2025-06-30 22:16:05
Suppose that people's success is a factor of multiple traits and talents. The less of any one talent someone has, the more of another they'd need in order to explain their success.
This has an awkward upshot: if you truly believe that your political/romantic/artistic enemy is an idiot, you should be more impressed at their success, and more eager to figure out what axis they're uber-talented on to make up for their idiocy.
"[rival party political leader] is an absolute moron."
"If he's so dumb, how did he trounce you so thoroughly at the last election?"
"Oh, because the voters are also dumb."
Probably the most productive response to the success of people who strike you as talentless is to figure out which talents they have that you don't appreciate. But this is also the least fun response.
2025-06-27 22:14:18
Here are some topics I would like there to be posts about, and which I will probably never get around to writing about.
So I want to try something different: if you believe you could write a good post about any of these topics, please reply to this email and we will either 1) pay you a small amount of money to write about them for ATVBT, 2) try to set you up to write about them for a bigger outlet, 3) some mysterious third thing.
The Scapa Society (Society for Checking (or Controlling) the Abuses in Public Advertising) was an organization founded in Britain in 1893 to protest against the burgeoning advertising business. It has been called "the first organised reaction against advertising" (Wikipedia)
Seems like it might have relevance for modern advertising discussions.
I see this particular design of chair everywhere now:
I want an investigation of this metal design that (if memory serves me) was not a big deal 10 years ago, and now is absolutely everywhere: who invented it? Who manufactures it? Why is it winning so thoroughly in the free market of chairs?
(Tangential but relevant: Ethan Zuckerman blogpost from 2011 about a previous chair phenomenon, the white plastic monobloc).
Hairdressers studios often seem to have a setup where the individual hairdressers pay to rent a desk (effectively) at a salon. I'm not really sure how this works in terms of walk-in customers: do they just go on rotation to whichever hairdresser has been unoccupied the longest? Do the hairdressers mostly see regular clients who ask for them by name, or mostly deal with walkins?
There's a similar business model in strip clubs – are there other businesses that work this way? What's the properties of a business that make it use a "you pay us rent to work here" model instead of hiring employees (or contractors)?
A large number of women in my life have 1) had IUDs inserted, 2) had some complications either while having the IUD in or while taking it out. I have not personally been present for any of the medical conversations involved, but my understanding is that all these women were told that negative side effects from IUD are incredibly rare. What's going on? Is this just a coincidence? Were IUDs tested on a different demographic than is now using them? Is nobody tracking the negative effects from IUD usage? Something else?
2025-06-25 22:19:41
Here is the election endorsement I know you've all been waiting for: (one author from) ATVBT is officially endorsing approval voting.
When I was in high school I was for some reason assigned to a committee to redesign the student government electoral system.[^1] Being in my time and place and susceptible (as so many of us are) to the Expert Consensus of the day, I helped select and implement a Ranked Choice Voting system. I had read somewhere that this was the mathematically fairest voting system, avoided pitfalls of First Past The Post, enabled the election of better, more-consensusy candidates, etc etc etc.[^2]
The best argument against Ranked Choice Voting is a five minute conversation with the average voter. And this is a knock on the voting system, not the voters: RCV is simply not comprehensible to any normal person putting a normal amount of effort into understanding their electoral system. This is a Crucial Consideration that the boffins at Election Theory University missed at the time: one of the most important elements of democracy is that voters 1) understand how the system works 2) understand why it reached a particular outcome in a particular case, and 3) feel that the outcome is fair and valid. It honestly isn't sufficient for a voting system to have good mathematical properties if voters don't feel that the outcome is fair and valid.
To be clear, First Past The Post doesn't exactly clear this hurdle either. On the one hand, it does have a strong (and meaningful!) incumbency advantage: because it's been in use for years, and we were taught in elementary school that This Is What Democracy And Therefore Fairness Looks Like, for many of us it has an automatic bonus in terms of how Legitimate its outcome feels. Again, this isn't "fair" in some cosmic sense but it is real! Perceptions of legitimacy may be circular but they're still real.
At the same time, I think modern history shows that FPTP so-consistently "forces" voters to choose between two candidates they actually dislike, and either prevents other candidates from running in the first place or guilts voters out of expressing their actual preferences, that [citation needed] both electoral participation and perceived legitimacy of the government keep finding new rocks underneath the previous rock bottoms. And as I said earlier, I think this is disqualifying for an electoral system regardless of its other fine properties.
This is why I have now switched my vote on voting-systems to Approval Voting: voters get a list of candidates and mark their Approval of as many candidates as they like, i.e. the ones they'd be happy to see in office. Whoever gets the most approvals, wins.
Your immediate objection to this could (should?) be that Approval Voting could create weird strategic voting incentives, e.g. if I prefer Anna to Betty and Betty to Charlotte, I might have a dilemma over whether to list approval of Just Anna or Anna And Also Betty, and this decision might determine who actually gets elected. (Ranked Choice doesn't have this problem, because I get to rank my choices in order).
