Why so few Matt Levines?
gwern.net
gwern.net
He focuses on the clothes first and never his personal celebrity, although he uses his Twitter platform to promote the desire for affordable housing and respect for immigrants fairly frequently. I don't think there is a picture of him anywhere on the internet. He violently rejects all paid content opportunities. Instead, he focuses on the aspects of good tailoring, "shape and drape", and the history of many menswear items. His bug thing is that "clothing is a cultural language" that all speak.
* putthison.com (he is among the writers, but the big itself is mostly dead now-a-days)
* dieworkwear.com (his personal, infrequent blog)
* styleforum.net (a forum where he used to participate a lot)
I wish his (substantial) Twitter activity was available elsewhere.
e.g. I saw someone say "Don't try to go toe to toe with him, he grew up in [snakepit forum with lots of insults]" — these forums are for morons (for which there is time and a place)
I don't see the similarity with Levine.
They're also pretty easy to ignore (unless you somehow feel offended by them), and mainly appear on people's feeds because of how retweeted they are.
I'm sort of inclined to agree even if I don't care.
Dispute aside, I just found it a bit strange because the other guy shops at primark (cheap and crap mass produced clothes) and hates wearing suits, but he just kept trying to dunk on him. I'd hate to be friends with someone like that.
Obviously if you just want to know if your suit is good or not then it doesn't matter.
Sure, one is less personal, but the ~ vibe ~ doesn't seem that much different. That's one of the things that makes reading Money Stuff so fun!
I don't know mate, if you cannot ignore it, which I find it pretty easy to personally, then maybe this isn't a Derek Guy issue.
> I don't know mate, if you cannot ignore it, which I find it pretty easy to personally, then maybe this isn't a Derek Guy issue.
These swipes aren't necessary. This trick of trying to make me look like the bad guy isn't going to work. As for ignoring him, yes, I did. I unfollowed him because it was clear he was no longer a reliable authority on fashion for me.
Who gives a damn how he dresses; I hope he takes his own advice because it'd be pretty weird not to, but he could walk around nude for all I care.
Ann Lipton is the Matt Levine of business law. https://www.businesslawprofessors.com/author/alipton/
> While I enjoy Derek Lowe, the extent to which his posts are inside-baseball and do not repeat themes, or only repeat many years apart, emphasize the contrast with Levine.
1. His posts are inside-baseball - this is true for some posts, but many are written to be approachable to all audiences, especially during the coronavirus. This is similar for Matt Levine's posts, but as a finance nerd, not a drug discovery one, the author does not see this.
2. [His posts] do not repeat themes - he has many examples of repeated themes, including the whole science-over-money aspect of the Aducanumab saga, various times he has touched on "AI" drug discovery, and the whole Things I Won't Work With series.
Scott Aaronson might be the ML of quantum computing.
(i also find the field slow, but i really think im the odd one out!)
- Matt Levine - Finance (Bloomberg's Money Stuff)
- Derek Guy (@dieworkwear) - Menswear
- Derek Lowe - Chemistry and drug development (In The Pipeline blog)
- Ann Lipton - Business law
- 3Blue1Brown (Grant Sanderson) - Mathematics
- Mark Brown - Alcoholic beverages industry news
- Bret Devereaux (acoup.blog) - Classical/Roman/Medieval history
- Admiral Cloudberg - Aviation disasters and safety
- Patrick McKenzie (patio11) - Financial sector (Bits About Money)
- Ben Thompson - Technology business and strategy (Stratechery)
- Financial Samurai - Personal finance
- Rick Beato - Music industry (classic rock focus)
- VX Underground - Cybersecurity
- Brian Krebs (Krebs on Security) - Cybersecurity
- Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) - Software development
- Marc Rubinstein - Finance industry (Net Interest)There is so much boring shit you have to read on a daily basis when working in capital markets. Breaking geopolitical news, WSJ / Financial Times / Economist / Bloomberg articles, endless internally published market commentary, all of it often written by someone who takes themselves too seriously. Matt Levine was a breath of fresh air, someone who was both technical AND irreverent.
