Scott's recent appearance on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Daniel Kokotajlo was to raise awareness of their (alarming) AI-2027 prediction. This prediction itself has obviously received the most discussion, but there was a ten minute discussion at the end where Scott gives blogging advice I also found interesting and relevant. Although it's overshadowed by the far more important discussion in Scott's (first?) appearance on a podcast, I feel it deserves it's own attention. You can find the transcript of this section on Dwarkesh Patel's Substack (crtl+f "Blogging Advice).

I. So where are all the good bloggers?

Dwarkesh: How often do you discover a new blogger you’re super excited about?

Scott: [On the] order of once a year.

This is not a good sign for those of us who enjoy reading blog posts! A new great blogger once per year is absolutely abysmal, considering (as we're about to learn) many of them stop posting, never to return. Scott thinks so too, but doesn't have a great explanation for why, despite the size of the internet this isn't far more common.

The first proposed explanation is that this to be a great blogger simply requires an intersection of too many specific characteristics. In the same way we shouldn't expect to find many half-Tibetan, half-Mapuche bloggers on substack, we shouldn't expect to find many bloggers who;

1. Can come up with ideas
   
2. Are prolific writers
   
3. And are good writers.

Scott can't think of many great blogs that aren't prolific either, but this might be the natural result of many great bloggers not starting out great, so the number of great bloggers who are great from their first few dozen posts would end up much smaller than the number of prolific bloggers that are able to work their way into greatness through consistent feedback and improvement. Another explanation is that there's a unique skillset necessary for great blogging, that isn't present in other forms of media. Scott mentions Works In Progress as a great magazine, but many contributors who make great posts, but aren't bloggers (or great bloggers) themselves. Scott thinks;

Or it could be- one thing that has always amazed me is there are so many good posters on Twitter. There were so many good posters on Livejournal before it got taken over by Russia. There were so many good people on Tumblr before it got taken over by woke.

So short form media, specifically Twitter, Livejournal and Tumblr have (or had) many great content creators, but when translated to slightly longer form content, didn't have much to say. Dwarkesh, who has met and hosted many bloggers, and prolific Twitter posters had this to say;

On the point about “well, there’s people who can write short form, so why isn’t that translating?” I will mention something that has actually radicalized me against Twitter as an information source is I’ll meet- and this has happened multiple times- I’ll meet somebody who seems to be an interesting poster, has funny, seemingly insightful posts on Twitter. I’ll meet them in person and they are just absolute idiots. It’s like they’ve got 240 characters of something that sounds insightful and it matches to somebody who maybe has a deep worldview, you might say, but they actually don’t have it. Whereas I’ve actually had the opposite feeling when I meet anonymous bloggers in real life where I’m like, “oh, there’s actually even more to you than I realized off your online persona”.

Perhaps Twitter, with its 240 character limit allows for a sort of cargo-cult quality, where a decently savvy person can play the role of creating good content, without actually having the broader personality to back it up. This might be a filtering thing, where a larger number of people can appear intelligent and interesting in short-form, while only a small portion of those can maintain that appearance in long-form, or it might be a quality of Twitter itself. Personally, I suspect the latter.

Scott and Daniel were discussed the Time Horizon of AI, basically the amount of time an AI can operate on a task before it starts to fail at a higher rate, suggesting that there might be a human equivalent to this concept. To Scott, it seems like there are a decent number of people who can write an excellent Twitter comment, or a comment that gets right to the heart of the issue, but aren't able to extend their "time horizon" as far as a blog post. Scott is self-admittedly the same way, saying;

I can easily write a blog post, like a normal length ACX blog post, but if you ask me to write a novella or something that’s four times the length of the average ACX blog post, then it’s this giant mess of “re re re re” outline that just gets redone and redone and maybe eventually I make it work. I did somehow publish Unsong, but it’s a much less natural task. So maybe one of the skills that goes into blogging is this.

But I mean, no, because people write books and they write journal articles and they write works in progress articles all the time. So I’m back to not understanding this.

I think this is the right direction. An LLM with a time horizon of 1,000 words can still write a response 100 words long. In a similar way, perhaps a person with a "time horizon" of 50,000 words can have no trouble writing a Works In Progress article, as that's well within their maximum horizon.

