Scott Alexander

How To Blog

James Bailey1 Comment

Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten shares writing advice for aspiring bloggers here. He is very much worth listening to on this- he earns more from Substack subscriptions than he does as a doctor, and even that undersells his influence. He distinguishes two types of writers worth reading:

If you write brilliantly, the world will read your review of watching paint dry. If you’re a normal person, you have to content yourself with reaching the limited subset of people who are interested in your topic.

There’s one new brilliant person per year, maybe less. But dozens of bloggers – dozens! – reach the lower bar of providing value to the people who care about the same things they do. That could be you!

Here we just aim to be the second sort of writers. For me Scott is the first sort, and if that’s true for you too, you should just go read his whole 6000 word post. But many people find his writing overly long, so for you I offer a summary with highlights:

TLDR: Honesty is key. Write what you know and care about. Write what you really think. Write original by being, doing, and thinking original:

The problem with bloggers is that they read blogs. So when they want to write about their exciting new opinion, it’s probably an opinion they got from a blog.

The problem with blog readers is that they also read blogs. So when they read your opinion that you got from a blog, they’ll think “Oh yeah, I read that on that other guy’s blog last week.”

The end result is that everyone talks about the same thing over and over, hoping they can be the one to educate the last person on Substack who hasn’t heard that social priming studies don’t replicate, or that stairwell restrictions are bad housing policy….

If everything good in writing comes from contact with the world, then your goodness is proportional to how direct your contact is. Best-case scenario, you live with a Southeast Asian tribe yourself and report your results. Second-best case, you at least read the book by the guy who did that and form your own opinion. Third-best case, now you’re reading a blog post by someone who read the book, three levels distant from the world. But even that’s getting rarer. Now people are reading tweets by someone who read the review of the book by the person who met the tribe, and forming opinions based on those. At that point, almost all the work is being done by the prejudices of your sources, rather than brute facts about Southeast Asians.

You contribute to the blogosphere by injecting first-level facts about the world, or second-level primary sources by experts who have gotten the first-level facts. You draw down those contributions by playing too many games of telephone with popular topics that you got from the blogosphere itself.

Read Matt Levine:

You can write brilliantly about anything. Consider Matt Levine. I have no interest in finance. Even though I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars by understanding finance better, every time I consider doing this I bounce off the fact that all the relevant books include terms like “credit default swap” and “ergodicity”. But the first time I read Matt Levine’s finance newsletter, I thought “I am going to read this approximately every day for the rest of my life”, and I was right – even though I will never trade credit default swaps or do anything else that would make reading Matt Levine directly valuable to me.

Likewise, many discussions of Freddie deBoer start “I’m a huge fan of Freddie, even though I disagree with everything he says, and find him personally abrasive, and his topics are unoriginal and repetitive, and I hate him, and I hope he dies.” Then in what sense are you a fan? “Well, I read all of his posts.” Good work if you can get it.

I don’t think anyone wants to read our reviews of watching paint dry, but I do think we are sometimes the first to get to the bottom of something important, and I hope that’s part of what keeps you coming back:

There’s almost no topic so overdone that you can’t be the first person to do a good job writing about it…. When you demand even the flimsiest of details, nobody’s written a good blog post even on the ultra-controversial topics that everyone talks about every day.… Some of the posts I’m proudest of involved taking a topic everyone was talking about, then being (as far as I can tell) the first blogger to put in significant effort to see which side was right.

(Not the first person; often the answers are hidden in old scientific papers. But ordinary people won’t know about those papers unless someone blogs about them.)

Woodstock for Nerds: Highlights from Manifest

James Bailey4 Comments

I’m back from Manifest, a conference on prediction markets, forecasting, and the future. It was an incredible chance to hear from many of my favorite writers on the internet, along with the CEOs of most major prediction markets; in Steve Hsu’s words, Woodstock for Nerds. Some highlights:

Robin Hanson took over my session on academic research on prediction markets (in a good way; once he was there everyone just wanted to ask him questions). He thinks the biggest current question for the field is to figure out why is the demand for prediction markets so low. What are the different types of demand, and which is most likely to scale? In a different talk, Robin says that we need to either turn the ship of world culture, or get off in lifeboats, before falling fertility in a global monoculture wrecks it.

Play-money prediction markets were surprisingly effective relative to real-money ones in the 2022 midterms. Stephen Grugett, co-founder of Manifold (the play-money prediction market that put on the conference), admitted that success in one election could simply be a coincidence. He himself was surprised by how well they did in the 2022 midterms, and said he lost a bunch of mana on bets assuming that Polymarket was more accurate.

Substack CEO Chris Best: No one wants to pay money for internet writing in the abstract, but everyone wants to pay their favorite writer. For me, that was Scott Alexander. We are trying to copy Twitter a bit. Wants to move into improving scientific publishing. I asked about the prospects of ending the feud with Elon; Best says Substack links aren’t treated much worse than any other links on X anymore.

Razib Khan explained the strings he had to pull for his son to be the first to get a whole genome sequence in utero back in 2014- ask the hospital to do a regular genetic test, ask them for the sample, get a journalist to tweet at them when they say no, get his PI’s lab to run the sample. He thinks crispr companies could be at the nadir of the hype cycle (good time to invest?).

Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara says they are considering paying interest on long term markets, and offering margin. There is enough money in it now that their top 10 or so traders are full time (earning enough that they don’t need a job). The CFTC has approved everything we send them except for once (elections). We don’t think their current rule banning contest markets will go through, but if it does we would have to take down Oscar and Grammy markets. When we get tired of the CFTC, we joke that we should self certify shallot futures markets (toeing the line of the forbidden onion futures). Planning to expand to Europe via brokerages. Added bounty program to find rules problems. Launching 30-50 markets per week now (seems like a good opportunity, these can’t all be efficient right?).

