SubStack “Notes” Is About to Be a Thing, Perhaps…; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-04-09 Su
Eternal September approacheth for yet another microblogging platform; Bret Devereaux on why the Roman Republic won so often; Lithwick, Roth, Orpheus; & Farrell, Mercier, & Schwarzberg...
FOCUS: SubStack “Notes” Is About to Be a Thing, Perhaps…:
SubStack has a “Notes” BETA feature now. and I am trying to think about it <https://substack.com/profile/16879-brad-delong>:
“Notes” is still in that state of prelapsarian innocence that all Internet meetups start out in, when the participants are people seeking to learn, and share, and communicate, rather than people who see an audience and want to perform for it. Every single time before, from Eternal September on, that state of prelapsarian, innocence has been followed by a fall when the shitposters and the outrage addicts and the engagement-machine merchants, and the trolls and the ‘bots show up.
The SubStack team’s problem right now is to create a space in which the affordances are such that, this time, that process does not happen. I fear that tying participation in “Notes” to some commitment to a newsletter is not going to be sufficient. I do not know what would be. I wish them luck.
I do know that by aggressively blocking people on Twitter, I have managed to turn my Twitter feed—but not, mind you, the algorithmic feed: that remains a cesspool—into a happy garden of unicorns and puppies. I very much hope that I will not have to do this here. But I am not optimistic.I feel like if you’re already blocking people on Notes (I didn’t even know you could do this) you’re missing the beauty of Notes.
Already here with the last round, Eternal September and Toxic Twitter Energy have started to appear here…
The hope, I guess, was that anchoring contributions here to a newsletter would keep the shitposting outrage engagement machine from being rewarded. But how to make sure that lack-of-reward is being maintained, given that so many people have shitposting outrage engagement machine muscle memory from the past decade?
Kinda thinking access to “Notes” should be a pay-for feature, as I contemplate what is coming as “Notes” moves away from being a community of people who earnestly write trying to persuade…
ONE AUDIO: Why the Middle Roman Republic Won so Often:
Bret Devereaux <https://overcast.fm/+M_GvjnrvE>
Very Briefly Noted:
Dani Rodrik: Will New Trade Policies Leave the Developing World Behind?: ‘Developing countries have plenty to worry about…. US and Europe… are unlikely to have poorer economies’ interests in mind…. But developing countries would do well to recognize that these unilateral policies are driven by legitimate concerns and are often aimed at meeting global needs…
Eric Topol: Why the new RSV vaccines are a BFD: ‘This, simplified, is beating out nature, rationally designing a better antigen (with amplified immune response) than the wild-type, be it the preF, used in all the RSV vaccines…
Dominic Cardy: ‘As a species we struggle to remember what things were like more than two generations ago. That makes us slow to realize the incredible good fortune we enjoy and blind to the incredible threats we face…
Charlie Warzel: The Vindication of Ask Jeeves…
Jesus Rodriguez: Inside Alpaca: The Language Model from Stanford University that can Follow Instructions and Match GPT-3.5: ‘Based on Meta AI’s LLaMA… significatively smaller than GPT-3.5…
Joshua Gans: I picked a bad day to restart my substack: ‘Moving beyond pandemic economics to innovation and technology…
Robert Farley: Does Ukraine Exist? Views Differ: ‘I for one am completely fucking befuddled that Ukraine is reluctant to sign off on surrendering territory as a precondition for negotiating with these guys….
