#Disadvantages of Substack

[jolenes-book-journey]

What Is Substack And How Can Authors Use It

Substack has emerged as a prominent platform for authors seeking to publish newsletters and share podcasts. It offers a streamlined approach to content distribution, but it’s essential to weigh its advantages and disadvantages to determine if it’s the right fit for your author. Jolene’s on Substack with her Publication called “The Indie Author’s Guide to Writing, Publishing, and Thrivin” Continue…

[taliabhattwrites]

I’m sorry if you’ve answered this, or if it should be obvious, but you does your substack say trans/rad/fem? What is trans radical feminism? How does it differ from just radical feminism?

Yep! It says Trans/Rad/Fem, as does the title of my book.

The short version is that your average online hate speech aficionado who calls themselves a TE"RF" is no more well-versed in actual radical feminist literature than the billionaire writer. The most feminist literature they've read is likely wizard kidlit, and maybe the most hateful bits of 'Transsexual Empire' or a bit of Sheila Jeffreys if you're lucky.

Meanwhile, the radical feminist tradition was one that itself emerged as a materialist, inclusive, and more working-class counterpoint to the First Wave's doddering Friedanism. People don't recall much of the first wave, but it engendered such ironclad feminist arguments as "lesbians are not oppressed by patriarchy because they do not marry and are not confined to the domestic sphere", or "mothers and fathers are equally responsible for women doing to the bulk of childcare, because mothers are so reluctant to let go."

Truly, it's a miracle there were any subsequent waves at all.

Adrienne Rich's essay on Compulsory Heterosexuality can be viewed as something of a turning point, a collation of a more materialist framework (since I don't believe Rich necessarily originated all the points she raised). She, rather gently and with more patience than I have ever demonstrated, addressed the arguments of the heterosexual feminists and highlighted the coercive nature of patriarchy and of heterosexuality itself, which could be considered a social regime, a model that attempts to subsume all women into domestic servitude and sexual labor for men.

(A quick aside--if you've ever encountered any arguments on this site along the lines of "CompHet is only for lesbians", do note that the original text involves Rich, a lesbian, laying out the argument to hetfeminists that all women, even straight women, are subjected to a mandatory heterosexual existence, and are punished for trying to live outside of it, as by pursuing economic independence or choosing to be childless.)

For me personally, given the rather dismal state of Indian feminism, which is dominated by affluent liberals and ignores the more radical prolefem and dalit feminist elements attempting to come to the fore, it was refreshing to finally behold a piece of feminist literature that identifies and names forced marriage as an aspect of patriarchy, one that a significant chunk of women all over the world, both within Western territories and without, live with. So much mainstream feminism in the 2000s and beyond was located in the interpersonal, the foregrounding of choices women "should" make, ignoring that for the vast majority of us, patriarchy either denies us any choice at all, or presents us with false ones, harshly punishing us for some choices while presenting them as "free".

(Liberal ideologies and systems, bound up as they are in a veneration of contracts between equal parties, account very poorly for contracts between parties on unequal footing, where one is at a significant material disadvantage and cannot truly make a "free" choice.)

Besides, it is neither true that modern feminism entirely discarded the second wave--look at "gender is a social construct" and "heteronormativity" for now-banal feminist concepts steeped in radfem origins--nor is it true that the "third wave", such as it was, was entirely aa step forward in inclusivity, trans-acceptance, class consciousness, or even racial justice. One need only look at the state of modern feminist discourses to see how well the latest "waves" have managed to argue the case for trans liberation, and my current most well-known essay is a deep dive into the Orientalist, transmisogynistic origins of "third genders", an idea the queer academy has uncritically absorbed and even championed.

I am under no misapprehensions that second-wave feminists would be my pals. A lot of them were white, for one thing. It is, however, a tradition that is both more diverse than the prevailing image of white, middle-class lesbian academics would have you believe, and one that has more than a few useful things to say, especially to a transfeminist.

I don't think we are best served by erecting a cordon sanitaire around the second wave and refusing to engage with it critically. I've read Transsexual Empire, for fuck's sake, and doing so revealed to me just how paper-thin this reactionary movement has always been. That book is as farcical and easily disproved as Hilary Cass' recent bilious screed, but both were elevated to legislative and political relevancy not due to their veracity, but because institutions simply need any literature to provide a veneer of legitimacy to their transphobia. That the texts exist at all is enough.

I have, in short, made my life's work engaging with scholarship that has historically ignored us, vilified us, or instrumentalized us, and that is as true for second-wave feminists as it is for cultural anthropologists. I just believe that Monique Wittig and Adrienne Rich made valuable contributions to feminist thought, and even as we remember all that their missteps, we should not erase what they did right.

On a personal note, I can think of no better revenge than taking the abandoned threads of the radical feminist tradition and finally fulfilling its aborted potential, as a transfeminist. The trans question tore the movement apart because of a subset of zealots who couldn't and wouldn't see us as sisters in the feminist struggle.

I am going to finish what they started, and make the conclusions that they couldn't. We're good at cleaning up other people's messes, after all.

[dhaaruni]

Let’s acknowledge three obvious problems upfront. One, this is inhrently subjective, although I did solicit feedback from AI models — which are increasingly good at extracting quantitative signals from qualitative data — and Silver Bulletin readers on Substack Notes. Election outcomes, including midterms, are the most important factor I consider — but presidential approval ratings, landmark legislation, court decisions, cultural moments, news events, and the overall size and scope of government matters, too. Two, I generally object to treating “left” and “liberal” as synonyms — and also to treating the partisan axis (Democrat vs. Republican) as being concomitant with the ideological one (left/liberal vs. right/conservative). But I’ve written plenty about that, so I hope you’ll indulge me in ignoring those distinctions for this newsletter. Third, I’m also going to ignore the argument that the “arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” or progress. Progress is underappreciated as an empirical fact by both the right and the left. Even if Trump’s second term rolls back protections for disadvantaged groups, for instance — like LGBTQ people — they’ll be in a better position than they were 50 or 100 years ago. And even if DOGE succeeds in making all sorts of budget cuts — I’m doubtful it will — the size of the government will be much larger than before World War II. But I’m not considering the long arc of the moral universe here — instead, just the medium term, the shifts from left to right given the Overton window (what was conceivable) at the time. If you want to tilt the chart I’m about to show you 30 degrees to the NNE, such that it indicates overall progress toward liberalism over the very long run, I won’t really object. I’m just not sure it’s germane to the points about the ebbs and flows of American politics that I’m trying to illustrate here.

[creatonationforyou]

Top 7 Chess Tactics Every Player Must Know to Outsmart Opponents

Chess isn’t just a strategy game—it’s a tactical battle. The ability to identify and execute strategic opportunities can be the difference between success and failure. If you want to level up your chess game, you need to master basic techniques.

