Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

Hurricane Isabelle has introduced itself with a drizzle of rain and wind. I've so far staved off the desire to put So Central Rain on repeat. In grade school, fourth I think, we learned that hurricanes are no longer named exclusively after women, because feminists were bothered by the characterization as tempestuous and destructive. The girls in the class were all unanimous that they liked the idea of girl hurricanes, because they're strong and assertive. [They alternate boy and girl names now, in case ya didn't know, and annually alternate between two lists, one with boy name first and one with girl name first.]

I hope I'm keeping the proper blog tone here... From Nerve.com's list of fifty most unsexy things: ``9. Livejournal. How I'm feeling: bored. Song stuck in my head: "Raspberry Beret." Air of mystery that once surrounded me: gone.''

I was really into Carl Steadman, a sort of internet pioneer and the guy who runs Plastic. I really felt for him after reading his autobiography in this Wired article, and could relate to the leitmotiv `Carl is tired.' Kid A in Alphabetland is everything a work of art should be. [I've found conflicting sources on whether Radiohead stole the title from Carl or not.] But then I read his blog, which is exceptionally histrionic. Air of mystery surrounding Carl: gone.

Tom the dancing bug, 6 Sept 2003

Our motivations for blogging are twofold. First, there's the pleasant ego boost of having random 14-yr olds who found you on Google write to you to tell you that they read what you wrote and now they like you. Also, I have a chance to shill books and try to leech a bit more of an Amazon commission out of people. Got a book/DVD/toy you want? I'll give you a dollar if you write me with the item name and then buy it from my link.

Re: comments. The blog form mandates that there be a mechanism by which readers can contact the author. Well, dear reader, I'm not gonna invest time in putting together Php forms and such for comments until I feel this is useful; instead you just have the cute little animated gif to the left. If you write interesting things about the content here, I'll post your comments (whether you like it or not).

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Television is a medium whereby data is sent from a few central points to a multitude of receiving machines. The reader may judge for him/her/itself, but people on the receiving side are often characterized as passive, mindless consumers.

The internet is a set of computers which use a standardized communication method to exchange data. Any computer on the network can address every other computer, and serve or receive data with its peers. There are some standards as to how that data gets shunted around, but the flow of data is basically arbitrary.

Now, the reader's experience with the internet is probably more like the definition of television than the definition of internet. You go to a website like nytimes.com or salon.com or hornywetmidgets.com and information is beamed in to your house, and you consume that information. Oh, you can use the Net like the mail to send one-to-one emails, and many web sites do have interactive details such as the `add to cart' button, but the flow of information is basically one way.

There are many forces out there trying to keep it as much like TV as possible. The majority of digital-protection schemes which protect the members of the RIAA and the MPAA will have the side-effect of making the Net more like TV. For example, the peer-to-peer networks that we read about in the news every day exactly fit the internet definition above. A site such as itunes.com, where you can download music that they put out for you, is a closer fit to the above definition of television.

But I digress. In Internetland, everybody can be a content provider to everybody else. Those who think this is how it should be can all have a blog.

Within the grand scheme of human history, this is new.

Nice, democratic people that we are, we like to think that everybody should have a voice, all the time. But that one isn't entirely obvious. It's like libertarianism: hoardes of free marketeers insist that the world would be a better place with zero regulation, but such a state has never, ever existed. [As a reply, a few thousand libertarians are trying to make one.] Equal access to public media has also never existed.

And the truth is, that if you give everybody a chance to talk, most of them will, indeed, talk about the completely banal, idiotic, or vaguely offensive. [I'd give examples, but how to cull it down?] So you get people who complain about the bloggers, saying that the Net is filled with blog noise from self-appointed experts such as this arse.

But people are really good at filtering dumb content. Yeah, they still think Fox News is Fair and Balanced (tm), but I expect that even that facade has been cracked, as they keep suing other content providers who parody them, such as Fox Broadcasting. [Ex post note: this lawsuit was just a joke by Matt Groening. But I'm leaving the darn links.] Or to give an example on the other end of the production spectrum, most people, when happening upon a Chick publication lying around, will successfully gather the clues and work out that this is the work of a crackpot.

