Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.To describe why idea injection is so powerful would take an entire post (which I do intend to write). There are a number of reasons. First, idea injection allows you to frame the terms of the debate. Whether people think your idea is right or wrong, once you put it out there, discussion of the issue at hand turns into discussion of whether your idea is good or bad.
But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:
1. The rise of populism on all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. means that smart ideas are simply not as likely to be implemented by the people in power.Monetization means intellectuals are siloed
2. The general shift to Substack and other monetizable direct-to-audience channels has made punditry less conversational.
3. The rapid proliferation of AI writing has increased the demands on readers’ attention (including my own). [...]
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc Molnár
Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that stifle their voice, impede their development, and don’t pay them their due. In many ways, Substack has resurrected the old blogosphere from the early 2010s.
However, this resurrection has come at a price. Substack’s killer feature — email distribution — allows writers to get much larger and more loyal audiences, and to make a lot more money by charging those audiences for subscriptions. But this creates a financial incentive for writers to spend more time serving their customers and less time talking to each other.
In 2011, I was blogging part-time, because it was fun — the attention that mattered was when Brad DeLong or Paul Krugman or Tyler Cowen was interested in something I had to say. It was a little “republic of letters”. Now I’m blogging full-time, and having a conversation with Brad or Paul or Tyler is still just as fun and stimulating, but it’s a distraction from my job of creating content for my paying audience. There are still interesting intellectual debates and exchanges in the blogosphere, but they are no longer the main thing writers are rewarded for.
Turning intellectuals into content creators tends to put them in siloes. And Substack is far from the strongest in terms of silo-ing. Most of the internet is being taken over by vertical-scrolling short-form video, which is not exactly good for conversation and exchange. I could go start a YouTube channel, but it would just be me talking directly to my fans — I’d basically be a TV talk show host. I might still do this, because it’s a high-leverage way to influence the world, but it’s not as intellectually rich or rewarding as being part of a round-table conversation.
Nor are interesting new ideas as likely to emerge from one-way siloed content creation. Ideas emerge not from singular minds in isolation, but from dialogue — the cross-pollination that the blogosphere and other intellectual communities create isn’t just fun, it’s productive. Writing for you, my readers, is not boring, but you’d get better content from me — and from all your other favorite writers — if we talked to each other more. [...]
AI is stretching our attention to the breaking point
“My ambitions accelerate. My afternoons do not.” — Claude
Unlike many people, I think AI writing is actually pretty good. Yes, there’s a recognizable style that the basic models use (“It’s not X, it’s Y” and lots of other little cliches). That style isn’t bad, it just gets overplayed when everyone uses it. Yes, AI models are still not great at boiling a complex idea down to one or two pithy sentences. But you can modify the style that AI uses. And AI can do plenty of things human writers can’t — it can seamlessly incorporate vast knowledge and novel data analysis into a piece as it writes it.
For example, I immediately suspected that this essay by Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Cliff Asness, on the confusion of the debate over “affordability”, is mostly AI-generated, and Pangram — the most reliable AI text detector — flagged it as around 50% AI. But that’s not a knock against it — the essay is great. It classifies different kinds of “affordability” problems — true poverty, precarity, downward mobility, etc. — into different buckets, gives some illustrative vignettes, and provides some useful numbers about each one. I broadly agree with the article’s conclusions, and I think it’s a valuable addition to the discourse.
A bigger problem is that in a world where a huge number of people generate effectively infinite amounts of good-quality content like this, it becomes hard for readers to decide where to allocate their attention. Instead of identifying the few most consistently useful blogs and reading those in great detail, a lot of people will respond to the explosion of content by “reading” a larger number of posts but only lightly skimming each one.
It’s not my job I’m worried about here. It’s that in that world, even if my blog continues to get tons of readers and make me plenty of money, what I do becomes less important. If people are just skimming what I write so they can move on to the next 10,000-word Claude-generated post, the fact that they’re paying me $10 a month is cold comfort — I’m not really reaching them. And even more worryingly, no one is reaching them — if they’re skimming 100 posts a day instead of reading 10 all the way through, they’re not getting really good information from anywhere.
I don’t know how severe this problem will be, to be honest. There was always a lot more high-quality content on the internet than anyone could ever read, and a lot of people always just skimmed my posts instead of reading them closely. Maybe AI can’t make this problem worse because it was already maximally bad.
Also, I’m optimistic that AI itself will open up new channels for intellectual influence. It’s a well-known fact that if AI just consumes AI-generated output, it gets worse and worse. So AI companies try very hard to “clean” the text they use to train their models. Human writers, whose personal experience brings in new data for AIs to learn, can influence the world if their writings are used to train the next generation of AIs. [...]
Claude and GPT often cite me as a source on topics I write about, and friends have told me that Claude recommends my blog with surprising frequency when they ask it for reading material. Maybe Tyler Cowen is right when he says we should be “writing for the AIs”.
by Noah Smith, Noahpinion | Read more:
Image: The Simpsons
[ed. See also: the post below about a Chinese discussion of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.]
[ed. See also: the post below about a Chinese discussion of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.]
