Stumbling and Mumbling

Free worker-bloggers

Should bloggers be free to criticize their employers in their posts? Most bosses would say no. And most bosses could be wrong. "Under certain conditions, negative postings by employees can actually help the overall reputation of the firm" says this paper (pdf).
This is because such postings attract more attention and page views than bland pro-company posts, which means that subsequent, positive posts get more attention. What's more, because the employee is free to post bad things, these positive posts are more credible.
The authors establish, with some cunning stats, that Sun Microsystems' liberal blogging policy actually helps the firm.
Which raises the question. Why then, do many firms limit worker-bloggers?
I suspect that, for quite a few bosses, what matters is not that their company be presented in a positive light but rather that they have control over their firm's image. Power matters more than efficiency.

Against web rankings

I'm in two minds about this exercise. Part of me thinks it's just vacuous; people who like blogs like Iain Dale's like blogs like Iain's - whoda thunk?
Another part of me, though, thinks it's downright pernicious, in three senses.
First, those who know little about blogs - some dead tree writers, for example - might think the higher-ranked blogs are good representatives of blogging. And they'll be disappointed; most of them are empty-headed, dull and trivial wannabe dead-tree writers. This might turn people away from blogs, not realizing the riches they can offer.
I'm not making a partisan point here. Among just "right-wing" blogs, there's vastly more sign of intelligent life at, say, Matthew Sinclair, Mediocracy or Freeborn John than there is among more highly rated blogs.
Secondly, there's something nasty about the very notion that blogs can be ranked on a simple single ordering. The overwhelming virtue of the blogosphere is its diversity. And the many things that make a good blog are to some extent incompatible; originality versus consistency; passion versus intellectual rigour; number of posts versus quality of individual posts; brevity versus weight of evidence; wit versus gravitas, and so on.
These trade-offs mean the quality of blogs is just incommensurable - we can't rank them. I can't say whether I prefer Tim, Norm, Justin, Paulie or Damian or countless others. I like them all, in different ways.
And even if we can each rank our own preferences, what meaning is there to an aggregate ranking? To pretend there is one is to commit the error that libertarians have often accused utilitarians of making - of believing preferences can be easily aggregated when they cannot be. It's symptomatic of the intellectual decline of the Conservative party that one of its cheerleaders should make this error.
Thirdly, even if others' preferences can be ranked, so what? Why should I give a damn what others think? I don't blog so I can be judged by any middle-class moron who thinks his opinion matters - that's what I go to work for.

Eight things...

Ophelia asks for eight random facts about me. Here goes.
1. I am distantly related to Stan Laurel. On learning this, some people say: "that's a surprise: you look more like Oliver Hardy." These people are known as men with broken noses.
2. I have only once been to the cinema in the last 10 years, to see the X-Files movie.
3. As a teenager, I was a prodigious shoplifter, mostly of classic books, among them Proudhon's What is Property?
4. I've never been in requited love. I like to think this is because I've always been in male-dominated environments rather than because I'm ugly and repellent: it's not because of this.
5. I don't own a passport, and have no desire to do so - more because of airports than foreigners.
6. I've seen David Miliband in the nuddy.
7. I've had only three full-time jobs in the 20 years since leaving university, and am unlikely to have any more.
8. I can't speak a foreign language or tie a bow-tie, and am a little ashamed on both counts.
Anyone who fancies it can consider themselves tagged.

Meaningless, and demeaning

Via James, I see that some Toryblogger is inviting us to rank our favourite blogs.
Include me out. To do this is to pervert everything that's best about the "blogosphere." The great thing about blogging is that it's diverse, egalitarian and gives a voice to those marginalized by conventional politics and the media. To pretend that bloggers can be ranked hierarchically according to a clear set of criteria by the sort of people who read dull mainstream blogs is to undermine these virtues.
Is Norm better than Wat Tyler? Is Matt Sinclair better than Shuggy? The questions are meaningless, because there's no obvious single objective standard by which to judge them.
Indeed, to assess them at all is to demean them - who the hell do I think I am to judge such evidently good people?
In practice, I guess most of the people daft enough to take part in this survey will use the standard: how far do they agree with me? Excellence in any writer is, after all, merely a matter of how far he flatters the reader's ego. But this merely reduces the survey to a question of the tastes of a biased sample - which is utterly uninteresting.
So, if you must take part in this survey - and I'd rather you didn't - could you please not mention me? I neither want nor need the acclaim of the multitude. As Adam Smith said:

To a real wise man the judicious and well-weighed approbation of a single wise man, gives more heartfelt satisfaction than all the noisy applauses of ten thousand ignorant though enthusiastic admirers. (Theory of Moral Sentiments, Book VI.III.31)

Defend blogging

I'm sorry to see that the Cutty Sark is on fire, and even sorrier to see that the Mail on Sunday's offices are not.
All good people have already rightly been appalled by its moronic smearing of Owen Barder. I fear, however, that they are understating just how vile is the mindset behind it. It's even worse than an attack upon free speech.
Think about the things that the MoS is promoting here:
Secrecy - civil servants shouldn't express ideas in public.
Hierarchy -  civil servants should only do as ministers tell them, and should not speak to the public as equals in a dialogue. 
Unoriginality - Owen shouldn't express ideas of his own.
Priggish uniformity - rather than reveal himself as a proper, decent human being with unique (and endearing)  foibles, Owen should pretend that he is a mere automaton, obeying the will of the powerful.
In short, the MoS is attacking every component of an open society.   And here we see an important fact. It used to be thought - following crude readings of Popper - that the enemies of the open society were mainly on the "left." They are not.