Despite the innovative features, online readily follows traditional media this way. I have full faith in the abilities of those who stumble upon this to realize that even though I'm a world authority on the application of Bayesian updating to models of simultaneous conviviality, that doesn't give me the slightest license to blather endlessly on why Jack Snow is annoying.

More meta: With that in mind, I've submitted the site to Google, which I count as the blog going live, as complete strangers will now stumble upon this work and be forced to work out whether it's worth reading or not. We'll see where it goes. [By its own purchases, Google seems OK with blogs, by the way.]

I have to admit that most of what I look for in web sites myself is the TV-like sort of thing, wherein I watch words come up and look at them while I'm eating. Y'know, sentences that you don't have to read all the way through because you have something to click on in the middle of each of them. I guess that's what I'm providing, and that's OK.

Despite my lack of authority, you're hopefully finding some entertainment value in these pontifications. One reader suggested that I shoot for something more personal and less beat-you-about-the-head-and-neck witty, but it's sorta hard to put personal content here. A simple `I still think about `Lissa Tom a lot' would probably deeply disturb some subset of the world's population. I certainly don't want to end up like these characters.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of this document, the reader will note that I'm only updating on even-numbered days, thus saving the reader the endless torment of hitting over and over again on at least the odd-numbered days. See, I really do care.

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This is actually the third time I've tried writing this `why I write didactic essays' essay. I think I'm afraid of inspecting my actual motivations too closely. On the one hand, a didactic essay places the author above the reader, in a `look what I know and you don't' kind of way. On the other hand, if the essay is effective, the author and reader are on an even footing at the end of the essay, since both now have equal ownership of the content. A hard call there.

Being useful has always been a concern of mine. The world has put a whole heap of effort and NSF funds in to me, and I don't really feel that I ever really repaid it, in an amorphous, collective sense. By the usual measure of being useful, i.e., getting paid, I'm a good negative $960/month right now.

I've sent a book proposal to (name of publisher). They should get back to me this week, maybe. I'm gonna be heartbroken if it's not accepted.

Anyway, when people go to a movie, I always ask them to take notes and act it out for me when they get back. This is not a dumb joke: I would be f.ing delighted if anybody did this. E.g., Miss JAM of Alexandria, VA gave me a detailed play-by-play of the musical `Wicked', including brief musical figures, and I was delighted. Not only did I get the content of the story, which I wouldn't have had the attention span to sit through, I also got to enjoy the affective fun of having a pal tell the story instead of watching attractive strangers from New York acting the thing out. Similarly with seminars: I'd always try to get the executive summary from pals who'd gone, and would always volunteer to give the executive summary for those seminars I'd attended.

In other regards, this has always been sort of my ideal manner of transferring information: struggling with primary sources or textbooks, and then telling pals all about it. It's efficient and fun, when everybody is willing to play along; it also either appeases my desperate desire not to be beneath others (like my professors) or my desperate desire for an egalitarian society (among my peers).

Conversely, my brain is filled with heaps upon heaps of useless information, and something about explaining it to a pal makes it feel less useless when they agree that it's interesting and useful. For those few moments when we sit in mutual admiration of a fact about the world, my life of collecting dumb information doesn't feel like a complete waste.

I attempted to explain one of my favorite facts, the Central Limit Theorem, to Miss STA of Prague, Czech Republic, and she was actively not interested. I almost cried.

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public This guy makes a brilliant point about magazine articles: "I had begun to notice that people refer to a magazine article by mentioning the magazine, not the author, but with a book they typically don't remember the publisher, but only the author[...]." In this context (but another post) the guy explains why RSS saves us: it lets us pick authors that we like and design a nameless, virtual newspaper/magazine which is entirely by the people we are most interested in. Our virtual magazine can even have lots of comics (see the links page) and Dave Barry. It gives me that 90's optimism that yes, the Web really can revolutionize publishing and information dissemination.

