JonahSinick comments on The Paucity of Elites Online - Less Wrong

26 Post author: JonahSinick 31 May 2013 01:35AM

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Comment author: gwern 31 May 2013 03:27:06AM *  20 points [-]

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?

Comment author: JonahSinick 31 May 2013 04:08:51AM 4 points [-]

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.

Comment author: gwern 31 May 2013 06:41:51PM 2 points [-]

I still think that many people could do more at the margin without great cost to themselves.

Why do you privilege your view over theirs? They know how much technical writing costs them.

Comment author: JonahSinick 31 May 2013 06:59:17PM 2 points [-]
  1. I'd recur to my remarks about inertia and adverse selection.
  2. Cost needs to be thought of as relative to benefits, and the public externality benefits may not be salient to them.
Comment author: gwern 13 August 2013 03:25:42PM *  1 point [-]

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.

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