What you say applies to most blogs as it currently stands. But there is potential for blogging to develop and function like disaggregated newspapers and journals, where you can follow individual writers, journalists, and even editors who aggregate trusted sources. I'm surprised that we are not further along that road than we already are. Substack seems to be a big step towards that process. But subscription prices for individual writers/feeds will have to be considerably less for someone to stitch together dozens of sources together into a newspaper substitute for the New York Times or the Economist at a comparable price. But I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that.
I also think that book-level information could be blogged. Razib Khan's Substack seems to me to be informative in the way that chapters of a book would be. Can we think of some series of blog posts as books in progress? Can books be put together from a collection of related blog posts?
I self published a book on economics some years ago. My next book will be on personal finance. I've decided to write it out as a series of blog posts on Substack and see how it goes. Maybe information dense materials can benefit from being written chapter by chapter with some reader interaction?
I dislike magazines for reasons very different from those you enumerated.
Firstly, most established authorities - mainstream media included - are slaves to ideological fads. They are absolutely not more trustworthy than independent bloggers, and the things they write are not of higher quality. Fear for their reputations makes them unreliable. They will say what is tired, boring, and expedient rather than risk saying the critically obvious. I really don't care for Parrhesia's blog, but the fact that he so frequently engages with the two of you demonstrates very clearly to me that you and Tove are not the kind of soulless puppets who say what they are supposed to, rather than what they really think.
Secondly, I absolutely adore the conversational, collective approach to learning. Scientific journals provide something along these lines; even though they're affected by the same kind of pressures that bias conventional magazines, I love wandering through google scholar and seeing where one study will be published in response to another. Knowledge slowly emerges from the process. A weblog should be like this - a *log* of someone's thoughts placed onto the *web.* When bloggers genuinely engage with one another and with their commenters, there's a real depth of understanding that develops. You can see it happen, and simply reading along with a good blogger can teach you a great deal.
In an ideal world, I think you are entirely right about the advantages of blogs. Interactivity is a great thing with great potential.
In the real world, I have noticed that reading blogs make me more stupid. Not all blogs and not always. But when I started subscribing to a number of blogs this year, it was a bit like a return to watching television. In my late teens, when it became technically possible, I stopped watching television and started browsing the internet instead and I'm eternally grateful for that opportunity. However, consuming blogs took me back to the information forcefeeding from the bad old days of television a bit. Just like television, blogs forcefeed me information that is mostly less interesting than information I would have looked up myself.
Fundamentally, blogs are better than television, not least because they are text-based instead of audiovisual. Still, I need to develop strategies to be able to use them without being caught in the television trap. And I need to be constantly aware of the forcefeeding effect when I choose what to publish.
I do not read The Economist for its good writing (although it is generally excellent) but for its good journalism. There are surely many excellent writers among the bloggers of today. But writing skills can not really compete with an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky or an on-site report from rural Uganda, both of which are present in this week's edition of The Economist.
Blogs are perfectly fine if you are after opinions or even ideas. But if you are mostly interested in information you are better served by journals with real journalists and real primary sources (or aggregators of primary sources, like Wikipedia).
You could as well ask why we would want to know the opinions of Vladimir Zelensky. The fact is that the future is shaped both by what happens on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine and what happens in the cattle kraals of rural Uganda. If you want to stay ahead of events you have reason to be interested in everything.
I think what you don't understand about my question is that there is a difference between trend and detail. Your focus seems very much to be that of a man who values these details, who values "staying ahead of events." I am guessing that you find this perspective so natural that it seems strange even to be asked, but this is what I am asking: Why do you - why should *we* - value these details?
As someone who quit reading The Economist, I wonder that too. Roughly the same things kept happening in rural Africa, and it became less and less interesting every time it happened. The first time I read about the low quality of schools in rural India it was very interesting. The second time it was tolerable. The third time it was annoying. The trend was obvious already the first time, so that information was more or less enough.
The problem with magazines is that many aspects of the world change rather slowly. If the same group of people are going to report about the state of the world every week, they will soon start to repeat themselves. There will still be entirely new information, but it will be diluted by new reports about the status quo. I think some people tolerate those elements of repetition better than others. Personally I tolerate them rather badly, so I'm doing my best to read more books and less real-time media.
I'm not at all surprised that's your attitude, Tove! I think you and Anders complement one another very well; there's definitely value in his sober, meticulous focus. (Then again you probably already knew I thought that, since my comments to the two of you over the past month largely boil down to me nagging you to be more careful, and him to take more risks.)
Incidentally, Scott Alexander is mentioning another Astral Codex survey. The last round I was able to acquire an excellent dataset from his readers; if you have an idea of a psychological/sociological/economic hypothesis to test with some questions, I strongly recommend it. If you'd like some help with design or analysis, send me an email.
