Blair Fix

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My how time flies. As of April 11th, 2024, I've been blogging for five
years. To celebrate, I thought I'd engage in some obligatory naval
gazing.

### Why blog?

I
[started](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2019/04/11/economics-from-the-top-down/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} this blog on a whim. In the spring of 2019, I was one
year post PhD and busy publishing pieces of my
[dissertation](https://osf.io/preprints/thesiscommons/7uqw9){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. It was about as much fun as licking sandpaper.

The problem, I now realize, is that I hate academic writing. Although
academic prose may be the orthodox dialect of science, it's also the
surest way to kill the intrigue of scientific inquiry. Science is full
of wrong turns, heated debates, huge breakthroughs, and foolish
mistakes. In short, science is like a courtroom drama. But the academic
presentation of the drama is the equivalent of legalese ... dry and
unreadable.

What's odd, though, is that in 2019, I didn't know that I hated academic
writing. Instead, I thought I disliked *writing* itself. You see, for
seven years of grad school, I'd leapt into new research, delighted by
the tendrils of data that led to unexpected places. But when it came
time to write up the results, I felt mostly dread.

In hindsight, the problem was that I hated writing like an academic.
Grad-school training had me convinced that writing should be self
important, needlessly complicated, and utterly humourless. So when I
started blogging, I had an immediate [sense of
relief](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2019/05/28/resources-for-recovering-academic-writers/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. Instead of writing tortured prose, I could write
honestly about what I thought. It was hugely gratifying.

To be sure, I still find writing difficult. Often, I struggle for hours
(sometimes days) to express an idea clearly. But while this churn is
frustrating, the reward of clear communication is worth it. When the
idea is finally on paper, crystallized in a form that (I hope) the
average person can understand, I feel like I've crafted something worth
sharing.

Alternatively, if I've done something scientifically foolish (which I'm
sure I have), I'm proud to do it boldly and clearly.

### The joy of writing research notes

Besides enjoying the tone of blog prose, I like that blogging is a way
to resurrect the 'research note'.

A century ago, scientific papers were concise affairs. A scientist would
discover something interesting. Then they would write a short research
note that said 'here is something interesting'. The published note would
have minimal references, and a only a cursory nod to other literature.
In short, the paper was the equivalent of a modern blog post.

Over time, though, the requirements for a formal scientific paper grew
more onerous, especially the need to conduct a literature review. The
result, as Figure [1](#fig-lit-review) shows, was the persistent rise of
the phrase 'literature review' in written English.

[]{#fig-lit-review}

<figure class="wp-block-image size-large">
<img
src="https://i0.wp.com/economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/lit_review.png?w=723&amp;ssl=1"
decoding="async" data-recalc-dims="1" />
<figcaption><strong>Figure 1: Scientists, thou shalt review thy
literature.</strong></figcaption>
</figure>

To be sure, reviewing what other people have said about a topic is good
scholarship. And there is certainly a place for well-crafted reviews of
past thinking. (In a dissertation, for example.) That said, requiring
every scientific paper to have an exhaustive 'literature review' is
frustratingly redundant.

What's also redundant is the need to funnel science through academic
publishers. These organizations are essentially vampires that suck 30%
profit margins out of publicly funded research. [We don't need these
monsters](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/03/17/why-are-most-textbooks-still-proprietary/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. Science is a public good, and it can be conveyed
swiftly and easily through the public internet.

In short, blogging is an easy way for scientists to document their work
without the burden of formal publishing. So if you're a young scientist
(or even an old one), I'd encourage you to think of blogging as the best
way to convey your research.

### Blogging as note taking

Now to some obligatory life lessons.

During my masters degree, I once had a committee member bombard me with
criticism of my thesis. After several minutes of onslaught, he noticed
that I wasn't taking notes. The meeting did not end well.

Now the truth was that I thought the committee member's points were
fairly silly, and hence, not worth writing down. But the flip side is
that I've always been bad at taking notes. I had no system then, and I
have no system now. I just read stuff and remember whatever my brain
happens to remember.

That said, I now realize that blogging is how I take notes. It was Cory
Doctorow who tipped me off to how this works. (It's what he calls the
[memex
method](https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.) The idea is that no matter how great your system, note
taking on your own computer tends to devolve into entropic decay. You
take notes. Then you forget about them. Repeat.

In a sense, the problem is that when you write notes solely for
yourself, there's no pressure to be coherent. Unfortunately, my
experience is that it's the pressure to be coherent that makes notes
memorable. Because blogging is public, it forces a moment of reflection
before you write something down. It's this reflection --- driven by the
implicit threat of public scrutiny --- that staves off the entropic
decay of personal note taking. Or at least, it does for me.

The other nice feature of blog-based note taking is that it makes your
ideas easily searchable. All modern website builders come with full-text
search that is generally better than what you get on your computer. Add
the fact that your public blog will be crawled by search engines, and
you have a built-in recipe for indexing your ideas for future reference.