So why don't all these people writing great books also become great bloggers? I would guess it has something to do with the "prolific" and "good ideas" requirements of a great blogger. While writing a book definitely requires someone to come up with a good idea, writing a great blog requires you to consistently come up with new ideas. One must do it prolifically, since if you are consistently discussing the same topic, at the same level of detail you can achieve with a few thousand words, you probably can't produce the same "high quality" content. At that point you might as well write a full-length book, and that's what these people do.

Most importantly, and Scott mentions this multiple times, is courage. It definitely takes courage to create something, post it publicly, and continue to do so despite no, or negative feedback. There's probably some evolutionary-psychology explanation, with tribes of early humans that were more unified outcompeting those that are less-so. The tribes where everyone feels a little more conformist reproduce more often, and a million years of this gives us the instinct to avoid putting our ideas out there. Scott says:

I actually know several people who I think would be great bloggers in the sense that sometimes they send me multi-paragraph emails in response to an ACX post and I’m like, “wow, this is just an extremely well written thing that could have been another blog post. Why don’t you start a blog?” And they’re like, “oh, I could never do that”. But of course there are many millions of people who seem completely unfazed in speaking their mind, who have absolutely nothing of value to say, so my explanation for this is unsatisfactory.

Maybe someone reading this has a better idea as to why so many people, especially those who have something valuable to say (and a respectable person confirms this) feel such reluctance to speak up. Maybe there's research into "stage fright" out there? Impro is probably a good starting point for dealing with this.

II. So how do we get more great bloggers?

I'd wager that everyone reading this, also reads blogs, and many of you have ambitions to be (or are already) bloggers. Maybe a few of you are great, but most are not. Personally, I'd be overjoyed to have more great content to read, and Scott fortunately gives us some advice on how to be a better blogger. First, Scott says;

Do it every day, same advice as for everything else. I say that I very rarely see new bloggers who are great. But like when I see some. I published every day for the first couple years of Slate Star Codex, maybe only the first year. Now I could never handle that schedule, I don’t know, I was in my 20s, I must have been briefly superhuman. But whenever I see a new person who blogs every day it’s very rare that that never goes anywhere or they don’t get good. That’s like my best leading indicator for who’s going to be a good blogger.

I wholeheartedly agree with this. A lot of what talent is, is simply being the most dedicated person towards a specific task, and consistently executing while trying to improve. This proves itself time and time again across basically every domain. Obviously some affinity is necessary for the task, and it helps a lot if you enjoy doing it, but the top performers in every field all have this same feature in common. They spend an uncommonly large amount of time practicing the task they wish to improve at. Posting every day might not be possible for most of us, but everyone who wants to be a good blogger can certainly post more often than they already do.

But one frustration people seem to have is that they don't have much to say, so posting everyday about nothing probably doesn't help much. What is Scott's advice for people who feel like they'd like to share their thoughts online, but don't feel they have much to contribute?

So I think there are two possibilities there. One is that you are, in fact, a shallow person without very many ideas. In that case I’m sorry, it sounds like that’s not going to work. But usually when people complain that they’re in that category, I read their Twitter or I read their Tumblr, or I read their ACX comments, or I listen to what they have to say about AI risk when they’re just talking to people about it, and they actually have a huge amount of things to say. Somehow it’s just not connecting with whatever part of them has lists of things to blog about.

I'd agree with this. I would go farther and say that if you're the sort of person who reads SlateStarCodex, there's a 99% chance you do have something interesting to say, you just don't have the experience connecting the interesting parts of yourself to a word processor. This is probably the lowest hanging fruit, as simply starting to write literally everything will build experience. Scott goes further to say;

I think a lot of blogging is reactive; You read other people’s blogs and you’re like, no, that person is totally wrong. A part of what we want to do with this scenario is say something concrete and detailed enough that people will say, no, that’s totally wrong, and write their own thing. But whether it’s by reacting to other people’s posts, which requires that you read a lot, or by having your own ideas, which requires you to remember what your ideas are, I think that 90% of people who complain that they don’t have ideas, I think actually have enough ideas. I don’t buy that as a real limiting factor for most people.

So read a lot of blog posts. Simple enough, and if you're here, you probably already meet the criteria. What else?

