Gentle reader, you are a genius

At least, according to this page:

So far, the only other economics blog that I've found that is in this tiny and marginalised elite and distinguished group is Econbrowser. (Update: add the Becker-Posner blog to that list). Not incoincidentally, the typical ranking for a top economics blog is a high school reading level.

[h/t: The Bayesian Heresy]

Comments

[Andrew]

Econbrowser is head, shoulders, and most of the torso above the rest of the econoblogosphere when it comes to quality/difficulty of content.

I had genius, too, though. I start to wonder about the algorithm used for determining the rating.

[reason]

So this means that your website is badly written? Or are I misinterpreting something?

[Stephen Gordon]

In a way, that is sort of what it's saying. From what I gather, people with a high-school reading level should be able understand what's written at (for example) Marginal Revolution, but would have difficulty following what's written here. Some other blogs have 'College' or 'Post-Graduate' ratings.

Of course, that's all assuming that the algorithm used to generate these rankings makes sense. I can't seem to find any reference documenting what the rankings are supposed to mean.

[Ape Man]

I wonder about the algorithms myself. Your website is a little more technical then Marginal Revolution, but not as much more as the gap between high school and genius would seem to imply.

I tried it out on some of my own blogs just to do a comparison. It rated my Ape Man blog at Junior High, which is about right if you accept Marginal Revolution as being High School (although the comparison should also disprove the idea that the lower the ranking the better the writing). I then put my essay blog into the reader. It was rated at high school level. That did not seem quite right to me, although I suppose that if you take all my essays together you might ague that they average high school level.

So as a further check I threw URL for my essay "Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason" into the reader. It came out as high school level. Given that the only people who seemed to understand that essay had advanced degrees and given the fact that I had extensive quotes from Spinoza in the essay, I find that rating hard to believe.

Readability is subjective I guess.

[EclectEcon]

I know I've been slipping lately, and I realize that I pride myself on keeping my writing "accessible", but I was a bit put off to see that EclectEcon was rated at "elementary" level. 8-)