Nobody trades off of Matt's articles. Nothing he writes about is secret. His best stuff takes the form of "this weird thing happened" or "XYZ made a dumb mistake." Matt is funny, and funny is VERY underrated in financial commentary.
Bess Levine was great was also great in a different way and its too bad she's left the Wall Street beat.
I didn't go so far as saving the emails offline but I do know they're in my inbox somewhere.
We don't have more Matt Levines because it's hard to create them.
I think the first filter is a much bigger factor, but for a reason that’s not mentioned in the post: $$$s to be gained. A large number of people read finance blogs because they think they themselves make money with the knowledge therein.
This is hard to replicate with other examples given: for purely abstract topics, eg Greco-Roman philosophy, the prize is purely intellectual. For others, eg fracking and drug discovery, you can make tons of money but pool of interested people is much smaller.
The only combination of general appeal and personal gain that could be interesting, I think, would be dating. You have recurrent patterns, clear outcomes, and pretty much everyone is interested and want to learn how to get better at it.
Levine's blogs aren't geared to this audience. The pitch is simpler: people in finance have money and the people with the most money in finance tend to enjoy (or at least spending way too much time) thinking about finance. (I'm in finance and I'm good at it.)
If I could pay for Matt Levine separately from Bloomberg, I would. Not because I expect to profit off it. But because it's fun, informative and once in a while helps me explain something to someone else (usually a friend) more concisely.
As for Bloomberg itself, you can subscribe to Money Stuff (via email) without paying for Bloomberg.
(Perhaps you just want to throw some cash his way because you get value from his writing, and want to show your appreciation; ignore me in that case.)
* sincere question.
I'm less in favor of propping up inefficient organizations as a byproduct. Bloomberg is a bit sus at this point, I'm not clear on whether the top has your and my best interests at heart.
Do you actually read his work?
I certainly don't expect to make money from reading it. I'd be surprised if a significant number of subscribers had that reason.
It's entertaining and informative about the overall world, not something I expect to make money from.
[0] https://github.com/0xNF/lawsofinsidertrading.com <- also has handy links for each rule
I work adjacent to finance, but I'd read Money Stuff even without that link. It's a good way to keep myself up to date on happenings in and around finance, and of course, the newsletter is often funny. I don't expect to ever make money from my reading activity, but I have found that being well informed of weird and/or interesting developments within that world makes me more valuable at work.
Being able to predict what kinds of compliance and governance related curveballs may be coming, a few months before they land on our desks? Surprisingly valuable.
Anyone doing this with Money Stuff is, well, extremely confused.
A similar market niche: home repairs.
Gwern says Greco-Roman philosophy wouldn't work as a niche; but my one offering to the list of Matt Levine simulacra actually does write about Greek and Roman _stuff_, if rarely philosophy: Bret Devereaux at https://acoup.blog . You might know him from his "historian's analysis of the Battle of Helm's Deep" or his three-parter on war elephants. Even though the people being studied are long dead, the people _doing_ the studying are very busy producing new works — there's no danger that ACOUP will ever run out of new books to review or new theories to evaluate.
It's not a newsletter, but it still hits the spaced repetition point. It doesn't have the advantage of following news, but it makes up for this by having a huge 'backlog' of things to write about. And it still has the 'known outcomes' point, because largely the outcome of history is known. And on the open questions, there isn't much progress, but there are themes to hearken back to. So even there you still have spaced repetition.
A lot of scientific fields are most definitely not based in such simple foundations, there will be complicated chemistry at a minimum. Engineering and physics quickly careens into calculus at a minimum.
- For aviation disasters and safety, can't beat Admiral Cloudberg: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/
- For more about the financial sector, Patrick McKenzie is solid gold every time: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/ (and I believe an HN regular as well!)
The formula is great and covers everything from airline company culture to what the pilot ate for breakfast figuratively speaking to material science.