It’s interesting because like a lot of areas of life are selected for arrogant people who don’t know their own weaknesses because they’re the only ones who get out there. I think with blogs and I mean this is self-serving, maybe I’m an arrogant person, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hear a lot of stuff from people who are like, “I hate writing blog posts. Of course I have nothing useful to say”, but then everybody seems to like it and reblog it and say that they’re great.

Part of what happened with me was I spent my first couple years that way, and then gradually I got enough positive feedback that I managed to convince the inner critic in my head that probably people will like my blog post. But there are some things that people have loved that I was absolutely on the verge of, “no, I’m just going to delete this, it would be too crazy to put it out there”. That’s why I say that maybe the limiting factor for so many of these people is courage because everybody I talk to who blogs is within 1% of not having enough courage of blogging.

Know your weaknesses, seek to improve them, and eventually you will receive enough positive feedback to convince yourself that you're not actually an imposter, you don't have boring ideas, and will subsequently be able to write more confidently. Apparently this can take years though, so setting accurate expectations for this time frame is incredibly important. Also, for a third time; Courage.

If you're reading this and your someone who has no ambition of becoming a blogger, but you enjoy reading great blogs, I encourage you to like, or comment, on small bloggers when you see them, to encourage others to keep up the good work. This is something I try to do whenever I read something I like, as a little encouragement can potentially tip the scale. I imagine the difference between a new blogger giving up, and persisting until they improve their craft, can be a few well-time comments. So what does the growth trajectory look like?

I have statistics for the first several years of Slate Star Codex, and it really did grow extremely gradually. The usual pattern is something like every viral hit, 1% of the people who read your viral hits stick around. And so after dozens of viral hits, then you have a fan base.  Most posts go unnoticed, with little interest.

If you're just starting out, I imagine that getting that viral post is even more unlikely, especially if you don't personally share it in places interested readers are likely to be lurking. There are a few winners, and mostly losers, but consistent posting will increase the chance you hit a major winner. Law of large numbers and all that. But for those of you who don't have the courage, there are schemes that might make taking the leap easier! Scott says;

My friend Clara Collier, who’s the editor of Asterisk magazine, is working on something like this for AI blogging. And her idea, which I think is good, is to have a fellowship. I think Nick’s thing was also a fellowship, but the fellowship would be, there is an Asterisk AI blogging fellows’ blog or something like that. Clara will edit your post, make sure that it’s good, put it up there and she’ll select many people who she thinks will be good at this. She’ll do all of the kind of courage requiring work of being like, “yes, your post is good. I’m going to edit it now. Now it’s very good. Now I’m going to put it on the blog”...

...I don’t know how much reinforcement it takes to get over the high prior everyone has on “no one will like my blog”. But maybe for some people, the amount of reinforcement they get there will work.

If you like thinking about and discussing AI and have ambitions to be a blogger (or already are), I suggest you look into that once it's live! Also, Works In Progress is currently commissioning articles. If you have opinions about any of the following topics, and ambitions to be a blogger, this seems like the perfect opportunity (Considering Scott's praise of the magazine, he will probably read you!). You can learn more on the linked post, but here's a sample of topics:

1. Homage to Madrid: urbanism in Spain.
   
2. Why Ethiopia escaped colonization for so long?
   
3. Ending the environmental impact assessment.
   
4. Bill Clinton's civil service reform.
   
5. Land reclamation.
   
6. Cookbook approach for special economic zones.
   
7. Gigantic neo-trad Indian temples.
   
8. Politically viable tax reforms.

There are ~15 more on their post, but I hate really long lists, so just go check them out for the complete list of topics. Scott has more to say as to the advantages from (and for) blogging;

So I think this is the same as anybody who’s not blogging. I think the thing everybody does is they’ve read many books in the past and when they read a new book, they have enough background to think about it. Like you are thinking about our ideas in the context of Joseph Henrich’s book. I think that’s good, I think that’s the kind of place that intellectual progress comes from. I think I am more incentivized to do that. It’s hard to read books. I think if you look at the statistics, they’re terrible. Most people barely read any books in a year. And I get lots of praise when I read a book and often lots of money, and that’s a really good incentive. So I think I do more research, deep dives, read more books than I would if I weren’t a blogger. It’s an amazing side benefit. And I probably make a lot more intellectual progress than I would if I didn’t have those really good incentives.

Of course! Read a lot of books! Who woulda thunk it.

