15th Anniversary

It has been 15 years since I started this blog! As typical with many of my anniversary posts, I reflect on things that I have started to do and/or have learned since the last time I wrote an anniversary post. Here's the full collection of anniversary posts from past years:

• https://davetang.org/muse/2014/10/01/4th-anniversary/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2015/10/02/5th-anniversary/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2016/09/30/6th-anniversary/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2017/10/01/7th-anniversary/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2020/10/01/ten-years/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2022/10/05/twelfth-year-python/
• https://davetang.org/muse/2024/10/01/14th-anniversary/

For this year's anniversary post, I'd like to bring to your attention something I recently read in HyperCapitalism: values, as in beliefs and guiding principles about what's worth pursuing in life. There's a section that talks about the work of Shalom H. Schwartz who is known for his pioneering work on modern values research. Schwartz came to identify 10 basic values via surveys that are fundamental to human experience:

1. Self-direction, independence of thought and action
2. Tradition, respect for cultural practices
3. Security, safety, harmony, stability
4. Achievement, successful accomplishment
5. Stimulation, novelty, excitement
6. Benevolence, helping and supporting the people around one
7. Conformity, fitting in, restraining the self to be like others
8. Universalism, helping and supporting all people and nature
9. Hedonism, sensual pleasure
10. Power, status, prestige, dominance over people or nature

These 10 values are shown in the Schwartz circumplex, which I was going to use from Wikipedia but the image seems to be copyrighted, so I created the same plot using {ggplot2}:

The values are arranged such that positively correlated values are next to each other and negatively correlated values are opposite each other. The survey that determined the basic value asks each participant to rate certain values on some scale; the correlation is calculated by how participants rated the values. For example, power and universalism are negatively correlated meaning that many of the participants who gave a high rating to power, gave a low rating to universalism or vice versa. I find that the arrangement makes sense. Someone who is more interested in pleasure (hedonism) is less likely to be helping the people around them. Someone who wants stimulation and novelty surely is less likely to conform to tradition. And actually if I had to rate the basic values, I would definitely rate Self-direction, Universalism, and Benevolence the highest and Hedonism, Achievement, and Power the lowest.

One of the things that has kept this blog going on for 15 years is my belief that my blog is still useful simply based on the number of visitors to my site. In recent years, the number of visitors have basically dropped off a cliff, which I guess can mainly be attributed to ChatGPT and the like. Almost all my traffic is organic and I'd say 95% or more via Google. I'm not sure what I would do if one day Google and/or some other tool just cuts out my website from their users. I guess this is already happening via AI summaries and all the web scraping for training LLMs. With regards to the web scraping, I have had to password protect my Wiki site because the AI bots were sending so many requests to it that my site would grind to a halt! While I think LLMs can be useful, they really are killing the Internet in my opinion. Anyway, it's almost the 2nd of October so I better publish this post before it's past my anniversary. If you're still reading this blog in 2025, please leave me a comment or send me an email!

Oh, and check out my daily tips! I've been adding one tip a day for almost 6 months!