Remember the `zine revolution, where a collection of a few people printed stuff up and made their pals read it and also left it at the bookstore hoping that a few strangers would also read a few pages? There's blogging with RSS for ya.

private So I myself have now been using an RSS reader for a little over a week. The results? My apartment is much cleaner, and I have no dishes lingering in the sink. I think I'm like a lot of people in that I guide my life based on the item on my `to do' list that is the least onerous at the moment. This had meant hitting <F5> on Paul's blog and seeing if he's said anything in the last five minutes, but now that's entirely obsolete, since the RSS reader does that automatically. As much as I love chycks in eyeliner, even that site from a few days ago has become onerous.

In fact, generally, looking for new content is among the most onerous things I can think of. As much as I may give the impression otherwise, I hate clicking on things and hoping they'll turn up something good; I really do think 90% of the content online is crap; and buying stuff online is so painful at this point that I'd rather go without than suffer the requisite half an hour of aimless clicking that goes into buying anything with plastic or silicon parts.

And so, having barred the joy of <F5>-ing the sites I really do like, I'm down to sweeping my floor and doing dishes. I guess it's sort of a geek thing to do, to automate and make efficient your downtime (here's a great example).

Oh, and I also read the NYT and the Economist more, since they now push themselves to me rather than requiring that I click on a link. I am thus notified within half an hour any time a U.S. serviceman dies in Iraq.

virtual I bought a big pile of records the other day. I'm increasingly feeling what the luddites of old said about CDs: they're just not fun compared to records. There's no tactile joy, nothing to do with your hands or your eyes. The little CD booklet really doesn't compare to the big square sleeve that hipsters have lately taken to framing and hanging on the wall. There's no ritual to putting a CD in the little motorized tray. As previously noted, if you have to get up every twenty minutes to flip the darn record, you're more likely to listen compared to just putting on a playlist in the background.

To go even further, walking through Chinatown in Manhattan a month or two ago, I happened upon a pile of 78 RPM records, from circa 1915-1925. They do indeed put the records of the 80s to shame: these things don't wobble or bend, and they weigh something substantial. They feel good to hold. These 78s are vaguely Jewish in nature, like Cohen calls his tailor on the 'Phone (comedy monologue, it says) and the Yiddisher klezmer orchestra. I wish I coud hear them.

I was raised more on CDs, though, so the step from CDs to MP3s on a hard drive was a trivial one, since pushing little plastic buttons and clicking on the picture of a button are about the same experience. Now I've got an efficient, streamlined system for playing music that involves absolutely no tactile involvement at all. Perhaps this is why I'm so into good computer keyboards---but compare the keys on your keyboard with the keys on a piano (not to be confused with a MIDI keyboard). In the end, convenience and cheapness will always win out over tactile fun. That's why CDs made records basically disappear, and why MP3s threaten to make the entire concept of music purchased with a tangible physical medium obsolote.

For me, this brings up two questions: first, how far will the virtualization of things go? Will all our media be on screens and speakers; our cars, tools, and other assorted things with buttons replaced with little touch-screens and voice commands; the soft parts replaced by pictures of soft parts; and once-heavy things like glass jars, wood furniture, and telephones replaced with cheap, light, and fully functional plastic counterparts? What'll be left? Which brings us to the central question:

The visitors from the future are always drawn as having gigantic heads and tiny hands. I wonder if the future really is in not touching things. I guess it can go one of two ways. We may not care at all, since our heads are getting bigger, or we may start to care much more about the things that are basically impossible to replace with non-tactile substitutes: clothing, food, people.

Which is how my RSS feed has made my life better: by streamlining the way I waste time online, I'm forced to read physical books, put my hands under running water, play records, and live more in the tactile world.