In this blog, we will explore the top 7 chess techniques every player should know to beat their opponents Plus, discover how KingCompiler, the first chess course, can help you become tactical genius on the board.

Thanks for reading KingCompiler_For_You’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

1. Swan: Attacks multiple pieces at once

The swan is one of the most powerful moves in chess, where one side (usually a knight) attacks two or more opposing sides simultaneously.

Why It Works:

It forces your opponent to sacrifice a valuable piece.

It brings immediate benefits.

At KingCompiler, we show you how to identify forks and use them to control your game.

📢 Welcome to Chess Academy! 🌟 🆓 We’re offering FREE Trial Classes for all levels — beginners to advanced! 🎓 Why Choose Us? ✅ World-class coaching by experienced players and coaches ✅ Interactive online sessions with personalized attention ✅ Build critical thinking, strategy, and focus ✅ Suitable for ALL ages and skill levels 🚀 Book a Free Trial Class at: https://forms.gle/M1x5dVL5tru5QSSw5 📱 WhatsApp us at +91 9903600848 ♟️ Let the game begin!

2. Pin: Solidifying your opponent’s pieces

A pin occurs when a piece is attacked and cannot move without finding a more valuable piece behind it.

Pins for:

Absolute pin: A pinned piece cannot legally pass.

Relative Pin: A pinned block can go, but at a cost.

KingCompiler’s expert trainers help players master pins and use them to block opponents.

3. Cutthroat: Forced loss of value

The knife is the opposite side of the pin, where the more valuable piece is attacked, and once it moves, the cheaper pieces are caught behind it

Key Note: Use long-range pieces like the queen, rook and bishop to kill the skewer.

At KingCompiler, we train players to skewer real games and use them.

4. Invented Attack: Unleashing a hidden power

A detected attack occurs when moving one block exposes an attack by another block. When a revealed attack is a check, it is a made check, one of the deadliest strategies in chess.

Why It Has Power:

It poses two threats.

It often brings important material benefits.

KingCompiler teaches students how to identify opportunities for discovered attacks and exploit them effectively.

5. Back-Rank Checkmate: Use a weak king

A back row checkmate occurs when your opponent’s king is trapped behind his pawns, with no escape frame within reach.

How to avoid:

Always give your king an escape route.

At KingCompiler, we focus on learning to kill and prevent external checkmates, so you stay ahead of your opponents.

6. Double Check: The ultimate tactical weapon

Double testing occurs when two sides investigate the king at the same time. The only way is to make a king move, which is a powerful way to force your opponent into a disadvantage.

The Cause of Death:

It is impossible to prevent both temptations.

often with decisive advantages.

KingCompiler helps players master this advanced technique through guided exercises and practice games.

📢 Welcome to Chess Academy! 🌟 🆓 We’re offering FREE Trial Classes for all levels — beginners to advanced! 🎓 Why Choose Us? ✅ World-class coaching by experienced players and coaches ✅ Interactive online sessions with personalized attention ✅ Build critical thinking, strategy, and focus ✅ Suitable for ALL ages and skill levels 🚀 Book a Free Trial Class at: https://forms.gle/M1x5dVL5tru5QSSw5 📱 WhatsApp us at +91 9903600848 ♟️ Let the game begin!

7. Bait: It attracts pieces of your opponent

Trickery involves sacrificing a piece or performing a deceptive tactic to trick your opponent’s pieces into a bad situation.

When to use:

To establish a decisive method (e.g., fork or skewer).

To gain positional advantage.

KingCompiler teaches players how to create effective lures and turn them into winning strategies.

Why chess strategy matters

Strategy is the backbone of chess, allowing players to create opportunities and exploit their opponents’ mistakes. Once you have mastered these techniques, you will:

Be confident in your ability to attack and defend.

Improve your math skills.

Make more victory positions.

How KingCompiler can help you discover chess strategies

At KingCompiler, we specialize in teaching players how to excel in strategy games. Here’s how we can help:

Communication Training: Learn techniques like forks, pins and skewers through practical exercises.

Expert Tutoring: Get guidance from experienced tutors who break down complex techniques into easy-to-understand concepts.

Customized courses: Whether you are a beginner or advanced, KingCompiler creates courses tailored to your level.

Practice sessions: Apply your tactical knowledge to real games with feedback from instructors.

Final Thoughts

Chess strategy is the key to defeating opponents and winning many games. By mastering these 7 top moves—forks, pins, squares, and more—you’ll take your chess skills to the next level.

With KingCompiler’s guidance, you can become a strategic powerhouse on the board. Don’t just play chess—control it.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

My favorite psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, has started an interesting Substack: After Babel. [...] Haidt's hypothesis is that the rise of social media is to blame for the rise of self-reported depression and suicidal thoughts. He means that the trend is most of all visible for teenage girls. While there is limited overall correlation between social media use and mental health problems among teens in general, that correlation is very visible among girls.

In a later post called Academic Pressure Cannot Explain the Mental Illness Epidemic, Haidt's research partner Jean M Twenge clarifies that it is most of all girls with lower grades in school who both have the most mental health problems and spend most time using social media. [...] That way, Haidt and his team also rule out academic pressure as a cause. 

A brave project

Establishing a link between two separate phenomena with only graphs at one's disposal is a brave project. I like such bravery and I'm often guilty of it myself. Bold thinking takes thinking as such forward. Thereby I'm almost feeling a bit bad for questioning Haidt's project: Obviously, social media use was not the only thing that changed during the last ten years. Pointing that out feels almost nitpicky. 

Still, since Haidt specifically singles out girls, and among them girls who are not doing very well in school as the main victims, I think he has a particularly important confounding factor to deal with: Gender. Haven't gender relations changed quite a bit during the last ten years? 

Gender trouble

The idea that gender relations can cause mental health problems in girls and young women is hardly new. [...] Since the 1970 there has been no lack of feminist writers explaining the bad feelings of young girls by disadvantageous gender roles. Already as a teenager I read Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and I fully agreed: How could anyone feel good in this superficial society that values females mostly for their looks? 

Apparently, rather many young girls did. By the time I was a teenager, around the turn of the millennium, teenagers' mental health was much better than now. Haidt's statistics are American and I didn't grow up in America. But I can easily find a Swedish report that says more or less the same thing as Haidt and his team: Girls' self-assessed psychological problems have sky-rocketed since 2009. (Team Haidt recently announced a plan to launch a series of posts that will show that the epidemic of mental health issues is a phenomenon encompassing all Western countries, especially the most individualistic ones. Stay tuned.)

How were the good times?

I'm a bad witness of those good times for teen mental health, because I was not a mentally healthy teenager. But I should have witnessed plenty of comparatively mentally healthy teenage girls around me in the small South-Swedish town where I grew up (and which I still live nearby). How were they? 

Well, they were… normal. Being normal was extremely important. At sixteen, everyone except the very uncool people drank alcohol on some weekend nights. That resulted in occasions to do crazy things and have casual sex. Having casual sex drunk was seen as kind of acceptable, if the offense wasn't repeated in a systematic manner. Males and females were judged surprisingly similarly at such occasions.

