The donations have kept coming in, as have Bitcoin donations. If you're one of the ones who sent me bitcoin, why don't you ring me up at gwern@gwern.net - what did you like so much that you were willing to donate?
I personally like your writings (over a lot of other blog articles) for the same reason I liked Nate Silver's writings over the punditry offered by WSJ op-eds and whatnot. You substantiate your claims with good math and statistics, and transparent methodologies.
Though it seems like most people here are commenting on your gwern.net articles, I'd like to say that I really enjoy the links you post on your google+ feed -- it has a higher signal to noise ratio than any other information stream I've found on the internet (including HN).
You are asking, gwern, a question about what people like about your writings. My answer, I hope, will be taken as a friendly suggestion about how to make your writings even better and more likeable. One area of research interest you and I share is the nature of human intelligence and what might be possible to do to improve human intelligence at the individual level. Having read extensively about this issue since 1993 (arguably since 1989, when I began extensive research on early childhood education), I been collecting bibliographies of the best sources on this topic for a long time.
When I started editing Wikipedia as a registered Wikipedian a few years ago, I soon discovered that many articles there on related topics are compiled in complete ignorance of the best sources on those topics. To do something about that, I have been compiling a bibliography in Wikipedia user space on IQ and human intelligence,
and I encourage you to look there for recommendations of up-to-date reliable secondary sources. (I am updating that bibliography as I do more research, so there may be new entries added there fairly soon.) It would be interesting to see what new paths your writings will take after more digestion of the previous literature on our shared topic of interest.
Another friendly comment is that many of your readers are glad to see your statistical approach to some of the issues you write about. I too like well writings that apply statistical analysis to data once they are gathered. I like even better writings that apply statistics to examine whether data are adequate to the task of answering the question posed by a researcher, as statistics is the science of data,
and what I have found out by participating in the University of Minnesota's journal club in behavior genetics with leading researchers on that subject is that many findings on human behavior now need to be reexamined as statistically astute psychology researchers reexamine the quality of data in old studies. Being aware of issues of validity of inference
is even more important than applying statistical manipulations to a data set after the data set is gathered. In their best use, statistics can help show which data sets need to be reexamined to make sure that a study inference is really warranted by data.
> and I encourage you to look there for recommendations of up-to-date reliable secondary sources. (I am updating that bibliography as I do more research, so there may be new entries added there fairly soon.) It would be interesting to see what new paths your writings will take after more digestion of the previous literature on our shared topic of interest.
I already know of that page, actually. I have been compiling citations for a while on 3 topics I'd like to write more about (the relationship of IQ & Big Five Conscientiousness, practical real-world correlates of IQ, and the net economic value of IQ points on the margin) and found a link to it. I don't think any of the entries proved helpful because I'm looking at such niche topics that I generally have to go to the original papers just to start.
> I like even better writings that apply statistics to examine whether data are adequate to the task of answering the question posed by a researcher, as statistics is the science of data,
> many findings on human behavior now need to be reexamined as statistically astute psychology researchers reexamine the quality of data in old studies.
True enough, but there's a lot of limits to this sort of thing: GIGO. For many psych studies, I think the same thing I do in arguments about the genetics of IQ: "why are we still arguing over this? there is no more meat on these bones. We know how to resolve these questions, we have the technology (to either replicate the experiments or look directly at the genetics), so why can't we just do it‽"
> You are asking, gwern, a question about what people like about your writings.
tokenadult, do you have an Ed.D or Ph.D in Education? Or maybe something related to Social Work?
Did you know that this communication style, which you use rather consistently in your HN posts, and which is prevalent in the education community, is poorly-received rather outside that community?
Not saying your style is wrong, just that is extremely grating outside the Ed world. It sits in the uncanny valley of faux-familiarity, and as such it breeds mistrust.
