{"id":201525,"date":"2026-08-26T17:54:33","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T01:54:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201525"},"modified":"2026-08-26T18:34:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T02:34:33","slug":"andrew-gelman-the-e-personality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=201525","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Gelman & the E-Personality"},"content":{"rendered":"

In June 2007, three years into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science<\/a>, Andrew Gelman<\/a> (b. 1965) wrote a short post about blog personalities<\/a>. He and Seth Roberts<\/a> (1953-2014), who interviewed him about blogging<\/a> that same spring, were both aggressive conversationalists face to face, he said, and both of them turned into someone else online. His own online self was the mellow one. He gave a reason. An academic with a reputation has more to lose than to gain from gratuitous controversy, so when he criticized something he could substantiate, he did it in a mild voice.<\/p>\n

Elias Aboujaoude<\/a> (b. 1971) published Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality<\/em><\/a> four years later, in 2011. His argument is that sustained life online produces a second self, more assertive and less restrained than the offline person, and that the second self does not stay online. He gives the traits chapters: delusions of grandeur, narcissism, ordinary everyday viciousness, impulsivity, infantile regression, the illusion of knowledge, the end of privacy. The closing chapter names the migration virtualism, the process by which the offline man drifts toward the online one.<\/p>\n

Gelman inverts the opening premise. Every other subject I have run through this framework, such as Paul Bloom<\/a>, Philip N. Cohen<\/a>, Amy Wax<\/a> and Nathan Cofnas<\/a>, gets louder online. Gelman got quieter on purpose, and then his influence boomed.<\/p>\n

The prudential reason he gave is incomplete, and his own archive shows it. Seventeen years before the blog personalities post, in a Harvard dissertation on image reconstruction for emission tomography<\/a>, he wrote in the same register. The PET study behind the thesis had five subjects, and he says in the text that the sample was too small to estimate the effects of interest. He reports in his own conclusion that an implementation he does not present indicates the standard model of PET data is incomplete in practice. He ran it, it failed, and he told a reader who was never going to check. There was no reputation at stake in 1990 and no audience to manage. The mild voice was not a policy adopted for the Internet. It was already how the man wrote when nobody was reading, which means the blog did not create the restraint. It found it and put it to work. <\/p>\n

Consider first what Aboujaoude calls grandiosity — the swelling of what a man believes he can do and how far his word should carry. In a university, Gelman is a statistician and a political scientist. Those are his departments and his training and the rooms where his authority is chartered. On the blog he passes judgment on psychology, epidemiology, nutrition, public health, education, medicine, polling, economics, and whatever paper landed in his inbox that morning. Noah Smith put the result to him in a 2022 conversation<\/a>: the frightening sentence in academic life is that Andrew Gelman just blogged about your paper. <\/p>\n

An expansion of jurisdiction on that scale has no offline equivalent. No committee appointed him. No editor commissioned him. No discipline credentialed him to referee the others. The blog gave a man trained in one thing standing to rule on twenty, and the ruling sticks because the technical objection travels across fields even when the substance does not.<\/p>\n

That is where the illusion of knowledge enters, and where Gelman is at once the phenomenon and the argument against it. Aboujaoude’s worry is that fast access to information gets mistaken for mastery, and that the network trains us to know less and less about more and more.<\/p>\n

A post from December 2015<\/a> shows the shape. A reader sent him a biology paper and asked whether he believed it. Gelman’s answer amounted to this: seventy-one subjects split four ways, no. He said in the same breath that he did not know the field and could not evaluate the biology. He ruled anyway, from the structure of the evidence rather than the content of the claim.<\/p>\n

Read one way, that is the Internet expert Aboujaoude warns about, pronouncing on a literature he has not read. Read another way, it is the whole point. A design that cannot support an inference cannot support it in any field, and a man who understands designs can say so. <\/p>\n