Also chiming in to say I read your articles with interest! But I still generally think of Substack articles as the same kind of thing as magazine articles so it rarely occurs to me that commenting here is not the old experience of screaming into a void
Just wanted to say that I do enjoy reading this blog. I admire how although you both are from Sweden, you two seem to have a good grasp on American society.
Your point about blogs is absolutely correct. I see Substack like an intellectual OnlyFans. Why pay $10 a month for nude photos when endless porn is available for free online? Because of the personal connection. I notice that the most successful blogs are ones where the author interacts often with their subscribers. Parasocial relationships are the norm in our globalized, atomized world.
We actually discussed the prostitution analogy quite a bit, it just didn't fit in very well in written text (I guess there is a reason why Anders writes this kind of text instead of me). Personally I think that part has been the hardest to adjust to since we started blogging. Being a successful, high-paid luxury cam girl is one thing. That is kind of savvy. Trying and failing to sell one's nude pics is much, much worse. However, during the last few weeks I have approached a solution: I am not a cam girl. I am just a nudist.
Thank you for your kind words (although I do not believe myself to have anything but an average understanding of American society for an educated European, I do not know if that means that my or your expectations are amiss). And thank you for the excellent parallel with porn and OnlyFans. Being a married man I am not much into porn but even I have raised an eyebrow or two over people's willingness to pay for content that should be very easy to obtain through Google.
> I do not believe myself to have anything but an average understanding of American society for an educated European
I don't admire your understanding of average educated Europeans. Believe it or not, but most people don't spend their days trying to get a better grasp of society (American or otherwise).
Blogs are an opportunity for people who lack other opportunities. Still, I can easily see how being inside at least some norm would be greatly beneficial. I know I am a freak, but I still struggle to find MY kind of freaks.
I guess the ideal blogger is just moderately freaky: too deviant to fit in to establishment mass media, but normal enough to fit in with, or even lead, an already established subgroup.
The sheer variety of blogs is of course hard to beat. But taking quality into account I often find it difficult to find anything worthwhile to read. Also, one should not underestimate the supply of magazines. Last year I had an app called Readly (go.readly.com), a self-appointed "Spotify for magazines". They give access to over 5000 magazines. Most of it is rubbish but the breadth of subjects is still impressive.
What you say applies to most blogs as it currently stands. But there is potential for blogging to develop and function like disaggregated newspapers and journals, where you can follow individual writers, journalists, and even editors who aggregate trusted sources. I'm surprised that we are not further along that road than we already are. Substack seems to be a big step towards that process. But subscription prices for individual writers/feeds will have to be considerably less for someone to stitch together dozens of sources together into a newspaper substitute for the New York Times or the Economist at a comparable price. But I don't see a fundamental barrier to doing that.
I also think that book-level information could be blogged. Razib Khan's Substack seems to me to be informative in the way that chapters of a book would be. Can we think of some series of blog posts as books in progress? Can books be put together from a collection of related blog posts?
I self published a book on economics some years ago. My next book will be on personal finance. I've decided to write it out as a series of blog posts on Substack and see how it goes. Maybe information dense materials can benefit from being written chapter by chapter with some reader interaction?
I dislike magazines for reasons very different from those you enumerated.
Firstly, most established authorities - mainstream media included - are slaves to ideological fads. They are absolutely not more trustworthy than independent bloggers, and the things they write are not of higher quality. Fear for their reputations makes them unreliable. They will say what is tired, boring, and expedient rather than risk saying the critically obvious. I really don't care for Parrhesia's blog, but the fact that he so frequently engages with the two of you demonstrates very clearly to me that you and Tove are not the kind of soulless puppets who say what they are supposed to, rather than what they really think.
Secondly, I absolutely adore the conversational, collective approach to learning. Scientific journals provide something along these lines; even though they're affected by the same kind of pressures that bias conventional magazines, I love wandering through google scholar and seeing where one study will be published in response to another. Knowledge slowly emerges from the process. A weblog should be like this - a *log* of someone's thoughts placed onto the *web.* When bloggers genuinely engage with one another and with their commenters, there's a real depth of understanding that develops. You can see it happen, and simply reading along with a good blogger can teach you a great deal.
In an ideal world, I think you are entirely right about the advantages of blogs. Interactivity is a great thing with great potential.
In the real world, I have noticed that reading blogs make me more stupid. Not all blogs and not always. But when I started subscribing to a number of blogs this year, it was a bit like a return to watching television. In my late teens, when it became technically possible, I stopped watching television and started browsing the internet instead and I'm eternally grateful for that opportunity. However, consuming blogs took me back to the information forcefeeding from the bad old days of television a bit. Just like television, blogs forcefeed me information that is mostly less interesting than information I would have looked up myself.
