Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if th

Do you know why most professors don’t participate in the blogosphere, even if they publish ideas in the blogosphere?

‘Cause unless you’re engaging in advocacy, particularly political advocacy, and particularly dishonest advocacy (krugman, delong, thoma) it is not worth your time.

Worse, once you realize that (a) almost all online participants are engaging in a search for confirmation bias, and (b) that almost all humans are incapable of more than sentimental expression, or moral argument, and are permanently prohibited from ratio-scientific reasoning by hard limits to their abilities, and (c) that the deeper the knowledge you possess on any given subject, the more you contradict intuitive arguments -even within your discipline – meaning that

So you basically can participate online as publisher, or a teacher, or as an advocate; but it’s pretty hard to participate as a persuader – debater. Because almost no one is capable of conducting a debate – either because of limited ability or limited knowledge or both.

The value of the internet to average people, is not so much one of learning the new, but in their own error reduction within their own cognitive biases. And the rate at which we can reduce errors within our own cognitive biases.

This does not help us to develop agreement on any form of moral universalims. What it does, however, eventually, is give us an opportunity for proposing compromises across cognitive and moral biases – our reproductive strategies – so that it is easier to obtain consensus across a smaller set of errors within the same distribution of biases.