As I blogged earlier, Tyler Cowen said that on his blog he can say what he really thinks, unlike other economists, who are often unable to say what they really think. Here is another example of the same thing from a blogger who writes about stuttering:

At least four [researchers] have told me that they try not to provoke or openly criticize work by a big name [researcher], because they are scared of having a paper rejected or getting no funding. Actually, they like me because I say what they do not [dare]Â to say [for] political reasons! So view my blog also as the voices of some in the research community!

This blogger isn’t a researcher so his situation isn’t the same as Tyler’s. But my point is the same: Blogs allow uncomfortable truths to be said that otherwise would not be said.

In the past this was much harder. To say some uncomfortable truth about this or that field of expertise (such as stuttering research or economics), the truth-speaker had to be (a) close enough to the field to understand it (which usually omitted journalists, with a few exceptions, such as Gary Taubes and John Crewdson) and yet (b) outside the field, so as to not suffer professional damage. There was also the problem of publicizing the uncomfortable truth. These requirements were hard to meet. Richard Feynman’s O-ring demonstration was a rare example where they were. Feynman knew what he was talking about yet was outside the industry, so he could say what insiders could not. (His criticism came from insiders.) Saul Sternberg’s and my criticism of Ranjit Chandra is another example. We knew enough about the sort of data Chandra had collected to criticize the work but were outside nutrition so we could say what we wanted to without risking professional harm.

A Philip Weiss example.

BC, AD, and BB. Before blogs, exactly how often could you read something like this — Philip Weiss (a Jewish journalist) criticizing pro-Israel bias among powerful (Jewish) journalists? Exactly never. Illustrating Tyler Cowen’s point that blogging allows him to say what he really thinks.

The Greatness of MondoWeiss.

If I had said to someone twenty years ago, “In twenty years there will be a way for you to say what you really think about everything related to your job, with a big audience” they would have looked at me as if I were crazy. Now, as Tyler Cowen pointed out, that’s actually the case, thanks to blogs. It’s a kind of psychological miracle. It’s due to technology, sure, but the achievement is essentially psychological.

It’s not the only psychological miracle that blogging provides. Consider this account of being in a mental hospital:

K, so since the night I got there, I would get a whiff of this nasty smell. It ‘s hard to describe, it was just nasty and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
One day, I’m in my room with two roommates and I smell it.
“There it is again!” I yelled.
“It always smells like this.” The older lady said.
“OmG, you’ve been here so long, you’re used to it,” I said, repulsed. However, I still couldn’t figure out where it came from. Some times I would smell it, then go back to that same place and it would be gone. It was making me (excuse the pun) feel like I was going crazy.
After using the bathroom, I went to wash my hands. Maybe it was the soap? No.
Later, I took a shower and sniffed the shampoo that came out of the pump on the wall.
It was the friggin shampoo! No wonder I got a whiff here and a whiff there. Everyone in the building (32 people) had that crap in their hair!

Vivid, easy to read, even enjoyable to read. Now you know a little — very little, but more than zero — about what it’s like to be in such a place. I read Girl, Interrupted. Lots of movies include scenes in mental hospitals — as stylized as a Dove ad. I didn’t see Titicut Follies. Maybe Sylvia Plath wrote about it, I don’t know. It’s been nearly impossible — or actually impossible — to get an accurate idea of what it’s like to be in a mental hospital without actually visiting one. But now it is.

Day after day I read Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss’s blog, even though his main subject — Israeli treatment of Palestinians, how this is enabled by Jewish Americans, what a mistake that is — is not something I read about elsewhere or think about when I’m not reading Mondoweiss. It would be too self-congratulatory to say now I care more about it but it is undeniable that now I know a lot more about it. Without any effort at all.

It’s like a really great column in a newspaper or magazine except it’s much better than that: Weiss can write anything he wants at any length at any time, unlike any columnist. The whole thing has a raw and impassioned and narrow and personal aspect unlike any column I’ve ever read. And it’s so easy to read, even though it’s unfamiliar and complicated. Here’s an example why:

I heard a crushing story about Aaron David Miller. He’s from Cleveland and a big Jewish family. He went to a synagogue there recently and spoke from the pulpit and said, The problem’s simple, two peoples fighting for a disputed piece of land, there will have to be a compromise. There was dead silence in the synagogue and the rabbi came up and said, “ In Numbers 34, God promised the land of Israe l to Moses, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean….”

What a chilling story.

Mark Liberman, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs at Language Log. Recently I asked him a few questions about blogging.

ROBERTS Why did you start Language Log?