People also formed couples. Most were single, but once in a while a girl and a boy could be seen holding hands. I especially remember the happy faces of some seemingly ordinary girls who had boyfriends already at age 15 or 16. Toward the end of high school, more and more people found each other. Also some of those very uncool people, who had until then mostly socialized in gender-segregated and sober groups, found each other when approaching adulthood. 

Few people had opinions. Opinions about anything important were seen as geeky and strange. Especially girls were supposed to be a bit bland. Only caring about what to wear, how to get through school and how to find something to drink for the next party was kind of an ideal. 

The future never comes

In the early 2000s, young people were supposed to drink, flirt, get attracted to each other, occasionally make mistakes and end up in bed with the wrong person, brush it off and go on with what they were doing. In other words, living the wild life of youth. But they were also, eventually, supposed to grow up and start grown-up lives. Those outlooks were not always happily anticipated. I remember that during our last year of high school, a girl in my class predicted that she would end up with seven kids and a beer-drinking man.

That particular girl did her best to avoid what she considered a default fate for the careless: She moved away to a bigger city as soon as she could. Those who remained, however, mostly did so because they didn't want the new freedom society offered my generation. People who stayed here continued forming rather stable couples, buying (rather cheap) houses and having their two kids per couple. 

Eternal youth celebrated

However, for those who weren’t content with being normal, new opportunities were opening up in the cities. There was no need to be heterosexual. No need to be monogamous. No need to settle for one partner. No need to have kids.

For those who wanted, there was no longer a strong stigma against continuing the teenage culture of week-end drinking in mixed-sex gatherings, flirtation, hook-ups and flings. For a rather significant share of my generation, becoming an adult didn't mean settling down, getting married and raising kids. It meant continuing doing what they were doing as teens, but better: Clubs instead of lawns. Cocktails instead of those smuggled cans of beer and cider. Total strangers to hook up with instead of that girl you would have to bump into in school on Monday.

When I grew up, this was something rather new. It was something to opt into, for those who really wanted. The default was still marriage and kids. But gradually, the prolonged youth culture has developed into a new default. For those who are teenagers today, partying, dating and having casual relationships into their 30s is not a rebellious option. At least in progressive circles, it is the norm. Among progressives, marrying and having kids early will raise many more eyebrows than dating until 30.

Since I was a teenager in the early 2000s, adult life has become much less different from teenage life. With one exception: When I was young, adults half-heartedly tried to put obstacles in the way of young people's alcohol-based socializing and irresponsible sexuality. [...]

Just a decade or two after my teenage career the adult world seems to have succeeded in suppressing teenage culture, or at least sanitizing it. All things naughty has decreased among teenagers: they drink less alcohol, they don’t get pregnant as much and they have less sex. Finally, teens became more of the docile creatures society always wanted them to be. Sadly, the docile creatures are depressed and suicidal like seldom before. [...]

The other side of incels

One of the clearest signs that young people have replaced reality with the internet is the decline in sexual relations between young people. [...] The decline in sexual relationships for young people is mostly described as a problem for young males. The self-proclaimed incels say they are being ignored by females, because all females worthy of them strive for higher-status males.

The question is how this could be a new phenomenon. Everyone, both males and females, have always strived for the best partner they could get. Why has this instinct wrecked the partner market only for the last decade or two? 

Incels often picture themselves as an antithesis to feminism. But in fact, I think they are themselves victims of their own feminist thinking. Feminism taught women that they should be allowed to do the same things men do. They were to be allowed to work like men, to enjoy casual sex like men and so on. Conversely, young men have got the impression that they should be able to do what women do. If women can have sex just through smiling in a bar, they expect it too. When women never offer themselves to them the way they offer themselves to women, they feel discriminated against.

No one told those men that in fact, women don't like casual sex as much as men do. Individualist feminism suppose them to, but in reality they don't. This is something new. Previous generations of men were taught that if they wanted sex, they would have to pay for it. That payment has looked very different in different societies. In Western society, men traditionally make themselves sexually attractive to women of similar mate value through channeling their resources to one specific woman and the children he gets with her. The men had to compromise with any desire for additional mates, however poly they were feeling. 

Such sacrifices make entirely ordinary men desirable for entirely ordinary women. In return, those ordinary women are most often eager to make themselves attractive, to invest a lot in their relationships and to become hard-working mothers. 

As long as society recommended its members to get together in high-investing, monogamous couples, most lower-status men managed to make themselves attractive enough for women who were attractive enough for them. The system was adapted to them, rather than to the highest-status men. If the latter wanted to cash in the full sexual advantages of being higher status, they needed to cheat and break the rules of the system (they often did).

In the new system, where society stresses that no one owes anything to anyone and that everyone should always follow their feelings as long as they deal with consenting adults, high-status men who want it all have finally become the most well-adjusted citizens. They can get all the benefits their status gives them without needing to cheat or be ashamed of anything. The victims of the system are instead all those people who are not high-status men and can no longer find a partner willing to invest in them.

It is described as a male problem, because those who express explicit discontent at the situation are mostly young males. But behind those involuntary celibate young males there must be a similar number of young females who are either also celibate or who have to date men who have no intention of ever entering a life-long relationship with them. Incels say young women should be happy with the situation because they have more power to choose. But clearly, young girls and women are unhappy with something. Otherwise their rates of depression wouldn't have more than doubled since 2009. And the fact that academic low achievers, probably a rough proxy for low status, are the most unhappy, is telling. 

No more roses for Becky

In fact, almost every statistic Haidt and his associates present point to the fact that the most depressed teenagers are those that incels would call Beckies (or future Beckies). In incel terminology, a Stacy is a highly attractive, higher status woman. A Becky is an only moderately attractive woman of only moderate social status. Incels accuse Beckies of striving for the highest status men while ignoring men on their own level.

I can't imagine the young men I met in the early 2000s creating a picture like this one from Incel Wiki. By then, ordinariness was a highly valued feature in women.

When I was a teenager, I often noticed the ordinariness of the girls who made it and became the girlfriends of boys with high social status. There was no way I could predict who would become a high status girlfriend, once I had sorted out the very uncool, the freaks (like myself) and the least attractive third or so. Misogyny definitely existed 20 years ago. But I think no one would have gotten the idea to invent slurs for entirely ordinary young women. Girls could be looked down on for being unusually ugly, unusually fat or unusually freakish. But not for being averagely attractive. Everyone agreed that young women were attractive in themselves. People still believed in love a bit, so there was an expectation that every reasonably attractive girl would sooner or later catch the attention of a young man, who would appreciate her particular qualities.