Fundamentally, blogs are better than television, not least because they are text-based instead of audiovisual. Still, I need to develop strategies to be able to use them without being caught in the television trap. And I need to be constantly aware of the forcefeeding effect when I choose what to publish.
I do not read The Economist for its good writing (although it is generally excellent) but for its good journalism. There are surely many excellent writers among the bloggers of today. But writing skills can not really compete with an interview with Volodymyr Zelensky or an on-site report from rural Uganda, both of which are present in this week's edition of The Economist.
Blogs are perfectly fine if you are after opinions or even ideas. But if you are mostly interested in information you are better served by journals with real journalists and real primary sources (or aggregators of primary sources, like Wikipedia).
...Why do we want to know what's going on in rural Uganda?
You could as well ask why we would want to know the opinions of Vladimir Zelensky. The fact is that the future is shaped both by what happens on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine and what happens in the cattle kraals of rural Uganda. If you want to stay ahead of events you have reason to be interested in everything.
I think what you don't understand about my question is that there is a difference between trend and detail. Your focus seems very much to be that of a man who values these details, who values "staying ahead of events." I am guessing that you find this perspective so natural that it seems strange even to be asked, but this is what I am asking: Why do you - why should *we* - value these details?
As someone who quit reading The Economist, I wonder that too. Roughly the same things kept happening in rural Africa, and it became less and less interesting every time it happened. The first time I read about the low quality of schools in rural India it was very interesting. The second time it was tolerable. The third time it was annoying. The trend was obvious already the first time, so that information was more or less enough.
The problem with magazines is that many aspects of the world change rather slowly. If the same group of people are going to report about the state of the world every week, they will soon start to repeat themselves. There will still be entirely new information, but it will be diluted by new reports about the status quo. I think some people tolerate those elements of repetition better than others. Personally I tolerate them rather badly, so I'm doing my best to read more books and less real-time media.
I'm not at all surprised that's your attitude, Tove! I think you and Anders complement one another very well; there's definitely value in his sober, meticulous focus. (Then again you probably already knew I thought that, since my comments to the two of you over the past month largely boil down to me nagging you to be more careful, and him to take more risks.)
Incidentally, Scott Alexander is mentioning another Astral Codex survey. The last round I was able to acquire an excellent dataset from his readers; if you have an idea of a psychological/sociological/economic hypothesis to test with some questions, I strongly recommend it. If you'd like some help with design or analysis, send me an email.
Also chiming in to say I read your articles with interest! But I still generally think of Substack articles as the same kind of thing as magazine articles so it rarely occurs to me that commenting here is not the old experience of screaming into a void
I have an unpublished text about why commenting on blog posts is such a good idea. Now I'm feeling a bit encouraged to publish it.
Just wanted to say that I do enjoy reading this blog. I admire how although you both are from Sweden, you two seem to have a good grasp on American society.
Your point about blogs is absolutely correct. I see Substack like an intellectual OnlyFans. Why pay $10 a month for nude photos when endless porn is available for free online? Because of the personal connection. I notice that the most successful blogs are ones where the author interacts often with their subscribers. Parasocial relationships are the norm in our globalized, atomized world.
We actually discussed the prostitution analogy quite a bit, it just didn't fit in very well in written text (I guess there is a reason why Anders writes this kind of text instead of me). Personally I think that part has been the hardest to adjust to since we started blogging. Being a successful, high-paid luxury cam girl is one thing. That is kind of savvy. Trying and failing to sell one's nude pics is much, much worse. However, during the last few weeks I have approached a solution: I am not a cam girl. I am just a nudist.
Thank you for your kind words (although I do not believe myself to have anything but an average understanding of American society for an educated European, I do not know if that means that my or your expectations are amiss). And thank you for the excellent parallel with porn and OnlyFans. Being a married man I am not much into porn but even I have raised an eyebrow or two over people's willingness to pay for content that should be very easy to obtain through Google.
> I do not believe myself to have anything but an average understanding of American society for an educated European
I don't admire your understanding of average educated Europeans. Believe it or not, but most people don't spend their days trying to get a better grasp of society (American or otherwise).
Good luck becoming the most successful of the unsuccessful! 😁.
Blogs are good for people who are way outside the norm in various ways.
Thank you!
Blogs are an opportunity for people who lack other opportunities. Still, I can easily see how being inside at least some norm would be greatly beneficial. I know I am a freak, but I still struggle to find MY kind of freaks.
I guess the ideal blogger is just moderately freaky: too deviant to fit in to establishment mass media, but normal enough to fit in with, or even lead, an already established subgroup.
The sheer variety of blogs is of course hard to beat. But taking quality into account I often find it difficult to find anything worthwhile to read. Also, one should not underestimate the supply of magazines. Last year I had an app called Readly (go.readly.com), a self-appointed "Spotify for magazines". They give access to over 5000 magazines. Most of it is rubbish but the breadth of subjects is still impressive.