Half Sigma

No more HTML tags in comments

Because I'm tired of having to edit people's posts to close their HTML tags, and because TypePad has refused to fix this problem, I have decided to turn this option off.

The TypePad programmers waste their time creating Compose Post editors that work worse the the original editor, but they refuse to fix known bugs that have been outstanding for years. How hard can it be to check input for unclosed HTML tags? Blogger does it, and Blogger is a free service. Shame on you Typepad.

Gladwell vs. Sailer

Malcolm Gladwell and Steve Sailer have been engaged in some blog vs. blog fighting. Let's look at the following quote from Gladwell's blog:

In Blink, I tell the story of a study done by the law professor Ian Ayres. Ayres put togother of group of young men and women--half white and half black--and sent them to 242 car dealerships all around Chicago. All were attractive, well dressed, and well-educated. All had the same cover story: that they were professionals from a wealthy part of Chicago. All pointed to the lowest-priced car on the floor and said--"I'm interested in buying this car." Ayres's question was--all other things being equal, how does skin color and gender affect the initial price quoted by a car salesman? His results: white men, on average, got quoted a price $725 above invoice, white women got quoted a price $935 above invoice, black women $1195 above invoice, and black men $1687 above invoice.

This was, I concluded, a powerful example of discrimination--of how unconscious feelings and prejudices have the effect of dramatically influencing the fairness with which we treat different groups. Hardly a controverial statement, right? Well, in criticizing my book, one reviewer defended the car salesman, and called their discrimination entirely rational. He wrote:

"Black men for whatever complicated reasons, enjoy being seen as big spenders. And car salesmen are all too willing to help them spend big."

Let's analyze this statement according to the criteria from my racism post. First, content. Does the statement propagate false belief about a targetted group? I think it does. Since when do black men--collectively--desire to overpay for cars? The restaurant Per Se in Manhattan, where the prix fix is $250, is an example of a place where diners enjoy being seen as big spenders, and waiters are all too willing to help them spend big. Does that mean that Per Se is full of black men? Actually, it's full of white people. Although it could as easily be full of purple people, since the willingness to pay three times more for a meal than it would cost down the street has nothing to do with the color of your skin.

Yes the guy who dared to "defend" the car salesmen is none other than Steve Sailer. Gladwell just doesn't seem to get Sailer's point, nor does he seem to have any sort of understanding of human behavior.

First of all, I doubt that the discrimination cited is in any way "unconscious." The salesmen are intentionally quoting different prices based on sex and race. In the six weeks I worked as a stockbroker, the sales manager told us "don't bother to try to sell to women, it's a waste of time." If stockbrokers are taught to treat people differently based on sex, then I'm sure that car salesmen are also taught the same thing.

Steve Sailer is not "defending" the salesmen, but rather he is claiming that they are opportunistic scumbags whose goal is to rip off every customer for the biggest amount possible without losing the sale. Through trial and error, car salesmen have learned that they maximize their commissions by quoting different prices based on race and sex. This explanation of the behavior makes more sense to me than Gladwell's explanation that car salesmen quote higher prices to blacks because of "prejudices" which are implied to be untrue.

Gladwell expresses surprise that anyone would want to "overpay" for anything. Well in the real world, sales are based on emotion, not logic. That's what the sales manager at the stock broker job told me. And of course it's true. If people bought stocks logically, all full service brokers would be out of business. I definitely sensed that one of the reasons why some clients use full service brokers is because it makes them feel like a bigshot. Why to people want to overpay in order to feel like a bigshot? That's one of the mysteries of human behavior, isn't it?

I am reminded of the "suggested admission" of $14 at the Museum of Natural History in New York City. The sign says it's "suggested," and in fact you can tour the museum for free if you want, so why doesn't everybody just ask for a free ticket? Why do they want to overpay? While some people probably feel that they have a moral obligation to make a proper donation to a charitable institution, I suspect the majority of people paying full price do so because they don't want to appear to be a cheapskate. Why do they care if the person at the admissions counter thinks they're a cheapskate?

If black men like overpaying for stuff, why aren't there more black men eating at Per Se where the "prix fix" is $250? Well this one is easy to answer. Not that many black people can afford $250 for a meal. Furthermore, it may not be an environment where black people feel comfortable.

I'm not saying that I agree that Steve Sailer's overpaying explanation is correct, only that it's a reasonable explanation for rational discrimination. Maybe there are other explanations. Maybe black men just don't do as much research into prices before they walk into the car dealerships, so the salesmen know they can get away with quoting higher prices. Maybe the salesmen quote the higher price so they can then throw in a "free" upgrade such as the Enhanced Bling Package. One really needs an a car salesmen who's honest enough to talk about the issue to tell us the real motivations for the discrimination.