It could be that the moderately attractive girls, with moderate outlooks for social status, get depressed because they spend too much time glued to their phones. It could also be that those girls are staring at their screens out of malaise, because ordinary girls aren't much appreciated anymore. Those girls know they are ordinary and have few realistic hopes of becoming something else. So they are killing their time through watching screen media.

Becoming just a woman

I think the graph above, taken from Team Haidt's collection of data, indicates that young girls above all use screen media out of a lack of better things to do. No matter what passive media teenage girls consume: Social media, the internet, television: It is roughly equally associated with depression. That suggests that there could be an important causality the other way round: Girls who feel a lack of agency fill their time with whatever entertainment they can find. Academically ambitious girls still have some sense of agency, because they are making a future for themselves through their education. But for girls with lower academic ambitions, outlooks have deteriorated during the last 20 years. 

20 years ago, a rather large share of all girls I met really had no higher ambitions than becoming girlfriends, wives and mothers. They would have jobs too, but that was not their main ambition. Decades before that, gender equality had given girls the opportunity to rise in social status on their own. It allowed ambitious and studious girls to rise in social class and to become eligible partners for men of higher status. But only two decades ago, many girls didn't take that chance. I went to school with many such girls. Girls who didn't strive to enhance their social status and their marriage prospects. Girls who were only girls, hoping, rather realistically, to be appreciated as such. The main point in life for those girls wasn't any particular career or any particular achievement. It was to get married to the right man. 

I think those girls still exist. I'm sure there are still many girls who are not feeling very inspired to enter the rat race of higher education and career work. But today, the prospects of those girls are much worse than 20 years ago. 20 years ago most of the not-so-ambitious girls had a value just through being girls. Today, they are mere Beckies. 

The existence of those girls is seldom openly recognized. We can't talk about them without talking about the limited success of gender equality. For decades, gender equality has been an option offered to everyone. But everyone didn't choose to take that option. Many people preferred to continue organizing their lives based on their sex, although they are in no way obliged to. 

Jordan Peterson says to young males who do nothing useful in life that they are actually not at all great just as they are. Instead they should work on becoming what they want to be. Who says something similar to young females? Who tells young females that right now, they are not good just as they are because they do not achieve anything, but with persistent hard work they can achieve something? I think no one does, for one simple reason: Young women never became useful mainly through their own labor and strivings. Young women were useful in themselves as attractive girlfriends and future wives and mothers. What was required of them was most of all not to make themselves ineligible. 

By this I don't mean to say girls were, or are, lazy, or get everything for free, as some incels claim. To the contrary, girls tend to be docile and dutiful to a higher extent than boys. When I was young, girls without high ambitions got through school, they took jobs and expected nothing else. After becoming mothers they worked hard to raise and provide for their children. Still, that hard work wasn't what made their life histories. They weren't self-made women. Instead, what shaped their lives was most of all which man they came to marry. Being a man is traditionally centered on achievement. Being a woman is much less so. Women get appreciated for being attractive, loyal, caring, motherly and so on.

Also, women's high workload tends to come more after marriage, while men are supposed to work also before. This is reflected in the age gap that is still common between spouses in Western society. Men match with women who are, on average, a couple of years younger. That makes sense, because women's hard work as mothers is supposed to come after marriage, while men's hard work as providers can easily be prepared before marriage. 

A generation ago, there were ambitious men and women who were busy rising in social status. There were the not-so-ambitious young men who nonetheless worked on making a decent living. And there were the not-so-ambitious young women who conformed to expectations and hoped for love to arrive. Today, ambitious people are doing more or less what ambitious people did two decades ago. Non-ambitious men are doing rather similar things too (if they aren't totally caught up in computer games), but they are less happy with it, because the reward for being a dutiful young man is no longer as self-evident as it was. 

Non-ambitious women, however, are doing different things than twenty years ago. By then, they were doing what was expected of them, while they were waiting for the right man to come. Today they can't realistically hold such hopes anymore, because high-investment, trust-based relationships between men and women have become much less fashionable.

This is especially true for liberals. Social conservatives still value marriage and family. That way, they implicitly still value maleness and femaleness for the sake of it. For the socially liberal teenagers, those of my generation who flirted, partied and dated beyond 30 are now the adult role models. For socially conservative teenagers, those who chose a partner wisely and formed a family are the role models. Social conservatives disapprove of the most extreme social changes that have happened during the last 20 years. Thereby, life for liberal teenagers has changed much more than life for conservative teenagers. [...]

The custom of forming high-investing, stable romantic couples is increasingly being lost. Especially among liberal people. Whoever is at fault for that, it doesn't just affect the incels. It also affects the Beckies who are no longer appreciated for their simple, feminine virtues. The Beckies are as useless as the incels, and there’s not even a Jordan Peterson to tell them how to be less useless. So they have plenty of time to browse social media and watch television while they are doing nothing to improve their situation. 

A lot more than social media has changed 

[...] A culture of extreme individualism on the one side and the immense choice of the internet on the other side have created a culture that doesn't appreciate ordinary men and women. Extreme individualism taught us that our desires are always right. The internet supplied us with thousands of suggestions of what to desire. The result is that we no longer desire each other as before. Those who most of all live to be desired, young women without high career ambitions, are the hardest hit by this development. 

The guilt of social media in this is self-evident. Still, I have no hopes that tech companies will solve the problem. I don’t even think they can solve the problem, even if they wanted to. Tech companies know how to create psychologically addictive apps, but they cannot change culture. For teenagers of today, social media is a window to the outer world. Removing that window will solve nothing if the door remains shut. 

Young people were not perfectly happy two decades ago. They were just a bit less miserable. Life was rough, to say the least. Changing culture back to what it was then is not desirable, even had it been possible. What we need is an improvement of the current culture. Something that gives teenagers back their agency and helps them set reachable relational and social goals for themselves. A greater awareness of the perils of social media might be part of such an improved culture. But most of all, it needs to provide people with clues to what they are supposed to be doing together when they are not looking into their screens. 

[cherryblossomshadow]

@picture-of-grace

just watched a video on this last night that said this is a documented pattern because most red districts are rural areas with les votes to count, and more blue districts are densely populated, so in the beginning it looks like most of a state is red bc all the rural districts finished counting their votes first, and then the blue districts finish counting and that's where most of the states population lies

here's the video

.

By the way, Robert Reich also gave much of the same information in his substack today, but with links!

.

Transcript of the video below the cut:

Beware Trump’s Election Night Trick | Robert Reich

Robert Reich

There's a dirty Trump trick you need to look out for. He used it in 2020 to try to overturn the election, and he's going to do it again. But it doesn't work if you know it's coming.

Watch out for Trump to exploit something elections experts call the Red Mirage, to prematurely declare victory before all the votes are counted. You see, in almost every election, Republicans appear to take an early lead. That's the Red Mirage.

Then, that lead gets smaller throughout the night, which is called the Blue Shift.

This happens because Republican votes tend to be counted before Democratic votes.

It's not magic.

