Social media is just the market’s answer to a generation that demands to perform. So the market said “Here: perform everything to each other all the time for no reason.”

It’s prison, it’s horrific… If you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.

– Bo Burnham, Make Happy

Alexey Guzey wants to persuade you to start a blog. He doesn’t care who you are or what your credentials. You, random internet stranger, should get out there and start sharing your thoughts.

What?

That’s sounds unjustifiably naive, but in his defense, there is a filter. Alexey’s advice is only transmitted to the kinds of people who read his blog, and thus demonstrate themselves to be the kinds of smart contrarians capable of generating insight. I guess that’s something, I’m just not sure it’s enough.

Let’s try this again. Should you start a blog? Here’s the statistical-quirk-insight-porn version: the blogs you read are, almost by definition, among the most popular. You are systematically exposed to success stories while the failures slither silently in the shadows. It’s all selection bias.

If you like writing and you want to write, do it privately. Share it with a few friends. If those friends insist on sending your writing to their friends, and if those friends-of-friends do the same, then maybe you have something good going on. Otherwise, you’d better keep your day job. Quitting isn’t going to turn you into a creative genius capable of churning out the daily intellectual labor that Substack demands.

Or as Byrne Hobart put it, “Writing: Good Career Move, Terrible Career”. [1]

Having said that, the problem is not even you’ll be unsuccessful and waste a bit of time. It’s that you’ll be moderately successful and waste a ton of time. The US median income is $36,000. That’s $28,000 after taxes, which isn’t a horrible opportunity cost… until you compound 10% annual returns less 2% inflation for 50 years, and realize you’re paying $1,300,000 for the privilege of pretending to be a writer.

But of course I don’t really believe any of that. Here I am writing. And honestly, I quite enjoy it!

With those qualifications out of the way, here is the much more optimistic angle: you probably have no idea before you start writing if it’s going to be any good. Other indicators of success are not good proxies, and it’s very hard to tell ahead of time how good you could be with a little bit of effort, practice and editing. [2]

This somewhat contradicts what I said earlier about top Substack authors attending very good schools and having very good jobs. But that’s just one data set. Here are some biographical notes of popular authors you might actually care about:

• Byrne Hobart had “astonishingly bad” grades in high school, attended Arizona State University (ranked #103 in the US). Then he dropped out to move to Brooklyn and live off rice and beans in a “former crack den”.

• Scott Alexander: Attended University College Cork School of Medicine in Ireland (ranked #151-200 globally for Medicine), was unable to get a residency. Once wrote that all math “slip[s] out of my mental grasp”. Spent 13+ years playing a nerdier and (more) made up version of Dungeons and Dragons, and clearly not in a casual way, but in a “we’ve only had one person totally lose touch with reality” kind of way.

• Alexey Guzey: failed high school entrance exams, was afraid of girls, was very depressed and addicted to video games, and didn’t have any friends.

These are three of my favorite writers. And with all due respect, they’re all massive losers. You could argue that Scott at least had a medical degree (even if it was from a 3rd-tier university). But I’m sorry, if your career plans include the phrase “going back to Japan and seeing if my old English teaching job is still available and whether I can just do that for the rest of my life”, something has gone wrong.

There are a few interpretations.

The first is something to do with growth mindset. Scott, Byrne and Alexey were losers, but then they became smart, capable and hardworking. If true, this implies that you can do great things with your life, no matter how it seems to be doing at the moment.

This sounds nice, but it strikes me as implausible. Sure, you can get better at math and learn new skills, but I don’t think you can just “growth mindset” your way from a community college dropout to world-class writer and financial analyst.

The alternative is much more disturbing, but it’s closer to what I actually believe. The world is filled with deep structural inefficiencies, and there is no guarantee that at this moment, some of our greatest geniuses are not rotting in gutters or trapped in poor institutions. In some ways these writers had difficult lives, but it could have been much worse. For every Wilbur Wright struck down by lawsuits, there may be a hundred Byrne Hobarts toiling away at ASU.

Finally, you might argue that only losers become bloggers, because everyone else is busy working actual jobs and making money. So Scott Alexander looks like a genius, but he’s really just the lord of the flies, or the one-eyed man leading the blind, or whatever your favorite ableist/speciest metaphor is for a winner who’s actually a loser.

That might have been a fair argument before Substack, but these days top authors are so wealthy that it must be a competitive market. It’s possible the non-losers are still catching up and 5 years from now all the top Substack authors will be Harvard-educated ex-Googlers, but I doubt it.