Sailer wins this exchange. Not only does Gladwell look pretty stupid here, but he has has also given Steve Sailer's blog a lot of free publicity.

Ilkka Kokkarinen archive

A blogger is posting an archive of Ilkka Kokkarinen's writings at the following url:

http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~chc007/ilkka.html

I doubt it will be read as often as the Washingtonienne Archive (which seems to have moved since the last time I looked at it). For a summary, I recommend my blog post analyzing the Washingtonienne.

Danimal Archive is gone

When Ilkka Kokkarinen took down his blog, he also took down the Danimal Archive. You can still read some of it in the Google cache.

Apology for blogging

Ilkka Kokkarinen, the author of the blog Sixteen Volts, has removed all of his old posts and has apologized for blogging. (Steve Sailer seems to have some additional info.)

I wonder if I should also remove all my posts and apologize for having opinions.

Xanga review

Xanga is a blogging tool, not unlike Typepad which I use for my Half Sigma blog, yet very different in it's orientation.

THE GOOD OF XANGA

I really like the software behind Xanga. It's a slick tool, and easier to use than either Blogger or Typepad. Xanga's pages are loaded dynamically from the database, which means that changes to your blog happen instantaneously. There isn't a long publishing delay like you would experience with other blogging tools.

Xanaga gives you a limited ability to customer your blog's layout with an easy to use web page. You can change colors and fonts, set a background image (a feature I wish people didn't take advantage of) and also set a url to load music onto your web page (another feature I wish peopld didn't take advantage of). If you upgrade to the premium version, then you can have complete control over your blog's template using custom layouts and "skins." I doubt that many Xangans know enough HTML to do that themselves, so they are using skins that other people created.

The goal of perhaps a majority of Xanga users seem to be to make their blog as annoying and hard to read as possible. There's a background image such that you can barely read the text, the "skin" totally screws around with the default positioning of the common blog elements, and there's horrible music blasting.

Xanga has recently added photo features. You can upload photos, create albums, and each user also has a "photo blog," which just means that users can look at the photos and leave comments on them. The "photo blog" is less featured than Flickr, a site I'd recommend over Xanga if you just want to post photos that others can comment on, and your're not interested in writing any non-photo posts.

Xanga lets you automatically add a photo to your regular non-photo blog post, and this is a pretty useful feature, although it downsizes each photo so that it's longest dimension is 400 pixels. If you want a bigger photo on your blog post, you can grab the HTML of a larger version of the photo (much like Flickr), and paste it into your post. But I suspect that most Xanga users don't have the HTML sophistication required to do that.

Xanga has also recently added a new footprints feature. Footprints function like a Sitemeter, giving you a breakdown of every single hit to your blog pages. The footprints also display the Xanga user ID of each visitor. This lets you know exactly who's reading your blog.

THE BAD OF XANGA

Xanga allows you to subscribe to other Xanga blogs, and the subscription process is pretty painless. You just click a subscribe link on the other person's blog, and that's it. Your subscriptions automatically appear on the left sidebar of your blog, and you also have a page where you can read all of the subscriptions (generally a better way to read posts than visiting the blog because you don't have to deal with blog author's horrible layout).

What Xanga does not allow you to do is link to non-Xanga blogs. (Well, if you upgraded to the premium version, you have a custom module where you can add links using HTML tags, but hardly anyone is going to go to the trouble.) Xanga also does not allow comment except from other registered Xanga users. The good thing, at least, is that there are no spam comments, but the bad part is that Xanga is a closed system. Although non-member websurfers are around to read your blog, because they can't leave comments, and because you can't exchange links with non-Xanga bloggers, Xanga essentially limits your audience to other Xanga bloggers.

Who are the other Xanga bloggers? Traditionally teenage girls made up the biggest share of Xanga users, but the the demographic seems to have changed in the past two years. MySpace has pulled away a lot of the teenage users. Because Xanga and Myspace are both closed systems, teenagers want to be where their friends are, and for most teenagers that now means MySpace. The popularity of MySpace is due to the fact that it offers comments, photos and profiles, much like Xanga, but it removes the annoying necessity for people to write blog posts.

One strange oddity of Xanga is that most of the users are now Asian. Xanga doesn't seem to market to Asians, and there are no indications anywhere that this is an Asian blogging tool, but nevertheless if you go through any of the blogrings, most of the blogs you find have Asian authors (usually female).

I think this is a case of white flight. When the young white users realized that Xanga was becoming an Asian hangout, they fled to LiveJournal, a blogging tool similar in scope to Xanga but which mostly has white users. And of course they fled to MySpace, the social networking tool where you don't have to write blog posts.