Votes are counted by precinct, and Democrats tend to live in more densely populated, urban precincts, while Republicans tend to live in more sparsely populated, rural ones. It just takes longer to count the votes in a precinct with a lot of people than in a precinct with fewer people.

In Georgia, for example, there are more than 300 times as many people living in Fulton County as in deep-red Glascock County. If Fulton County has 300 times as many ballots to count as Glascock, obviously Glascock is going to finish counting first.

In 2020, when numbers came in from counties like Glascock first, it made it look like Trump was leading in Georgia, when he really was not.

It was a Red Mirage.

Also, Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, and mail-in votes take longer to count.

Anyone who follows elections knows about the Red Mirage and the Blue Shift, as the former political director of Fox News has testified.

Chris Stirewalt: So in every election, and certainly a national election, you expect to see the Republican with a lead, but it's not really a lead

Ms Lofgren: So this Red Mirage, that's really what you expected to happen on Election Night?

Chris Stirewalt: Happens every time.

Robert Reich: But in 2020, Trump pretended the Blue Shift was surprising and suspicious.

Trump: We were winning in all the key locations by a lot, actually. And then our numbers started miraculously getting whittled away in secret.

RR: No! There was nothing miraculous or secret about it. But it's easy to see why people who don't know about the Red Mirage could be tricked into thinking that something unusual had happened.

According to Trump ally, Steve Bannon, that's exactly what Trump was counting on.

Steve Bannon: And what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner

Steven Bannon, via Mother Jones: The Democrats — more of our people vote early that count. Theirs vote in mail. And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage and Trump’s going to take advantage of it —that’s our strategy. He’s gonna declare himself a winner.

RR: Bannon said that in October of 2020 — before the election! And that's just what Trump did on Election Night.

Trump: We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.

RR: Trump's nonsense claim that the votes counted earlier in the night were more legitimate than those counted later became the underpinning of the entire Big Lie, culminating in the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

The 2024 election will be close, and early in the night, Trump is likely to appear to be ahead and, again, use that early lead to falsely claim victory.

Mirages can be confusing, but if you know what they are, you won't be fooled by them.

Please, help spread the word about the Red Mirage, so people know exactly what to expect on Election Night.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it has been a central Republican strategy in the final week before an election to claim that the polls are breaking their way, that a red wave is coming, that Republicans are engaging in victory tours at least since the presidential election of 2000. (That's when I stopped watching CNN regularly, as the network promoted this line despite the fact that Gore would go on to win the popular vote.)

Given that Republicans have, in fact, only won the popular vote once in this period (2004), this is a strategy, not a statement of fact.

Don't sweat the narrative. Vote. Turnout wins, not news stories.

[bycelestetsang]

Remy Bazerque on his directing and writing career, culture shocks and more

I want to share the interview series I have been doing for some time. It has kept me motivated on my creative writing journey. The following interview was originally posted here. If you want to get these interviews in the future, subscribe to my newsletter.

Remy Bazerque is an award-winning French writer and director in film, animation and commercials.

[His] work has been screened at international festivals like Flickerfest, Raindance, and the London Film Festival. I've been supported by institutions like the BFI, Film London, and Creative England, and I've earned a Vimeo Staff Pick and a win at the Firefox Flicks competition during the 65th Cannes Film Festival.

Being in the exposure of three cultures has given him its advantages and disadvantages. We talked about how his background affects his work when it is in English, the influences that his directing work has on his novel and vice versa, and so much more.

What are you working on right now?

On the film front, I wrote a pilot for a comedy, and I am going through the kind of querying that you often see in the publishing industry. So I am applying to things, waiting for responses, etc.

I have a script for a feature film that I am working on and off, something personal. As a director, I am also attached to an animation series for adults, something similar to South Park, but it is at the pilot stage now.

As for the novel, it has been about two years since I started working on it. I wrote two full manuscripts, only to realise that I was not happy with both of them. So I started over. This will be my third time right now.

That is a lot of work! Have you ever procrastinated on a project because of hitting roadblocks, as in when you had to start over? How do you usually deal with these roadblocks?

I need to write every day, for a range of reasons. So usually when I hit a roadblock I tend to obsess over it rather than procrastinate. Although it usually doesn't wield much better results. One of the reasons I have a bunch of projects is to precisely have a means of switching to another if one gets blocked, or if one needs a pause. I have my newsletter too.

That is reasonable. I have used the same method to choose if I write my newsletter or novel. It has been quite useful for my creative process too. Where can we find your work online and offline?

You can find my stuff both on my website at www.remybazerque.net or on my Substack. I don't think the offline applies as much here because it is all film stuff essentially and there is always a trace online. When my films are screening in film festivals, you can see them there. But that is not a daily occurrence.

How has being French affects the way you write stories in English? What is the most difficult part of it all?

I think for the novel, it has been more of a psychological block.

When I write for film, I always have the actors in a way as a last proof. They often rephrase the lines anyway to an extent. So when I set myself to write a novel, I simply wasn't sure whether I could do it. In that sense, Substack has been great, it really has helped me a lot to feel more relaxed about this.

On the process itself, I write in English, but it happens here and there that I need to translate a word from French into English to get the exact meaning.

I would think it probably makes the process slower, and there is probably more to edit as well. I wouldn't say it's the most difficult part. I love English and I often think in English. It was more of a psychological wall to get through.

I see. Sometimes I would have to put in a weak verb before I can find a better one. I have a bunch of brackets with my notes in the manuscript. I am procrastinating to find the right words, to say the least. I need to flash out the full manuscript before it takes fives years to finish one.

Does having a Russian wife ever affect how you write or think about stories and directing films, as she brings her cultural influences into your relationship?

I suppose indirectly it does, since she is always one of the first people to read something from me. Subconsciously, her upbringing would bring that influence.

As for world-building, I am already sufficiently culturally confused. I don't need another culture on top of it.

Do you think that the way you direct films influences the way you write scripts and/or novels?

Most certainly, I am a visual storyteller first and foremost. I spent a large portion of my life thinking images.

When I write, I definitely need to visualise things a lot. I have to see how it plays out concretely and I am keen for this visual aspect to present on the page.

I like the idea of a mood, of a visual mood board for a book to make sure to give everything a certain palette, like when we do in film. But I find it a lot less instinctive, I am learning every day when it comes to writing prose.

Subscribe for future interviews

How do you usually make it easy for you to visualise things? I have written pages and pages of back story and development as I write. I have also have a little mood board for mine too. The most difficult part is figuring out the timeline and outline.

Images come naturally in my head. But for instance when I make character sheets, there is always some sort of mood board. Sometimes when I am uninspired with a description, I toy around with AI 'art' generation. I play around with images, try different references until I find something usually unexpected that gets my creative juice going.

I find outlining very hard, the feeling of having fun quickly recedes when I spend too much time on that.

