If it helps: I wait for your posts. And recently, I have been pushing myself to read 2-3 of your older posts daily. You’re a wizard with words and concepts. I have done courses on AI/DL from MIT and Harvard and still think the way you build intuition around it is unmatched.
‘Incompressible regularities’ - is easily the most profound description of the scope of DL I have ever read. Please write a refresher whenever you can. I have used it extensively to train government officers in India and helped them understand the AI trajectory better.
Also, regarding populism: remember your shouting class. They influence policy, sure, but they are not representative of the majority, right?
I know the future of the attention economy is opaque, and we don’t yet know how platforms and AI companies will react to near infinite masses of generated content…but I believe your views are way more in line with most people compared to the populists on either side. Experiment with ways to get to them, and you might find yourself more useful than you thought.
Please do not switch to short form video. Krugman does videos on his blog and I just read the transcripts or skip those posts entirely. It's one reason I am not on his paid tier.
Agreed- there are too many decent writers who 1) think they don’t need an editor and 2) think they are skilled and engaging video presenters. Painful.
Each of the three are crafts that require lots of attention and practice and are also skills where most people would be blessed to have one of them.
The biggest problem with substack content is lack of editing and poor video presentation skills.
The best thing about it is to find garden variety (non-populist) leftists or conservatives who have the occasional pragmatic or non-conventional view. In other words some aren’t straight partisan hacks where you already know what they are going to say. Why pay for that (particularly when you can get it for free on MSNow or Fox)?
Original ideas? Not too many on substack, really- ultimately most everything is derivative. I would say “unexpected” or thoughtful more often than unique. In our monolithic tightly managed media landscape, Substack is a bit like encountering a talking dog - the fact that it exists is maybe more astounding than what it has to say.
Noah, I just wanted to say that your writing matters a lot to me. I find it insightful and delightful even if there is noone to actually implement your ideas.
I really enjoy it when you interact with other bloggers and podcasters and I especially miss Econ102, which was a great podcast that I would regularly recommend to my students.
I don't really know what I want to say with this except that you are skilled at what you do and that this skill is appreciated. For many people this would be pretty close to ideal when it comes to their working life. Personally, I hope that you keep blogging for a long time. As long as you keep putting the blogs down, I will keep picking them up to read.
You are writing in the last age of "unpoisoned" human training - your writing will be immortalized in the weights and output of models for as long as we are using LLMs. That means your writings will become cliche - like shakespeare or spielberg; not a new phenomena, you are basically the victim of influence. Some of my own idiomatic writing style I recognize in LLM output from time to time and although I am not quite sure I've ever been prolific enough to have influenced these things (I have some highly rated substack comments, stack overflow posts, reddit posts, millions of LoC on starred github repos, tens of thousands of comments on BBS, so maybe a teeny bit) I must admit it does gross me out at some level, but we've all been embedded and maybe we should try to be proud about it.
=
in my personal communication i've been very lax with my grammer and spelling, sending messages unedited and leaving my weird quirks totally unfiltered. the the benefit is that it feels substantially more human (and while an AI can certainly mock it, as it may do to this!) i think we will iterate to differentiate ourselves from slop. and i've started swearing a fucking lot more, and maybe being a bit meaner too, it feels more authentic, ai/assisted writing is starting to feel saccarin, overly-cordial, kinda corpo, its just a shitty vibe. when I'm throwing the straw I use spoonerisms, nomdegreens, malaprops, etc it just brings life back into it. being concise helps too, almost curt.
Since I am a more experienced human than Noah, age tends to do that, I’ll just say there is a season for everything. Things come and go, things change. If you can imagine many different rivers flowing in the same space. Some rivers move fast, some much slower. Some have rapids, some meander.
This is life, and you’ll spend it in different rivers at different times and at different speeds. The more complicated human life becomes, the more rivers there are. Hunter-gatherer tribes experienced a very slow, boring river most of the time until another tribe came along or a flood overtook them.
There is a deluge of choices in modern society about how to spend our time, but when it comes to information gathering, it is becoming too much for the human mind to process. With the addition of AI, it feels like drinking from a firehose.
Noah and others in the information sphere might be blessed to make a living doing what they love for their entire lives. Or they might be like most baseball or football players, you get to the big show for a few years, and then it's over. The ticket you get when born only says “Admit One"
Noah, questioning whether your writing matters is a sign of growing maturity and healthy self-awareness. If you were not asking this question it would mean you are among the herd of populist ditto heads. I have my disagreements with a portion of your ideas and post comments taking issue which really means you are making me think and re-evaluate my own ideas, kudos. None of us really know if our ideas, our work, or our lives really matter but to shrug our shoulders sating we don't care is just giving in to nihilism. Don't give in, keep fighting in the way you know how.
