Blogging as Self-Experimentation

Marginal Revolution: Blogging as self-experimentation

I have fallen way behind in reading Marginal Revolution and am spending the evening catching up. Also not having any input into the discussion until I get a bit more macro-economics in my head. Instead I am just reading to learn. Tyler Cowen's thinking, however, expands often times beyond economics and provides more general insights. This one, from way back in February of 2007, I found especially true.

Blogging as self-experimentation Seth Roberts writes:

“Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation,” Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He explained: “Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.”

Tyler Cowen adds,

"Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy. All you bloggers out there, or spouses of bloggers, what effects do you notice?"

In truth, I don't blog in the usual understanding of the word, I write more for my own education than trying to teach or convince anybody else. This weblog is an expression of interconnected self-reflection and quest for knowledge. I can agree with everything Professor Cowen says but then this weblog was intentionally created with those goals in mind. The responses from the various bloggers who participate in the discussion was interesting. I have collected them for a closer look to see what they offer and how they present themselves. They seem to cover a wide span of thought.