Alex Tabarrok: belief

Transcript context

…I tried doing that for two weeks a few years ago, just to be arbitrary, and a lot of people complained to me that they no longer had context for the posts. My style, in particular, is to assume the reader knows everything and give them nothing. They all think it’s Straussian or some secret code. It’s not. You don’t know what I’m talking about. That’s fine, but readers use the comments to norm and hone in on what I’m saying, like to see who gets upset by it, for instance. When the comments were gone, they felt rudderless and at sea, and that was more or less the correct reaction. The only thing worse than the comment section is no comment section. The comment section could be hit or miss. It usually misses on theory. People are not good at that, but you can sometimes find the one person in the world who knows more facts about the issue that you’re writing about. The ability of the blog to bubble that person to the top who has this really specific knowledge about this tiny, tiny area of the world, and then you can learn from them — that, I think, is very valuable about the comments. Do you guys read the Twitter responses to the MR posts?…

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