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Comment by Spinnaker_ | Hacker News Reader

Substack was really good at getting writers with dedicated followings on their platform and properly monetizing their skills.

Take a look at someone like Freddie deBoer. He was a very popular blogger, had written for all the prestigious publications, and was about to accept a $15/hr manual labor job before substack offered him a contract. Now he's making 200k+ a year.

Once enough popular writers were on the platform, and with some help from twitter controversies, the network effect took over.

I love it because it's fast and minimalist. No ads, no nonsense, just the text.

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I'm about halfway into his book. I'm not someone familiar with the education field so I just nod along during his discussions of the studies, but that introduction chapter was so good. I want to send it to everyone I know.

Make sure to spend a little extra time after reading this review of that book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-o...

Also coincidentally on substack...

Because I can't resist reading a dialogue, I read this now. I appreciate the summary of the book as it's written but I break with it here:

"He wants a world where smart people and dull people have equally comfortable lives, and where intelligence can take its rightful place as one of many virtues which are nice to have but not the sole measure of your worth."

IMO the more accurate claim is that FDB wants everyone's lives to have an equally comfortable floor. Whatever happens after this floor gets established (by a state, or otherwise) is not his main concern... and in my view, at least, it'll be a very different world so what happens is less important argue about.

Alexander then writes as if FDB hates whenever meritocracy dictates anything, but to me the important point is that the meritocracy dictates the floor.

"... Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer's "charter schools are frauds, shut them down" perspective."

I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral, and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this.

"Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true."

What Alexander describes here is the reactionary progressive strain of anti-IQ that is only as strong as progressivism's enemies' focus on IQ. It's an inverse function; I don't think liberals actually care that much about less intelligent people, people with educational disabilities and so on.

"DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time."

I had to skim this ending part. Maybe I missed it, but Alexander doesn't mention that: FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?

Respectable and respectful review, but I am still with FDB in ethos.

I think Alexander and I would agree wrt the floor. Saying "equally" was probably a mistake on Alexander's part.

>'FDB wants to lower the dropout age to 12; Schools guarentee that kids get to have interactions with lots of other kids, even in very rural areas; Schools guarentee parents time to themselves, to not worry about keeping their kids safe. Aren't these important points?'

Yes, but 5 - 12 is still a looong time for a kid. All those points are orthogonal to charters.

>'I think FDB wants to shut down charters because he recognizes that they're immoral [citation needed], and public schools are simply what we're supposed to maintain for taking care of and educating our kids (at this moment in history.) It seems like Alexander is just saying "you're dreaming too big!"; in every era some people always exist to say this."'

Personally, I'm very fond of Alexander's passage against public-schools-only near the end:

"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!"

I guess I was reading between the lines:

p174 : "There is no such thing as a 'public charter.' 'Public' does not just denote public money but also public accountability; most charter schools are not under the control of the parents and local citizens at all and thus cannot be called public."

p177: "[T]he very competitive landscape that charters are meant to foster creates a structural bias toward dishonest practices."

All public guarantees in this modern time are going to end up with a lot of shitty conditions and outcomes, when people in power don't care about them. Maybe that's a poor reply but it's my reply. The book indeed mixes "just overthrow the culture and machines of capitalism" and "here's some reforms I like, each of which may or may not be precluded by the overthrowy bit, at least a little." I think an unstated and reasonable assumption of FDB's is that if we enact these reforms, it will be because we've convinced the public that public schools and teachers are important. The ideas aren't just to put legal language on paper, they are cultural reforms advanced through appeals to compassion ("As a socialist, my interest lies in expanding the degree to which the community takes responsibility each all of its members, in deepening our societal commitment to ensuring the wellbeing of everyone.") Did the gay and lesbian community get marriage legalized by just crafting the most perfect bill texts?

It's hard to deny that leftism is in a confused way right now. They (generally, not deBoer afaik) think prostitution is liberating!

>I love it because it's fast and minimalist.

Minor quibble about this: On large pages, it can be quite slow. E.g., on https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-t... , it takes a few seconds after initial loading for it be responsive to pressing the PgDown key, at least on my machine.

> No ads, no nonsense, just the text.

I tried it out and was kind of shocked by the formatting lock-in and all the embedded tracking... I couldn't make it just default to plain text and I wasn't sure what the GDPR implications would be, i.e. whether I as an EU resident can do a Substack newsletter for EU subscribers and if so what do I have to ask them to agree to exactly.

But yeah if you don't care about that stuff it's pretty frictionless and I will probably give it another try if I get my newsletter act together. And I like that I can save Substack articles (the web versions) to Pocket for plain-text reading offline, a lot of sites don't support that.

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