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So back in April, I'd written about the joy and delight of the RSS feed. The summary: whereas the web had once been an endless pit of time-consumingness, RSS made it manageable and easy. Whereas I'd spend all day in glassy-eyed clicking before, I could now spend a little under an hour reading everything I could possibly read, and could then move on to do things involving the real world.

Oh, how times have changed. I now have so many RSS feeds that it is a truly Sissyphean task to read them all. Whereas before I could have a set, fixed endpoint (`stop when I've read all the feed updates'), this is now impossible. Meerkat, O'Reilly's wire service, will feed me a thousand links a day. Seriously reading two percent of that is already an hour. And I haven't even gotten to the newspaper yet: the New York Times will feed me a hundred articles a day, of which I'll want to read a whole lot more than two percent.

In other news, I've entirely stopped reading anything that doesn't have an RSS feed. I paid some guy to write up an RSS feed for Toothpaste for Dinner because it's funny in a severly embittered kind of way, but with no RSS feed pushing it upon me, I never looked at it. So I'm more lazy, but not actually saving more time.

The other thing that amazes me about all of these RSS feeds is the immense repetition. First, there's direct copying: Meerkat aggregates other RSS feeds, without editing, and puts them out for you in one feed instead of several. [And so, given that feed readers are now a dime a download, I'm not sure what its point is anymore.] And of course, other blogs frequently have entries among the original content in the way of `so over at this blog, they say...' without really adding much of anything.

But beyond that is the original generation of the same idea that ten other people also originally came up with. As some of you may know, I'm writing a book on software patents, so many of my feeds are about intellectual property, and frankly, the news is almost exactly the same on all ten of `em. Even the stories themselves tend to repeat; I've simply stopped reading DMCA cases, they're all so alike (as is the outrage they inspire again). This form of repetition feels even sillier than the blatant copying above---at least there was no effort expended in copying. Here, there are extensive write-ups which boil down to the same facts and the same emotions; if these guys all teamed up, they'd have one feed with the same content and a tenth of the effort.

In my own head, this turns into a constant pressure to not repeat myself or others. The `others' part is frankly kind of easy: since all ten of our IP authors look at IP in the same way, I really only have to distinguish myself from one mindset. The `self' part is getting harder and harder. This is my 75th blog entry, and I simply don't have 75 actual real live ideas. This blog has been up for almost a year, but others have been up for the better part of a decade---how do they do it? It constantly worries me, and is the reason I've been posting less lately: when am I going to hit that age when everything I say is just repetition, and have I already hit it?

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OK, so the content management system keeps track, and this is the hundredth entry.

What I'd had here: I had written up an appropriately self-absorbed analysis of the situation to date: me, the audience, our interaction. I'd posted the winners among this month's oddest search terms:
persuasive essay about gallstone
i hate my students
young teen girls liking another girls boobies
crusades pictoral
gays are rapping by pictures
optimal griping position
[That was the end of November. This month: ecuadorian dwarves.]

I'd talked about the effect that writing on a regular basis has had on my thought process and my writing ability. The big winner among ways my writing has improved by writing sort-of-essays on a sort-of-regular basis is that I cut more. I used to think that every frigging thing I'd written was golden. I mean, I'd put effort into constructing the sentence just right, and now it's so delightfully clever---the reader would be so much worse off if such beauty weren't brought to light.

So yeah, I cut more. There are paragraphs and sections in the dustbin, and even entire half-entries which just never went anywhere, or never said anything that others haven't already said better, or that just didn't feel good---like the entry that used to be here before I deleted it all.

Small scale: The medium one writes with needs a method of turing an undesirable paragraph into an invisible comment. It is much easier to say `oh, I'll just set aside this paragraph for now' than `I'll just irrevocably delete what I'd jut written'. That is, if my writing tool allows commenting, my output will be of higher quality.