You challenge my thinking because you are not beholden to one of the populist extremes. I've cannot predict what your take will be on an issue or topic. That's valuable.
For what it's worth, what you write matters to me! I look forward to reading your posts, and always find them thought-provoking and well-written. But I agree, what you write will never be read by or influence Donald Trump, or probably anyone in his cabinet. However, there is a very good possibility it will be read by and influence members of Democratic congressional staffs and the next Democratic administration. (May it start in January 2029!!) So I urge you to keep writing this Substack!
Donors and activists come into each new admin with pre-conceived ideas they are looking to have implemented and posts they are looking to get appointed to (to implement those ideas). If you want to influence policy, become a billionaire bundler and max donor and dark money spigot and fund some NGOs and think tanks and get one of your lackeys appointed to the EPA, SEC or FTC.
As for the pundits, sometimes mangled versions of their ideas get adopted….if they can be hijacked to help justify something the billionaire and their NGOs already wanted to do.
Outside of regulatory policy, most administrations are run by a handful of people in the WH whose priorities are payoffs and polling and winning the daily media narrative (and implementing the president’s ideas, if they have any- Obama and Trump did. Biden did not).
I think it's easy to whistle past the graveyard, seeing the right wing populism as just Trumpian cult of personality and left wing populism as factionalism. As opposed to some real rejection of intellectual conversation -- or assumption that intellectual debate will be the prime mover behind policy.
But I think that history would argue otherwise. Rational conversation is an ideal of print culture, particularly print culture after steam made print cheap enough that print culture spread to the masses and made democratic decision making rational while, not coincidentally, making rational decision-making compatible with what we call democracy.
But print culture has been in decline for several decades now, and populism -- both right and left wing -- are rejections of multiple aspects of print culture.
Your worries are well-placed. It is extremely unlikely that the trend going forward will be for rational public discussion to decide issues.
(I would argue that Republicans, in general, have a better handle on this than Democrats, and that this more than anything else explains how apparent idiots in their party punch above their weight in elections. On probably their #1 priority, tax relief for the wealthy, they don't campaign at all. On election security, they are untroubled by having no facts on their side. On opposition to solar, their actual motivation although not particularly off-putting is kept secret. And this appears to work better for them than sincere Democratic policy debates.)
For what it's worth, this reflection -- a sort of meta-comment I haven't encountered before -- offers insights new to me and changed my perspective on the world of virtual discourse that I spend so much of my time in. I'm old, retired, and influence no one (even my cat ignores me), but I imagine that many more influential readers who start out skimming this post will slow down as they realize it articulates something they need to understand about their own lives.
I also miss the conversational blogging style of long ago. To me it has been bifurcated into very short hyper-interactive twitter conversations and very long (relatively) Substacks on a more traditional publishing cadence. But once upon a time those things lived together in blogs, and it was excellent.
LOL on footnote #2, I felt that way about "Enter Sandman" at one point.
On the AI front, I think the real skill will be terseness cause LLMs generate A LOT and I just can't handle reading it, I just tune it out and move on. It's amazing how much it outputs and how little it actually SAYS. The information density of the output is astoundingly low.
That and the sycophancy are my two main complaints about AI. I would like to have a toggle button to get just the straight up unconstrained model, but I think the AI companies are still to scared of the media companies to allow that.
(100 books a year is 2 books a week and can be done if the books are sufficiently short or if novellas and graphic novels count as I have seen with some Hugo-nominated BookTubers of the past)
(For example The Republic Of Letters sold me on Anatole Broyard's "Kafka Was The Rage". That's 150 pages! A very busy person might not be able to turn that around in 24 hours!)
If it helps: I wait for your posts. And recently, I have been pushing myself to read 2-3 of your older posts daily. You’re a wizard with words and concepts. I have done courses on AI/DL from MIT and Harvard and still think the way you build intuition around it is unmatched.
‘Incompressible regularities’ - is easily the most profound description of the scope of DL I have ever read. Please write a refresher whenever you can. I have used it extensively to train government officers in India and helped them understand the AI trajectory better.
Thankyou so much.
Awww thank you :-)
Dude, I read a lot of Substacks, and have off and on paid for a bunch, but you’re the only paid sub I stick with.
Please do not stop. Slow down, try other things, experiment, sure. But we need broad, smart, evidence based thought like yours.