Finding the balance between outlining and being spontaneous with the story has proved to be one of the hardest things. Too much time on the outline, I lose my spark. But not spending enough time outlining always lead to problems that pops up later in the manuscript.

In terms of structure, I use my own soup of structure. They are often a mix of different methods. I try not to stick to the same structure, to avoid predictability.

Which one is easier, writing your newsletter, screenplay or novel?

The newsletter. I voluntarily stay away from writing fiction on Substack. The newsletter is more like a column. It relieves the pressure to stay creative a little.

For screenplays, I have these moments of real flow where I am on a roll and I can feel it. It gets easy and smooth. Prose is still quite new to me, so it is definitely the most difficult one to work on.

Which structure do you like the most? Do you ever find yourself leaning towards using your favourite structure?

My basic knowledge in structure is what I learned in La Dramaturgie by Yves Lavandier. I quite like elements from The Seven Basic Plots, at least in the understanding of how our subconscious functions. Bestsellers like Save the Cat, I only find it useful for working on ACT II. I think it is a good one on how to approach a second act, which is quite tricky. So I pick elements from here and there. Sometimes I do something specifically against the logic of the structure to create an element of surprise.

About Save the Cat, it literally only teaches you how to write a Redemption type of storyline. Even though there are plenty of other story structures.

I think at the end of the day, some extremely well structured films/books succeed, some fail. Some completely unstructured books/films succeed. There is no recipe with structure. Sometimes it all comes together and sometimes it doesn't.

Which work of yours do you like the most, among different mediums?

That would probably be my latest short film Leave to Remain. I think the tone is very much my style and it manages to talk about quite a tricky subject (immigration) in a tongue-in-cheek tone, which is sort of the essence of what I am doing in films. I like the idea of laughing about the tricky subjects.

I can definitely see the tongue-in-cheek style in your newsletter. Very easy and fun to read!

Is there anything, culture-wise, that is shocking to you when you come across three cultures, French, English and Russian regularly?

I am always shocked at the profound difference between a Brit on weekdays and weekends. The most uptight ones turn into hurricanes on Friday and Saturday night with enough booze. And then on Monday morning, they are back to being so polite with each other. I worked in a pub for years before university, so I served a lot of alcohol and saw my fair share of binge drinking. It is quite frightening.

As for Russians, it always seem that they are yelling into each other's faces. I am always worried that my wife is arguing with her parents, but in fact they are often just talking about the weather. French is a pretty quiet language. Italians yell at each other a lot as well, actually.

As for French, I am appalled sometimes at the snootiness of my fellow Frenchmen sometimes. The most snooty people that I have ever met in film were always French. It made me slightly uncomfortable in some instances.

Can you give writers advice on writing their first movie script?

When you find something you care for deeply, something you want to talk about. Make sure to identify it, nurture it and protect it. Because if you are lucky and your script gets made, you will be inundated by a deluge of contradictory feedback, and you must have a strong anchor in you to know what you are fighting for, and what your story is about. If you can't find that strong anchor, move on to the next idea.

Interesting. I guess it can apply to novels too. Contradictory feedback would often be there when writers start querying.

Totally, or even from beta readers.

Can you give my readers a creative challenge?

Why not try and be proud for once? Stick to your guns, don't listen to everyone. Act like Dali would.

If you find this useful, subscribe to my newsletter for more <3

[justinssportscorner]

With the news that Missouri State University is leaving the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC or The Valley) to join the Conference USA (C-USA) in 2025, who will take their place in The Valley, if they decide to replace Missouri State?

With the Bears departing The Valley, the MVC will have no Missouri-based teams despite having its league HQ there.

[...]

I have a couple of plausible candidates: Southeastern Missouri State (SEMO) and Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE).

SEMO

Advantages:

Football program that is somewhat respectable, but not in the best shape.

Instant rivalries with SIUC and Murray State.

Keeps a foothold in Missouri for the MVC.

Disadvantages:

A 3rd team in the Cape Girardeau/Paducah/Carbondale DMA (SIUC and Murray State are also in the DMA).

No men’s soccer team.

SIUE

Advantages:

Former associate membership in Soccer, since their main conference (Ohio Valley Conference/OVC) didn’t sponsor it until recently.

A potential budding rivalry between SIUE and SIUC in Carbondale for the Battle of SIU Rivalry.

They could also have potential rivalries with Bradley and Illinois State University (ISU).

An actual presence in the St. Louis DMA, as it would be near their league HQ in St. Louis.

Disadvantages:

Football program is nonexistent.

Basketball program is low-mid-major.

My recommendation would be SEMO, since it is a Missouri school that has a football program. I’d love for SIUE to be in it, but since they don’t have a football program, they would be at a disadvantage.

Read the full Substack post.

[theliterateape]

Common Sense Propositions to Move Progress Forward

by Don Hall

Ruy Teixeira over at The Liberal Patriot SubStack drops some ideas about the Democratic Party can reclaim the majority of the country in terms of moving the needle back and to the left, back and to the left.

What struck me was the list within the piece of what he calls common sense proposals.

‌Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. However, more and better policing is needed to get criminals off the streets and secure public safety.

Both things are true and can be achieved in tandem.

‌America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is hugely important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.

True and true.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.

People who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right. However, biological sex is real and spaces limited to biological women in areas like sports and prisons should be preserved. Medical treatments like drugs and surgery are serious interventions that should not be available on demand, especially for children.

As the oft-used phrase goes, two things can be true at the same time. If one side of the lunatic class can agree with one and the other side of the rabid mouth-framers can agree with the other, we call that compromise. Common ground.

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.

This is Ruy's only example that doesn't quite the common sense proposal model. Yes, equality of opportunity is fundamental to American society. True, equality of outcome (otherwise known as 'equity') is not. Contrary to the exercise of finding that common sense common ground, this piece doesn't fit the puzzle.

Equity is a tricky proposal. It posits that, given the same resources, the same advantages, and the same equality of opportunity, we all can achieve some modicum of success. It suggests that those born with disadvantage—disability, poverty, unconventional family structure—just need the same external resources more advantaged folks have and they will likewise succeed in life. It does not take into consideration that some people are born shorter than others, less physically capable than others, less intellectually capable than others. Some people are just ugly. Some are stupid. In the host of humanity, some people are born with allergies, genetic anomalies, big ass ears, huge noses, bowed legs.

Some are genetically more likely to lose their hair.

To be equitable does that mean the rest us should be required to shave our heads? That's just dumb. Equity as defined is a utopian ideal without recognizing reality like magic or religion. It ignores the huge disparities in human abilities and attempts to flatten us all into one universal human. So, it’s also really boring.

Maybe the common sense proposal should look something like this:

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle and shifting resources to affect that opportunity for all people has been an ongoing march of progress and should continue.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Heather Cox Richardson

“I have to say, as an attorney, that the decision didn’t surprise me,” said Savala Trepczynski of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. “It’s very hard to hold the police accountable in a deep way... given the system that’s in place and how it tends to favor police at every turn. As a person, though, the (decision) is upsetting, disappointing, angering — all of those things. I felt grief, a familiar grief.”