However you wont get commentry on anything that is still flying.
I had a sixth grade teacher who was a brilliant and certified historian, and a former pilot who served in the Vietnam war. Yet he worked at an ugly, outdated elementary school in an exurb of greater Cleveland. He made school a delight and taught me more world history in one year than all of junior high and high school combined. Few have ever heard of him, yet I doubt any of his students will ever forget him or any of the things he taught us.
At this point he's now been writing about the industry longer than he's been in it, and given his prominence and name brand, I am sure he is paid well for it.
Most people at the peak of their professional ascendence, after the gauntlet of the right schools, the right jobs, etc.. are unable to walk away.
There could easily be such a writer about pretty much any field if anyone was good enough at writing and motivated enough to do it. But they're not (yet). There is a requirement that whatever field it is, they understand most of it really well. And there aren't that many people who have gotten to that point.
I've found almost the opposite. Many smart people see a new field and think "ah this can't be too hard if we just approach it from first principles" and then leave behind all of that field's accumulated knowledge. In finance, this is a well known trap for the unwary polymath.
I mean, that was his entire point about crypto- how it speed-ran the entire history of finance markets and discovered- in very painful and usually expensive ways- why each bit of market regulations exist.
https://stratechery.com/2024/elon-dreams-and-bitter-lessons/
https://www.financialsamurai.com/minimum-investment-threshol...
Reminds me of Mr Money Mustache, dude has some good takes, but a lot of his advice is predicated on having a huge nest egg.
Maybe one reason for lack of newsletters is YouTube pays more and video is sometimes a better format, Levine has a bloomberg salary too, not many people are going to employ you to be writing about roman philosophy full time
Yeah sometimes the best content is from people who are in well paid careers that are just researching a topic to scratch their own itch and then sharing it. I like the History of English Language podcast, and the guy who does it is a lawyer or something in his real life.
The only other writer I can think of who elevates their topic in a similar way is Dan Neill, the automotive columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism when he worked at the Los Angeles Times.
The first is the propensity for journalists to be in lockstep with US foreign policy. This occasionally gets brought up to them and they generally act offended and might respond with "my views haven't been bought" to which the retort is "you wouldn't have this job if you didn't have these views". The point is that there are filters at every level to produce people who are complicit with the status quo, not just in journalism.
The second is an old Noam Chomsky video talking about Newt Gingrich railing against "welfare queens" when in fact his congressional district (at the time) received something like the third-most (after the Kennedy Space Center and another I forget) most from Congress, which is really the definition of welfare. But we don't often talk about "corporate welfare".
But the point is the Democrats at the time never challenged him on this. Why? Class solidarity. The political elite (regardless of party) are more interested in perpetuating the system than anything else because they directly benefit from it.
A good example of this is so-called "floor privileges". If you've been a Congressperson and leave, almost inevitably to become a lobbyist, you retain, by convention, "floor privileges". That is, you have the right to enter Congress and the chamber of the House of Representatives even though you're a private citizen (worse, a lobbyist). No Congresspeople wants to upset that apple cart because that's their future path to wealth: selling access.
So people like Matt Levine are an outlier basically by design.
this would be a consultant. the market for 'shipping container experts' is tiny . not enough to support a columnist
Reddit 'had' solved the 2 main conundrums of 'Matt Levines'. If you're in demand, you don't have the time to be blogging. If you're in demand, you don't want your public persona to low effort comments. But reddit wasn't a job, it was leisure with a pseudo anon persona. Its status as a pretty-filter-on-4chan meant that greybeards could offload their writing by linking to 4chan. Alas, in trying to make it appeal to the mainstream, Ohanian killed the golden goose and reddit became a sanitized quora-tiktok analogue. Gwern himself runs a couple of niche subreddits which occasionally see such grey-beards stepping in. But, the website is clearly in decline.