I think it’s just that being successful in real life is genuinely not well correlated with being a successful blogger.

Scott Alexander (presumably) did poorly on his MCAT, but it turns out that had nothing to do with his potential as a writer. Byrne Hobart did poorly in high school, but only along the axis that matters to college admissions officers. Arguably, high school GPA proxies for intelligence, but also for not having anything more interesting going on in your life. Alexey Guzey was addicted to video games, but now he’s addicted to building scientific institutions. It seems to be working out okay.

I still don’t think you should start a blog, but you definitely shouldn’t not start a blog just because you expect it to go poorly.

Think hard, write words, get an audience, find out for yourself.

Footnotes
[1] Disclosure: Byrne Hobart is now a popular and prosperous full-time writer.

[2] More importantly: the upside is so massive that even a 7-figure opportunity cost is easily justified. It’s easy to make fun of hypothetical want-to-be writers for the same reason it’s easy to mock failed entrepreneurs and geniuses. “If I can’t have it, neither can you.” Get back in the fucking bucket. Get back in the fucking box. In the words of Kanye West:

If the slave gets too strong, then the other slaves will feel too proud. So what we’re gonna is take this slave and put him in front of the crowd. And we’re gonna whip his ass every motherfucking day! And tell him "What’s up now??

So when you see the media talk shit about me…

While critics were busy calling him lost and confused, Kanye was writing Ye, his 8th album in a row to debut at #1. While they raced to publish op-eds questioning his mental stability, Kanye was negotiating the deal that would make him a billionaire. While they called his politics internalized self-hatred, Kanye was funding James Turrell’s Roden Crater and donating to victims of police brutality.

The New York Times headline The Battle for Kanye West Is Happening in Real Time reveals more than it lets on. Kanye is not a man. Just a prize to be won. As described by journalist Jon Caramanica, Kanye is merely “a vessel, not an agent” and “all around him, what amounts to a collective global rescue effort for his mind and soul…is playing out in real time.”

This is more than just garden variety condescension. It is dehumanization, disguised as sympathy for the mentally ill. No different than the rhetoric of colonialist missionaries professing to “save the souls” of heretic savages.

From the outside, Kanye is a mystery no one can quite grasp. Is he leftist, as he was in 2005 when he called out “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on national TV? Far right, as he was portrayed for supporting Trump in 2016? Is he the sinner who wrote “Fuck you and your Hampton house, I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse”, or the saint who hosts Sunday Service?

There are at least three answers.

The first, is that he sold out, or converted. That Kanye was once “woke”, but has since fallen.

Second, that he’s ascended. Like the lovecraftian Old Ones, Kanye exists on a higher plane, leaving us capable only of witnessing his low-level earthly projection, and unable to comprehend behavior impossible in both our physics and our ideology.

Third, the tension lies not in him, but in ourselves. Kanye’s image has been mashed up, remixed and distorted so many times that each side sees only what they want to. Compare, for example, the Atlantic’s headline “Lou Reed Compares ‘Yeezus’ to Farting” to Reed’s actual review: “the guy really, really, really is talented. He’s really trying to raise the bar. No one’s near doing what he’s doing, it’s not even on the same planet.”.

Or to take a more nuanced musical case:

• When Kanye performed New Slaves on SNL, it built in anger for 3 minutes, ending with “I’m 'bout to tear shit down, I’m ‘bout to air shit out, now what the fuck they gon’ say now?”
• As performed live in concert, it contains the same line, but then pours out into an outro “I won’t end this high, not this time again…” followed by this incredible melodic hum from Frank Ocean.
• On the album, there is yet a 3rd version, which follows Ocean’s chorus with a sample from the Hungarian band Omega. As described in that same Lou Reed review: he nails it beyond belief on ”New Slaves.” It’s mainly just voice and one or two synths, very sparse, and then it suddenly breaks out into this incredible melodic… God knows what. Frank Ocean sings this soaring part, then it segues into a moody sample of some Hungarian rock band from the ’70s. It literally gives me goosebumps… just overwhelmingly incredible.

The discord lies not in Kanye, but in our own refracted images of his work.

Our modern world is rife with contradictions, and if Kanye seems incomprehensible, it’s because he’s the only honest person living in it.

The rest of us are content to care for pet dogs, then go on to eat pork. To donate to charity while wearing clothes sewn by slaves. We make transpacific flights to attend climate conferences. Make vows to the sanctity of marriage then get divorced. We go out into society covered in the veil of civility as if we will not be naked, cold and alone each night before our final return to ashes.