This is valuable whether or not you're a blogger, but apparently being a blogger helps reinforce this. I try to read a lot in my personal life, but it was r/slatestarcodex that convinced me to get a lot more serious about my reading (my new goal is to read the entire Western Canon). I recommend How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler if you're looking to up your level of reading. To sum it up;

1. Write often
   
2. Have courage
   
3. Read other bloggers (and respond to them)
   
4. Understand that growth is not linear.

Most posts will receive little attention or interaction, but if you keep at it, a few lucky hits will receive outsized attention, and help you build a consistent fanbase. I hope this can help someone reading this to start writing (or increase their posting cadence) as I find that personally, there's only a few dozen blogs I really enjoy reading, and even then, many of their posts aren't anything special.

III. Turning great commenters into great bloggers.

Coincidentally, I happen to have been working on something that deals with this exact problem! While Scott definitely articulated this problem better than I could, he's not the first to notice that there seems to be a large number of people who have great ideas, have the capability of expressing those ideas, but don't take the leap into becoming great bloggers.

Gwern has discussed a similar problem in his post Towards Better RSS Feeds for Gwern.net where he speculates that AI would be able to scan a users comments and posts across the various social media they use, and intelligently copy over the valuable thoughts to a centralized feed. He identified the problem as;

So writers online tend to pigeonhole themselves: someone will tweet a lot, or they will instead write a lot of blog posts, or they will periodically write a long effort-post. When they engage in multiple time-scales, usually, one ‘wins’ and the others are a ‘waste’ in the sense that they get abandoned: either the author stops using them, or the content there gets ‘stranded’.

For those of you who don't know (which I assume is everyone, as I only learned this recently), I've been the highest upvoted commenter on r/slatestarcodex for at least the past few months, so I probably fit this bill of a pigeonholed writer, at least in terms of prolific commenting. I don't believe my comments are inherently better than the average here, but I apply the same principle of active reading I use for my print books, that is, writing your thoughts in response to the text, to what I read online as well. That leads me to commenting on at least 50% of posts, so there's probably ample opportunity for upvotes that isn't the case for the more occasional commenter. I'm trying to build a program that at solves this problem, or at least makes it more convenient to turn online discussion, into an outline for a great blog post.

I currently use Obsidian for note taking, which operates basically the same as any other note taking app, except it links to other notes in a way that eventually creates a neuron-looking web that loosely resembles the human brain. Their marketing pitch this web acts as your "second brain" and while this is a bit of an overstatement, it is indeed useful. I recommend you check out r/ObsidianMD to learn more.

What I've done is downloaded my entire comment history using the Reddit API, along with the context provided by other commenters and the original post I'm responding to for each comment. I then wrote a Python script that takes this data, creates individual Obsidian notes for each Reddit post, automatically pastes in all relevant comment threads, and generates a suitable title. Afterward, I use AI (previously ChatGPT but I'm experimenting with alternatives) to summarize the key points and clearly restate the context of what I'm responding to, all maintaining my own tone and without omitting crucial details. The results have been surprisingly effective!

Currently, the system doesn't properly link notes together or update existing notes when similar topics come up multiple times. Despite these limitations, I'm optimistic. This approach could feasibly convert an individual's entire comment history (at least from Reddit) into a comprehensive, detailed outline for blog posts, completely automatically.

My thinking is that this could serve as a partial resolution that at least makes it easier for prolific commenters to become more prolific bloggers as well? Who knows, but I'm usually too lazy to take cool ideas I discuss and term them into a blog posts, so hopefully I can figure out a way to keep being lazy, while also accomplishing my goal of posting more. Worst case scenario, my ideas are no longer stored only in Reddit's servers, and I have them permanently in my own notes.

I'm not quite ready to share the code yet, but as a proof of concept, I've successfully reconstructed the blog posts of another frequent commenter on r/slatestarcodex with minimal human intervention and achieved a surprising degree of accuracy to blog posts he's made elsewhere. I usually don't discuss my blog posts on Reddit before I make them (they are usually spontaneous), so it's a little harder to verify personally, but my thinking is that if this can near-perfectly recreate the long-form content of a blogger from their reddit comments alone, this can create what would be a blog post from other commenters who don't currently post their ideas.

I'll share my progress when I have a little more to show. I personally find coding excruciating, and I have other things going on, but I hope to have a public-facing MVP in the next few months.