The experts tell me that – perhaps surprisingly! – Approval Voting captures many of the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting anyway. I will be honest that I have read very little of this, and certainly not taken the time to follow the maths, so in a sense I am doing no better than when I was 16.
My approval of approval voting is based on two things:
1) I feel confident that the average voter would understand what their vote means and how votes are tabulated. (Well, at least somewhat confident – would need to see it in action more to know).
2) I believe the long-run equilibrium dynamics of Approval Voting would be much better than FPTP.
Basically, a long-shot candidate running under Approval Voting systems can tell their voters "please approve me and this mainstream candidate who is more likely to win."
If the long-shot candidate outperforms expectations, even though they didn't win, they're better set up to run a credible campaign in future, AND the establishment parties will have a clear signal of what voters care about that they should incorporate into their own platforms, AND we'll get an actual gauge of candidate popularity for things like debate participation and election financing, which currently often exclude long-shot candidates in a self-fulfilling circular dynamic.
Effectively, FPTP destroys useful information about voter's actual preferences, which then feeds into future elections as well, such that its properties in a single election are not the only thing that should be worried about – surely this has been written up elsewhere, very possibly I read it and stole it, but I don't actually remember hearing this consideration when reading up on voting systems as a kid.
Ranked Choice preserves even more information than Approval Voting, but I think that's outweighed by its downsides.
Almost-every policy I've supported in my life has had new and exciting downsides once implemented in practice, so presumably there's ways that Approval Voting would skew outcomes that I haven't yet predicted. But still, out of the candidates, it's the one that gets my vote.
[^1]: incidentally, I don't think Student Governments should be called Governments because they have no power to Govern; they should rather be called the club for representing student interests in front of the administration that actually governs, or club for allocating a small budget to make students lives' slightly funner, or something.
[^2]: Our first election wound up as a draw, something I had been told was EXTREMELY rare, perhaps because the people writing about RCV were not including the maths for a group of fewer than 50 people.
2025-06-23 21:25:27
For context, I run what used to be the 2nd biggest newsletter on substack by revenue and the biggest by far by paid subscriber count. Apparently they're trying to raise money again at what looks from outside like a pretend-up round; here's what I'd want to know if I were an investor. (Everything here is speculative, I do not have inside information).
As best I can tell, Substack's One Weird Marketing Trick was leveraging the economic interests of traditional media employees against their publishers to get positive "earned media". This is clever, and apparently effective! I'm not sure it's a trick available to many other startups, but it's an interesting thing to noodle on.
When buzzy articles first came out about Substack, people would say "it's crazy that journalists are writing these glowing profiles of their competitor!!!!" But this gets it wrong: Substack competes with publishers like The Atlantic, but it competes for writers at the Atlantic. And since Substack has long had a VC subsidy to throw around, it can compete for those writers at higher prices than most magazines can.
If you're a writer at a legacy publisher and there's a new company in town who is promising to pay writers a lot of money, this increases your leverage against your own employer; it makes sense for you to gush about this new alternative employer for writers. I think the right comparison is well-funded media companies of the past like FusionTV, who hired writers at competitive salaries and got a lot of coverage.
Early on, the coverage of Substack was truly ridiculous: there was a time when e.g. Substack added a feature to allow publishers to change colors of their websites, and got gushing standalone coverage in the Verge. For a while I thought the fawning was just because Substack had raised a lot of money, and people confuse fundraising for income. But competitor Beehiiv launched in 2021, got a bunch of VC funding, and brought in various famous writers e.g. a popular fitness influencer named Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Beehiiv claimed $15 million revenue in 2024, and on previous growth trends will be claiming $30 million revenue at the end of 2025; I suspect they may have more real recurring revenue (more on that in a minute) than Substack. But you still hear infinitely less about Beehiiv than Substack. Why?
Partly it's just self-fulfilling: once you become A Company That People Write About you're a Company That People Write About, and journalists with a quota can just file a fluff piece about whatever random junk you did today and pass the Nobody Every Got Fired For Writing About IBM test. Some of it is possibly the consequences of the paid PR ecosystem. And part of it is Substack's annoying-to-me but ultimately successful gambit to brand-smother actual writers and publishers, while other platforms are much better about letting publishers get credit for their own work.
But ultimately, I think the secret of the Substack Story (TM) is that it gets disproportionate media coverage because it offers lots of money to writers, and (consciously or unconsciously!) writers can then go back to their employers and say "hey wanna see my BATNA? Substack sets my BATNA."
When I say "offers lots of money to writers", I mean that (as best I can tell, though I cannot know for certain: my experience is that publishers who sign deals with Substack do not then talk openly about the contents of those deals), Substack has been compensating famous writers and publishers to be on its platform since day 1, in a way that other platforms are not doing. They suffered some controversy for this in 2021 with the "substack pro" product, which gave "advances" to famous writers to join. But my sense is that the extent of Substack-paying-publishers has never been reported properly: that many important publishers on Substack are getting many special deals and arrangements, in a way that might scare investors if they knew about them.
