Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves that it can be done, but -- wow! -- what an omission.
Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.
As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.
It's not obvious from the webpage, but if you are a subscriber or enter your email address you can read the whole essay, which is 4849 words long. And though it does not mention Goodreads explicitly, it does mention "Amazon reviews" as a category (close enough, with Goodreads reviews sometimes? showing up on Amazon) quite a bit at the beginning, for example:
> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics
Ah, but when you're little, if each misstep annoys a few early users who hit a dead-end with your project, the longer-term reputational damage is trivial. You've still got 99.999% of the TAM (total addressable market) that is ready to be charmed by something new, with no negative vibes in their mind.
As you get bigger, serious numbers of people get annoyed at dealing with a company that keeps inviting us into the Roach Motel of doomed products and features. Big case in point was Google's spree, a few years back, in terms of launching big new services/features that soon afterward got shut down. Great training ground for ambitious PMs; miserable user experience.
Somewhere between the death of Google+ and the demise of Google Hangouts, even folks like me began thinking: Why should I engage with new Google stuff if it's likely to be blown up in a few years, leaving me with buried IP from whatever I tried to do?
Hardcore gamblers' tendency to lash out at athletes, when bets go wrong, can get really scary. This is Point No. 2 in Thompson's analysis -- and it deserves a closer look. From what I've seen, the level of threats, abuse, etc. is just horrifying. The 30x increase in money bet, sadly, seems to be translating into a 30x increase in betters' hostile conduct.
I've seen a huge amount of videos of sports fans having melt downs when their team/player loses, to the point of destroying their own TVs and attacking their guests. I have to believe gambling is a factor in this behavior.
Professional writer here. On our longer work, we go through multiple iterations, with lots of teardowns and recalibrations based on feedback from early, private readers, professional editors, pop culture -- and who knows. You won't find very clear explanations of how this happens, even in writers' attempts to explain their craft. We don't systematize it, and unless we keep detailed in-process logs (doubtful), we can't even reconstruct it.
It's certainly possible to mimic many aspects of a notable writer's published style. ("Bad Hemingway" contests have been a jokey delight for decades.) But on the sliding scale of ingenious-to-obnoxious uses for AI, this Grammarly/Superhuman idea feels uniquely misguided.
OP's critique feels like a celebrity economist's variant of those travel magazine pieces that tell us why Zermatt, Phuket or Nantucket is no longer a "cool" vacation spot. On some sort of momentary buzz meter, sure.
But the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no? Worrying about whether a couple dozen X/Twitter legends are hyping you today feels silly.
Think it's more looking at the trend for Very Serious Political/Economic Commentators to suggest it as a model to emulate in long form articles than the Twitterati, but yeah, it's explicitly asking about opinions rather than whether there's anything about it that's actually broken down. Which is, relatively speaking, a nice place to be as a country.
Cowen is focused mostly on the US commenteriat, but the trend is similar in the UK, where "we should totally be like Singapore" peaked around Brexit, under the delusion idea that all we needed to do to emulated the success of the city state that founded ASEAN two years after declaring independence was leave the EU.
Meanwhile HN generally forms its opinion from a decades-old William Gibson article lamenting that it wasn't cool enough to write cyberpunk about :)
That is what MarginalRevolution is. It's fairly heterodox by most standards, but not in the good way.
> the factors that help Singapore be an Asian or often global hub in so many respects are still running strong, no
Nope.
If I can now IPO in China or India with Singapore level valuations and attract Singapore level deal sizes, why would I as a Chinese or Indian want to dedicate significant capital in Singapore beyond what is needed to build an operating shell to interface with western capital markets?
Similarly, if I'm GS, JPMC, Citadel, etc and I'm seeing significant dealflows in China and India, I should concentrate on building an organization within their borders as much as possible - which is what they have been doing since the mid-2010s.
Singapore will remain a major financial hub, but it is losing it's relative advantage to other hubs within Asia.
India and China don't have the low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has. In some ways it's advantage has increased now Hong Kong is part of China.