Thanks for reading and I hope Scott's advice will be useful to someone reading this!

TLDR (because this is really long)

My constraints:

• 24M, lower middle class, third-worlder, with a physics degree
• ADHD (=> low conscientiousness, high-variance attention to detail)
• have in-person, context-dependent social skills, but not enough to network aggressively
• otherwise good at math, programming and word-y things

My inner desires:

• achieve FIRE in a first-world country and start whichever moonshot company I want
• start Astral Codex Eleven and write enough words so that GPT-N can emulate me
• found a László Polgár cult
• get me and my dog into a liquid nitrogen tank

Hi, r/ssc. I feel like I fucked up my trajectory in life by deliberately straying off the beaten path. I got Silicon Valley-pilled very early on and it didn’t work out as well as I’d hope it would. So…

Anyway, so first things first:

• There’s this trope that entrepreneurs make for bad employees and I feel like I played it straight here. I founded a company when I was 18 and it flopped after five years, leaving me with nothing to show for it AND also a glaring lack of employment history.
• In the meantime, I spent waaay more time on extracurriculars in college than on schoolwork (physics) and that left me with a 2.4 GPA. Sure, I had trouble completing my homework and got myself diagnosed with ADHD too late, but that number is still a number and thus I’m severely limited to the kinds of places I can apply to.
• Third: I was born in a developing country. The worst thing you can do in your career is to be born in a developing country, so don’t do it.

Let me explain that last point. Before COVID-19 and its rapidly multiplying cousins, I had places to be in. Got accepted into newfangled Silicon Valley fellowships, went to international hackathons, all that jazz. But I couldn’t follow through with all of them for the simple reason that the US denied me a B1 visa. Which is like, great, right? Try again, live another day, not an AI takeover-level doomsday scenario. There were other options but I had no money and there was no way in hell I could keep studying while trying to get $10 000 just to pay for lawyer fees for an O-1 which wasn’t guaranteed to work out anyway…so yeah.

That was all Q1 2020. Instead, I had to become a freeloader in my mum’s metaphorical basement who’s also supporting my currently unemployed older brother.

The thing is, lots of career advice out there is aimed at 20-somethings in the US. Which makes sense, because the Internet is American, but it also means a dearth of advice for people like me which a) do not fail Economics 101 (Become a nurse! Everyone and their mother became nurses 30 years ago when it was still lucrative to do so and now they’re in Canada licking syrup off maple leaves and barely conscious seniors), or b) aren’t borderline illegal.

For example, since I’m not white, even if I speak English fluently it’s going to be an uphill battle for me to move to some East Asian country to teach ESL. I can’t just move to Europe too and pluck diamonds out of some newly discovered diamond mine because, well, the Schengen visa is almost as hard to get for people like me as a US visa. And it’s not like I can sell bathwater…

I know the Ideal Entrepreneur isn’t supposed to be whiny, and the Ideal Rationalist doubly so, but god fucking dammit I want things! I wanna be out there doing stuff.

So, okay. In the spirit of shutting up and multiplying, what’s my n-step plan then?

Step 1: Suck it up and move to Canada

Months of scouring r/iwantout and r/immigrationcanada have led me to believe that Canada and Australia are the only places in the world which are actively trying to minimise the number of pulled hairs per immigrant they get. Their immigration systems are points-based, which means you can actually plan your life around them instead of going on wild goose chases and trying to seduce people into committing immigration fraud.

My reasoning goes: anything and everything I do from here on out is partly constrained by money, and partly constrained by the trustworthiness of the institutions around me. For reference, it took ~6 months for me to register my company in our version of the SEC. And that’s with lots of ‘applying grease’ and other unscrupulous-but-necessary activities which I very much would not like to do again.

So the first step in my plan is to give up trying to found yet another company and get a real job.

To do that, I have to tick the following boxes:

• [ ] achieve ⩾B2 level in French
• [ ] get 1/2/3 x 1560 hours on the clock (either through full-time employment or freelancing)
• [ ] earn at least 12 960 CAD in the meantime OR somehow trick a Canadian employer to offer me a LMIA-category job

Doing all these will get me enough points to potentially be invited into the country without having to go back to school. These are pretty easy/hard depending on how much time I’m willing to allow myself to achieve them. If I hurry and make the right choices, I can probably accomplish the first two by 2022.