I suspect a higher percentage of Asians blog compared to other races. My guess is that only people with above average IQs are interested in blogging (because people with below average IQs don't enjoy reading or writing), and because Asians, on average, have higher IQs than other races, a higher percentage of Asians would be interested in maintaining a blog.

Unfortunately, young Asian girls have adopted the anti-intellectual writing style of their non-Asian peers. Here is a sample blog post from Xanga:

1ST DAii OF SKEWL WAS MAD FUN YOOO!! ii GOT 2 C EVERY1 && ii HAD VERii NiiCE TEACHERS!! BUT U KNO BEiiN AN 8TH GRADER THEY TOLD US SOO MANY iiNFO THAT WE WERE SOPOSE 2 DO OR SHiiT'S LiiKE DAT!! BUT U KNO JUST DA NORMAL STUFF!!AHHHHH EVEY1 WAS LOOKiiN MAD CUTEEE!! OFCOURSE ii WAS WEARIN MY SHORT SKiiRT, NEW KiiCKS, && MY SWEATER DAT LOOK GREAT!! LOL PPL WERE SAYiiN ii LOOK MAD HOTTT!! BUT PPL ALWAYS SAY LiiKE ALWAYS!! LMAOO MY WORSE ENEMY iiS iiN MY CLASS WERE KiiNDA TALKiiN BUT ii DONT WANNA TALK 2 HER ii WiiSH SHE WOULD JUST DiiE!! BUT U KNO WE SAY Hiii BYE!! W.E JUST DONT WANNA TALK 2 DA HOE!! 2ND DAY OF SKEWL WAS AiiGHT BUT iiT WAS MAD HOTTT!! FREAKiiN GiiRL iiN MY CLASS R MAD RACiiS YOOO!! ii FREAKiiN HATE DAT SHiiTT!! BUT W.E US ASiiAN WOULD B RiiCH THEY WOULD B WORKiiN 4 US!! MUAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAH!!

EVERY1 GOT HW ALREDY!! BUT MiiNE iiSNT DAT BAD ii GUES!! JUST DOiiN ESSAY 4 MS.BRUNO!! BUT iiTS REALLii EASY! ii WENT 2 EAT PiiZZA WiiT MY BESTFRiiENDS HAiiVY DA FREAKO, JESSiiCA DA HOE!! LMAOOOO ii LUV THEM BOTH 2 DEATH!! ANYWZY ii GUESS DATS iiT 3 DA DAii YOO!!

If you can put in the effort to actually read the above post, it contains some interesting sociological insights. The author of the post, an Asian girl in the 8th grade, complains that the blacks in her school don't like Asians, but consoles herself with the knowledge that Asians are more successful in life than blacks, and when they are all adults the blacks will be working for the Asians.

It's these kinds of raw sociological observations of American youth that make it worthwhile to visit teen sites.

Brad DeLong, deleter of comments

Steve Sailer complains about Brad DeLong deleting comments. I also had a comment deleted from Brad DeLong's blog. And I was just commenting about Social Security, hardly anything as controversial as the genetic topics that Steve is interested in.

Apparently, Brad just deletes comments from people who disagree with him, keeeping his blog ideologically pure. I urge everyone to remove Brad's blog from their blogroll.

China and Microsoft censor blogs

Microsoft has been censoring Chinese blogs in order to appease the Chinese government. Chinese bloggers are outraged after Microsoft shut down an especially popular Chinese blog located at MSN Spaces. Via Instapundit, you may read reactions from Chinese bloggers over at Rebecca MacKinnon's blog (post 1, post 2). You can even read about it in the New York Times.

What do I get out of this?

(1) Big companies like Microsoft are not the friends of freedom or even the friends of the United States. They are simply out to make money, and Microsoft is making zillions of times more money selling Windows and Office to Chinese customers than it makes from MSN Spaces.

(2) I would like to say that bloggers should support small independent companies such as Six Apart, the company that operates Typepad which I use to blog. But Typepad isn't a very good solution for Chinese bloggers because of the cost. $80/year is nothing to an American, but it's prohibitively expensive to someone in China. Only big companies with ulterior motives such as Google with its Blogger service or Microsoft with its MSN Spaces service can afford to give away blogging software and bandwidth for free.

(3) China is gearing up to be the next world superpower. We should be worried about this.

David Lat to become Wonkette?

Underneath Their Robes is back online, and David Lat will soon be moving on to better things, taking over for Wonkette, according to the Wall Street Journal Law Blog.