Gelman consistently marks the edge of what he knows and keeps marking it. I am no expert here. I do not know. Here is what bothers me. In January 2011<\/a>, asked how to teach introductory statistics better, he said he did not know how, and added that one of the pleasures of tenure and blogging was being free to say so rather than bury the uncertainty for publication. The medium that Aboujaoude says inflates confidence is the medium Gelman uses to publish his uncertainty, because the journal will not take it and the seminar will not reward it.<\/p>\n

So the illusion of knowledge cuts twice. The blog enlarges the territory across which he can pronounce, and his central intellectual commitment is the deflation of pronouncements. <\/p>\n

The viciousness chapter fits with less resistance. Aboujaoude’s argument there is that anonymity is not required for disinhibition. Named people harden online too, because the ordinary brakes, the face across the table, the warmth, the manners, all go missing.<\/p>\n

The mature blog runs on a vocabulary of ridicule. Power pose. Himmicanes. Gremlins. The coinages are funny and they are meant to be. They turn a methodological failure into a comic object with a handle, and the handle is why the lesson travels. Gelman has defended the practice on those grounds. During the 2016 fight over methodological terrorism<\/a> he said that a little mockery makes a point memorable<\/a>, and he has admitted writing silly posts because he wanted to entertain. The New York Times, describing the blog, noted that his critiques get read with a certain pleasure at other people’s expense.<\/p>\n

He has set the reasoning out at length<\/a>, and it holds up on its own terms. Ridicule is vivid. Vivid teaches. Status protects bad work, and mockery punctures status.<\/p>\n

Would the coinage arrive if the target were sitting three feet away? Sometimes, probably. Always, no. The screen changes what each move costs. The target’s embarrassment is a name on a page. The audience’s amusement arrives within the hour, in the comments, in the reposts, in the phrase entering circulation. What reads as cruelty across a seminar table reads as wit when the man is a hyperlink.<\/p>\n

The coinages are the mockery, and they attach to particular targets. Count them. If the ridicule vocabulary clusters on the famous and the tenured and the TED-adjacent, then the disinhibition runs along a status gradient rather than a random one, and the finding is about who the form licenses him to mock rather than about whether he is mean. That count belongs with the larger audit of his targeting, and it would settle a question that this essay can only raise.<\/p>\n

Narcissism needs care, because the word carries a clinical meaning that has no business here. Twelve thousand posts and two hundred thousand comments<\/a>, written mostly by one man, construct a world where that man’s attention is the organizing principle. A paper enters because he found it interesting. A dispute continues because he kept thinking about it. A researcher recurs for a decade because the case became useful in his vocabulary. Wansink is not a subject on that blog. Wansink is a category.<\/p>\n

Gelman publishes corrections. He links to people who say he is wrong. His comment threads are full of readers telling him so, and he answers them, and he changes his mind in public, and he says which commenter caught him. In 2019 he credited<\/a> part of his methodological development to answering questions from strangers on the Internet. An e-personality organized around admiration does not run an open thread for twenty-two years and let it correct him in front of the audience.<\/p>\n

Aboujaoude’s Internet rewards sending before thinking, action taken before the information is in. Everything about the blog’s surface says impulse. The prose is colloquial. A post opens mid-thought, as if you walked in on a conversation. Somebody just sent him this. This seems ridiculous to me. Thought appears to become publication with nothing in between.<\/p>\n

Then look at the machinery. He was already running a backlog in 2007. By 2015<\/a> he was posting a month or two in arrears and arguing that the lag improved the result, because by the time a post ran he had seen more and could revisit it. In April 2018<\/a> he mentioned that an item written in September had waited until then for a slot. On August 15, 2026<\/a>, he announced that the queue had reached a full year. Posts written now appear in August 2027. He still bumps timely material forward, and his co-bloggers publish when they like.<\/p>\n

A man who has turned the instant medium into a periodical is not the man the impulsivity chapter describes. Something more interesting is going on. The voice still says I just saw this, and the publication system says nothing of the kind. Spontaneity has become a style rather than a condition. The prose performs immediacy that the calendar has removed, and the performance is so consistent that most readers have no idea they are reading a man’s thoughts from last summer.<\/p>\n

