The Paucity of Elites Online

Blogging technical material at a level where it won't embarrass you can be a pretty demand and time-consuming task (especially if you want to provide any sort of graphs or visual accompaniment, and equations aren't hugely better either since you're not writing PDFs).

I still think that many people could do more at the margin without great cost to themselves.

What makes you think that blogging wouldn't crowd out high-level contributions, and that the elites are not elite in part because they don't blog?

I agree about there being opportunity cost, but I think that at the margin there should be more of an effort to put things in the public domain.

This could be fixed by someone providing infrastucture to blogging experts. A service that would do the following:

• receive the article in whichever form (word, latex, e-mail, paper)
• convert it to HTML
• check spelling
• publish the article online
• moderate the forum
• send relevant feedback (individually, or daily digests) by e-mail to author
• publish the author's response

This way the burden to authors could be kept at minumum. And it could be done by a few volunteers.

Surely this partially accounts for the phenomenon. But I didn't mean to claim that elite mathematicians are unusually unlikely to blog: what I meant to convey is that they have the most to offer (mathematically), so that the opportunity cost (to the world) associated with them not blogging is highest.

Thanks for pointing these out, which I had not seen before.

Neither blog seems to have almost any mathematical content, and the posts seem few and far between, so I don't think that they budge the bottom line. Even in the case of Gowers, the average number of mathematical posts is about one a month.

Also, the category "Fields Medalists" is in some sense cherry-picked, in that it happens to include Gowers and Tao in particular: if one broadens consideration to all of the prizes that I listed, the fraction of bloggers is much smaller (though the winners of the other prizes also tend to be older).

John Baez has made outstanding contributions to the mathematical community via blogging, and there are others. I restricted myself to major prize winners so as to avoid considering a larger and more amorphous reference class.

Out of curiosity, what is your subfield?

What's the value of them blogging to such a small audience, when most of us see each other two or three times a year at conferences?

Probably about the same benefit as having a mailing list, except that outsiders can access it. (I have no particular opinion on how useful a mailing list would be, but it seems like an appropriate reference class.)

None of them are Gold IMO medalists, so it's a good thing we're not working on existential risks!

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/hj5/research_is_polygamous_the_importance_of_what_you/

these blogs succeed ... because they ... exclude comments whose quality falls below a certain threshold.

I see an opportunity for philanthropy. Identity the elite people that one hopes will blog, and then pay for somebody else to do the comment moderation for them.

The problem I foresee is that this turns out to be big-money philanthropy. Who do you hire as your moderator? They probably need a PhD in mathematics, and the right personality: agreeable yet firm. People like that have lots of well paid options in which they are not playing second fiddle. The philanthropist backing this may have to come up with $150,000 a year to pay the wage bill.

Turning this round, it answers the question of why so few elites blog. Hoping that they take on the task of doing their own comment moderation and community building is hoping that they engage in some serious philanthropy and tolerate getting little credit (because they are paying in kind rather than in big wodges of cash).

Someone exceptionally good at something is likely to spend almost all of their free time on that something. If so they won't have time to routinely blog about it.

Yes, this is indeed so. Still, it may be possible for them to blog at least some more without very much cost to themselves.

Almost everyone who blogs a lot eventually posts something very stupid. If you strike someone off your list of elite thinkers when they say something really dumb, you'll end up with a list dominated by non-bloggers. (See also this old taw comment.)

• This may be a reason not to blog a lot, but not a reason not to blog at all.
• It's awfully silly to strike someone off of your elite thinkers for things that they say in a few blog posts, especially if they redact their positions later on. But the issue that you describe could be a deterrent in practice.
• I think the world would be a better place if people worried less about their reputations.

But if you wrote much more frequently, wouldn't your writing get better that much faster?

I agree that blogging more isn't the right thing for everyone to do. But for people who are highly productive and whose reputation is sufficiently secure, I think that it can be a very good choice.