In praise of anonymity

Bryan Appleyard is almost always brilliant. But this, surely, is plain false:

All western — not just scientific — wisdom is based on identity. Advocates and their critics can be identified and their ideas formally tested. This is nothing to do with the statistics of crowds, and everything to do with the authority of the person. Take that away and truth and judgment become fictions.

Surely not. Take a simple statement, "all swans are white." The validity (or not) of this has nothing to do with the identity of who utters it. It's merely a statement about swans, to be tested by looking for a non-white swan.
The key test of an idea is not: whose is it? It's: does it accord with facts and reasoning?
This is one reason why this blog is (thinly) anonymous. Debate should be a dispassionate investigation of facts and theories. Someone's identity matters insofar as it explains their Bayesian priors - no more.
If we personalize debate, it becomes merely a battle of egos, which leads to a politics dominates by tittle-tattle and spin.
Worse still, identifying authority with particular persons leads to an anti-democratic deference to charlatans.
So, anonymity has its advantages.

Thogging

I was hoping to avoid this meme. But as so many good people have shown uncharacteristically poor judgment (thanks chaps!) in nominating me as a thinking blogger, I feel obliged to pass it on.
Lot's of blogs make me think. Iain and Guido make me think: are people really interested in this tittle-tattle? Harry's Place makes me think: don't these guys ever get bored of making the same point? I could go on...
Anyway, my five nominees are: Paul, Shuggy, Fabian, Matthew and Not Saussure.
I've excluded those kind enough to nominate me. I've left out Norm, Samizdata, Civitas and Wat as they don't need the traffic. And I've left out US bloggers - though I find Bryan Caplan and Overcoming Bias, to name but two, very stimulating.

Polly doesn't get it

It's a cliche that the dead trees just don't understand blogging. But cliches become cliches because they are true, as Polly demonstrates (via Iain):

People say: ‘What's the difference between a blog and column anyway?"...There is a skill in crafting a column with a beginning, a middle and an end, a coherent argument and at least three facts readers don't know, preferably information gleaned from talking to the leading players in the case. There is a risk that the style of the blogosphere is dragging us all along to shout louder.

This just shows that Polly doesn't read the many intelligent blogs there are; Devil's Kitchen, whatever his merits or demerits, is not representative of the blogosphere.
I like to think this blog - which Polly doesn't read - contains a few facts, some of which might even be true. And I like to think they have a beginning and middle at least. They don't have an end, because  I don't have (or want) the final word.
What's more,  there is little advantage "talking to the leading players." If these have anything worth saying, they publish it so we can scrutinize it. There can be no role for private information in democratic policy-making.
Speaking of which, Polly is horribly wrong on another point:

If you start out assuming that all politicians are ill-intentioned knaves and bounders who are all out to feather their own nests, you will illuminate nothing for your readers and discover very little of interest...

So James Buchanan won a Nobel prize for illuminating nothing? 

...You will be adding to the dangerous anti-democratic mood.

No. The venality of our politicians is an argument for more democracy, not less - for greater openness, greater scrutiny and more direct democracy.
But then, if you don't understand blogs, you won't learn that there's more to politics than the Westminster village.

Experts, instinct and bloggers

Marcel Berlins criticizes Time magazine's decision to make web users "Person of the Year." And he misses the point by a thousand miles. He says:

The philosophy I object to, which the internet's information explosion has fostered, is that the "ordinary" person is as - no, even more - important to the dissemination of knowledge, information and opinion as the expert or the professional....Time's assertion that those working for nothing are "beating the pros at their own game" is nonsense. They are providing a different service, an opinion based not on expertise and experience, but on their less tutored feelings.

What this misses is that the "less tutored feelings" already dominate public life; has Berlins never seen the Sun or Daily Mail?
Worse still, " less tutored feelings" dominate expertise in Downing Street. Here's Blair earlier this year:

Political leaders have to back their instinct and lead (my emphasis).

This is no isolated example. Here he is in 1997:

There are times when to calculate the risks too greatly is to do nothing; there are times too when a political leader must follow his instinct.

And in a speech in Sedgefield in 2001 (no longer webbed), he said that in the 1980s:

I stopped thinking about politics on the basis of what I had read or learnt, and started to think on the basis of what I felt.

And, of course, there are Blair's many claims to be "passionate" about things.
We are, then, ruled by "untuored feelings" and emotivism. To blame the web for the rise of these and decline of expertise is not just wrong, but indicative of a bullying mentality - a sneering at the powerless accompanied by a reluctance to chastise the powerful.
Indeed, far from embodying raw emotion, the web can give a greater voice to the expert: there's more economic expertise in my sidebar than you'll find in Downing Street or the mainstream media.
What's more - and Berlins misses this too - in the diverse blogosphere there's a chance that individual errors will cancel out, thus giving us the wisdom of crowds. In the narrow hierarchical villages of Whitehall and the dead trees, there's no such hope.
So, Time was right. The web is a (small?) hope for escape from the barbarians who rule us.

10 things...

Dave and James pass the meme to me. So, here are 10 things I would never do, in no particular order:
1. Vote Conservative.
2. Hurt a cat; I've no problem hurting people.
3. Get a Prince Albert (if I did, I'd only be the second economics journalist to do so.)
4. Have children in London (or probably anywhere else.)
5. Have sex with a man, other than Cesc Fabregas.
6. Turn down any member of Girls Aloud.
7. Stop loving Jolie Holland.
8. Appear on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, even if I were a Z-list celeb.
9. Lose the chip on my shoulder.
10. Pass the meme onto anyone else.