Ed Yong is leaving The Atlantic
buttondown.email
buttondown.email
Pretty much everything else (not counting public health websites) felt like sensationalist garbage that wasn’t aiming to inform us but rather just get clicks.
I know if these folks write something, it will be well researched, well thought about, and when they make mistakes (like getting caught up in any political debates), they genuinely care about fixing them in search of knowledge, truth, and better understanding an issue.
I’m a huge fan of Ed Yong’s work and I know just about any issue he writes about, I will come away truly learning something new and useful.
https://buttondown.email/edyong209
...of course I get that he's not committing to publishing all of his writing there:
> I’ll likely do smaller-scale pieces too, but am still working out the details of where, what, how, and all the rest.
So… problem solved?
Honestly can't tell if you're trolling or being dense.
"If only my five favorites would get together and do something collectively, I'd pay $100 a year," I thought to myself. "And I'd bet they'd get vastly more subscribers and come out way ahead."
Whoever said there are only two business models, bundling and un-bundling, seems to be right, as far as I can tell. I'm looking forward to the next bundling cycle.
Wow. I never thought of it that way. It's kind of mind-blowing to think of a magazine as a bundle of writers.
Any more insights of this caliber?
> the problem may get worse
If you didn’t subscribe to the Atlantic (which it sounds like was the case) this is at worse a wash.
No, unlike with Substack, you don't get access to articles through Buttondown, the payment is just a donation.
> If you didn’t subscribe to the Atlantic (which it sounds like was the case) this is at worse a wash.
So what? Yes, this is a wash, and I didn't say it was worse than before. I just said I wish he'd started a Substack, which would have been better.
Still hard to tell if you're trolling or just cursed with a surplus of density in the wrong areas.
Because that is how he set it up because that is how he explicitly wants it. If he wanted to charge for access, he could, on his current platform. So, yes.
https://buttondown.email/comparisons/substack
> So what? Yes, this is a wash, and I didn't say it was worse than before
You said it “may get worse” but what you described was a wash.
Maybe avoid the repeated insults.
Interesting and, given the types of articles he has written (that I'm familiar with), seems impressive!
Just seems like there will never be a Scotsman capable of appeasing this standard.
There's a bit to unpack here. Being articulate is orthogonal to being skilled. That is, it's widely understood to be harder to explain what you do than to actually do, often by an order-of-magnitude.
Articulation can itself be considered a skill, but I think it's practical to ignore that in a conversation like this - with the sole exception of when articulation takes precedent over skill, as is the case with bullshitters and sophists. This is an error mode, similar to how any valuable quality can be overdone and loose it's healthy relationship to other qualities.
I hope this guy was bullshiting me, and I really didn't want to drill down further under the setting and circumstances, but the venue being a Beverly Hills entertainment biz mixer it's entirely likely that he was not.
In fact, this is really why it can be so incredibly helpful to know people you can talk to and trust who have different points of view and can help nudge thinking back towards a certain level of, say, "goodness". And, it's a major factor in the very dark side of "social media", as has been well-documented - including by Facebook itself, mostly internally.
The "tribe heuristic" can easily supplant years or decades worth of training on, essentially, "critical thinking" and "how to test / discover / 'know' things", such that you end up with absolutely jarring inconsistencies in people. I.e., the doctor (MD or DO or etc.) who has an entirely separate "Mr. Hyde" persona peddling a kind of witchcraft that is apparently grounded in philosophies entirely at odds with the "doctor compartment" in their lives.
It's a hazard for all - and, that bit, at least, can be of use to others. The "warning" inherent in seeing this sort of thing directly. But, well, personally, I try to stick to small inconsistencies that are unlikely to have major consequences, especially for other people.
Perhaps the questions about vaccine safety and efficacy have some basis in the empirical experiences of practitioners and recipients?
The human immune system is vastly complicated and not even close to being fully understood by science.
Is it unreasonable to want intelligent, unbiased answers to reasonable questions, or is that sacrilege "because we already know"?
A fundamental of science is repetition of experiments. This is how we know and verify what we know: it will be true consistently with repetition.
If vaccines are as safe and effective as claimed the sellers and proponents should have no problem defending them. In fact so doing would bolster their position, if they are being honest.