The idea that our laws are written in such a way that they privilege white people and disadvantage people of color, especially Black Americans, is the principle at the heart of critical race theory. This is the theory that Trump has called “un-American propaganda,” and which he has ordered federal agencies to stop addressing.

Trump learned about critical race theory from Tucker Carlson’s show on the Fox News Channel, and that show, too, was in the news today. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against Carlson by Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump before he became president. In 2018, on his show, Carlson accused McDougal of extorting Trump. She sued him for defamation.

Lawyer Erin Murphy argued for FNC that Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, should toss the lawsuit because Carlson’s show is not news. It is commentary, Murphy said, and so he has no obligation to tell the truth. Murphy said that a reasonable viewer should recognize that Carlson simply provides hypothetical statements to offer “provocative things that will help me think harder,” and his accusations against McDougal, couched as questions, were simply provocations. "What we’re talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times," Murphy said. “It’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a commentary show.”

Today Vyskocil agreed with FNC’s lawyers. “The statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation,” she wrote. Vyskocil agreed with FNC lawyers that the “general tenor” of Carlson’s program indicates to the audience that he is not explaining the news, but rather is “engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary.’” She said: “Given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’” about anything Carlson says.

—-

[reporterswithoutorders2]

Reporters Without Orders: Launching January 1, 2023

Reporters Without Orders is an anarchist news publication, launching on Substack on the first day of next year. You can subscribe to the Substack page by following the attached link.

The kind of subject matter that will be covered is suggested in part by the name itself, and by the tagline, “the home of anarchist journalism.” By “anarchist journalism,” I do mean all of the obvious things: journalism which is anti-authoritarian, which holds power up to scrutiny, which gives voice to needs and welfare of the voiceless, the disenfranchised, the deprived, excluded and subordinated. But it means much more than this, as well.

The philosophy of Anarchism is not merely oppositional, against authority, against government, etc. It also offers its own rich, creative, and eminently positive vision of a different, free society. 

It proposes that people have the capacity to organize every necessary or desirable aspect of a functioning society through voluntary arrangements and relationships. A function of anarchist journalism, therefore, is to document the myriad ways in which people are already doing this, whether motivated by an explicitly anarchist ethos or not. In short, a major focus of anarchism is what may broadly be called ‘emergent order’.

A focus on emergent order involves, for instance:

Stories about people, groups, and projects which address the needs of their community and its most disadvantaged members, especially in innovative and unique ways;

Analysis of governmental regulatory and artificial barriers to essential services and better living standards;

Informative articles on what individuals can do to take a more active part in their communities; and…

Generally, such related subjects as: 

the gig, sharing, and gift economies; in more theoretical language, black markets, gray markets, microenterprises, and homebrew production projects; modular and vernacular techniques for constructing affordable housing and other vital goods and services, and economies characterised by moves toward reduced capital outlays, distributed infrastructure, and scalability; disruptive technologies; co-operative businesses and business models; 

unschooling, homeschooling, free or open schools/universities, and other alternative systems of education; community organization and developing the infrastructure of civil society; mutual aid and resource sharing; etc

In addition to this, we will cover a broad cross-section of those aspects of the social and political landscape which seem most significant to us, including: law and justice, with a focus on the Melbourne and Victorian courts and the cases being heard therein, and Victorian legal advocacy and reform groups; policing and police reform; protests and other forms of civil activism in Australia; civil unrest and activist movements globally, and particularly the global anarchist movement.

Finally, one of the aims of this project which is nearest to my heart is to celebrate the craft and tradition of journalism, and to keep alive the memory of its great practitioners and the noble heights to which they took the medium. To this end, I will be publishing a series of articles on the history of journalism, consisting of: longform essays on significant chapters in that history — the Abolitionist Press, the Afro-American Press, the "Race Beat", the Muckrakers and the genesis of investigative journalism, etc. — supplemented by profiles and critical discussions of the writers who figure most prominently in these narratives and annotated reading lists/guides to the journalism of these historical episodes; and profiles of the great journalists of history, such as I. F. Stone, Murray Kempton, Sy Hersh, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, etc., etc.

If you’re interested in getting involved, submitting an article, or becoming a regular contributor, drop me a note at leekavanagh1@gmail.com or check out the ‘Submissions/Volunteers’ page.

[customdesignnnn]

Will Substack go beyond newsletters? A company weighs its future.

Will Substack go beyond newsletters? A company weighs its future.

There are things newsletter editor Kirsten Han misses about Substack. They are simply not enough to compensate for the disadvantages. She didn’t like how the platform presented itself as a haven for freelance writers with fewer resources while offering six-figure advances to several prominent white men. The hands-off content moderation policy, which allowed transphobic and anti-vaccine language,…

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[genkiro]

Patrick Collison's thoughts on the future

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/interview-patrick-collison-co-founder

Scenius: The extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes” can occasionally generate. The intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.

the 2020s are when we'll finally start to understand what's going on with RNA and neurons. .. more time investigating how the microbiome and the immune system interact with things like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions

Solar electricity is asymptoting to near-free, which in turn unlocks other interesting possibilities.

New semiconductor technology. Improved ML and everything that that enables. Starlink -- cheap and fast internet everywhere! Earth-to-earth travel via space plus flying cars.

("Innovation economics" probably came closest but is still too specific.) Some early highlights for me include Jose Luis Ricon's survey of the evidence about science funding mechanisms, Matt Clancy's class (along with his excellent Substack -- you should subscribe), and the Works in Progress magazine, which gives a home for writing on these topics more broadly.

Lots of people have sketched out reasons as to why the midcentury picture in the US was perhaps anomalously good and I think those stories probably all have truth to them. If I had to offer some hypotheses that tend to get a bit less attention, I'd throw out a few:

Science funding & structure: Used to be more effective.

Culture: Shifted emphasis from effectiveness in advancing prosperity to perceived fairness.

Institutions & first mover disadvantage: Used to be for the right things, now bureaucratic.

Talent allocation: Many right things lack talent.

Different problems: More complex & experimental, no longer top-down.

As Jonas Salk said, it’s important to think about whether we’re being good ancestors!

In terms of what the world needs, improvements in medical technology are probably still #1. Climate change mitigation technology (cleaner energy generation and CO2 sequestration and so on) is also quite high up.

