2019 in review: state of the blog
Other part of the 2019 review: reflections.
2018 review: state of the blog, analytic, reflections.
2017 review: analytic, narrative.
2016 review: analytic, narrative.
Writing
My favorite posts from 2019:
- Watchmen trilemma – "In symbolic terms, the Transcendent occupies a middle position between Philosopher & Antiphilosopher."
- Altruistic action is dispassionate – feels like an important piece of any sustainable moral theory, was glad to get it down in writing
- (a) – "I think basically anyone whose writing includes links to other work should include archived links alongside the original hyperlinks, if the writing is intended to be long-lived. (And if you're not trying to write long-lived content, what are you doing, even?)"
- China notes – some thoughts from a March 2019 trip to China
- What we talk about when we talk about life satisfaction
Most viewed posts in 2019:
- Scott Adams' persuasion tips – from 2017
- Jordan Peterson on Exodus – not really sure why this was so popular
- Two quotes from "The House I Live In" – from 2015
- Jordan Peterson on hockey & iterated games – from 2018, linked to from my About page
- Excerpts from "The Gulag Archipelago" – from 2017
As always, the blog's landing page was the most visited page of the site. But the content of the landing page rotates (always displaying the most recent post), so this doesn't say anything about what posts were most popular.
Statistics
I posted substantially less in 2019 than in 2018, though more than I had in previous years (2019: 65 posts, 2018: 141 posts, 2017: 41 posts, 2016: 35 posts).
In 2019, ~4,100 people visited the site – roughly 340 visits a month. That's up about 1.6x from 2018, when ~2,500 people visited.
(Note that these aren't unique visitors – if one person visits on two different days, that's counted as two separate visitors. However, if the same person goes to multiple pages during the same session, that's recorded as one visit.)
Plan for 2020
I plan to keep on keeping on in 2020 – posting interesting things when it feels fun to do.
Given everything else that's going on presently, I expect that this will mean fewer posts in 2020.