The third ones’ tricky though, and thus we go back to the whole developing country issue again. Most local job postings offer salaries that fall within 4000-8000 USD/year, which is not nearly enough to survive on while also saving up to immigrate BUT the advantage of choosing them is I can probably get any one of them quickly with the stuff I already have in my résumé. On the other hand, most decent-paying programming jobs are restricted to US/EU timezones (I live along UTC+8) and there’s the problem of, well, I don’t really know how to apply to jobs and their job postings are much more intimidating. At least, with local jobs, I already have an idea of what to expect during interviews from conversations with my peers.

I know it’s HR people who write those things and you don’t have to match all the requirements 100% to get accepted but the competition right now is fierce, right? I see people sending out 100+ résumés without getting so much as a canned response, so what are my odds being in a weird timezone AND not having several GitHub repos with 1000+ stars? If on the other hand I niche down and stalk the monthly Who is Hiring? posts on Hacker News, well, those guys are even more serious about posted requirements and are probably holding LeetCode interviews.

Still, not getting a job from the Western Hemisphere is leaving a lot of money on the table so I’m thinking there’s two ways I can go about this: either a) I spend 2-3 months obsessively padding my GitHub then interviewing with EU companies, or b) I grind LeetCode for much longer and try my hand at US/Canada companies directly.

Hell, if I do it right, maybe I can get transferred and not have to worry about my CRS points. A lot of people have warned me over the years that immigrating to a first-world country will probably mean I have to do some manual labor for a couple of years, and going by LMIA-category job postings the reality might not be far off. And I get that, I really do. I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but it just feels like such a waste, though. I can code my way out of a paper bag, I can teach graduate-level math to children, I can run a proper business and yet to better my living conditions I have to change toddlers’ diapers? I know dignity is one of those snooty things which people like me shouldn’t feel entitled to especially if I’m LARP-ing rationality and trying to Systematically Win, but it still sucks, y’know?

Step 2: ./financial-independence.sh, sign up for cryonics

Another sage comment I keep hearing from Canadian immigrant-would-bes is that, it’s a thankless achievement. You basically uproot your life so your children can frolick in cut grass instead of trash piles infused with rusty nails.

Since this is a pseudonymous post anyway, I can be shamelessly ambitious. I want to raise the next John Stuart Mill, and this is a huge part of why I want staying in my country of origin isn’t an option. But that also means I have all sorts of soft deadlines, e.g., peak fertility, income level by said peak, my own capacity to homeschool my children, etc. that I have to meet to maximise the success of this…err…project, not to mention having my own intellectual body of work to pass on.

Lots of things to do, time is so short, and I can already feel my mortal coil unwinding by the second…

Another constraint my utility function has imposed on me is an otherworldly attachment to my 8-month old puppy. I would very much not like him to die, and so I would like to be in a position to take advantage of biotech advances from companies like Loyal in a couple of years AND then maybe sign us both up for cryonics down the line. I know r/ssc has a love-hate relationship with cryonics and cryonics-adjacent technologies but I’ve been an LW-er far longer and the anti-cryonics arguments I’ve seen have yet to shift my priors as strongly as the original discussions on that darned green website.

It’s weird, actually. I used to not want to get pets, because I knew it would make things 10x harder for me (e.g., I can’t squeeze myself into six-person 3BR apartments anymore) but he was bequeathed to me and it was downright creepy how quickly my values drifted. Literally, within four days, I became so enamored with my furry friend that I had pre-mourned his probable death.

In any case, by this point I should have produced a voluminous body of work in some discipline. Which is basically the same thing as saying I have no idea what to do with my life.

I am clever. Or rather, I have to believe I’m clever because otherwise I have nothing else. I have no other genetic endowments. I will probably lose a sprint to a guy in a wheelchair, and my parents were dirt poor before they became not-as-poor so I don’t have a pile of gold to sit on. In a way, my insistence on naïvely thinking of life as a munchkinable game protects me from the harsh reality of not really having great odds when it comes to doing any of the things I want to do. So instead of playing statistical tennis, why not work with what I have, right?