> low tax stable capitalist system thing that Singapore has
I can say from personal professional experience that historically businesses are domiciled in Singapore primarily for us investors in Western capital markets to enter China, India, and ASEAN.
For capital that is already located in China, India, and parts of ASEAN (primarily Vietnam), that becomes less attractive, especially because China, India, and Vietnam all operate SEZs that have aligned with western corporate law or have BITs signed with major western financial hubs (eg. Pudong SEZ, GIFT City SEZ), so we don't need to route via SG to the same degree we did 20 years ago.
Additionally, if we want to exit our investments in China or India, we have no choice but to list on a Chinese (including Hong Kong) or Indian stock exchange because no other Asian market has comparable trade volume, which makes exits difficult.
Finally, what differentiates Singapore from the Dubai or London? Depending on where you are investing in Asia, you may end up getting much more preferential access from either of those two instead of Singapore.
This is why Singapore has lost it's mojo - it can't differentiate itself as a financial services center and Singapore never really had a strong innovation sector.
Vibes guy here. I dabbled in Bitcoin for about a year, on the notion that if the world's overall financial system got degraded, more people would view Bitcoin holdings as a safe way to preserve value. Maybe better than owning physical gold. Why not get in early before the next stampede?
But I was wrong about bitcoin > gold. It's worked the other way around. There's also persistent chatter that the supposedly uncrackable Bitcoin private keys might someday be crackable with quantum computing. Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. There's a mind-blowing amount of compute coming into the world, and not all of it's going to be used to create goofy memes or robo-PowerPoints. Call me timid, but I cashed out with modest Bitcoin profits last year and am fine watching the show from the sidelines from here on.
The biggest problem with metals is the same as crypto - there's no fundamental underlying value like P/E or product announcements you can anchor the price to - so its free to fluctuate.
How much of a problem that actually is we got to find out last Friday.
> there's no fundamental underlying value [...] its free to fluctuate
I don't understand this argument since that's how literally all markets work: the consensus is the current price. If we're talking about fundamentals then crypto isn't comparable to gold at all since 1) it's a physical, tangible, durable thing, and 2) has been used for centuries as a store of value.
Gold is easy to understand from a human perspective and doesn't require knowledge of a blockchain or anything tech related. You store it, secure it, and transport it like any other physical asset. Whereas something like Bitcoin involves seed phrases, blockchains, irreversible transactions, a public ledger, and it's all virtual. If your store of value is one mistake away from being lost to the void then it's not very good. I'll just finish with this: there is a reason that central banks have been loading up on gold recently in light of uncertainty and not crypto.
A large fraction of gold mined every year is used for its material properties in industrial and electronic applications. That presents a very real floor on price. If good was suddenly worth 1/10th as much we would use it in far more industrial applications thus driving up the price. Similarly mining would slow down from the current ~3,000 tons annually again driving the price up.
Gold is currently priced way above that level, but just like the stock market were dividends allow people to buy more stock when the price is low there is a very tangible feedback loop propping up the price which eventually kicks in.
Counterintuitively this means using gold as an investment vehicle makes the world a worse place because we fall back to less efficient methods in industry, and efficiency is ultimately the engine of progress.
Gold is also one of the best heat conductors so if it got really cheap it could be used a lot in industry and electronics. Anything from cookware to heat sinks!
Hence why I said at 1/10th the price we would use a lot more of it.
There’s easily decades worth of industrial use in vaults so the instantaneous floor is quite low. However feedback occurs well before you hit the actual limits here.
Recycling jewelry to make more jewelry is quite common, which kind of distorts how much the gold supply vs reserve is. If demand to manufacture jewelry ends then the supply of recycled jewelry also dries up.
~3,300 tons where mined in 2024
“Industrial and tech demand accounted for 83 tons of gold in the third quarter” of 2024. 83 * 4 = 332 so ~10% which is fairly typical.
Whats your baseline for volatility? 0%? Outliers aside, metals are still the most stable store of value thats widely used
And the P/E and product announcements your touting as inherent value are for generating value, not storing it. If your purpose was to store and transfer value, it would be stupid to use stocks over currency or gold
They’re durable, resistant to corruption, relatively rare, pretty… Titanium or gems would’ve been equally used if they were equally convenient. Not to mention that coinage could be minted or mixed with, say, copper. Gold makes good alloys and can be recovered later.