I saw good news that Wonkette is being replaced by a conservative. And good for David Lat that things worked out for him.

And sour grapes that no one pays any attention to me.

Spam update

Attempting to delete spam, I accidentally deleted a very cool legitimate comment about hobbits and their gift giving customs. I feel so bad about that. How I hate the spammers.

Spam attack

Half Sigma has been subject to a huge amount of comment spam during the last two days, so I turned on the Typekey authentication requirement. Sorry. I would rather people didn't have to sign in in order to leave a comment, but unfortunately for every legitimate comment I was deleting ten spam comments.

UPDATE: I turned authentication OFF now becaue I was unable to leave a comment on my own blog when it was turned on. I'll probably get spammed again now.

Blog popularity and link spawn rate

In order for a blog to become really popular, its inbound links have to be self-propagating, kind of like a virus.

Suppose that each of your inbound links spawns 0.9 new links. Suppose further that through much marketing efforts, you obtain 10 inbound links. Those 10 links will spawn 9 new links, the 9 spawn 8.1 links, etc, until you wind up with 100 inbound links.

But suppose another blog is just slightly more interesting than yours, just enough so that each inbound links spawns 1.1 new links. It’s only 22% more interesting. But what happens is that the 10 links spawn 11 new links, which spawn 12.1 links, and in no time all the blog becomes an A-list blog.

Very few blogs, if any, have a link spawn rate that exceeds 1.0, the number required for blog links propagate without any marketing efforts on the part of the blog author.

Half Sigma has a link spawn rate well below 1.0. Maybe my link spawn rate is around 0.5, which means that for every link I manage to obtain through blog marketing efforts, it eventually gives rise to one additional link.

The now defunct blog Libertarian Girl had a link spawn rate much closer to 1.0. The picture of the pretty blonde girl on the blog sidebar made the blog more interesting and therefore increased the link spawn rate. As we saw from the examples above, even a small increase in the link spawn rate results in a huge increase in a blog’s popularity.

A blog’s eventual popularity is a function of the link spawn rate and the marketing efforts. A blog with a link spawn rate close to 1.0 can become an A-list blog if the blog author puts forth a good marketing effort. A blog with a link spawn rate of around 0.5, like Half Sigma has, can never become an A-list blog. A blog with a link spawn rate of 1.0 or greater can become an A-list blog without any marketing efforts at all.

One can increase the link spawn rate by writing better and more interesting posts and by posting more often, but many factors which affect the link spawn rate are out of the blog author's control. A person with fame outside of the blogging world, or a person who is a pretty young woman, just has an inherently higher link spawn rate that a regular guy with a boring job can't compete with.

Anonymous blogging

Juan Non-Volokh and Howard Bashman have some thoughts on anonymous blogging. Here are my thoughts:

(1) If law enforcement authorities ever have probable cause to get subpoenas to find out who are, you will no longer be anonymous. That simple.

(2) If you use a credit card to buy a Typepad subscription, employees of Six Apart will know who you are. Unless you get yourself a gift credit card.

(3) Most anonymous blogs are found at free services like Blogger. Everytime you log into Blogger, they get your IP address. Do a Google search for "anonymous web surfing" to find ways to mask your IP address.

(4) When you send out an email from some email services like Yahoo, your IP address is sent to the recipient. Gmail didn't do this the last I checked, but one would be advised to use the anonymous web surfing technique when sending emails.

(5) Same applies to leavng comments on blogs.

(6) Does anyone really care enough to put effort into figuring out who you are? Having a blog that no one reads (99% of blogs) is a great source of anonymity.

(7) I support anonymous blogging because otherwise there is some important speech that people would withhold for fear of reprisal. The Federalist Papers were originally published anonymously.

(8) Half Sigma is not an anonymous blog, I just choose not to put my name on my blog's home page. It's very easy to find out my full name, address, etc.

Underneath Their Robes makes the New York Times

Today's New York Times has an article about Underneath Their Robes. I guess this mean's that the David Lat's outing has moved up from just being a funny blogosphere thing to being Big National News. The NY Times article gives us some insight into what might happen to David:

"It's fair to say that it came as a great surprise to many people in the U.S. attorney's office that David was the author of the blog," said an official who insisted on anonymity, saying the situation was novel and under investigation.

Mr. Lat, a graduate of Harvard and the Yale Law School, did not respond to e-mail messages and did not return calls to his office, his home and his mobile phone. He explained to The New Yorker that he decided to come clean, because "I was putting a lot of time into this and was unable to get any credit for it."

Why is David working for the government if he has an Ivy League law degree anyway? If he's lucky, he'll get fired and then obtain a real job where he can contribute to society.