[The tech details: Word and OpenOffice users: don't send out DOC or SXW files. If you save as a PDF, then your bitchy asides and bad writing are safe. [How to save a DOC as a PDF: download OpenOffice.org, open your Word document with it, click file|export.] HTML is half-OK, since people never read the comments unless they're really bored. If that describes you, then let me confess that I myself have some nontrivial comments in many entries. TeX users, put \long\def\comment#1{} somewhere, and then \comment{stuff} will work (but be careful about spacing).]

Large scale: I've been posting less frequently lately, partly because I have so many things I've already said, but partly because my quality control is higher. It gets back to the root question of what a blog is supposed to be, exactly. Unlike (daily or weekly) TV or (weekly or monthly) magazines or any other medium that I can think of, the blog does not need to be updated regularly.

I'm reasonably confident that in the near future, I will be able to produce interesting content; however, I have absolutely no faith that in any given seven-day period I will produce anything of interest at all. And this is where RSS saves me: I don't have to make sure that I have something every day or week to keep you interested, `cause when I have something, the RSS feed will tell you. And so, RSS makes me a better writer.

[Tech: So if you don't have an RSS reader, get thee to Bloglines and set yourself up. There are probably at least a half dozen other irregularly-updated sites which you read, so a centralized site-checker will pay off quickly.]

The moral is that although our modern technological world has given us the ability to cheaply produce reams of cheap content, in a few ways it's also given us the ability to filter and throw away content. On balance, I think I'm a better writer for it.

My faves Since this is the navel-gazing entry, I wanted to give those of you who weren't here from day one a brief list of favorites from the archive, since I've written well over a novel's worth of text and you're probably not going to read it all. So here are the entries that score high in importance, utility, or reader popularity. Rereading, I think a few sentences could be cut from all of them.

10/14/2004: Does Economics make people evil?
09/16/2004: Cohen calls his tailor on the `phone
09/09/2004: Neoclassicism watch
08/10/2004: Comparative advantage and capital
07/08/2004: Debate suggestions
06/02/2004: Yet another entry about drug access restrictions.
05/18/2004: Accounting for humans
05/12/2004: Measuring attractiveness
04/06/2004: Instrumental music measures
03/30/2004: Floating in midair
01/14/2004: The legacy of the French
12/18/2003: Israel I
11/28/2003: The perception of causation

Next time I'll get back to the usual alienating overtechnical detail.


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The editorial page of your favorite newspaper or magazine is primarily (but not 100%) push-driven. Editors don't solicit editorials; editorials solicit editors.

Here's the timeline: I wrote a 700-word op-ed on Tuesday, and sent it to the think tank's Communications department, where we have a few people who work full-time on placing op-ed pieces in the newspapers. Ms AM wrote up a polite cover, and emailed it to the editors of a paper or two (I don't know how many). The editor of the Wall Street Journal wrote back on Friday, saying that he'll run the thing as a letter. He cut a few hundred words, sent it back to me and Ms AM for approval, I made two tweaks, the editor prepended a sensational headline that I did not approve, and it ran in today's paper.

Among the columns pushed upon him or her, what will an editor pick? No surprises: the work will have to be apropos to current news, and will have to be sensational. Simmering-but-not-boiling issues will not run. Moderate opinions will not run. Or at least, as in the case of my editorial, relatively moderate opinions will be revised to sound as sensational as possible.

Topical

The trouble with patents has been building for a decade, but it hasn't been in the mainstream press until the whole thing about the Blackberry hit. Now, it's easy for me to get op-eds printed, because disaster is already starting to strike. But wouldn't it be great if people could have gotten press five years ago about how trouble like the Blackberry case is on its way? But punchiness really does force the press to be reactive instead of proactive.

The guys on Capitol Hill want desperately to be proactive. They're smart folks, and many of them care about good policy. That means that the press, to the extent that it goes after what happened yesterday, is of limited relevance to policymakers. Conversely, to the extent that rulemaking is about obscure details of legal code, policymakers are assured that general media will not molest them.