The value isn’t in the specific form the output takes, but that your mind does it’s thing, and then we can comprehend whatever way it’s expressed.
Thanks! I will never stop blogging, so don't worry!
Also, regarding populism: remember your shouting class. They influence policy, sure, but they are not representative of the majority, right?
I know the future of the attention economy is opaque, and we don’t yet know how platforms and AI companies will react to near infinite masses of generated content…but I believe your views are way more in line with most people compared to the populists on either side. Experiment with ways to get to them, and you might find yourself more useful than you thought.
Please do not switch to short form video. Krugman does videos on his blog and I just read the transcripts or skip those posts entirely. It's one reason I am not on his paid tier.
This is a good format for your material.
Smart people do not have the time and patience for video.
And talking to Adderall-Kids is totally different to your idea of blogging.
Right. I have unsubscribed from some Substacks because too much of the content was video.
Agreed- there are too many decent writers who 1) think they don’t need an editor and 2) think they are skilled and engaging video presenters. Painful.
Each of the three are crafts that require lots of attention and practice and are also skills where most people would be blessed to have one of them.
The biggest problem with substack content is lack of editing and poor video presentation skills.
The best thing about it is to find garden variety (non-populist) leftists or conservatives who have the occasional pragmatic or non-conventional view. In other words some aren’t straight partisan hacks where you already know what they are going to say. Why pay for that (particularly when you can get it for free on MSNow or Fox)?
Original ideas? Not too many on substack, really- ultimately most everything is derivative. I would say “unexpected” or thoughtful more often than unique. In our monolithic tightly managed media landscape, Substack is a bit like encountering a talking dog - the fact that it exists is maybe more astounding than what it has to say.
Noah, I just wanted to say that your writing matters a lot to me. I find it insightful and delightful even if there is noone to actually implement your ideas.
I really enjoy it when you interact with other bloggers and podcasters and I especially miss Econ102, which was a great podcast that I would regularly recommend to my students.
I don't really know what I want to say with this except that you are skilled at what you do and that this skill is appreciated. For many people this would be pretty close to ideal when it comes to their working life. Personally, I hope that you keep blogging for a long time. As long as you keep putting the blogs down, I will keep picking them up to read.
Thanks so much!!
You are writing in the last age of "unpoisoned" human training - your writing will be immortalized in the weights and output of models for as long as we are using LLMs. That means your writings will become cliche - like shakespeare or spielberg; not a new phenomena, you are basically the victim of influence. Some of my own idiomatic writing style I recognize in LLM output from time to time and although I am not quite sure I've ever been prolific enough to have influenced these things (I have some highly rated substack comments, stack overflow posts, reddit posts, millions of LoC on starred github repos, tens of thousands of comments on BBS, so maybe a teeny bit) I must admit it does gross me out at some level, but we've all been embedded and maybe we should try to be proud about it.
=
in my personal communication i've been very lax with my grammer and spelling, sending messages unedited and leaving my weird quirks totally unfiltered. the the benefit is that it feels substantially more human (and while an AI can certainly mock it, as it may do to this!) i think we will iterate to differentiate ourselves from slop. and i've started swearing a fucking lot more, and maybe being a bit meaner too, it feels more authentic, ai/assisted writing is starting to feel saccarin, overly-cordial, kinda corpo, its just a shitty vibe. when I'm throwing the straw I use spoonerisms, nomdegreens, malaprops, etc it just brings life back into it. being concise helps too, almost curt.
"The answer to the great question... of Life, the Universe and Everything... is... forty-two."
Ha...my own thoughts...he or she wins who dies with the most interesting questions.
Since I am a more experienced human than Noah, age tends to do that, I’ll just say there is a season for everything. Things come and go, things change. If you can imagine many different rivers flowing in the same space. Some rivers move fast, some much slower. Some have rapids, some meander.
This is life, and you’ll spend it in different rivers at different times and at different speeds. The more complicated human life becomes, the more rivers there are. Hunter-gatherer tribes experienced a very slow, boring river most of the time until another tribe came along or a flood overtook them.
There is a deluge of choices in modern society about how to spend our time, but when it comes to information gathering, it is becoming too much for the human mind to process. With the addition of AI, it feels like drinking from a firehose.
Noah and others in the information sphere might be blessed to make a living doing what they love for their entire lives. Or they might be like most baseball or football players, you get to the big show for a few years, and then it's over. The ticket you get when born only says “Admit One"
I read your posts. I watch Youtube on how to splice rope. Please do not go over to Youtube.