### Don't write SEO spam

Now to some obligatory advice about blogging. First up, don't write SEO
spam.

Some backstory. When I started blogging in 2019, I quickly learned that
business bloggers were obsessed with 'SEO' --- search engine
optimization. The idea was that you should write content that catered to
certain key words --- words that would get you ranked highly on search
engine results. I thought SEO targeting was stupid then, and I continue
to think it's stupid now.

The difference is that today, we know that SEO bullshit is ruining the
internet. SEO is a way to [game search
engines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} --- a way to place vacuous, ad-driven clickbait at the
top of search results. The consequence is that if you search for
something on the modern web, you have to sift through a mountain of
useless spam. Unfortunately, the popularity of large language models has
only made things worse, vastly increasing the ability of internet
enshittifiers to churn out SEO swill.

If you're starting a blog today, take no part in this enshittification
industry. Write for humans, not search engines.[^1^](#fn1){#fnref1
.footnote-ref target="_blank" role="doc-noteref" rel="noopener"}

### Search-engine traffic is over-rated

Speaking of search engines, there's a common assumption that
search-engine traffic is the route to internet success. But for the most
part, it's not.

Think of search engines like the tourist industry. Some websites are the
equivalent of Hawaii --- a place that depends on tourist traffic for its
survival. Such sites are almost always selling something, and their
content caters to the lowest common denominator. But other corners of
the internet are like a great local restaurant --- places that thrive
mostly by word of mouth.

A science blog (like this one) will invariable land in the second
category. Sure, some people will stumble upon it by chance. But most of
these tourists will eat one meal and never come back. The real audience
for your science blog are the readers who become 'locals' --- the ones
who read your stuff regularly.

Now the truth is that building a community of 'locals' is a tough slog.
There's no shortcut other than to keep at it. Sure, the odd post may go
viral. But my experience is that this short-term traffic has almost no
relation to long-term readership.

For example, when captain Elon Musk
[tweeted](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/musk_dk.png){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} a link to my post on the [Dunning-Kruger
effect](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}, it created a boom of tourist traffic. But almost all of
the visitors ate a single meal and never returned. (That's probably a
good thing. If a Musk-bro liked my research, it would suggest that I'm
doing something wrong.)

To summarize, while you're ignoring SEO, forget about targeting search
engines as well. Write for the group of engaged readers who like what
you do.

### Blogging is dead. Long live blogs {#blogging-is-dead.-long-live-blogs}

Now to some obligatory reflection.

The funny thing about 'blogging' is that the term itself has long been
an anachronism. Named after a contraction of the phrase 'web log', the
'blog'
[arose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} in the late 1990s as a kind of online diary, devoted to
the minutia of everyday life. But by the mid 2010s, this way of blogging
had been mostly killed off by social media. What survived were 'blogs'
that focused on issues of public importance. Science communication
flourished, as did web writing about all kinds of niche topics.

By the 2020s, people continued to declare that 'blogs' were dead.
Meanwhile social media had so thoroughly killed off traditional
journalism that reporters were fleeing to the blogosphere in
droves.[^2^](#fn2){#fnref2 .footnote-ref target="_blank"
role="doc-noteref" rel="noopener"} Of course, these journalists
rebranded their blogs as 'newsletters'. But pot*a*to, pot*ah*to. Call it
whatever you want ... my point is that self-published, internet-hosted
writing is alive and well.

### Thoughts on the future

Now to some obligatory speculation about the future of this blog. What's
in store? The short answer is *more of the same*. I'm going to continue
to do research that interests me, and I'll continue to write about it on
the internet.

That said, lately I've been thinking about the massive rise in audio and
video content on the web. Part of me dislikes this content, as it's
prone to gimmickry and meaningless pyrotechnics. But another part of me
realizes that it fills a huge void. The truth is that often, it's easier
to get knowledge from a talking person than from a word-laden page. For
example, I'm an avid consumer of YouTube talks about astrophysics.
Usually, the talks are accessible in a way that scientific papers are
not.

Turning to my own work, I try hard to make my research accessible. But
my guess is that by virtue of it being written only, I'm excluding a
(potentially large) group of people who'd prefer to have audio-visual
versions of my posts. The problem is that pontificating on video is
*not* my thing. I think slowly. So if I appear eloquent in print, it's
because I've agonized over my choice of language. Give me an open mic,
and I'll mostly sound like an idiot.

That said, I've noticed a trend in which bloggers record themselves
reading their own posts. This approach *does* interest me. Still, my
posts are typically data heavy, and charts don't translate well into
audio. So what to do?

