A lot of the best intellectuals I know don’t really engage with podcasts nor blog posts - (highly selected) books and academic papers are just transmit way more high quality information per unit time.
I wonder if one wants to speak to intellectuals instead of important decision-makers[1], the latter have less time and more focus on reading easy-to-read things. Presumably there’s also a sliding scale of how far outside of one’s native network the things one writes reach, but it can be pretty far.
Even intellectuals do read random high-quality blogs though, I think? Especially on things that academia doesn’t really touch or can’t touch because it’s not quite an LPU. There is, of course, tons of writing, but a lot of it is concentrated in specific topics—there’s possibly six orders of magnitude more writing on What Donald Trump Did Yesterday than on methods for increasing subjective lifespan. I don’t necessarily advocate for writing more, but if one finds it easy then the value of information of trying a bit looks large enough to outweigh the costs.
Who I’m pretty sure do read blogs, e.g. Vance alluding to Scott Alexander’s Gay Rites are Civil Rites or having read AI 2027, the influence of the Industrial Party on (some) PRC policy despite being mostly a group of online nerds, the fact that Musk reads Gwern, SSC, the fact that so much current SV AI company culture is downstream of the 00s transhumanists, specifically Yudkowsky…
I wonder if one wants to speak to intellectuals instead of important decision-makers [1] , the latter have less time and more focus on reading easy-to-read things. Presumably there’s also a sliding scale of how far outside of one’s native network the things one writes reach, but it can be pretty far.
Even intellectuals do read random high-quality blogs though, I think? Especially on things that academia doesn’t really touch or can’t touch because it’s not quite an LPU. There is, of course, tons of writing, but a lot of it is concentrated in specific topics—there’s possibly six orders of magnitude more writing on What Donald Trump Did Yesterday than on methods for increasing subjective lifespan. I don’t necessarily advocate for writing more, but if one finds it easy then the value of information of trying a bit looks large enough to outweigh the costs.
Who I’m pretty sure do read blogs, e.g. Vance alluding to Scott Alexander’s Gay Rites are Civil Rites or having read AI 2027, the influence of the Industrial Party on (some) PRC policy despite being mostly a group of online nerds, the fact that Musk reads Gwern, SSC, the fact that so much current SV AI company culture is downstream of the 00s transhumanists, specifically Yudkowsky…