The NYT article mentions that Judge Posner thought that the author was a man all along:

"I have a theory that the author is not a she, but a he," Judge Posner told The ABA Journal eReport. "The thing is exaggeratedly feminine and constantly drawing attention to her gender."

Posner is a brilliant guy, which makes it so unfortunate that he was never nominated to the Supreme Court.

Opinionista is also a man pretending to be a woman

Christy (who is most certainly really a woman) pointed out to me in a comment the blog opinionistas.

The author of this anonymous blog claims to be a female in her twenties who works as an associate at a law firm (BIGLAW as it's called at the Greedy Associates boards).

It's pretty obvious to me that the blog is the work of a man. In his second post he writes:

I think there's no contest whatsoever between Alien & Predator, the whole premise is flawed - Predator is a highly intelligent being with superior technology, while Alien is just a scaly ill-tempered animal with acidy spit.

Women don't watch science fiction movies, especially not cute women. Once I went to a Star Trek convention, and there were only 10% women, and none of the ten percent could I imagine writing a blog like opinionistas.

The post entitled The Subway Code lends further evidence:

Many Manhattan women bewail the death of chivalry. "The men here are all complete assholes, none of them can be bothered to show the slightest bit of manners or courtesy, they'll only do something nice if they're trying to sleep with you, etc. etc." I honestly haven't given the topic much thought (that last one seems pretty obvious- the fact that Joe Lothario is buying your drink or opening your car door because he harbors some sexual agenda is hardly rocket science) . . .

Women actually do completely believe they are entitled to this sort of behavior from men and are totally unaware that men think it's just a lot of BS they have to put up with in order to get laid. Opinionista demonstrates far too much self-awareness about womanhood to be a real woman. Opinionista is a man.

Underneath Their Robes is gone

As noted by the Samuel Alito parody blogger, the blog Underneath Their Robes has disappeared. Yesterday I blogged about how the creator of UTR was actually a guy pretending to be a girl. Now he has taken down the blog. Wonkette suggests that his employer, the DOJ, made him take it down. Daniel J. Solove has some interesting commentary. He writes:

The drawing she supplies on her profile page is of an attractive Sex-in-the-City-type diva . . . and one who purports to be starstruck by the nerdy world of the federal judiciary. How exciting that someone--anyone--is even interested in this lonely corner of the world in the same way that groupies are into rock stars!

I guess the sad news for federal judges is that there is not a single woman anywhere in the United States that is startruck by them.

First, what will the consequences for David Lat be? He’s a federal prosecutor, and the word will quickly spread about his authorship of the blog. Will his supervisors look kindly on his blogging?

Federal prosecutors have no sense of humor. Poor David is toast.

Anonymity allows people to escape accountability for their words, but this comes at a cost -- the loss of authorship credit under one's real name. Lat wanted to have the praise and attention his female alter ego A3G was getting. He wanted to have his labor and toil on the blog associated with his name.

Sadly, David will only get five minutes of fame and that will be the end of it. No one is interested in guys, no matter how clever they are. On the other hand, if he was really a woman, and he wrote about getting paid for sex, then he'd be able to sell a book for $300,000.

Another female blogger turns out to be a guy

I wrote before about the blog Libertarian Girl in which a guy pretended to be a beautiful blonde recent college graduate, but his hoax was revealed when one of the blog's readers discovered that the picture of Libertarian Girl was actually taken from a "Russian brides" website.

The author of Libertarian Girl was neither the first nor last person to use this classic scam. Benjamin Franklin did it.

Now it has been uncovered that the supposedly female blogger behind the blog Underneath Their Robes is actually a guy by the name of David Lat. He/she has some further comments.

The unanswered question here is are there any successful female bloggers who are not men pretending to be women?

Photostream

I've been posting stuff to the internet, just not to this blog. Check out my Flickr photostream, it has a new photo every day.

Flickr

The reason I haven't posted anything recently is because I've been too busy playing around with Flickr. Check out my photo gallery.

Flickr is like blogging in the sense that the goal is to get other people to view your creative works. At Flickr, the creative works are photos instead of words. You can also leave comments on other people's photos.

The only problem with Flickr is that no one ever writes any bad comments. There are some photos I see and I want to say "geez, this photo sucks, why did you send it to a group, you should be embarrased that people should see it." But if you say stuff like that it would hurt your popularity, and then less people would view your photos. So a typical comment reads, "Wow! Nice photo."

