Half Sigma

Business Week doesn't quite get blogging

Instapundit also links to a worthy article about blogging at Business Week. But the author of the article demonstrates that he doesn’t quite get it when he writes:

If this were a true blog, that last post would have generated a mountain of comments over the weekend

Only a tiny fraction of blogs have enough traffic to generate even a foothill of comments. The vast majority of bloggers blog in unread obscurity.

The egalitarian part of blogging is that with hard work and smart marketing, a nobody can garner a readership, but it doesn’t happen very often.

Trackback spam and libertarianism

Captain’s Quarters, Ed Driscoll, and Epoch3 discuss the problem of trackback spam.

Trackback spam is an example of negative sum activity. Sending a spam trackback ping may have a benefit of +1 to the spammer, but a cost of -10 to the blog owner and readers. But because so many members of the human race are scum, they will engage in activity that has a benefit for themselves but a net loss for society.

So what does all this have to do with libertarianism? It’s like I said in my first post, “Pure libertarianism just doesn’t work because, when left to themselves, people pursue agendas to benefit themselves at the expense of society.” Trackback spam is just another example of this observation of human nature.

Sometimes, the most efficient way to stop people from engaging in negative sum activity is to make the activity illegal (or perhaps better, tax it so that the entity engaging in the activity pays back society for the harm caused). In this manner, well thought out laws and taxes benefit society and increase its economic efficiency.

Blog traffic: quality vs. quantity

I previously wrote about this topic at my old blog. The point was that traffic from Google is the worst kind of blog traffic because these types of visitors are searching for something specific and aren’t interested in reading blogs.

My move to a new blog at a new url demonstrates my point. Even though The Calico Cat gets over 1,500 unique visitors per day (nearly all from search engines), and the front page clearly tells people to visit my new blog, Half Sigma, only a tiny number of visitors have actually clicked on the link.

At least I know that my 80 visitors to Half Sigma yesterday were quality visitors.

Introduction to Half Sigma

My last blog, The Calico Cat, was probably classified as a Republican leaning blog. But I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the Republican party now exists to primarily serve two constituencies: (1) the wealthiest 1%; and (2) the Christian Right. Since I’m not a member of either group, I don’t see the point of continuing to identify as a Republican.

The Democratic Party, as much as it would like to claim the mantle of representing the average American, usually represents a bizarre web of special interests and political correctness.

I also gave up on being a libertarian. Pure libertarianism just doesn’t work because, when left to themselves, people pursue agendas to benefit themselves at the expense of society. The extremist ideas favored by the Libertarian Party and the people who post over at the Mises Economics Blog ignore human nature and are just too stupid to support.

Then there is the fact that everything Ayn Rand wrote was just plain dumb. (At least her two huge novels were dumb, I never read her other stuff.) One day, maybe I’ll write an essay about why Galt’s Gulch, the society envisioned in Atlas Shrugged could never work. Or why a guy like Howard Roark (the protagonist in The Fountainhead) is doomed to failure in any society with more than two people in it.

Therefore, given the failed philosophies of Republicans, Democrats, and Libertarians, I’ve created this blog, Half Sigma, based on the new politics of common sense.

Why Half Sigma? Perhaps you’ve heard of six sigma, a term from manufacturing that’s supposed to represent only 3.4 defects per million. Why not name my new blog six sigma? Besides the obvious problem that the sixsigma.com domain name was already taken, the less obvious issue is that no one is right all the time when it comes to politics or the social sciences.

Half sigma represents 38% of the normal distribution (assuming half a sigma on each side of the median). Being right 38% of the time, while seemingly humble, is actually pretty darn good when each problem has several solutions. Half sigma reminds us that we don’t live in a world where all the questions are true/false, even though our two party system unfortunately leads some to believe that.

When have I been wrong? Well, I was completely convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destructions. I was wrong about that. (Of course, if Collin Powell said that Saddam had WMD, why should I have disbelieved him?)

I also thought that getting a law degree from Arizona State University was a good idea. Boy was I wrong about that!