IMO, this article comes a little late. Substack is the killer-app for Matt Levines. Substacks by Razib, Asianometry, Sebastian Raschka, Dominic Cummings, etc. rub shoulders with Matt Levine in their respective fields.
I'm not rich enough to be paying $100/month across different substacks. But I occasionally get a 1 month 'binge-subsription' to my favorites. There is a lot of gold there.
____
Since folks are doing recommendations, I'm going to add a few across different platforms.
- Frank Stephenson (Jonny Ive of car design)
- Bill Bishop. (China expert. Stratchery's co-worker)
- Stewart Hicks (Professor of Architecture at UIC)
- Kenji (food. duh)
- Healthcare triage (Distinguished Pediatrics professor. Dumbed down, but still good)
1. cases with known outcomes/answers => data with labels
2. first-principles explanations: most people experience an “illusion of depth” => avoiding local minima
3. spaced repetition enabled by fast turnover => stochastic optimization
In actuality, probably nubile coeds.
As someone who has a similar background to Levine, I'm a big fan and can say it's uncommon to find someone like him who can write effectively and with levity.
also a big fan of:
- marcus hutchins
- geohotz
Joel Spolsky's blog (Joel on Software) was also very pleasant read on software back in the day
Occasionally you'll see people joke that they need to change their content from art to home loans to cash in.
Bloomberg is a subscription. It has ads, but they don't complain about ad blocking. Turned it off out of curiosity: these look generic.
Subjects?
Which your? Levine's? Why does it matter if the subject of an article is on Bloomberg? (If you're saying Bloomberg only concerns itself with financial markets, you're wrong.)
Deep insights in finance are typically not useful once everyone knows about them.
I do also read his stuff less nowadays. I still enjoy it, but it's not as high a priority for me as it used to be. I think it's the repetition. After 100 "everything is securities fraud" stories, number 101 is less entertaining.
Still a big fan though.
By that logic, it is right and good for the American public to be financially illiterate.
(Never miss a chance to promote him, when I can!)
It also means you can make a change in the world.
Pretty skeptical of this assertion in an otherwise great read
It misses a larger point which is that advertisers pay for readers who are interested in financial content, and they tend to pay less in most other areas of coverage. So other industries do not produce Matts as easily, or takes bets on writers to see if they work well driving people into the wide end of the funnel.
In the case of Bloomberg, it's a little more nuanced than ads, since the company treats content as a loss leader to make people aware of the financial data it sells through its terminal.
Matt Levine exists because Bloomberg can charge more than $400k per year to a terminal subscriber, which means they will gladly absorb a really high CAC.
Some people are just really, really good.
Makes sense - Mr Money Mustasche is about personal finance, whereas Matt Levin is commentary on the financial industry.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sabine Hossenfelder, Brian Greene and many others cover astrophysics, quantum mechanics, particle physics, and other science topics.
I think the challenge is that the sciences are hard and developments there are fairly slow as compared with financial stuff which moves a bit more quickly.
None of those three "cover" any topics. They push their own topics and agenda, which can often be fringe or counterculture and highly personal pet preferences or topics. Tyson, in particular, just likes to hear himself talk above all else, took 11 years to get his PhD, was kicked out of the UT Austin PhD program, is often wrong, and is a living breathing example of "well, actually".
These three are about as far from journalism as you can get and are actively hurtful, at least in the case of Greene and Tyson due to their popularity, to science.
The problem.. as it often tends to be in instances such as this.. is that he did become a faux celebrity with all the benefits and drawbacks it brings. Unlike another celebrity in that realm however ( Hawking ), he did not manage to get the same level of recognition.
Check her YT channel - full of clickbait content outside of her expertise. Quite sad actually. https://www.youtube.com/user/peppermint78
Sean Carroll would be a better example, although his reach is limited.
More likely that because finance involves money, and huge amounts of it, and a lot of people are interested about things that involve huge amounts of money, especially if there's drama.
> I think the challenge is that the sciences are hard and developments there are fairly slow as compared with financial stuff which moves a bit more quickly.