About "Libertarian Girl"

"Libertarian Girl" was a successful blogger (Original Libertarian Girl blog at Blogspot and renamed Libertarian Man of Mystery blog at Typepad) until the blogging world found out that Libertarian Girl was really a man in his mid-thirties pretending to be a "girl." For a better explanation of the hoax, read If it weren't for you meddling kids. (I have it on word from the hoax blogger that he made up the part about being unemployed and living with his parents. He ways, "It added to the fun. It’s amazing how gullible people are. After being duped, they were so eager to believe the stereotype of the unemployed guy living with his parents.")

Six figure blogging

Manolo's shoe blog makes him a six figure income while i'm lucky to eek out four figures from blogging. Not fair.

If I could only think of some blog subject that could pull in that kind of money that someone else hasn't already done.

Online Dating Insider

One of the other blogs I run is Online Dating Insider. It's been a year since I last posted to it, but yesterday I got it into my head to try an experiment in which I'd use an online dating service and write about it in a blog.

It's going to be somewhat more voyeuristic than Half Sigma, but don't worry, my life is pretty boring so you can be assured that there won't be any Paris Hilton type videos.

Typepad's facelift

Kudos to Typepad for fixing some of the features that I found most annoying.

(1) Comment moderation: it's not something I ever intend to use, but it's nice that the feature is there.

(2) Typekey: for a long time only Movable Type users were able to use this feature. It's finally integrated into Typepad. Once again, I haven't had any problem with spam comments, but if they ever start happening then I will set the blog so that only people with a Typekey registration can comment.

(3) Better emails: the look of the notification emails has improved, and now finally there is a link to delete trackbacks from the notification email. (Half the trackbacks I get are bogus. If anyone sends me a trackback, and the trackback post doesn't contain any kind of link to me, then out it goes.)

(4) Comment permalinks: finally the comments on the default template have permalinks.

Did a New York Times article use deceptive statistics?

In my post about David Cay Johnston’s NY Times article about the top 0.1 percent, I wrote:

People will criticize the article and say it reads more like an editorial, and it does. It also uses some deceptive statistics that are designed bolster the point of the writer rather than shed any light. I give a big thumbs down to deceptive statistics. They are especially uncalled for considering that the non-deceptive statistics, like the one quoted above, are so illuminating.

David Cay Johnston didn’t like my characterization of his statistics as “deceptive.” He left a long comment on my blog. Most of his comment explains where he got his statistics from, which misses entirely the point of my comment. I didn’t say anything in the article was untrue, I was expressing my dissatisfaction with some of the statistics which were cherry-picked to overemphasize his point.

Johnston wrote in his comment, “For example? You don't cite a single example of a supposedly deceptive statistic.” The nature of blogs is that we don’t write huge essays all the time, it’s not what people want to read, nor do I have the time. But to set the record straight, this is probably the part of the article that made my deceptive statistics radar go off:

One way to understand the growing gap is to compare earnings increases over time by the vast majority of taxpayers - say, everyone in the lower 90 percent - with those at the top, say, in the uppermost 0.01 percent (now about 14,000 households, each with $5.5 million or more in income last year).

From 1950 to 1970, for example, for every additional dollar earned by the bottom 90 percent, those in the top 0.01 percent earned an additional $162, according to the Times analysis. From 1990 to 2002, for every extra dollar earned by those in the bottom 90 percent, each taxpayer at the top brought in an extra $18,000.

Using absolute dollars to compare rich and poor is an immediate red flag because it easily distorts the true picture. Furthermore, from the quote above, it’s hard to even understand exactly what he’s writing about. I presume he’s comparing the change in the arithmetic average income of the bottom 90% to the arithmetic average income of the top 0.01%, but he never tells us what these averages are nor how much they changed.

Imagine if, in 1950, the average for the top 0.01% was 200 times higher than for the bottom 90%. In that case, the top 0.01% earning an extra $162 for every extra $1 earned by the bottom 90% would mean that the bottom 90% were actually catching up, yet the way it’s phrased it appears that the top 0.01% are pulling away.

What about the $18,000 figure? Well, suppose that during a period of time, incomes were nearly flat, with the bottom 90%’s income increasing by 0.01% but the top 0.01%’s income increasing by 1%. Hardly a very big deal, only a 1% increase in income, but if the 0.01% started out with 180 times as much income, then the scenario above would equate to that $18,000 figure.

Now my numbers above are just made up to illustrate a point, but the point is that these comparisons from the article are meaningless because they tell us very little about the differences between the two groups, yet they give the appearance of the better off group being outrageously better off.

At the end of his comment, Johnston seems to be asking for an apology:

If you don't have an example of unethical conduct -- and that is what you accused me of -- but rather blogged without carefully thinking first then a corrective post would be the honorable response.

