Seth’s blog

I asked Bryan Caplan what effect his blogging had had. It made his first book a success, he said. Or helped make it a success. He had started blogging about two years before it appeared. Other bloggers wrote about his book as if they knew him. They knew him from his blog.

A recent EW Popwatch post compared several YouTube versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, much like I did here. It’s like Leno and Letterman telling the same joke. We have an Instinct of Connoisseurship, Veblen would say.

Odd Numbers, an excellent blog by Jubin Zelveh at Portfolio.com, recently listed a few findings from the American Time Use Survey, which is in danger of being ended. They included:

- First-born children receive 20 to 30 minutes more quality time each day from parents than second-born children.

- Married couples have very little influence over each other when it comes to how much time each spends on leisure, child care, and chores.

A comment was:

Valuable information?

You can’t be serious. What can possibly be done by anybody about these “observations”?

This seems like a welfare program for economists.

Time use data — from 13 countries, including America — had a huge effect on my research and I suppose my life, since I applied my research to my life. The time use data I’m referring to showed that Americans were awake an hour later than people in the 12 other countries. They also watched TV an hour later. In other words, America was an outlier in two distributions: time of going to sleep, and time of stopping TV watching. I knew about research that showed that exposure to other people controls when we sleep. The time use data suggested that watching TV can substitute for ordinary human contact in the control of when we sleep. I wondered if seeing faces in the morning would improve my sleep; so I tried watching late-night TV early in the morning (via tape). I did that on a Monday morning. On Tuesday morning, I felt exceptionally good. Thus began the self-experimentation behind my pretty-face post. My best work. (The self-experimentation, not the post.)

Thanks to Marginal Revolution.

What I like most about magazines is their ability to open new worlds to me. Books — unless by Jane Jacobs — rarely do this. Music, TV, and movies almost never do this. Paintings and other visual arts never do this (to me). Magazines do this regularly. Entertainment Weekly — the best magazine with a dull name — tries to do this (and succeeds). I am now reading The Golden Compass because of EW. An issue of Colors made me visit Iceland. Spy made New York fascinating. (E.g., an NYC map of smells.) It’s the best kind of teaching: you open a door and make what’s inside seem so interesting and wonderful that the student voluntarily decides to enter and explore.

Which is why it isn’t completely surprising that Abu Ayyub Ibrahim, who writes Behind the Approval Matrix, is a teacher. New York magazine’s Approval Matrix has a wonderful way of introducing new things: with humor, poetry (if well-written short captions = poetry), a dash of outrage (calling stuff “despicable”), and an attractive layout. When it calls something Brilliant, I’m instantly curious — thus fulfilling the best function of magazines with remarkable ease. The problem for me, and I assume many others, is that the captions are often obscure. Behind the Approval Matrix — which might have been called The Annotated Approval Matrix — explains each item.

The creators of The Approval Matrix had a great idea and didn’t quite pull it off. It’s often too hard to figure out what they’re talking about. Ibrahim has supplied what is missing.

It’s a bit like my self-experimentation. Previous (conventional) research, for various reasons, couldn’t quite reach practical applications (e.g., omega-3 research couldn’t figure out the best dose); my self-experimentation, building on that research, was able to cover the final mile.

What Jonathan Schwarz calls “the Lost Kristol Tapes” is a taped debate between William Kristol (the new NY Times columnist) and Daniel Ellsberg about the invasion of Iraq. The debate was on C-Span’s Washington Journal, of which I have fond memories; I watched it for years to get morning faces for my self-experimentation. Schwarz called Kristol’s comments “a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit.”

The debate has been watched about 5000 times. Three days ago, just before Schwarz’s piece, it had been watched four times, three by Schwarz himself. My long self-experimentation article would have been read by almost no one had not Andrew Gelman blogged about it. Now it’s been downloaded thousands of times.

More blog power: here and here.

Addendum. Funny coincidence: The day after I posted this, the formerly-obscure Wikileaks hit the news for a super-charged version of the same thing. Wikileaks exposed Cayman Island tax shelters.