Robin Hanson has been writing regularly, at about the same quality for almost 20 years. Tyler Cowen too, but personally Robin has been much more influential intellectually for me. It is actually really surprising how little his insights have degraded via return-to-the-mean effects. Anyone else like this?
IMO robin is quite repetitive (even relative to other blogs like Scott Alexander’s blog). So the quality is maybe the same, but the marginal value add seems to me to be substantially degrading.
I think that his insights are very repetitive, but the application of them is very diverse, and few feel comfortable or able applying them but him. And this is what allows him to have similar quality for almost 20 years.
Scott Alexander not so, his insights are diverse, but their applications not that much, but this means he’s degrading from his high.
(I also think he’s just a damn good writer, which also degrades to the mean. Robin was never a good writer)
Not exactly what you were looking for, but recently I noticed that there were a bunch of John Wentworth’s posts that I had been missing out on that he wrote over the past 6 years. So if you get a lot out of them too, I recommend just sorting by ‘old’. I really liked don’t get distracted by the boilerplate (The first example made something click about math for me that hadn’t clicked before, which would have helped me to engage with some “boilerplate” in a more productive way.). I also liked constraints and slackness, but I didn’t go beyond the first exercise yet. There’s also more technical posts that I didn’t have the time to dig into yet.
Robin Hanson has been writing regularly, at about the same quality for almost 20 years. Tyler Cowen too, but personally Robin has been much more influential intellectually for me. It is actually really surprising how little his insights have degraded via return-to-the-mean effects. Anyone else like this?
IMO robin is quite repetitive (even relative to other blogs like Scott Alexander’s blog). So the quality is maybe the same, but the marginal value add seems to me to be substantially degrading.
I think that his insights are very repetitive, but the application of them is very diverse, and few feel comfortable or able applying them but him. And this is what allows him to have similar quality for almost 20 years.
Scott Alexander not so, his insights are diverse, but their applications not that much, but this means he’s degrading from his high.
(I also think he’s just a damn good writer, which also degrades to the mean. Robin was never a good writer)
Not exactly what you were looking for, but recently I noticed that there were a bunch of John Wentworth’s posts that I had been missing out on that he wrote over the past 6 years. So if you get a lot out of them too, I recommend just sorting by ‘old’. I really liked don’t get distracted by the boilerplate (The first example made something click about math for me that hadn’t clicked before, which would have helped me to engage with some “boilerplate” in a more productive way.). I also liked constraints and slackness, but I didn’t go beyond the first exercise yet. There’s also more technical posts that I didn’t have the time to dig into yet.
bhauth doesn’t have as long a track record, but I got some interesting ideas from his blog which aren’t on his lesswrong account. I really liked proposed future economies and the legibility bottleneck.