Wish he was starting a Substack -- I'd subscribe right away. Great science writer, and one of the few journalists today whose name I recognize and whose byline is pretty much an instant recommendation to me.
I hate that this shitty company (Substack) has become synonymous to newsletter or blog. The submission literally links to his newsletter on Buttondown.
The issue is, as I said in another comment here, that his newsletter doesn't have his full-length articles. It links to his articles in The Atlantic, and you have to be a subscriber to The Atlantic to read them.
Consider the possibility that the problem is not having to subscribe to The Atlantic per se, but having to subscribe to a magazine to read just one of its writers -- and that, perhaps, the problem may get worse because Ed Yong might start writing for multiple magazines that each ask you to subscribe.
Honestly can't tell if you're trolling or being dense.
Another way to think about it is that up till now, if you had subscribed to The Atlantic, you would have got him + a bunch of other writers in the bundle. To me, what the a-la-carte model has revealed is what media-savvy people had always said it would reveal: a bunch of individual writers who all want me to pay $70 a year to get their periodic newsletter updates.
"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.
> Another way to think about it is that up till now, if you had subscribed to The Atlantic, you would have got him + a bunch of other writers in the bundle.
Wow. I never thought of it that way. It's kind of mind-blowing to think of a magazine as a bundle of writers.
Substack doesn’t solve that problem any more than Buttondown (which accepts paid subscriptions) already does. Go subscribe and pay him money. Be the change you want to see in the world.
> 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.
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.
> Annoyingly, being a writer means you can’t say things like "I can’t tell you what this means," because, well ... I can. That's kind of the point of me.
I find exactly this attitude to be annoying about writers. They may write well on a subject but that doesn't mean they know anything. Much the same way pilots complain about doctors who get into flying -- the doctor might be the most educated pilot, but that's not what good flying is about.
That's kind of their job, though, right? Couldn't you have the same complaint about doctors, pilots, or engineers who try to write? Writing isn't what they do.
Just seems like there will never be a Scotsman capable of appeasing this standard.
Lots of people write. The author of the linked post is a journalist. His job is to journal things, if I can be loose with language, and not just to be a writer. The arrogance that comes through his statement is pretty thick, and I think, of all people, I would like journalists to be as unbiased as possible. And arrogance seems like it could leas to bias quite easily by allowing assumptions to creep in.
I thought he was just saying he doesn't have an excuse for not being able to communicate what's happened or how he's feeling about it in words, since at the very least it's his job, if not his purpose in life. I didn't interpret him as saying he knew everything as a result of that, or that he had special access to the truth.
>They may write well on a subject but that doesn't mean they know anything.
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.
Wait till you meet a doctor, such as the one I met last night, who gets into anti-vaxx conspiracies, as in wholly subscribing to them. An actual board certified, practicing doctor with a diploma from USC. Working, of all places, in _hospice_. I don't even mean the high-minded ones that pretend to scientific justification, but it's almost as if doctor mode switches off and q anon conspiracist switches on like a light.
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.
The issues of "psychology" (/ "sociology") are ubiquitous with human beings (and many other animals, arguably). Partly borne of "heuristics" and other hacks / optimizations that make for a species quick and efficient enough to survive, they permeate everything human, no matter how much our minds might tell us they don't, in general. It took me years to learn, through repeated demonstrations, just how many illusions and delusions permeate my own every day existence.
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.
Are you a doctor or scientist? What is your credential to critique his view.
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.
I was gling to post this as well, lol, asking "does anyone find this weird?". It iust really stood out as if I need him, and it also presumes I even know him, whoch I don't. I actually subscribed to The Atlantic at one point because I wanted access to some old articles on Noam Chomsky, Claude Shannon, and I think on Cormac McCarthy, but I ended up canceling because of some very strange attitude I picked up from the magazine.
Pretty much a few months in the pandemic, I realized I would be 100% well informed if I generally just read 3 sources: Ed Yong, Zeynep Tufekci, and Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist).
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.
I’m curious how you got the impression that Ed Yong “covers all viewpoints.” Going through the list of stories he wrote for Atlantic [1] seems to tell a different story, particularly in regards to his covering of the COVID pandemic. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with what he wrote, but to claim he “covers all viewpoints” seems disingenuous.
What are some viewpoints that you think he should have covered in order to justify the “covers all viewpoints” claim? Could you elaborate on why they would be important to cover?
That sounds like a list topics that he hasn’t covered, or that he hasn’t provided updates on, rather viewpoints on a topic that he hasn’t covered. Unless he’s recently written on those topics and I’m missing some context.
I'm not especially a fan of Yong's COVID reporting (Zeynep Tufekci was my most reliable source), but this isn't a good criticism. COVID's origins are of less importance to The Atlantic's readership than the other COVID topics he wrote about, and the science is much less settled than the typical topic Yong writes about.
Even your own (non-medical) source doesn't go this far with its claim, concluding There is really no specific way to determine the exact number of nurses who left the profession due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
A fair point - I'm not sure disingenuous, and, I have a sense of what the parent commenter means in informal language about "covers all viewpoints", but, really, doing so in any stricter sense is almost certainly impossible, even for far simpler stories / events than those he has tended to cover.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 78.5 ms ] threadhttps://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?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> 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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ed-yong/
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/the-mass-...
> rather than get the vaccine
Even your own (non-medical) source doesn't go this far with its claim, concluding There is really no specific way to determine the exact number of nurses who left the profession due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Interesting and, given the types of articles he has written (that I'm familiar with), seems impressive!