Looking to the future, I'm toying with making audio versions of my posts
that come with embedded slides. (So basically, a YouTube slideshow.)
This approach appeals to me because I could make some whizzbang code
that automates the slideshow from the figures that are already in my
posts. Then I'd just have to record myself reading the text that I've
already written.

Anyway, in the near future, you may find audio/video versions of my work
that accompany the normal text version. Perhaps you will find it useful.

### Thanks for reading

This ends my anniversary trip gazing at my own naval. Regular
programming will resume soon, with an upcoming post about the [Jevons
paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}.

To everyone who reads this blog, thank-you for joining me on this
scientific journey. If you have the means, the best way to support my
work is by [becoming a
patron](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/membership/){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. And the second best way is to recommend the blog menu
to passing tourists. Some of these folks may become regulars!

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This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
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You can use/share it anyway you want, provided you attribute it to me
(Blair Fix) and link to [Economics from the Top
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### Notes

::: {#footnotes .footnotes .footnotes-end-of-document role="doc-endnotes"}
1.  [As Cory Doctorow [puts
    it](https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/){target="_blank"
    rel="noopener"}, "No one reads 2,000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM
    garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's
    feed."[![↩](https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png){.wp-smiley
    style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;"}︎](#fnref1){.footnote-back
    target="_blank" role="doc-backlink" rel="noopener"}]{#fn1}
2.  [More precisely, it was socially media *ad-tech* that killed off
    traditional journalism. As Facebook became a content aggregator, it
    sucked up the ad revenue that would have gone to newspapers. Google
    did the same thing, translating its search monopoly into an ad-tech
    monopoly. So while people may still *read* newspapers, for the most
    part, businesses no longer *advertise* in
    them.[![↩](https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/72x72/21a9.png){.wp-smiley
    style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;"}︎](#fnref2){.footnote-back
    target="_blank" role="doc-backlink" rel="noopener"}]{#fn2}
:::

The post [Five Years of Economics from the Top
Down](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2024/04/27/five-years-of-economics-from-the-top-down/)
appeared first on [Economics from the Top
Down](https://economicsfromthetopdown.com).


My how time flies. As of April 11th, 2024, I’ve been blogging for five years. To celebrate, I thought I’d engage in some obligatory naval gazing. Why blog? I started this blog on a whim. In the spring of 2019, I was one year post PhD and busy publishing pieces of my dissertation. It was about as much fun as licking sandpaper. The problem, I now realize, is that I hate academic writing.

Five Years of Economics from the Top Down

I have a confession: I’m a recovering academic writer. Here I share resources that have helped my recovery.

Hello, my name is Blair Fix. I'm a recovering academic writer.

Let me explain. I'm convinced that a major part of grad school is
learning to decipher academic prose. Let's face it --- academic writing
is usually bad. It's dense. It's jargon filled. It's often monotonous.
In short, academic writing begs the reader not to read it.

So a big part of grad school is learning how to read prose that was
designed not to be read. This takes great effort and a healthy dose of
masochism. If you've learned how to read academese, I commend you.

Having learned how to read academic prose, the next step in grad school
is to learn how to *write* this way yourself. Writing like fellow
academics signals that you're ready to join the guild. Your lofty ideas
belong in the academic pantheon.

I'll use myself as an example. During my master's degree, I did lots of
academic signalling. Check out my [master's
thesis](https://thesiscommons.org/e74ng){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}. It's a dense fog of verbiage that's almost unreadable.

So you finish grad school. Congratulations! You've learned to read and
write like an academic. What's next?

*Recovery.*

Take a hard look at your writing. Is it designed to be *read*? Or is it
designed to be *cited*? If it's the latter, then you need recovery. You
need to unlearn the bad habits you acquired in grad school. Rather than
write for the guild, you must learn how to write prose that is
intelligible to the non-expert.

As a recovering academic writer, I've spent the last few years
(re)learning how to write well. Below is a list of resources that have
helped me. I hope they aid your recovery as well.

### Writing guides for recovering academic writers

**1. *[The Elements of
Style](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33514.The_Elements_of_Style){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}* by Strunk and White**

This is the classic manual for clear writing. First published in 1920,
most of its advice is still sound. The advice that sticks with me most:
"*Omit needless words*".

Take a close look at any article that you find hard to read. You'll
probably find that many of the words are unnecessary. To recover from
academic writing, your first step should be to jettison the filler words
that clog your text. Here's Strunk and White:

> Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary
> words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that
> a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no
> unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his
> sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects
> only in outline, but that every word tell.

**2. *[Politics and the English
Language](http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}* by George Orwell**

This is George Orwell's famous rant against the prose used by those in
power. The quote that sticks with me: "In our time, political speech and
writing are largely the defence of the indefensible".

While Orwell's rant was directed at politicians (and their apologists),
it contains good advice for recovering academic writers. One tip is to
ditch pretentious vocabulary. I'm reminded of Orwell's rant whenever I
talk to people in management. Managers don't *use* things --- they
*utilize* them. And managers don't *speed up* a process --- they
*expedite* it.