There was lots else of interest, but to keep things short I’ll just say it was way more fun and informative doing yet another academic conference, where I’ve hit diminishing returns. More highlights from Theo Jaffee here; I also loved economist Scott Sumner’s take on a similar conference at the same venue in Berkeley:

If you spend a fair bit of time surrounded by people in this sector, you begin to think that San Francisco is the only city that matters; everywhere else is just a backwater. There’s a sense that the world we live in today will soon come to an end, replaced by either a better world or human extinction. It’s the Bay Area’s world, we just live in it.

Childhoods of exceptional people

James Bailey2 Comments

Henrik Karlsson read lots of biographies of geniuses and tried to sum up the things their childhoods had in common here. Some highlights:

At least two-thirds of my sample was home-educated (most commonly until about age 12), tutored by parents or governesses and tutors. The rest of my sample had been educated in schools (most commonly Jesuit schools).

As children, they were integrated with exceptional adults—and were taken seriously by them.

They had time to roam about and relied heavily on self-directed learning

A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.

They were heavily tutored 1-on-1

An important factor to acknowledge is that these children did not only receive an exceptional education; they were also exceptionally gifted.

There is lots of discussion of John Stuart Mill and John Von Neumann, who each had major contributions to economics:

When they were done, James Mill took his son’s notes and polished them into the book Elements of Political Economy. It was published the year John Stuart turned fifteen….

There is a moving scene in John Stuart Mill’s biography, when John Stuart is about to set out into the world and his father for the first time lets him know that his education had been . . . a bit particular. He would discover that others his age did not know as much as he did. But, his father said, he mustn’t feel proud about that. He’d just been lucky.

Let’s make more people lucky.

Other nice posts along similar lines are Erik Hoel’s “How Geniuses Used to Be Raised” (linked in Karlsson’s piece), and Scott Alexander’s review of Laszlo Polgar’s book “Raise a Genius” (about raising his 3 daughters to be chess grandmasters). Karlsson’s post, worth reading in full, is here.

Best Books 2021

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I read 23 books in 2021, but none that were written in 2021. Tim Ferriss stopped reading new books deliberately but for me it just happened, something about this year made me want to hang out in the ancient world instead.

I read about how five thousand years ago the Indo-Europeans figured out how to ride horses and use wheels, and so ended up spreading their language to half the world. I read about the Bronze Age Collapse three thousand years ago. Also set three thousand years ago are the semi-mythical events of the Aeneid and the Odyssey; I particularly enjoyed Emily Wilson’s new translation of the latter. From two thousand years ago, Caesar’s Commentaries reads like an action-packed fantasy novel but gives real insight into history and strategy. It was also a good year to go back to the Biblical events of two to three thousand years ago, though I didn’t make it cover to cover.

The one book about the modern world I gave 5 stars in 2021 was The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics. The short version of my review is that it’s secretly a development economics book:

Bueno de Mesquita, author of The Dictator’s Handbook, is a political scientist but his analysis is very much economic, in both the methods (rational choice & methodological individualism) and in the focus on material incentives as the main driver of behavior. The book is good as a manual for aspiring tyrants, but suprisingly great as an explanation for why many poor countries stay poor.

So overall compared to 2020 I don’t have many good books to share, apart from things like The Odyssey that you presumably already know about. The best new writing in 2021 probably isn’t happening in books at all, but in Substacks. Many bloggers switched to the Substack blogging/newsletter platform last year because it makes it easy to monetize their writing, while many professional journalists switched over as a way to keep being paid to write while enjoying near-complete editorial freedom. I recommend Byrne Hobart on finance and business strategy, and Razib Khan on history and genomics. Probably my favorite writing of 2021 was the return of Scott Alexander to blogging, now at Substack as Astral Codex Ten. He is also a great demonstration of just how much the monetization game has changed, as less than a year into the new Substack he is making enough money to start giving large amounts of it away.

Gifts for a Time of Inflation and Supply Bottlenecks

James Bailey1 Comment

I’ve never been great at gifts, and don’t have much in the way of specific ideas now. But I’ve been thinking about what the macroeconomic environment means for gift-giving.

First, as you’ve probably heard by now from us or elsewhere, if you want to get any physical gift I’d order it now, since shipping is a mess and prices are only going up. I’d especially recommend this for complex electronics that could become hard to find- its part of why I got my wife an iPad for her birthday this summer. Foreign food and drink that can be stockpiled is always a good idea, but perhaps especially now; think wine, Scotch, or Beirao liqueur (a Portuguese drink that was my favorite discovery this year). Wine and liquor make good stores of value in an time of inflation.

Alternatively, you could avoid the scarcity of physical goods by turning to the digital realm. If your economistic heart yearns to give cash, consider giving some your favorite stock or cryptocurrency instead- its both more personalized and less subject to inflation. Or if you think you can judge the recipient’s taste well enough, subscribe them to one of your favorite Substacks or podcasts. My recommendations:

Unsupervised Learning, Razib Khan– Genomics and History

The Diff, Byrne Hobart– Finance and Strategy

Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander– Rationality, Psychiatry, Everything

The Readers Karamazov– Funny podcast on literature and philosophy (now seems entirely free though)

Or if you really have money to burn, go for the Bloomberg subscription. I always run out of free reads on the Tyler Cowen articles and so can’t read Matt Levine, even though he has the magic ability to teach you finance while making you laugh. But the subscription is expensive and Mike Bloomberg doesn’t need the money, while the Substacks are relatively cheap and enable talented writers to spend a lot more time writing instead of needing to focus on a real job.