Comment by screye
3 years ago
As a reader, if I had to generalize; Dynomight is a SF-rationalist-substack-adjacent blogger with a good understanding of statistics. The 2 closest popular bloggers I associate him with are SSC and Gwern; both pretty popular on HN.
I particularly loved his blogs on the homelessness[1] and drug[2] crisis in the US. He? digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and usually finds conclusions that richer-academics-media houses have yet to find. I have found his arguments to be in good faith and are generally unencumbered by the political repercussions of said findings.
[1] https://dynomight.net/homeless-crisis/
[2] https://dynomight.net/p2p-meth/
my 2 cents. Don't actually know him or anything.
Great pitch, might add a few of his articles to my list.
I'm a fan of Gwern too, but who is SSC? Haven't heard of this one.
Scott Alexander of Slate-star-codex fame. Now at astralcodexten.substack.com
It is funny you that you have never heard of SSC. Most people I know have found Gwern through SSC.
Ok. How would you describe SSC's revenue model and incentives, then?
SSC spent the last decade as a blogger on the side. He had a big enough following to monetize it, but actively chose against it. It was only after the whole NYT debacle, that he actually moved to blogging fulltime.
If his incentives were aligned with money, then he'd have tried to monetize his platform far sooner than he did. If anything, a portion of the new subscription money is already being invested into weird community moonshots that would've never seen the light of day.
There is revenue that facilitates means needed to make good content; and then there cases where the revenue is the end. I have yet too see him do the latter and the former is essential to any healthy career.
That's interesting, but that does not answer my questions about what SSC's incentives are.