Like all of us, he is stuck between animal and God. Both perfectly human and perfectly divine.

Kanye is merely the one who doesn’t turn away.

It’s taken 5 months, but Noah Smith is finally done with his ”epic” four-part saga “answering the techno-pessimists” in response to my initial post back in December.

A critical point of clarification: there is no such thing as a techno-pessimist, at least not in the context of this debate. Across the entire series of posts, I’m literally the only critic cited as a techno-pessimist, but none of this even describes my beliefs.

Take, for example, this accusation from Part 3:

Many of the Applied Divinity Studies blogger’s arguments rely on TFP as the fundamental measure of technology.

It’s difficult to understand how Smith could plausibly interpret this as my view. Throughout my entire post, “TFP” is mentioned exactly one time, and it’s not even my words! It’s in a quote from the Cowen/Southwood paper, the middle of a laundry list of other items, hardly a notable keystone of my thesis:

the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.

I do also cite the Bloom paper which mentions TFP, but it is not their central argument either. The bulk of the argument is about agricultural outputs, semiconductor development and life expectancy. My own treatment of the paper deals exclusively with the latter two of these issues.

Actually, let me make a more basic claim. I am not even a techno-pessimist, and have never claimed to be. From the original post:

The problem is not even that the ideas [of techno-optimists] are wrong. The problem is the blatantly imbalanced and isolated demands for rigour.

And even more explicitly:

To be clear, none of this is to say that The Great Stagnation is not over! Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe the whole thing was an illusion…

I planned to write a more substantial rebuttal, but reading through the rest of Noah’s post, the most notable thing is how little I disagree with his object-level claims. Rather then substantial, our differences seem to be primarily aesthetic. He likes anime; I prefer science-fiction. In the words of physicist-magician Suravaram Vidyasagar:

You are reading things that I have not written. You are having an argument, but it’s with somebody who isn’t me.

…that’s not to say that there aren’t also disagreements.

Concluding his latest post on scientific stagnation, Noah writes “U.S. business has done its part, but federal government R&D funding has really fallen off… In other words, business is running fast enough to stay in place in terms of R&D”. As evidence, he cites this chart from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:

This is an erroneous interpretation on several accounts:

1. Business has hardly “stayed in place”, it’s more than doubled from ~0.75% to nearly 2% of GDP! Additionally, real GDP is up around 10x since 1956, meaning real business investment has actually increased around 20x since 1956.
2. Critically, this is only a measure of financial input, not of scientific output. Without accompanying evidence of actual innovations, growth in spending is evidence of stagnation (“less bang for its buck”), not of progress.
3. Finally, we can’t conclude that “U.S. business has done its part” without understanding where that R&D spend actually goes. Note that since R&D expenditures result in tax breaks, firms push as much as possible under that umbrella. Amazon’s 40 billion in R&D spending is less impressive once you realize that it includes the development and acquisition of streaming content, alone an $11 billion line item. Amazon Studios may win awards, but it’s still not doing science.

So sure, I have plenty of details to nitpick. We could go back and forth like this for years.

But who cares?

Launching his new blog back in November, Noah originally wrote:

Twitter has become a dumpster fire of contentiousness, performativity, negativity, stupidity, and misinformation, and one solution is to go back to blogging. Blogs give readers time to digest and think about ideas, without being interrupted by random shouters with little context and lots of agenda.

That was a promising purpose, but Noah’s blogging has quickly devolved into the thing it aimed to replace. Arguing against a critic who doesn’t really exist? That’s nothing if not performative. You don’t get to escape the Twitter ethos just by joining an additional platform. Until you delete your account, you’re part of the hellscape and subject to its demands.

The performative aspect of feuds is only part of the issue.

But the real problem is that they’re profitable! Noah has a couple of orders of magnitude more followers than I do. The cost to my reputation is far lower than the benefit of being mentioned at all. C’est le succès du scandale. Noah has less to gain than I do, but since he writes on a monetized substack, he gets to profit in a more literal sense.

As usual, I’m just here to “raise or lower particular individuals in status”. The only problem with Noah is that he has the same incentives, but won’t admit it. So instead we’re here debating totally pointless questions, pretending to have a dog in the race. Maybe there is something for him, but as I said, it’s purely aesthetic.

If this all makes you feel pessimistic about the utility of blogging, you’re right.

Which is precisely why I don’t spend much time on it anymore.

Noah: Steins;Gate is overhyped, but I like FLCL and my email is always open if you want to talk.