500 Subscribers: I Have Questions
In which I go on a listening tour for my constituents, erm, subscribers.
In the ~80 days since this Substack launched, we've covered everything from bee welfare and the rising premium for life to how anthropic reasoning can be used in everyday situations. We've published a tiered ranking of epistemological methods and explored the game theory of war through dwarven kingdoms and elven republics. 30,000 of you read my Ted Chiang review!
We’ve also just crossed 500 subscribers, which feels like a cool milestone, as well as time for some reflection.
Alas, I’ve just been hit by COVID-19, so longer reflection will have to wait. Instead, let’s try something different: A reverse AMA
How it works:
If you’re interested in participating, comment with a brief introduction of yourself. This could include:
A question you’re currently pondering.
An intellectual interest you have.
Any background that gives you unusual or surprising expertise.
A specific connection you have to one of my blog posts.
Anything else you'd like to chat about.
I'll respond with a question tailored specifically to you.
My goal is to ask questions that genuinely interest me and that I believe you can answer, rather than performative questions that sound profound but are unanswerable. That said, I am sometimes more interested in how people approach unanswerable questions than the answers themselves.
Ground Rules
Please post in the comments of the Substack post itself - Not on a Substack Note, or an email, or a Tweet thread, or LinkedIn, or via hot air balloon.
Your initial intro can be as broad or as specific as you want - From a single thought to your entire life story! Just provide enough context for me to ask a meaningful question.
Fair warning, if you do an overly broad or long intro, I might end up focusing on something you don’t care about at all!
When you do share context, be specific about the details, if possible - "I’ve been reading about marital customs in Papau New Guinea" is more helpful than "I'm interested in anthropology."
I’ll start asking questions on Tuesday afternoon, and try to respond to all comments by EOD Saturday (California time). No promises or anything, especially given the COVID. But I think the question load with 500 subscribers should be manageable!
Feel free to answer my question, ignore it, or use it as a jumping-off point for your own exploration. No obligation to respond, though of course it’s highly appreciated.
Other commenters: Feel free to ask follow-up questions or offer your commentary, but please try not to hijack other threads for your own soapbox!
Above all, bias in favor of chiming in! As an author, it’s lovely to hear from my readers. Don’t try to be too polished in either your intro or your answers. Remember, done is better than perfect.
Thank you everybody for subscribing, and for reading my writing! Even if you chose not to comment here, or engage in any way other than reading, I appreciate you regardless. It’s truly a privilege and an honor to have my long posts be read by so many people.
Other announcements:
Next Substack Chat with Tommy Blanchard! I will be chatting with
, philosopher, Harvard-trained cognitive scientist, and current data scientist. He writes about science, brains and philosophy of mind over at Cognitive Wonderland . Thank you to everybody who came to my previous substack chats with , , and ! It’s been a blast.Date and time of the next chat TBD, I’m hoping to lock in a time as soon as I recover from COVID!
Next Post TBD. Unfortunately due to COVID, I don’t have a timeline for when my next post will drop. It depends on whether I can only find high-effort things I want to write about, or if I get struck by inspiration to write something relatively easy, like the recent joke post.
See you in the comments.
PS. If this experiment works out well, we might do something similar again at a later milestone, or even turn it into a recurring phenomenon. If not, we’ll just strike this as a COVID miss and pretend it never happened.
Open question to all readers: How do you balance parsimony vs nuance in your own thinking, in that of academic theory, and in various sides of academic and practical disputes?
I often see calls to both register as "applause lights"[1]. Where in some contexts people would only see arguments for nuance, or to "complexify the situation" or "the truth is complicated" etc but nobody gives an argument for simplicity. In other contexts (more implicit than explicit) people would say the truth is simple or give arguments for the virtues of parsimony. But don't acknowledge the costs of simplicity.
It's clear to me that this is a tradeoff, and many points along the tradeoff are defensible. But I also don't want this comment of "nuance about nuance" to be a Wise Saying or something you nod along to. It's a practical question: how do you balance parsimony vs nuance? What are guidelines you use? What are practical tradeoffs you've made in your academic or professional work, and/or daily life?
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The best treatment in favor of parsimony I'm aware of is Kieran Healy's Fuck Nuance (2017) https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/epistemology/2017-healy.pdf
I'm not aware of a specific treatment in favor of nuance but I see enjoinders to nuance all the time in the middle of other discussions. I'm also curious if readers have other sources they'd like to point to.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLbkrPu5STNCBLRjr/applause-lights
Hey! Enjoyed talking with you live the other day, Linch. I’m a philosophy professor with interests in math, political science, and economics.
One thing I’ve been pondering lately is the loss of community in the US. (I know less about the problem in other countries, though would like to learn.) It seems to me like a major force driving many political and economic trends. But it’s also a bit slippery to measure “social capital.” And there are so many things one could mean by community. Friendship? Trust? Interpersonal knowledge? Shared norms? Etc.
So I find this all very new and exciting to think about.