Susan Page: A GOP war on 'woke'?: ‘Most Americans view the term as a positive, USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds…
Kieran Healy: ‘Honestly loving the parade of Con pundits who are like “I, too, have been to the great Harlan Crow's Memorabilia Compound to gaze upon his original Hitlers, his signed Mein Kampf, and his Sculpture Garden of Tyrants in a reverential spirit of lavish horror and luxury revulsion”…
Alex Massie: A Very Long Good Friday: ‘After 25 years, it is time to tell the truth about the Northern Irish peace process…. Gerry Adams…. “Thank you peace process, for making me stop being me…
¶s:
Rodney Orpheus: ‘My daughter, who's had a degree in computer science for 25 years, posted this about ChatGPT on Facebook. It's the best description I've seen: “Something that seems fundamental to me about ChatGPT, which gets lost over and over again: When you enter text into it, you're asking ‘What would a response to this sound like?’ If you put in a scientific question, and it comes back with a response citing a non-existent paper with a plausible title, using a real journal name and an author name who's written things related to your question, it's not being tricky or telling lies or doing anything at all surprising! This is what a response to that question would sound like! It did the thing! But people keep wanting the ‘say something that sounds like an answer’ machine to be doing something else, and believing it is doing something else. It’s good at generating things that sound like responses to being told it was wrong, so people think that it's engaging in introspection or looking up more information or something, but it's not, it’s only, ever, saying something that sounds like the next bit of the conversation…
Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier, & Melissa Schwartzberg: The New Libertarian Elitists: ‘Just as Brennan shades from epistocracy to markets, Caplan extrapolates from markets to epistocracy. He believes that there is “much to be said” for giving extra voting power to educated voters, “since [they] think more like economists.” Both Brennan and Caplan agree that they would greatly prefer a world in which democracy was limited in favor of the rule of markets and the economically enlightened…
Dave Roth: It Only Seems Unprecedented: ‘The idea that something is unprecedented means a great deal more to the national news media than it does to just about anyone else…. So much of what Trump did as president was unprecedented, in its open and overt corruption and its relentlessly brutish presentation, that it overwhelmed the media’s capacity…. Even into the pandemic, the national press was hunting in vain for the moment when Trump would display “a striking new tone” and start acting like a president. What Trump did instead, which is the only stuff that Trump ever does—try to get people to give him money and try to stay out of trouble, neither of which he is especially good at…. The stuff he got indicted for last week and arraigned for on Tuesday was the sort of dumb shit a person would do if and only if they believed that they could never be held responsible for anything. But he’d done so many things like that, for so long, that even the faint possibility of any of his actions drawing consequences arrived as a surprise. That he’d kept right on doing those things as president, and did them so oafishly, created a problem that the national media still evidently hasn’t figured out; it’s as if the ridiculous and implicating fact that Trump really was elected President of the United States somehow superseded the lurid fact pattern presented by his whole disgraceful life…. The office—and the system it sits atop, and the political process that supports it—is much more ridiculous than any of the people involved in covering it can comfortably admit or allow…
Dahlia Lithwick: Clarence Thomas Broke the Law and It Isn’t Even Close: ‘The best argument in his defense is that the old definition of “personal hospitality” did not require him to disclose transportation, including private flights. This reading works only by torturing the English language beyond all recognition. The old rule, like the statuteit derives from, defined the term as hospitality that is “extended” either “at” a personal residence or “on” their “property or facilities.” A person dead-set on defending Thomas might be able to squeeze these yacht trips into this definition, arguing that, by hosting Thomas on his boat for food, drink, and sightseeing, Crow “extended” hospitality “on” his own property. But lending out the private jet for Thomas’ personal use? Come on. There’s no plausible way to shoehorn these trips into the old rule—which quotes the statute verbatim—even under the most expansive interpretation imaginable. Letting somebody use your private jet to travel around the country is not “extend[ing]” hospitality “on” your property…
I don't think "Notes" is going to stay "good" till my birthday, which is 90 days from now. The only reason my Substack is as good as it is was the discovery that I could click on an offender's name and reduce them to their component electrons. That and making sure everyone understands that I operate on the One Strike Policy. Embarrass me that I have attracted a moron, and you're gone. It doesn't really take that much to get rid of them. Like everything else American, the idiots are 5% of the total population and 98% of the bullshit.
Notes has the same problems as Twitter. I've been seeing more stuff coming from Mastodon these days. When Epic Games decides it wants Notes to be profitable, it has the same problem as Twitter, Facebook or any of the others. Mastodon doesn't seem to be about making the big bucks. I can easily see it becoming a sort of side benefit to being an alumnus, belonging to a group like the AARP or YMCA, or any number of other options. I'm betting that anyone with a decent site hosting service will be able to spin up their own instance pretty easily.
This is not to say that I am ever going to get a social media account.