It's a great medium for the manual arts. It attenuates ideas and discussion, "dumbifies them."
PS: And,yes, what you write does matter.
Noah, questioning whether your writing matters is a sign of growing maturity and healthy self-awareness. If you were not asking this question it would mean you are among the herd of populist ditto heads. I have my disagreements with a portion of your ideas and post comments taking issue which really means you are making me think and re-evaluate my own ideas, kudos. None of us really know if our ideas, our work, or our lives really matter but to shrug our shoulders sating we don't care is just giving in to nihilism. Don't give in, keep fighting in the way you know how.
Almost none of us affect society and we’d be vain to think so. Focus on helping individuals - the needy, the troubled, family, friends, colleagues.
You’ll know it matters, and you aren’t doing it for cash.
You challenge my thinking because you are not beholden to one of the populist extremes. I've cannot predict what your take will be on an issue or topic. That's valuable.
For what it's worth, what you write matters to me! I look forward to reading your posts, and always find them thought-provoking and well-written. But I agree, what you write will never be read by or influence Donald Trump, or probably anyone in his cabinet. However, there is a very good possibility it will be read by and influence members of Democratic congressional staffs and the next Democratic administration. (May it start in January 2029!!) So I urge you to keep writing this Substack!
Donors and activists come into each new admin with pre-conceived ideas they are looking to have implemented and posts they are looking to get appointed to (to implement those ideas). If you want to influence policy, become a billionaire bundler and max donor and dark money spigot and fund some NGOs and think tanks and get one of your lackeys appointed to the EPA, SEC or FTC.
As for the pundits, sometimes mangled versions of their ideas get adopted….if they can be hijacked to help justify something the billionaire and their NGOs already wanted to do.
Outside of regulatory policy, most administrations are run by a handful of people in the WH whose priorities are payoffs and polling and winning the daily media narrative (and implementing the president’s ideas, if they have any- Obama and Trump did. Biden did not).
Cynical, sure. 😊
I think it's easy to whistle past the graveyard, seeing the right wing populism as just Trumpian cult of personality and left wing populism as factionalism. As opposed to some real rejection of intellectual conversation -- or assumption that intellectual debate will be the prime mover behind policy.
But I think that history would argue otherwise. Rational conversation is an ideal of print culture, particularly print culture after steam made print cheap enough that print culture spread to the masses and made democratic decision making rational while, not coincidentally, making rational decision-making compatible with what we call democracy.
But print culture has been in decline for several decades now, and populism -- both right and left wing -- are rejections of multiple aspects of print culture.
Your worries are well-placed. It is extremely unlikely that the trend going forward will be for rational public discussion to decide issues.
(I would argue that Republicans, in general, have a better handle on this than Democrats, and that this more than anything else explains how apparent idiots in their party punch above their weight in elections. On probably their #1 priority, tax relief for the wealthy, they don't campaign at all. On election security, they are untroubled by having no facts on their side. On opposition to solar, their actual motivation although not particularly off-putting is kept secret. And this appears to work better for them than sincere Democratic policy debates.)
For what it's worth, this reflection -- a sort of meta-comment I haven't encountered before -- offers insights new to me and changed my perspective on the world of virtual discourse that I spend so much of my time in. I'm old, retired, and influence no one (even my cat ignores me), but I imagine that many more influential readers who start out skimming this post will slow down as they realize it articulates something they need to understand about their own lives.
I also miss the conversational blogging style of long ago. To me it has been bifurcated into very short hyper-interactive twitter conversations and very long (relatively) Substacks on a more traditional publishing cadence. But once upon a time those things lived together in blogs, and it was excellent.
I miss RSS.
LOL on footnote #2, I felt that way about "Enter Sandman" at one point.
On the AI front, I think the real skill will be terseness cause LLMs generate A LOT and I just can't handle reading it, I just tune it out and move on. It's amazing how much it outputs and how little it actually SAYS. The information density of the output is astoundingly low.
That and the sycophancy are my two main complaints about AI. I would like to have a toggle button to get just the straight up unconstrained model, but I think the AI companies are still to scared of the media companies to allow that.
(100 books a year is 2 books a week and can be done if the books are sufficiently short or if novellas and graphic novels count as I have seen with some Hugo-nominated BookTubers of the past)
But yes, to expect to read 100 of the kind of book that would get a review on Noahpinion in a year is entire folly.
(For example The Republic Of Letters sold me on Anatole Broyard's "Kafka Was The Rage". That's 150 pages! A very busy person might not be able to turn that around in 24 hours!)