Besides the obvious diseases, better cures for depression and mental illness and other psychiatric conditions would be hugely beneficial. $100 robotic surgeries. A machine for cheaply manufacturing arbitrary food -- a 3D printer for nourishment into which you just insert elemental "ink cartridges". (And not just for replicating already-existing foods -- the possible design space is very large!) Flying cars, obviously. (Plus space-based earth-to-earth transportation.) Fast-growing trees so that everywhere can be as blissfully arboreal as you like. Technology for comprehensively eliminating air pollution (not just from internal combustion engines but also sand, dust, etc). Ubiquitous detectors for toxins like lead, arsenic, and benzene. Smart books that are better fit for purpose. A babelfish that works. Programming environments that are less hopelessly primitive than those today. (Take Mathematica/Squeak/Genera and go far beyond them.) Better education technology for everyone... what's Khan Academy but 10 times better? Too-cheap-to-meter water desalination. Batteries with so much energy density that they need never be recharged. Nanotechnology -- self-repairing wood; flexible glass; translucent steel. Quantum computers that accurately simulate physical chemistry. Completely new kinds of matter. Better catalysts for all major existing chemical processes.

Anyway, I believe in messy innovation clusters and the supply chain model might suggest more separateness and unidirectional flow than is actually optimal (or manifested in practice).

[dalanmendonca]

Knowledge worker interviews are weird

In “Are job interviews a farce?”, Can Duruk describes how the job interview process is not the deterministic talent filter you’d like it to be. 

Hiring decisions are not rational, and they just cannot be. They are, if anything, like returns on the stock market. Any individual hiring decision is a random toss-up, and at scale they are mostly determined by both skill and luck. This doesn't mean there's no objectivity in the system. There is. But whatever the tiny bit of objectivity, you can only observe it in aggregate

The whole post is worth a read and I can’t help but agree. I would’ve been earning much more if this wasn’t the case. Painful facts Jokes aside, the post rings deeply true.

I’ve have some experience with interviews and from both sides of the table. The mapping of interview performance to hiring decision is often fuzzy. I often can’t tell if an interview will get me hired. On the other side of the table, after interviewing someone, I can scarcely say if they’ll make the team.

Knowledge workers vs sports-stars

Lets start from a near ideal scenario: Sports. Messi and Ronaldo don’t have to give interviews when switching clubs. Their performance and performance characteristics are visible to all. Even here, desired outcomes are a function of multiple factors - individual skill, team characteristics/environment and luck. Yet there’s enough information for market participants to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Knowledge work differs from sports along multiple lines:

Lack of visibility 

Individual skill: No one can see spec I wrote or the code I pushed or for that matter how I rude I am or how late I show up to meetings. 

Environment: Someone coasting in a performant team at Google can claim credit for a lot while someone busting their balls and at a smaller company will still have much lesser to show. 

Inconsistent game formats 

Practices: Some software teams are heavy on TDD+automation, some rely on manual QA. Some companies want designers to also do front end coding, some don’t care. Some places expect PMs to own project management, others have project managers. Some teams are agile & customer-driven, some are dancing to exec whims.

Culture: Company & team culture defines the power equations, nature of information sharing, etc. which are material inputs that determine how you work, and thus make the nature of work differ. Amazon is run by business people while engineers dominate Google, the same job role at the two companies can feel entirely different.

Knowledge workers are all playing different invisible games. So performances are invisible and incomparable. So come transfer season job switch time, every club  recruiter has to acquire information about the player candidate from scratch. And thus is born the interview. There is one class of knowledge workers who benefit from being exactly like sports player. Stock traders. The game format is standardised by the stock market rules. Their outcomes are measurable and their performance is visible (indirectly through their bank balances!). Team interaction is low and outcomes are a mix of luck and skill.

So how do we solve this? 

The inconsistency of game formats is harder to solve. Companies and teams are, and will remain, idiosyncratic; and that’s perfectly fine. The world benefits from people and organisations taking different approaches towards solving problems. “Hey Apple! Stop giving giving your designers so much power. It makes hiring Apple engineers complicated” doesn’t seem like a conversation we want to have. So industry-wide consistency is neither feasible nor desired. 

Though there is one way companies make the game consistent: Work samples/Internships. Which is equivalent to saying “Come play with us for a while and we’ll take it from there”. But this doesn’t for work 90% of folks. Few, save for college kids and Jack Dorsey, can afford to work at another company.

The visibility part seems like a much nicer attack surface. Though we’re well short of people live streaming their entire work lives, there’s a lot happening on this front. 

Behance and Dribble allow designers to share their entire previous work. Developers can use Stackoverflow and Github to showcase their knowledge and skills. Maybe one day, sharing well-written products specs will be a thing. And videos of smoothly flowing Trello boards and JIRA backlogs will showcase project manager effectiveness. Until, then thought-leadership on Twitter and Medium (and now Substack) is the way to go. Side-note: A personal ritual I do, is update my resume annually regardless of whether I’m looking for a new job. This automatically makes me reflect on whether I’m making career progress and communicate my work well. 

Much work can’t be exposed due to the need for company confidentiality and  none of these come even close to capturing the complexity of everyday work. But they’re better than nothing. Blog posts can get you hired and I expect more of this to happen.

Interviews are not going away anytime soon. There’s lot of things we can do there too. The problem with interview process is the human. All subjectivity stems from there. Standarised tests are unidimensional and cruel, and should not be the only thing used to judge a person. but they are fair. 

Some ideas there:

Using AIs as interviewers during video interviews and and phone screens.  They can executing pre-programmed flows like chat bots (See “Worlds first AI presenter”) 

Modify gender/caste/age in resumes to neutralise bias

Common interview process (like TripleByte and TopTal do)

The interview game

If a candidate is a product, then interviewing is the marketing/distribution mechanism. Like many real world processes, that distribution mechanism is riddled with chaos that stems from logistical constraints, cognitive biases, timing issues, human insecurities and more.  

Ceteris paribus, good candidates would do better but interviewing processes are the opposite of standardised. In some ways, this is a game. You have to figure out the rules and play it.

First the basics. Be professional, arrive (or start the call) on time, research the company and role, etc. 

Beyond that, I don’t even view the interview process as a skills contest. My goal is to hack System 1 so it overrides whatever failings the System 2 might bring up  (see Two Systems). I want to take my interviewer to a place where they’re emotionally sold on me. Once that is done that the nature of conversation inverts, the interviewer goes from a default no to a default yes.  

In my view, most interviewers begin conversations with a default no mindset and want reasons to say pass over the candidate. The interviewer comes in thinking “So what’s so special about you?” and the onus is on the candidate to prove otherwise.

If you’re able build familiarity and comfort with your interviewer, the rules of the game flip 180°. Now that they are sold on you, their mindset flips to default yes and you just have to play along. The only thing you have to do now is avoid egregious mistakes that might trigger System 2 again.

Word of caution: What I’ve suggested seems to be work for me but the success of this strategy depends on my frame. I’m a hyper-credentialed tall, fair tech nerd; the effectively possessing multiple forms of privilege. If you’re an interview candidate from disadvantaged group, the interviewers System 1 is deeply biased against you. They might have a hard time connecting with you. So it might be a better idea to move the conversation towards System 2 which is more objective and evidence-based.