I don’t see why I need to apologize for accusing him of “unethical conduct,” because I never said he was unethical. Deceptive statistics are used all the time in the MSM (as well as the blogosphere), so they seem to be an accepted practice. Nor do I need to apologize for not “carefully thinking.” Even if true, it’s the nature of blogging that you can’t carefully think about everything you write, but in this case my original impression of the article most certainly does stand up to closer scrutiny.

Group blogs vs. solo blogs

In the blogosphere, Gordon Smith, Larry Ribstein, Orin Kerr, Kaimi Wegner and Dan Markel have been discussing the merits of group blogging.

Anyone familiar with the blogosphere must have observed that group blogs are disproportionately represented among the top blogs. If you find a blog that has zero inbound links and no readers, it is almost always a solo blog. But many of the top blogs are group blogs. In the top ten (according to the Ecosystem) we see that Daily Kos, Power Line, The Volokh Conspiracy and Boing Boing are all group blogs. A similarly high percentage of the top hundred blogs are group blogs.

Clearly, when group blogs work, the power of the group is greater than the power of an individual, making group blogs far more likely to rise to the top. But what exactly are the advantages of group blogs? First of all there is more frequent posting. I’ve been posting quite a bit since I started Half Sigma, but can I keep it up at this rate forever? (How does Glenn Reynolds manage to post so frequently and still be a law professor? As I explained in my post Law school: the big lie, law professors have pretty easy jobs.)

If a group of semi-successful bloggers joins forces, then each blogger brings his own readership to the new group blog, creating a much larger aggregate readership. Do four bloggers with 250 daily readers automatically create a group blog with a thousand readers? Maybe, maybe not. Some of the old readers may not like the new group format. But on the other hand, the synergy of more frequent postings and a larger audience could cause the new group blog’s readership to grow to 2000 per day.

According to Gordon Smith, the best group blogs have a consistent voice. I think he’s correct. Imagine a blog where one person is a liberal, one’s a Christian fundamentalist, and one’s a libertarian. Such a blog has no consistency. Readers would get confused and stop visiting. The group blogs on my blogroll, such as Catallarchy or Gene Expression, all feature co-bloggers that blog on similar topics from similar points of view.

The problem I see with group blogs is that, from the reader’s perspective, the co-bloggers’ individualities tend to become merged with the whole. Often when I read group blogs, especially groups blogs with a large number of co-bloggers, I tend to lose track of the individual names and just think of the blog as some monolithic Borg-like entity. I don’t think this is what most bloggers really want. I’m not getting paid anything for blogging, so my reward is the recognition I get from my readers.

Not all bloggers blog for free. Glenn Reynolds is making a six figure income from Instapundit. Larry Ribstein addressed this issue in his post. Human nature being what it is, bad feelings could develop between co-bloggers when it comes to dividing the profits. What if one blogger publishes twice as many posts as the other bloggers. Does he earn twice the profits? What if the less prolific blogger’s posts are much higher in quality? How do you determine each co-blogger’s contribution to the group blog?

Because of all these troubling caveats attendant to group blogs, I don’t think I’m ready to jump headfirst into the group blog waters. Although extremely unlikely, my dream is to earn a six figure income from blogging, much like Glenn Reynolds. I don’t see how a group blog could provide each co-blogger with that much income.

Job seeking by blog

Last month I posted about how blogging probably won’t help you find a job.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution notes that someone has tried a new blog related approach, trying to find a job by advertising on blogs.

The traditional job seeking advice is that advertising on the part of the job seeker doesn’t work. On the other hand, publicity just might work, and the job seeker in question seems to be getting some attention because he was the first person to think of advertising on blogs.

Does blogging help you find a job?

Michael Higgins has a post about this subject over at his Chocolate and Gold Coins blog. His post gives my blog a big plug, which is gratifying to my ego. Although his post his thoughtful and well worth reading, I’m going to have to respectfully disagree with his take that employers will be impressed by your blog.

In fact, the reason why my real name is not on my blog is because I don’t want people typing it into Google and finding me. But I just Googled myself right now, and to my horror my old blog came up as the top result because I left my name on the template! So I just removed my name and hopefully it will sink in the search results real soon. However, even though I am incredibly easy to find via Google, not a single employer I ever interviewed with bothered to find my blog, as far as I know. Women I’ve dated have found my blog. It’s interesting how women will put more effort into researching their dates than employers will into researching their job applicants.

My own take is that blogging requires a lot of intelligence to do well and it’s not a coincidence that a high percentage of top bloggers have Ivy League degrees. Ivy League schools only accept the most intelligent applicants. Writing skills are also required for blogging, and in fact blogging ought to improve one’s writing skills because practice always improves a skill. But skill in writing and intelligence, though correlated with each other, are also separate attributes.