Why does this matter? Because, per Newcomer, "Substack is telling investors that it’s currently generating about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. The total subscription revenue flowing to Substack creators is roughly $450 million, sources tell me." That implies a 10% take on creator revenue, which is the public "standard" deal. But if in fact a decent share of that $45m is being rebated to publishers – in cash or in kind – to keep them on the platform, the company's economics are completely different from what they seem on the outside.
If I were an investor, the first thing I'd ask about is Substack's "enterprise" offering. If an individual publisher is (supposedly) responsible for more than 1% of Substack's nominal revenue, it becomes really important what deal that publisher is actually on. And there are many ways to rebate to a publisher, for a platform that is willing to do so.
Another "tell" I'd look at is when an established mainstream writer moves to Substack and launches with a ․substack․com domain instead of their own custom domain – again, I'm sure some of these people are on the public Substack plan, but if I were an investor I would try to get a hold of these people and ask in some NDA-circumventing way whether Substack is giving them a special deal.
2025-06-20 21:57:19
People talk about how AI will enable "the first one-person billion-dollar business"; I find this very dumb and it aggravates me. (I can't fully explain why I find this annoying, out of all the dumb things in existence, but so it goes).
Basically, "one person billion-dollar business" feels like a fact about your legal setup and contracting decisions rather than a real fact about your business.
I have no idea what her business situation is like but I'm pretty sure JK Rowling could have been a one-person billion-dollar business if she outsourced everything to contractors. Why should I care if she hires a full-time employee accountant vs signing a non-employee contract with an accounting firm? I'm sure the "one-person business" people are pointing at something, but I don't know what it is.
There's an economic model I've had vaguely in my head for a while, but which I've never really concretized, that's roughly like this:
Once upon a time, if you lived in a village and played the fiddle, you had a local captive audience that couldn't hear music easily except from your local band. You could get a ton of Live Music Performance Reps in with an appreciative audience, and after a while you'd be good enough to go to the nearest town and get more reps with a bigger audience, and eventually you could move to the city and become a fiddle superstar. I'm sure you had lots of other problems but in terms of your fiddle–playing this seems really ideal to me.
In the modern day, everything is different. People can listen to world-class fiddlers on their phones all day, or watch videos of fiddle concerts by the world's best fiddlers, and with improvements in transportation (and incomes) even hearing those musicians live is infinitely easier than it was a hundred years ago. And for consumers this is in some sense Good, but it also creates a problem of "how will our next generation of champion fiddlers learn to fiddle?"
Anyway. It strikes me that plausibly AI will create this problem in a whole bunch of new domains. I know there's a future where this is irrelevant because even the best fiddle-player is supplanted by AI two years from now, but suppose we're in a world instead where AI is better than 95% of people at any given task but the best human practicitioners are still better. How do those best human practitioners ever get to be best in a world where their many years of learning-curve are not appealing to any audience because AI provides a better version? Yes you can practice alone in your room for years until you show the world anything, but a) this is very unrewarding, and b) there's some things you can only learn by doing them for other people. I worry about this.
One possible outcome of AI (again, in the short term) is that it's a massive boon to "solo creators" who aren't that great at getting along with other people. In the old days, if you wanted to learn songwriting, you had to be good at songwriting but also either 1) good-enough at playing music to perform your songs, 2) good-enough at friend-making to find someone who would sing your songs. To the extent that AI creates a good-enough complement to all kinds of skills like this, the benefits accrue disproportionately to people who aren't good at finding human partners to work.
2025-06-18 23:36:19
When the yoga instructor repeats, before every posture – not just once at the beginning of class – that you can not-do this posture if you don't feel comfortable with it, this is inexplicably hateful.
When you do a favor for a friend that involves a large amount of time and effort, plus a small amount of money, and your friend venmos you the money, this is inexplicably hateful.
At a party, when you're suffering through conversation with someone who doesn't ask you any questions, but you're doing your best to ask them questions and keep things lively anyway, and then THEY make an excuse to leave, this is incredibly hateful.
At a party, when you're trying to get out of conversation with someone but they keep asking you questions and eventually you just have to make an excuse to leave, this is incredibly hateful.
When you don't reply to someone's message, and then you feel bad, and then you keep not-replying because you feel bad you didn't reply sooner, and you're just doing this to yourself and nobody is to blame, this is so hateful.
When you're reading a comments thread about someone who's had a difficult social experience, and then someone else chimes in saying "if that had been ME they would never have got away with this, I would have simply [done thing that's easy to say in theory but hard to do in practice]," this is unbelievably hateful.
When you're walking along the sidewalk behind someone who walks just slightly slower than you do, not slow enough for you to easily overtake them but also just slow enough that you keep failing to get into the walking-groove, this is unfairly hateful.
An attractive person who is also very nice, this is especially hateful.