Comments on: That’s It for Me, I Suppose

By: First Post « Math Ed Blog

First Post « Math Ed Blog — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 21:36:34 +0000

[...] also discovered that founding C of M poster Alon Levy quit doing Abstract Nonsense a couple months back. Well heck. Anyhow, congratulations on an outstanding [...]

By: C. L. Hanson

C. L. Hanson — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:07:32 +0000

BTW, speaking of your math carnival, I have two posts I was thinking of submitting, but I'm not sure either one is appropriate since they're just barely on the fringes of being about math. Way back in May of 2006 I wrote a post containing a little bit of knot theory (the actual math part is in the comments): celtic knotwork. The other one I posted just the other day on my professional blog. This one is probably not interesting to real mathematicians, it's more of a fun little real-world application of some very simple math: a little maze algorithm.

By: C. L. Hanson

C. L. Hanson — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 09:46:19 +0000

I don’t spend that much time on the very biggest blogs myself because I feel like you don’t get the same quality of back-and-forth discussion as on some of the smaller blogs. I guess I’m less frustrated by the quality of political debate out in blogspace though because I’m not much of a debater. My style is more “Hey, here’s an idea, what do you think?” than “I know the right answer.” That’s the main reason I haven’t posted many comments here: your style seems a tad more confrontational than mine. I don’t mean that as a criticism — just a stylistic difference. I think you have a lot of good insights and analysis, and I definitely spend time thinking about your posts after reading them.

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:24:26 +0000

You’re crazy if you think I’m going to stop reading Debitage just because I don’t feel like posting anymore.

By: Stentor

Stentor — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:14:38 +0000

Dang, I’m losing my only reader!

By: Some Blogging Reflections « Growth Rate n lg n

Some Blogging Reflections « Growth Rate n lg n — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 04:32:43 +0000

[...] Blogging Reflections Published March 11th, 2007 Other Crap Alon has been contemplating a blog-freeze, and now considers himself fairly certain that he’s going to do it. I’m [...]

By: SLC

SLC — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:42:43 +0000

I might suggest that in Mr. Levys’ non-mathematical posts, he try to be a little less wordy and a little more focussed. Mr. Levy has a tendency to be a little long winded. Keeping short and punchy is more effective then long winded.

By: Ran Halprin

Ran Halprin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:09:22 +0000

re “this blog doesn’t have an especially balanced body of commenters, let’s face it. “ – if you write less about Galois fields and more about American Idol, u might have more opinionated commenters

By: Ran Halprin

Ran Halprin — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:06:53 +0000

I think the biggest problem with blogging, and the intellectual world in general, is the fact that a thinking human has many different issues they deal with, but they won’t be interested in reading other people’s array of issues – They usually want to read only thoughts of interest for a specific issue at a certain time.

This paradox makes blogging problematic, unless u’r mind only deals with a single issue at a time, which usually means u r crazy or just a plain fanatic. Some people would use the term “professional”, but I think its not very professional to use it

Eventually this paradox ends us leaving the shaping of the world intellectual resources to the select few fanatic and insane individuals who are also non-productive enough to have time to share and push forward their thoughts in a convincing manner.

By: Alon Levy

Alon Levy — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:49:50 +0000

I don’t think I’m crowded out of the internet – at least not yet. As I said, I still have email. And I’m not sure I’m going to shut down this place; it makes sense to start by striking out the most offensive echo chambers from my blogroll and starting to concentrate on better milieus.

For example, Ezra Klein has no official everything goes comment policy, but in practice he has lively dissent, which has unfortunately degenerated into two Republican hacks regurgitating talking points and Democrats regurgitating talking points back at them. The only trick is to promote a more reasonable level of dissent (which, incidentally, does exist on Ezra Klein, only among less prolific commenters).

So I might start small and focus more on the sort of posts I’ve written in the past that don’t involve weighing in on pointless blog wars. The idea is to tailor my writing to what my readers appear to want to see rather than to what Amanda Marcotte et al like.

The group blog idea sounds basically good, but if we go for it, I suspect we’ll need to know exactly who’ll be writing there in the first place, in order to have a good balance of points of view. Echo chamber or not, this blog doesn’t have an especially balanced body of commenters, let’s face it. On Appletree, some of the best discussions are those where Gordo and I disagree. So it would make sense to also have someone like J4Jesus, who, as Lynet notes, has shown a very strong capability of making reasoned arguments.