those by Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, and other crime / caper writers.
In the meantime, virtually no English professors I know are using these kinds of methods, chiefly, I think, because they’re wrapped up in the standard forms of English criticism and debate. Those forms are very good, of course, but I’d like to in other directions, and one way I’ve learned about alternative directions is through reading blogs. As far as I can tell, no one else has developed a theory of how signaling and status work in fiction, even though you could call novels long prose works in which characters signal their status to other characters, themselves, and the reader.
September 24, 2010 at 2:57 pm
rd
what is the scrap value? (ie what is benefit to you of writing about non-publishable ideas on blog) i’m not questioning the existence of this value, just pointing out that it’s not clear from what you wrote
September 25, 2010 at 11:18 am
jeff
hi.
it’s fun.
it’s a challenge.
it’s good exercise.
ideas multiply over time.
etc.
🙂
September 25, 2010 at 2:19 pm
rd
ah – might not be true for everyone (the ‘fun’ part at least) – which weakens your claim in first sentence of post. and i’m not sure i buy the challenge/exercise part. you claim E(benefit) of experimenting with a new idea is increased by being a blogger because if the idea is a bust then you get the challenge of blogging it? hmm..
sorry, maybe being nitpicky. but perhaps you are not being completely honest in not mentioning the ego-gratification aspect? 🙂 but perhaps there is a good (likely psychological) reason for not mentioning it (assuming it exists, which of course it may not)
September 25, 2010 at 7:26 pm
jeff
Oh. I assumed my ego motives were already common knowledge. And covered in previous “why I blog”s. Like. https://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/why-i-blog-3/
🙂
September 27, 2010 at 1:25 pm
rd
ah – you are of course a (giant) step ahead of me – my apologies
but is this consistent with your more recent post, where you say others ‘should blog too’? if others blog, would that reduce the ego value to you (and them)?
no need to respond, i’ve taken too much of your time already. i like the new sufjan a lot btw, thanks for link
September 24, 2010 at 5:53 pm
Matt Warren
I sincerely hope that you are right. While there’s a lot of concern that blog writing is a bunch of regurgitation and repetition, I find it important to stress that it’s a hybrid of writing and oral culture (even if, superficially, it looks like writing).
In venturing a response to rd, I would think that what Jeff means is that smallish ideas that may have merit can bob to the surface now and then, rather than being merely buried by subsequent edits (if you were focused only on publishing long-form findings/ideas).
Recurring motifs find their way into my own writings. It could be that some of it is garbage, but I will figure that out over time (and with readers’ astute observations). If I fail entirely, then the exercise is still valuable if only in what’s learned after the fact. At least, that’s the hope. 😉
September 27, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Why I should blog more | El-DOPA
[…] https://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/why-i-blog-6/ […]
October 7, 2010 at 12:33 pm
Fall Semester « Red White Waves and Blue
[…] Why I blog: There is a painful non-convexity in academic research. Only really good ideas are worth pursuing but it takes a lot of investment to find out whether any given idea is going to be really good. Usually you spend a lot of time doing some preliminary thinking just to prove to yourself that this idea is not good enough to turn into a full-fledged paper. Knowing that most ideas are unlikely to pan out there is an incentive not to experiment on new projects. […]
February 2, 2011 at 12:15 am
Dew « Cheap Talk
[…] for two years now. When we turned 1 I started writing a sequence of posts on Why I Blog. Here’s a few of them. As a final why-thought I would like to say that while blogging often feels like […]
August 30, 2011 at 7:27 pm
Lones Smith
http://tinyurl.com/cheapblog