i feel like the underlying thesis of this is maybe wrong. someone closer to the methodology would know better but here is what i see:
(1) Meta and Google have seen their growth slow (not shrink) because they reach virtually the entirety of the online population, especially in the US. Meanwhile their time spent metrics continue to rise.
(2) Reddit is called out as a modest grower but its usage has more than doubled in the US since 2021 from 90M to 170M (according to emarketer).
Doenst mean the conclusions are wrong (i agree with it on polarization) but the growth measures seem to not reflect reality.
I think you are right to suspect the methods and the results. If you look at the paper's github, the python notebook was clearly written by a chatbot (the comments are all in the second person). So what you have here is a monograph, unreviewed, unpublished, based on GPT-level understanding of a survey that might not even apply to this subject.
Meta and Google time-spent growth is probably people watching Reels and YouTube. They're both becoming Tiktok and most of the accounts on Tiktok when I was on it for a while did not look like people's real name. So with regard to Meta/Google "growth" idk if there's anything too social about that.
sure, call it entertainment rather than social. very fair comment, but that is not a distinction this paper is making. the paper is also talking about tiktok too which falls into the same entertainment category.
Building and growing a business of any size is probably one of the most intellectually stimulating lives possible. People work for years without any where close to his amount of engagement with the world.
I really admire Rob for his blog, life experience, and some truely unique and powerful perspectives.
This type of culture war bait is a little lame though. Its even more lame that he isnt welcome in certain bookstores for some reason. His book is still going to sell great and its those bookstores loss for not seeing his value.
Also: do we know if he tried to present at other, not so politicised or ideologically-driven bookstores? I'm sure there's some. Feels like he's somewhat cherry picking to market his own book with some good old controversy marketing.
Scott Alexander is not for everyone (as I've learned by unsuccessfully foisting him on friends for years) but for people who are even remotely interested he is probably the greatest internet writer alive.
I read a couple of articles and he seems to blur line between truth and fiction. I couldn't tell when he's making things up. Did he really write about Taylor Swift for four months? Is anything he wrote about Swift true? Did he actually go to a protest where they started chanting "from the river to the sea?" (Soon after, it’s obviously fiction.)
When I have to read something else to find out what actually happened, I think the writer is being too clever and too obscure for me.
Then again, there are people here who clearly don't get Scott Alexander and it's clear to me when he's joking, probably because I'm a long-time reader. So I guess it's all context-dependent.
I used to enjoy Terry Gross and many other interviewers, but Tyler Cowen just blows past everyone by getting so much deeper so much faster than anyone else.
You can tell that the interviewers are often relieved to finally get asked real questions. Some people are put off by his style but I find it exhilarating.
What would you consider to be his best interview? Asking because I always found his interviews (I've only heard a few) to be quite dull, and that was a surprise since he is a pretty interesting guy.
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