I’m glad you’re engaging with this (and I had a back and forth with Megan on X). I think the more important issue is revising the prose, which is what I spend time on my Substack. My recent piece on paragraphs (!) has over 100 likes, which is crazy for a piece on human v. LLM paragraphs! My piece last month on “not x but y” has over 300 likes. There is clearly a need for engagement with craft and how to tell the difference.
"Lots of working musicians lost their livelihoods to jukeboxes and radios replacing them in hotels, bars, and restaurants."
Worldwide there are more working musicians now than there were then, per capita.
Every single time that technological change has been predicted to be a net job killer, that change has proven to be a net job creator. Every single time. And the only reason people have to believe that now is different is because they live now and they need to believe that they live in a unique, special time. But there's nothing special about them and there's nothing special about now.
Yes... the point of the piece is even when industries end up "better off" than they were before, lots of real people are impacted in the short to medium run.
The transition costs aren't frivolous just because the end state passes a benefit cost analysis. The transition from agricultural to industrial employment took more than a century and involved enormous suffering even though it was obviously worth it.
It's good to ground ourselves in that even if we're optimistic about the new equilibrium we're headed towards. In part because it's callous to tell someone whose entire life is about to be upended that it'll be worth the cost and in part because there are policy levers we can use to smooth transitions for people who were caught unawares.
An apocryphal story I heard years ago hit me in a way the old Luddite debate never quite did. A western economist was being given a Potemkin Village-style tour of rural China during the Great Leap Forward. When his minder brought him to a site where a dam was being constructed, he observed the work for a while, then asked, “why are the workers using picks and shovels? I know you have earth-moving equipment.” “We do, of course,” he was told. “But the peasants need jobs.” The economist slapped his forehead and exclaimed, “Oh! I’m sorry! I misunderstood completely — I thought you wanted a dam built. If you wanted a jobs program, why didn’t you give the workers spoons?”
AI is helping me oversee very large quantities of information that I’m writing about. A lot of the projects I’ve had lately have involved thousands of pages of documents. It makes it much easier to scan them for the right source material. I use it stress test my drafts to see if the arguments are strong given my source material. I don’t use it to replace thinking but to augment the writing process. It makes me much more efficient.
The Bully Pulpit is really good! It made me have even more complicated feeling about TR
I’m glad you’re engaging with this (and I had a back and forth with Megan on X). I think the more important issue is revising the prose, which is what I spend time on my Substack. My recent piece on paragraphs (!) has over 100 likes, which is crazy for a piece on human v. LLM paragraphs! My piece last month on “not x but y” has over 300 likes. There is clearly a need for engagement with craft and how to tell the difference.
Here's the link if anyone wants to know how to paragraph. https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/for-the-love-of-god-learn-to-paragraph
"Lots of working musicians lost their livelihoods to jukeboxes and radios replacing them in hotels, bars, and restaurants."
Worldwide there are more working musicians now than there were then, per capita.
Every single time that technological change has been predicted to be a net job killer, that change has proven to be a net job creator. Every single time. And the only reason people have to believe that now is different is because they live now and they need to believe that they live in a unique, special time. But there's nothing special about them and there's nothing special about now.
Yes... the point of the piece is even when industries end up "better off" than they were before, lots of real people are impacted in the short to medium run.
The transition costs aren't frivolous just because the end state passes a benefit cost analysis. The transition from agricultural to industrial employment took more than a century and involved enormous suffering even though it was obviously worth it.
It's good to ground ourselves in that even if we're optimistic about the new equilibrium we're headed towards. In part because it's callous to tell someone whose entire life is about to be upended that it'll be worth the cost and in part because there are policy levers we can use to smooth transitions for people who were caught unawares.
An apocryphal story I heard years ago hit me in a way the old Luddite debate never quite did. A western economist was being given a Potemkin Village-style tour of rural China during the Great Leap Forward. When his minder brought him to a site where a dam was being constructed, he observed the work for a while, then asked, “why are the workers using picks and shovels? I know you have earth-moving equipment.” “We do, of course,” he was told. “But the peasants need jobs.” The economist slapped his forehead and exclaimed, “Oh! I’m sorry! I misunderstood completely — I thought you wanted a dam built. If you wanted a jobs program, why didn’t you give the workers spoons?”
AI is helping me oversee very large quantities of information that I’m writing about. A lot of the projects I’ve had lately have involved thousands of pages of documents. It makes it much easier to scan them for the right source material. I use it stress test my drafts to see if the arguments are strong given my source material. I don’t use it to replace thinking but to augment the writing process. It makes me much more efficient.
Question is the weekly pod coming back?
We'll have an exciting announcement about this in just a few days!
You let a 'McCardle' slip through...
Thanks! Thought we got them all...