Mr. Higgins writes that having a successful blog also requires good marketing skills, and this I agree with as well. Marketing your blog requires intelligence, an understanding of the importance of marketing, and a lot of effort. (I’m not so sure I put in enough effort to ever become an A-list blogger.)

So with blogging demonstrating all sorts of good things about a job applicant, what’s the downside? First of all, most employers are scared off by the unusual. Employers aren’t really looking for the best applicant, they’re looking for the safest applicant. The applicant least likely to make the hiring manager look stupid for hiring him. Because blogging is a big unknown, it’s a red flag to the employer.

Successful blogging requires a lot of effort, but employers don’t want employees who put a lot of effort into their hobbies, they want employees who put a lot of effort into their jobs.

A blogger with a truly successful blog (mine doesn’t reach such a lofty level) has power. Employers don’t want employees with power. They want powerless employees who can easily be bossed around. An employee with a well read blog can write about how much his employer sucks, and thousands of readers will then find out about it.

Employers tend to have an extremely narrow focus when looking for employees. So the fact that you have great writing skills and can market a blog means absolutely nothing unless maybe you’re trying to find a job in journalism or internet marketing. If employers really cared about your writing skills, they'd ask for a writing sample. I have found that no one ever asks for a writing sample unless you're applying for a job as a lawyer or as a writer. Employers are lazy and uncurious when it comes to hiring practices.

With all the negatives associated with blogging, my advice is to keep your blog hidden from current and potential future employers. However I’d love to hear other people’s take on this topic.

Runtime

Runtime is an interesting blog I discovered, authored by David Rea who works at a private equity investment firm. His blog is a technology blog (nerd alert!) but with more diverse topics than your typical technology blog.

For example, he writes about humans and computers playing chess together as a team, whether Russia has the best programmers, and the benefits of nuclear power.

Blogger's "Next Blog" button is broken

The “Next Blog” button displays on all of the free Blogger hosted blogs. It takes you to a random recently updated blog.

The button isn’t broken from a technical standpoint. But once upon a time you could keep hitting it and you’d catch a decent percentage of blogs worth reading.

Not so anymore. Half the blogs seem to be spam blogs (which are supposed to show up in Google search results and the blog author hopes someone will click on one of the ads—either that or they’re supposed to help boost some other site’s search engine visibility by linking to it).

Of the non-spam blogs, half of those seem to be in a foreign language.

Of the quarter of the blogs that are not spam and are in English, half are teenage blogs with awful templates and unreadable grammar/style.

Of the eighth that are not teenage blogs, half seem to be devoted to Christianity and Jesus.

In the end that leaves only one blog in sixteen worth looking at, and most of those suck as well.

A much better way to view random blogs is to go to the Typepad homepage where there’s a list of recently updated Typepad blogs. Because Typepad is a pay service, it weeds out nearly all of the spam blogs, the teenage blogs, and other low quality blogs. Foreign language blogs are also a lot rarer.

* * *

On my third attempt this morning at picking random Typepad blogs, I found a very interesting post about what it means to be Asian. The author writes:

And maybe you wouldn't think someone assuming I'm smart is a bad thing. But it can be annoying, especially when it isn't based on anything but my race. Why can't we just be of average intelligence and depicted as so?

One of the problems with America is that people think being smart isn’t cool.

No, use Typepad, not Blogger

The Mudville Gazette has a post about starting a blog, and it has mostly good advice. Anyone unfamiliar with blogging would certainly do themselves a favor by reading the post.

But I disagree with the recommendation to use Blogger as your first blogging tool. Blogger was my first blogging tool, and I once wrote about why Blogger is better than Xanga. However, after moving to Typepad, I endorse Typepad as the best first blogging tool.

The Mudville Gazette article mentions the importance of comments and trackbacks, and those are great reasons to use Typepad, because Typepad does a much more elegant job of embedding both into your posts.

The Mudville Gazette article also talks about the importance of a blogroll, and recommends BlogRolling.com. I find that the TypeList system built into Typepad works much better because it’s integrated with the rest of your blog. (The fewer external javascript widgets and pictures you have on your blog, the faster the page will load.)

At times, Blogger was pretty slow. Typepad seems more responsive, probably because the fact that you have to pay to use it keeps the volume of users down. Sometimes, I’d want to post something, but I would be unable to log into Blogger.

I’m not saying that Blogger is a bad tool. In fact, I would use Blogger again if I wanted to have a simple blog where comments and trackbacks weren’t important. But if you’re looking to do a politics type blog, and you want to get people to comment on and link to your posts, Typepad is definitely worth paying for.