Step 3: Do what I would have done in my 20s

There are lots of interesting people doing interesting things, and most of them can be found on Discord, Twitter, and Clubhouse.

wookay that statement sort of outs me as a grifter, huh, but it's becoming clear that this is LinkedIn 2.0 especially for people in the Bay Area memespace. Savvy careerists have recently been touting cosigning-style credentialism everywhere, and discussions in these spaces tend to feel very permissive (?), high Openness to Experience (??) in a way that’s hard to pin down. What’s even better is, even though I’ve given up on migrating to the Bay, I now have access to these pockets of techno-optimism that I otherwise wouldn’t. And that’s great! Entrepreneurs get a lot of flack for many things (some fully deserved, admittedly) so it’s nice to have a place where people try their darned hardest to see the good in your ideas.

If the coming Singularity somehow turns out to be underwhelming , I would very much like to start a space shipping/manufacturing company or hell join these folks who are trying to build self-replicating factories on the Moon. Barring that, I’d like to be the first to take this tech to market. I mean, I can’t be the only one seeing the trillion-dollar genital enlargement bill lying on the ground here, right?

Given all this, it’s really painful for me to even consider getting a job, even if saying that sounds so…socially unacceptable? Insert CW designator here? It means I have to give up working on this promising new idea I recently had (or at least take it up as an evenings-and-weekends affair), just as I was able to finally find a cofounder [*]. I’ve always known I rolled badly so I took great pains to rebuild my environment to maximise my chances. That’s how I was able to start a company without having any capital: I found co-founders who were willing to foot the bill. Similarly, I’ve convinced my entire family to let me disentangle myself from the typical Asian path of being my parents’ retirement plan, even though culturally speaking that was a very selfish thing to do. I don’t know how I could have done things differently, to be honest. There weren’t win-win options in my case, but then again maybe I should have looked harder.

One thing I would have if I was born in the average household in the US are equally palatable options. If I don’t drop out of high school and immediately move to the Bay, I would have gone to apply to the best universities in the world. Of course, there’s no telling if I’m actually going to get into any of them, but the alternative is what I have: a degree from some no-name university as my only real credential. Sure, what I learned in my uni was probably not that far off from what I would have learned in say Dartmouth (according to people I’ve asked) but if employers really cared about what people knew, we wouldn’t be in this pickle we’re in right now, would we?

Barring all that, I still have so many other options to chose from. Work in a trade, own a farm, become an au pair in some cozy European country, join a commune, backpack in Southeast Asia with my powerful visa, pull a Matt Damon and audit classes, write the next Great American Novel, join the formless matrix like Gwern, work remotely in an RV, etc.

Either that or I just have a very, very unrealistic view of how things work over there.

Outro

I've heard all sorts of horrible things about jobs. In fact, my mom works 16 hours a day, six days a week for ~8700 USD/year with unpaid overtime and a boss who keeps telling her she should be "thankful that she didn't lose her job during a pandemic". They even have their employees on a minute-by-minute-accurate pseudo-surveillance app where bathroom breaks are written off one's worked hours and not moving her mouse every three seconds is grounds for a being told off come performance review time. And she's supposed to be the head of her department! So I'm thinking if that's how things are, right now, and by good ol' Copernicus there's nothing special about her, then don't I have enough reason to stay away from office work forever?

I will vomit my spleen out if I get into such a dystopian state.

Of course, something tells me that her case is somewhat out there in terms of being y’know, healthy? And it does show. She’s been having breakdowns every other week and it’s a real worry for us that she’s going to pop a vein or two soon, if things don’t change. But yeah, even if I know intellectually that not all jobs are like hers, I can’t absorb it on a visceral level. I can’t make my inner brain follow my outer brain.

So that’s why I’m here. Our monthly (Slack-free) fixed costs amount to like 720 USD/month which I’m guessing is below the US poverty line so I am sorry if I’m trying to take away your jobs. But all this remote business means that the bar shouldn’t be high for people like me, right? I just have to earn enough money to allow my mum to get a new, not-run-by-Satan-himself job and hopefully allow me to save for Canadian Express Entry.

Lastly, a final complicating factor is I don’t know if I can stomach programming as a job. I love programming for programming’s sake, so I worry that unlike in my first startup where I could dictate what needs to be done, a soulless job would leave my interest a likewise soulless husk. If anything, I’m currently under the throes of the Lisp curse after having avoided the language family for so long.