LIBERMAN Several reasons. First, I had started reading blogs and enjoyed them. Second, I was spending quite a bit of time exchanging email with friends. They were like long-distance dinner-table conversations. Each email was a couple of paragraphs. I was spending quite a bit of time on that. It was interesting and fun, a way of keeping up with friends and former colleagues. I realized that many of these emails were close to blog entries that might be interesting to a wider audience. Some of them could have been blog entries. I thought to myself: If there was a weblog, instead of sending this to 1 or 2 people I could put it on the weblog and send a link to those people. Third, I had felt for a long time that linguistics, in our current culture, was in an historically atypical and irrational place. Almost nobody learned about linguistics, got any intellectual information about language. It was undertaught to the general public. It has been valued much more in the past. Now we’re in a situation where many English professors have never taken a course that teaches anything about the analysis of language. They don’t know how to do it. One small way to improve that situation would be to put stuff out there that people could read.

ROBERTS How has blogging affected you?

LIBERMAN Three things. First and most important, I’ve met — mostly digitally — a large number of people that I would never otherwise have met. They send me email. If I look over my email logs, there are probably 5 or 10 people that I correspond with frequently whom I’ve met that way. Most of them are not linguists; I wouldn’t have met them otherwise. Some of them are not even academics. Second, it has allowed me to influence the conversation inside linguistics and related fields in a way that I hadn’t really expected. It wasn’t my motivation. I’ve always thought of writing for people outside the field. Issues that I’ve raised within the field, including how the field ought to view itself, people respond to. I was invited to give a plenary talk at the Linguistics Society of America meeting about the status of the field in academia. I had blogged about such things. Third, I get a lot of calls from journalists asking me to comment about this or that. A lot of things they ask me to comment on I don’t know about. It made me someone that journalists call.

ROBERTS How have your views about blogging changed since you started Language Log?

LIBERMAN There is a spectrum of blogs; some are just sets of links — minimal comment and a link. When I started I thought that was what I was going to do, along with email-to-friends kind of pieces. Along the way I learned that a blog entry is a good way for me to learn things. If there’s something that I’m interested in, I may write a blog-like essay about it. I compose quite a few blog entries that I never publish. When I’m working through some ideas, I often organize my thoughts an awful lot like an blog entry. Like an annotated bibliography but with more structure. I don’t publish some of those things because I don’t think the general audience of Language Log would be interested in them. They’re too difficult. They take the form of an extended blog entry — links plus evaluation and discussion but more informal than a paper. Very helpful in organizing my thoughts. I read some things, put in some links, quotes, weave it all together into some structure. I produce an html document. It’s a way of taking notes. Something I do at the very beginning of an intellectual enterprise. A journal article is what you do at the end. For example, I’ve become interested in auditory texture. I’ve been composing a few things that are like weblog entries.

Once a month or so I try to do what I call a breakfast experiment. Some issue has come up in the world that I want to comment on. There’s an experiment that I wouldn’t want to submit to a journal. Better than an anecdote. For example, a few months ago somebody wrote that a journalist who had been living in Japan had been learning girl Japanese. Is it true that there is more gender difference in pitch in Japanese than in other languages? At the Linguistic Data Consortium we had conversations in many languages, including Japanese and English. I could select appropriate conversations, throw values into R, look at quantiles. (There were a few issues you’d want to clean up for a journal article.) I got up early, set up scripts, made coffee, had cereal, plotted quantiles. By 7:30 am I had some pictures. It was true that there was more gender polarization in pitch in Japanese than in English. The analysis involved 18 Japanese conversations and a similar number of English conversations.

I had been abstractly aware for a long time that there’s a lot of value in doing experiments on published data. One of the problems in doing empirical linguistics has been that gathering data takes a lot longer than anything else. For English we’ve now got about 10,000 extemporaneous telephone conversations, with demographic info about the speakers. I thought of experiments on that sort of data where someone had to spend a lot of time gathering the data, but once it’s gathered and published, there are a lot of ideas that you can try out very quickly.

In this case, Weiss says what he really thinks by repeating what someone told him:

She can never bring these ideas up with her Jewish relations, they go haywire. She never talks about these ideas in company.

But Weiss can express them without breaking a sweat. This is amazing.

Tyler Cowen on blogs as truth.

“I can say what I really think,” said Tyler about blogging a few days ago. Not only that, (a) this truth-speaking is on a topic he cares about, (b) what he says is based on considerable knowledge (what an ignorant person “really thinks” about something isn’t helpful), and (c) a lot of people listen. This is a potent mix.

The magic of blogging is that when you start you can tell the truth because no one is listening. With zero audience, it makes sense — it feels good — to tell the truth. If you are an expert like Tyler, this sort of thing is irresistible to readers (economics confidential) so your audience grows. Now it is too late to start censoring yourself; people are reading your blog because you tell the truth.

Tyler’s blog.