The app for independent voices
2 month anniversary of my substack, “noticing what matters”! We’re currently 9 posts in, at ~400 subscribers, and ~50k views!
No idea how good this is objectively but it’s good that at least some people are interested in hearing my views!
Highlights:
My second article (linch.substack.com/p/th…) being shared as a featured article by The Browser (thebrowser.com), a subscription service with 150k+ views
Chiang book review (linch.substack.com/p/te…)going semi-viral (front page of Hacker News, 28k views, etc), causing ~100 new subs including the CEO of Substack
random inbounds from websites in other languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean (Google Translate tells me they’re saying nice things but for all I know it’s all sarcastic versions of “lol check out this dumbass”)
inviting me to my first (and so far, only) substack chat after I wrote a heavily critical article (linch.substack.com/p/ea…) on his honey post
Hosting an in-person Arrival (movie based on one of Chiang’s short stories) viewing for friends and subscribers in the Bay Area and meeting ~10 new subscribers in person!
More broadly, it’s great to have a long-form platform to explore ideas I’m intrigued by and don’t have a natural home elsewhere, like the intersection between eusociality and theoretical models of animal welfare, the rising premium of life, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, the connection between anthropics reasoning and population-weighted reasoning, and pragmatic epistemology in general.
(maybe) most importantly, it’s lovely to get comments and discussions with serious, intelligent (and sometimes funny!) people from all walks of life on these ideas.
Substack is great in exposing me to a variety of people! I’ve had great comments and discussions from not just philosophy PhD students, but also philosophy undergrads, philosophy professors, and even philosophy postdocs!
But seriously, I’ve long believed that epistemology and clear thinking is a community effort. Good reasoning does not come ex nihilo, for humans. Writing my thoughts out in detail, and discussing them, is both my way of further honing my thoughts, and my way of giving back.