Brief

TV and radio are only worse. They have a hard-and-fast time constraint, meaning that they have no choice but to be on the low-detail end of the spectrum. A five-minute piece can not have much more content than a one-page op-ed, which is not much. I've done a few interviews for the nice people at NPR. One went for half an hour, and my final on-air time in the three-minute piece was a single sentence--I didn't even get a semicolon. Last week, I got a call where I was explaining the situation to a radio reporter, and she said, exasperated, “We've been talking for thirteen minutes now and I still don't have a good ten-second clip.” I wound up getting cut from that one entirely.

You don't need me to tell you this, but details are anathemic to punchiness, and so are going to be lost. If your idea is too complex for a single sentence, it's evidently not worth the listener's time.

The odd relationship

I'm mostly whining because before I started dealing with media folk on a regular basis, I didn't think that it would all be so true. Every time I deal with generalist media people, I feel pressure (often explicit) to round off details and say caustic and sensationalist things. When I get off the telephone or hit the send button, I fret about how the journalist at the other end is going to spin and simplify me until I disagree with myself.

So, am I going to stop talking to media folks and stop submitting oversimplified op-eds? Of course not. If I want Congress to do anything, or if I want to get grants or continue writing, I need media appearances. It's how we keep score. For many people, the mental shortcut to answer the question is this person worth talking to? is to reduce it to has this person been published in/by something I've heard of? The first question is about whether the person knows the topic in depth, while the second is about whether the person can convince an editor that he or she can summarize information for a general audience. But it is an ingrained heuristic, rooted in observation biases that one could characterize as basic human nature, and I can't imagine a future where such tendencies magically disappear.

So it's not going to go away. There will always be a need for generalist media, and generalist media will always be better-recognized and more widely read than specialized media, and to maximize audiences they will chase ambulances and oversimplify. Further, people like me have a strong incentive to play along even though we really hate to, because so many people equate widely-read with authoritative.

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This is part three of three. It will make the most sense if you maybe look over part I, Anatomy of an op-ed and part II, Anti-intellectual.

When I ask people what they do, the most interesting answers are verbs. I don't care that you're an assistant executive manager for BungleCo. What have you been doing for the last eight hours? Have you been talking to people? Organizing papers? What conflicts do you need to resolve?

Conversely, when I tell people that I work at a think tank, many of them are entirely unconcerned with what I actually do during the day, because they already have the correct image of me staring at a computer screen until my eyeballs hurt. The real mystery: where does the money come from? How does somebody make money at a place where people just sit around and, um, think?

Writing doesn't pay the bills. If you get a few hundred bucks for an op-ed, you should be delighted. If you put out a magazine article a month, you can make a living, but then you're a full-time journalist and don't have time for anything else. The book? I've made more on Amazon referral commissions than royalties for writing the thing. From a business perspective, the press placements are all just advertising.

Not everybody thinks they know all there is to know about knowing things. There are people who appreciate an expert. They realize that the most efficient means of doing things is a division of labor where they produce widgets and when they need a policy expert, they hire one, rather than thinking they can study up on the subject in their spare time.

So when does somebody need an expert in a given policy? When they have a deeply-held opinion, and need somebody to espouse it. By finding an expert who happens to agree with them, the expert gets funded and the interested party gets support on its beliefs. And that is where all those studies funded by the most obvious donor come from. Since I know the software patent debate well, I can point to a pro-software patent study or two that says “We are grateful to Microsoft for their support” on the cover. Some read this and presume that MSFT found somebody to speak for them, and then purchased their opinion. But the flow probably went the other way: the expert formed his opinion (I have in mind two guys, one of whom I know), and then approached Microsoft about maybe providing funding for the research.

This is how the funding for many a study happens: first, the expert does research until he knows the subject well. He has formed his honest best opinion about the subject. He starts writing up a few pages. Then, he shops it around.

Dear philanthropic organization/corporation/wealthy individual: I have an opinion, and can state it eloquently and with authority. Further, that opinion happens to match yours perfectly! What a wonderful coincidence. If you'd like me to continue fleshing out this idea which I personally hold, then please send cash.

