Looking Back on Year 1
What have I learned?
When I wrote my first post a year ago today, I didn’t anticipate what a fun ride this year would be.
Some highlights:
Meeting my favorite bloggers—Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, and Arnold Kling
Appearing on Marginal Revolution for the first time and getting the “Good Piece.” from Tyler
Writing the Irrational Institutions series
In short, it’s been amazing. But reflecting on my greatest hits is likely to be of limited value to you. As infovores, you and I crave information and generalizable insight.
In that spirit, let’s look back on what I’ve learned from year one of writing on the internet.
1. Use lists
Much more than I ever imagined, it helps to write in the form of a list.
This lesson is one I’ve been extremely stubborn to learn because listing seems to lack the subtle craft and artistry I grew up admiring in famous writers. But I’m slowly learning that when it comes to non-fiction, many of the best and most influential writers frequently make use of lists—even when they don’t seem to.
This insight can be taken too far, as many of the most rewarding texts are initially inaccessible. But on the margin, I’ve learned that listing insights in a relatively straightforward manner can make for a great post.
2. Proximity matters
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has written,
Urban areas tend to be well supplied with models of success. To see the value of being near successful practitioners of a craft when young, compare New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. Among the three, New York City produces notable journalists at the highest rate; Boston produces notable scientists at the highest rate; and Los Angeles produces notable actors at the highest rate. Remember, we are not talking about people who moved there. And this holds true even after subtracting people with notable parents in that field.
When I came across that passage recently, I was reminded how profoundly being in DC during a particular window in my life shaped my beliefs and aspirations. While I had heard of Marginal Revolution before moving to the DMV, reading it in close proximity to where that network of economics blogs are written made starting my own blog feel more real and attainable to me.
As you think about what you want to achieve and who you want to become, the value of close proximity to models of success cannot be overstated.
3. It’s very hard to get attention
When I included this chart in an early post, I didn’t fully grok how true it was.
Insofar as you can emphasize the welfare-enhancing features of the internet (e.g. being able to publish freely, engage directly with interesting people) and avoid being sucked into ruthless zero-sum status games, your experience can be quite positive.
4. It helps to have skin in the game
While many of the intrinsic benefits of writing are the same regardless of who’s listening, I’ve found blogging for an audience to be extremely motivating.
When you write for yourself, it’s easy to put it off to next week or mail it in with something half-baked and poorly considered. Writing for others contributes healthy pressure to maintain quality output and unlocks more steady improvement.
While some of these benefits have grown with my subscriber list, you don’t actually need very many committed readers to elevate your learning and personal growth.
Some of my favorite posts were written well before I hit 100 subscribers, and I never would have gotten around to writing them without the stakes of sharing them publicly.
5. Pseudonymity does more (and less) than you think
Writing as Infovores has taught me a lot about pseudonymity.
Though much of what I write is not remotely “cancellable”, writing under a different name takes a lot of the unnecessary anxiety out of the process and ultimately makes it easier for me to hit send. At the same time, I’ve found that pseudonymity is not enough to make me truly fearless, which has led me to revise my view of the world in various ways:
I have greater respect for individuals who risk significant reputations to put forward challenging ideas. Even (and at times especially) when these risks result in a high-level of visibility or fame.
Chilling effects are much more pervasive and significant than I realized before, as the bar to saying what you really think can often be quite high. I now frequently consider the possibility that even people I know quite well have views they may not feel comfortable expressing to me.
To successfully arrive at the truth on a great many matters requires not just intelligence, but virtue.
6. How to Win Friends and Influence People is both over and under-rated
I’ve argued before that the essential goal of Carnegie’s self-help classic is to transform naturally selfish readers into more fundamentally decent human beings. This of course will always and everywhere be under-rated. It is also likely to make you more popular and successful.
But it’s over-rated in the sense that filtering too strictly on the attributes presented in HTWFAIP can cause you to overlook opportunities to see what others don’t. Many otherwise brilliant people struggle socially in certain settings and you can miss out on the positive attributes these deficits obscure. Resist the tendency to immediately extrapolate from idiosyncrasies, growing pains, or awkwardness to less visible but more defining traits.
7. Be charitable to those who disagree
Being charitable to those you disagree with is an expression of humility, recognizing that very likely their views appear strange or immoral because you don’t fully understand them.1 While I am far from perfect in my commitment to this principle, I’ve learned a lot from my attempts to apply it.
For example, I have not always appreciated Ezra Klein. At times he seems to go out of his way to irritate me.
But over the last year or so, I’ve started to come around to his virtues. His podcast is often excellent and he seems genuinely willing to learn from people who think differently. Even when he appears to be serving strictly partisan ends, Ezra is able to ask honest questions in ways that illuminate more nuanced ideas beneath the surface.
Consider his interview with Barack Obama. To a non-progressive, Klein seems to be throwing out one softball question after another to inflate a Democratic Party icon. But with a little more context, I was able to appreciate the subtle ways he challenged the former president.
Though I’m far from the only blogger to have started a Substack during the pandemic—and there’s no guarantee I’ll “make it” in any world-changing or career boosting sense of the term—I fully intend to stick around. Being an infovore is too much fun.
“Many attributions of bad motives to people, or attributions of conspiracy, spring from a lack of understanding of context. It is easy enough for someone to seem like he or she is “operating in bad faith.” But usually a deeper and better understanding is available.”