Regression comes out mixed. Aboujaoude means the childlike register the browser invites, the emoticon standing in for the sentence, and, more seriously, the way the short forms excuse a writer from building an argument that has to hold together across pages.<\/p>\n

The playful half applies. The joking titles, the running gags, the feuds, the recurring parables all let a chaired professor at Columbia behave in ways The Annals of Statistics<\/em> would not permit. The blog gives him room to play, and he takes it.<\/p>\n

The serious half fails. Posts run to thousands of words. Arguments continue through hundreds of comments. A post from 2011<\/a> refers back to one from 2006 and forward to one from 2019. Papers have come out of comment threads. Readers arrive with counterarguments and he revises. The retro feed<\/a> he set up in 2019, which reposts the archive from the beginning at one entry every eight hours and will take a decade to catch up, is a monument to how much of it is worth rereading. The Internet fragmented most intellectual life. He used it to rebuild a seminar that never adjourns.<\/p>\n

Which brings the argument to virtualism.<\/p>\n

Aboujaoude’s last move is that the online self migrates. The offline man becomes, over years, an approximation of the man he plays on the screen. In most cases that means a person gets harsher, faster, surer, and does not notice.<\/p>\n

In Gelman’s case the migration went somewhere stranger. <\/p>\n

In 2007 he had an alter ego who was calmer than he was, adopted for prudential reasons he could state out loud. That alter ego published every day for two decades. It acquired a vocabulary, a cast of recurring characters, a body of parables, a readership that arrives already knowing the references, and a reputation that arrives at a researcher’s inbox before the post does. Somewhere in that accumulation the alter ego stopped being a manner and became a position. The mellow blogger turned into the man Noah Smith could call the scourge of bad statistical papers, the man whose attention functions as a sanction.<\/p>\n

Andrew Gelman working through journals, seminars, and referee reports can tell three people that a paper is bad. Andrew Gelman on the blog can tell thousands, without an editor, without a referee, without a discipline’s permission, on a schedule he sets, in a voice that admits doubt, with a comment section that lets the accused answer. That is a form of standing no university confers and no journal can revoke.<\/p>\n

The public Andrew Gelman is by now a character, and the character is more stable than any man. He hates unearned certainty. He pounces on noisy studies. He loves multilevel models and hates bad graphs. He distrusts prestige. He revisits old enemies. He says I don’t know. He tells you when he was wrong. Twenty-two years of posts, thousands of commenters, and a permanent archive built him jointly, and no single author, Gelman included, can now revise him. The archive does not forget.<\/p>\n

Aboujaoude expects the medium to enlarge the man’s aggression. Here it enlarged his jurisdiction. The 2007 inhibition was real and it held for years, and it turned out to be the thing that made the expansion possible, because a mild voice applied to a hard claim for two decades earns a standing that a loud voice never would. He was careful because he had a reputation to protect. The care built a larger reputation, which bought a larger license, which he now exercises across every field that publishes a number.<\/p>\n

There is a caution in that for anybody who admires the result. The office he built is available to him and to almost nobody else. Sustained public criticism of famous work requires emotional stability, financial independence, tenure, technical credibility, a second discipline to stand in, textbooks everyone assigns, and no need for the target’s approval. A graduate student who wrote the same posts would likely be unemployable.<\/p>\n

Aboujaoude worries that the archive holds us to selves we have outgrown. Gelman’s archive does exactly that, and he treats it as an asset. He can point at what he said in 2004<\/a> and show that the equipment predates the crisis that made it valuable. Most men would find a twenty-two year record of their opinions a liability. A man whose whole method is to check what a claim looked like before the result came in finds it the best evidence he has.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In June 2007, three years into Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, Andrew Gelman (b. 1965) wrote a short post about blog personalities. He and Seth Roberts (1953-2014), who interviewed him about blogging that same spring, were both aggressive … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andrew-gelman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=201525"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201536,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201525\/revisions\/201536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=201525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=201525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=201525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}