The expert is independently deriving his opinion, but the funding certainly has great potential to corrupt the expert's research. First, there are the details to be negotiated, wherein funder and researcher agree on the broad concept, but there may be details on which they differ. Second, there is the problem of the non-unitary actor. You know that guy that MSFT funded because they agree with him? We're coworkers, to the extent that you'd call this work. When I plug in my laptop to write articles opposing MSFT's IP position, MSFT chips in for the juice.

There are a few approaches to the conflict. I'm happy to say that in my case, the administrators at my think tank are well aware that my writing disagrees with the position of one of its funders, and at no point have they asked me to tone down my bitching. They care more about doing independent research than any one donor, and know that the only way to please all the donors all the time is to never say anything.

Another approach is to take such a firm opinion that there's no way to budge. Are there orthodox economic motivations for government regulation? Absolutely. Will you hear about any of them from the Cato Institute? Funders know the answer to that one, and know not to bother asking.

The final approach, of course, is to fold to pressure. I could only guess at how often this happens. To keep a parallel essay form, I should give an example here, but that would be rude.

The other way that the 'formulate hypothesis, then find funding' approach can create bias is in the suppression of certain ideas. This is no conspiracy theory suppression, but the simple fact that publicizing an idea needs both an expert to formulate it and a funder to pay for it. You can find an expert somewhere that espouses any given idea, but the business side has a whole lot more money than the rest of us, so why doesn't the policy world turn into a gigantic pro-business alliance? First, the funding for the pure social benefit is surprisingly large. There are general funds like MacArthur, Ford, Soros, Hewlett, and while we're talking MSFT, the Gates Foundation, that have little or no interest in supporting moneyed interests. Any one of these funds could keep several think tanks running for a long time to come.

Second, there's two sides to every issue. Say Company A has a labor-intensive process to produce pollutants, while Company B has a giant machine that was built in Japan to produce the same pollutants. Company A will be happy to support bills that espouse anti-business import tariffs because they would hurt Company B more; Company B will be happy to support higher minimum wage laws, because doing so is handing a charge to its competitor. As for the overall corporate tax rate, you won't see much disagreement.

Thus, the problem of getting funding for policy research (and the problem of policy design in general) is finding the mega-rich interests that happen to agree with your belief. For any sufficiently detailed question, there will be some balance between the funders.

Other

Others are interested in access for the sake of keeping engaged. People want to be surrounded by folks who are beautiful and smart; the think tank ain't doing much for the beautiful part, but has its share of smart folks who can say an interesting thing or two. There are people who will contribute to be a part of that. The administrators describe these folks as individuals who “get it”, where “it” is the value of good research, regardless of the bias of that research. If this were Broadway, I suppose we'd call these guys angels.

There's also the funding from the pure research supporters, such as the National Institute of Assorted, which is not nearly as exciting. Though, it's a chance to mention an interesting paradox that applies to academic work in general: nobody will fund a study that doesn't have a good idea of the expected conclusion. You can't do the research until you've got the funding; you can't write a good proposal until you've done the research. The academics who can unravel that knot live in big houses.

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You all know good ol' Wikipedia, but there are also Wikibooks. As you browse through the books at that site, you'll notice two things: they aren't very complete (most are half an essay at best), and they aren't very good.

I'm not going to talk about the reliability and authority issue which seems to dominate most discussion of wikimedia. Personally, if I'm reading to get a lite intro to a subject of which I'm ignorant, I'll take Wikipedia as gospel, because it doesn't matter; if I'm working on an academic topic, then I'm not going to cite an encyclopædia of any sort, but will have my own external sources providing detail. You no doubt have your own sense of what is or is not reliable.

Instead, I'm going to talk here about why the deck is stacked against wikibooks and other attempts to apply the open source idea to every field of endeavor.