I feel like I'm having tunnel vision here. Surely there are more career paths than engraving technomancic runes into electrified rock? I did scour the subreddit for other career-advice threads, which seem to crop up every season (sorry!) and there are jobs like business analysis that seem to be up my alley (aside from being the CTO in my last startup, I also did a ton of market research and spun various internal processes directly from it) But then again, I am writing all this down so I’m at the point where I’m desperate enough to compromise on this.

What do you think, r/ssc? Any glaring errors aside from this entirely incoherent mess? Alternative paths I’m not seeing?

[*]: We could bootstrap a less risky SaaS company and grind towards $1000 MRR but that could take at least two years to come to fruition, if I'm being honest.

I’ve become enchanted with reading Richard Hanania, Rob Henderson, Razib Khan, and all the regular Hoover Institute and Mercatus folks. I find them provocative and compelling, but I don’t have any deep reads coming in from the left.

I see Freddie deBoer from time to time (comment about getting destroyed has been removed): https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart).

Any others that are worthwhile?

Scott Alexander often reminds me of Jonathan Swift. I think rationalists generally might find a kindred spirit in Jonathan Swift, because he had a knack for pulling back the curtain on the absurdities of society. He didn’t just poke fun, he made people think deeply.

Jonathan Swift has always been my favorite classical writer. While Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal are iconic, I actually think his best work lies elsewhere. A Tale of a Tub would top my list if I grasped all the references, but since I don’t, I’d say his Essays on Polite Conversation and Letter to a Young Lady on Her Marriage are my personal favorites.

I have had less exposure to the works of Taylor Swift and only recently discovered Tom Swifty jokes. So, a few years ago, when I first saw the terms "Swiftie" and "Swiftian" in the news, I was thrilled. I haven't had anyone to discuss Jonathan Swift with since my step-grandmother, who was a literature professor, passed away when I was in 8th grade. I imagined sounding intelligent while participating in popular conversations about the The Battle of the Books or An Essay on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.

Alas, no one seems any more interested in Jonathan Swift than they were before. In fact, had I ever tried to talk about Taylor Swift, the conversation would have probably gone something like this:

Me: You know what a Tom Swifty joke is?

Person: Go Swifties!

Me: How about this one: "Jonathan Swift’s satire is so sharp," Taylor said ironically.

Person: When did she break up with him?

Me: Historically, he was outdated by the time she started dating, so she never dated him, but one can easily imagine him appreciating my saying the following sentence: "If only I could *turn back time*," Jonathan Swift said regretfully, "I would have included a few pop hooks."

Person: I like her Pop music.

Me: I googled that, and my response is another Swifty joke: "Looks like I have to shake it off," Jonathan remarked modestly after his latest satire was criticized. Do you like it?

Person: No. I like Taylor Swift, though.

Swiftian Quotes - who said it, Jonathan or Taylor Swift?

"People throw rocks at things that shine." "Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own."

"Why you gotta be so mean?" "I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed."

"And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate." "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."

"I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22." "No wise man ever wished to be younger."

"When you're young, you just run, but you come back to what you need." "A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying... that he is wiser today than he was yesterday."

"You can write a book on how to ruin someone’s perfect day." "The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with."

"Words, how little they mean when you’re a little too late." "Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style."

I’ve loved seeing some of my favorite podcasts live (99PI, RadioLab, etc.) would love to expand it to see more. Any one put on a particularly good show?

I have Lars Doucet’s Land is a Big Deal. Any others worth subscribing to?

10 Ways to Stop Bullshitting Yourself Online

Submission statement:

How much would you pay for a bullshit filter? One that guaranteed you’d never be misled by false claims, misleading data, or fake news?

Even as good algorithms successfully filter out a small fraction of bullshit, there will always be new ways to sneak past the algorithms: deepfakes, shady memes, and fake science journals. Software can’t save you because bullshit is so much easier to create than defeat. There’s no way around it: you have to develop the skills yourself.

Enter Calling Bullshit by Carl T. Bergstrom & Jevin D. West. This book does the best job I’ve seen at systematically breaking down and explaining every common instance of online bullshit: how to spot it, exactly why it’s bullshit, and how to counter it. Truly, I consider this book a public service, and I’d strongly recommend the full read to anyone.

Linked above are my favorite insights from this book. My choices are deeply selfish and don’t cover all of the book’s content. I hope you find these tools as helpful as I do!