I'm convinced that the purpose of this pretentious language is to signal
that you're part of a club. Managers talk differently than their
subordinates as a way to signal superiority.

I think academics writers do the same thing. I used to quickly write
down ideas in plain English. Then I would translate them into academese.
You see, the plain-written idea didn't sound important. I needed to
signal my academic pedigree by using pretentious language. Thanks in
part to Orwell, I'm recovering from this habit.

**3. *[On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing
Nonfiction](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53343.On_Writing_Well){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}* by William Zinsser**

What I like about good writing-advice books is that they *demonstrate*
good writing. Here is Zinsser making his point with clarity and force:

> Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society
> strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous
> frills and meaningless jargon.

Zinsser also does something that many writing-advice books don't. He
shows us how he's *edited* a first draft. We get to see the first copy
of a paragraph from his book, marked up with all the needless words that
Zinsser has removed. Then we get to read the clean final copy.

I also like that Zinsser stresses how difficult good writing is. In
fact, Zinsser admits that he doesn't like writing. He likes *rewriting*.
I feel the same way.

I dread writing the first draft of a new paper. It's tedious, difficult,
and filled with dead ends. But once I've finished the rough draft, I
enjoy rewriting. When you rewrite, you're clarifying your *thinking*.

**4. *[Style: Lessons in Clarity and
Grace](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39323425-style){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"}* by Joseph M. Williams**

This is one of the most detailed writing-advice books that I've read.
It's full of examples and practice questions.

Williams touches on many areas of bad writing. If I had to choose one
point, it would be to avoid *nominalizations*. A 'nominalization' is
when you convert a verb to a noun. Take the clear sentence: "We
investigated the matter". To make the sentence less clear, just
nominalize the verb 'investigate'. You get: "The agency conducted an
investigation into the matter". Academic prose is littered with
nominalizations. Recovering academic writers need to ditch this habit.

Another great part of Williams' book is that he shows how to structure
sentences. No, I don't mean how to write with correct grammar. I mean
how to structure sentences so they are cohesive and accent your point.
William's advice is to begin sentences with information familiar to your
readers. You should end sentences with information that readers cannot
anticipate.

**5. *How to Write a Great Research Paper* by Simon Peyton Jones**

This writing guide is different that the ones above. It's not a book.
It's a youtube talk:

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There are so many things that I like about this talk. Jones stresses
that the job of a writer is to pass on ideas. Good writers *infect*
other hosts minds with their idea.

I also like Jones's formatting advice. First off, ditch the meta summary
at the end of your introduction. This is the sentence that says: "The
rest of this paper is structure as follows. In Section 1 we ... ".

Jones points out a dirty secret: no on ever reads this meta description.
So don't bother writing it. Instead, use *forward references*. Tell
people about your findings, and reference the sections as you go. For
instance: "We find that the first step of recovery is to admit that you
are a bad academic writer (Section 2)".

Another great point: put your literature review near the *end* of the
paper. Think about this. Before we write about our research, academic
writers bombard readers with what *other* people have said. This is
masochistic. The point of a literature review is to compare your
research with others. So why not do this *after* you've told people
about you findings? It will make your paper far more readable.

### Final Thoughts

They say that addicts don't recover until they've hit rock bottom. The
problem with academic writing is that there is no rock bottom. You can
spend your whole academic career as a bad writer with no bad
consequences. As long as you communicate successfully to your guild,
you'll do fine.

But this is a narrow-sighted way to do science. I think scientists have
a mission to spread knowledge. Yes, this means talking to other guild
members. But it also means talking to non-experts.

[John
Hawks](http://www.johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/tenure-blog-prosper-2008.html){target="_blank"
rel="noopener"} makes this point poignantly. If you're an academic
writer who is skeptical that you need recovery, think about Hawks'
words:

> Your education cost a lot of time for yourself and a lot of money,
> either for yourself or somebody else. Your work may have been funded
> by governments, universities, or private foundations. Your education
> may have been funded by your parents. They have asked you for nothing
> but good work. But you can repay them with more than this: you can
> explain why your work is valuable, making it clear to everyone why
> their money and your time have been well spent.

As a recovering academic writer, my goal is to write so that my parents
can understand my research. Since they read this blog, they can let me
know when I'm successful.

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Hello, my name is Blair Fix. I’m a recovering academic writer. Let me explain. I’m convinced that a major part of grad school is learning to decipher academic prose. Let’s face it — academic writing is usually bad. It’s dense. It’s jargon filled. It’s often monotonous. In short, academic writing begs the reader not to read it.  So a big part of grad school is learning how to read prose that was designed not to be read.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Five Years of Economics from the Top Down

Resources for Recovering Academic Writers