Narrative vs reference

The average entry on Wikipedia is between a single line and a few pages long. They have limited narrative depth at best, and generally just cover a simple list of facts. Although wikipedia would be thousands of pages if printed out in its entirety, nobody is expected to have edited anything beyond a sliver, and nobody expects it to have any structure beyond alphabetical order.

Figure one: Wikiart from the surrealists. [Photo credit]

Computer code is much like this: a person working on one subpart of a program doesn't have to know anything about how the other subparts work. To write a translator, Jane can work on text parsing, Joe can work on a set of dictionaries, and Jess can work on the clicky interface, and all can work with little regard to what the other parties are doing.

Narrative works don't have such wonderful compartmentalization. Sure, there are chapters, but if the chapters don't tightly come together, we won't like the darn story much.

You ever play the Exquisite Corpse? You fold a paper in thirds, and draw a head, and then refold so the head isn't visible and hand the paper to a pal who draws the torso, and then your pal hides the torso and another pal draws the waist and the legs. Then you unfold it all and laugh about how delightful such a disjointed figure could be. If you were lucky enough to be one of the founders of the Surrealist movement, then your drawing will wind up on the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago (see figure). But for the rest of us, the game is a fun brainstorm but ain't a final work.

Anthologies are common enough, but we often call them edited volumes and put the editor's name on the cover to remind the reader that somebody sat down and made sure that the elements somehow cohered.

We're used to other aggregate works directed by one individual: pop songs that have a single producer and movies with one director. I leave to the reader the debate over the quality of songs written via jamming with the band versus songs written by a single composer.

OK, there's your survey of media. Painting, sculpture, movies, music, novels, all involve one or a small number of people directing a final product, which may have been touched by dozens of hands. This is not surprising, and I don't think anybody seriously expects wikipainting to truly surpass the old method.

But textbooks. There seems to be a serious belief that a textbook can be collaboratively written by a committee. This is not a new wikiconcept. In elementary school, we all had many a textbook with no author or editor on the cover, and a list of committee members on the title page.

Those textbooks sucked.

We often refer to a subject like math or biology as a field. Picture a big expanse of plain, in which you could take any direction. When we go to school, we take courses--carefully guided paths through an open expanse. In other words, a good textbook goes somewhere. It is a narrative.

Conversely, some textbooks attempt to survey the entire field at once. Such books are frankly no longer textbooks, but are rightly called references. They have their place, but it ain't teaching. I can see the appeal for the textbook writers, who want to maximize their market share. They provide as much material as possible in the hopes that the teacher will select a course through the material; some teachers do, covering only chapters 1.3, 3.8, 8.1, and 16.4, while others wind up ploughing through the entire field, column by column. [If you are reading this in book form, I've put effort in to cohering the essays into something of a few narrative threads. Really.]

The wikimethod is good for writing references but bad for writing narratives, so the deck is stacked against wikitextbooks. Again, like the encyclopædic texts, they have a valid and valuable place on the e-bookshelf, but they can't replace narrative works, just as (conversely) we wouldn't read a single narrative and claim that we understand the entire field.

I built it and nobody came

Of course, it's not so simple. The real success stories in open source come from a single good idea, some good coding, and lots of good advertising and self-promotion. Of course, it also helps if your program is about porn.

Out of a thousand readers, over 990 won't fix so much as a typo, and a handful will make little ten-second fixes on a single equation or such. If you're lucky, maybe a single reader out of every few thousand will contribute the significant time investment to contribute a narrative. Open source provides a new alternative to finding and coordinating coauthors, but it's not particularly a revolution over existing coauthoring tools (diff, revision control, those cute little change tracking features in word processors). The fact remains that a narrative is best written by a small number of people in close communication.

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The best-of

• “It's both fluffy and informative!”
• “He spell-checked it!”
• “I replaced my copy of Esquire with this, and thanks to all those charts and graphs, now my houseguests think I'm smart or something!”
• “Much more accessible than his book on statistical computing!”
• “It's a triumph of semantic markup!”

And if you're a publisher, take this as a prospectus. Quirky books by economists are hot these days.

The readership