The fundamental underlying value on stocks also depends on fluctuating prices for the goods and services that firms buy and sell, just like commodities.
The way bitcoin works is that addresses are hashes of a public key.
This technically allows for an emergency measure in case ECC is broken by a quantum computer:
The [unknown] public key becomes the private key. The signature becomes a ZKP of this key. I believe this has been proposed before as well.
The signature sizes are going to be a big problem is this scenario however, consensus may actually do something up to alleviate this in extremis. And also the people who have coins in addresses for which the public keys are known will be screwed, but then that's how everyone will know there is a problem - it's unlikely early cryptoraphically-relevant quantum computers (CRQC) will be able to front-run bitcoin transactions.
Quantum computing is interesting to think about in the context of bitcoin. It would be technically feasible to upgrade the protocol to be quantum-secure (e.g. allow wallets to make an on-chain declaration of a new PQ pubkey, and after that point all transactions must be signed with the PQ keypair) - but getting everyone to coordinate on something like that would be challenging.
Quantum computing isn't a serious threat. Would require a concentrated effort from the community to migrate to a quantum-proof hashing algorithm but there's no greater motivation than potentially losing it all.
You can easily trade gold today. You can easily trade gold if ww3 starts to the goons pressganging people into dying in the trenches so they take your bitcoin hoarding neighbor instead. You can easily trade gold after a nuclear apocalypse to your local warlord so you get access to non-irradiated food.
Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable. It is fundamentally a superior store of value than bitcoin if you’re talking about notable global disruptions, even without going into the actual tech.
This can’t be a serious comment. If ww3 starts the respective countries central banks will keep the gold for themselves. You are so naieve if you think any government is going to honour the fact that you have a piece of paper that saya you own some gold in their vault.
It is not like they haven't done lot to collect it off the population in such scenarios during previous crises. My guess is that if WW3 breaks out. For duration your gold will have rather little use. At best you get price set by government. At worst it will be confiscated. And black market will probably be only place to use it.
And post WW3. If there is economy left. It will be while before people lock back on gold.
If you want something you can trade post ww3 also stockpile alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc. . Small luxuries everyone will be willing to trade for in a post war country.
Sugar and salt are non-perishable if stored in right conditions. Later one does not get too much use. But first one can be turned to drugs and those are always popular.
Yeah, that angle never worked out for me. If we imagine instead the world became hyper-capitalistic (even more than today), then I could see that digital and untracable (not Bitcoin) decentralized money might have a big influence, but in the opposite scenarios, I don't think there is a lot of need for cryptocurrencies.
It might be worth considering why drug deals are always portrayed as a high stakes, dangerous event (it's because to do the sale, the physical products have to all be in one well known place where everybody knows both the place and time).
> Gold is a pretty, shiny rock and rich people like pretty, shiny things so they can display their superiority to no-gold-having proles. Just about everybody on the planet knows gold is highly valuable.
But isn't this all based on belief? What if you break the spell? During the Dutch Tulip Mania you could've replaced "gold" with "tulip" and changed a few adjectives and it was the same until the spell broke... I don't see the difference to Bitcoin, GME, or TSLA, "I'm going to hoard this because tomorrow (for an infinite amount of tomorrows) someone else will want to buy it at a higher price!".
Yeah yeah yeah, gold can also be used for technology (e.g. as a non-reactive metal), but copper is useful in technology too...
Sheep is probably a better thing to own. You can eat it, or you can take its wool to make clothes to keep yourself warm. You can't eat gold.
Ah, it would have been nice to get OP's perspective on Russian population counts. They've stayed remarkable stable at 144 million for two decades, even though the fertility rate has been long reported at way below the 2.1 that's considered stabilizing. And I don't think Russia is attracting a lot of inward migration.
My intuition is that their official numbers are cooked. Factors that influence the numbers:
- after 2014 the official numbers include the annexed parts of Ukraine
- since 1992 the natural change is negative (with a small interval around zero in 2013-2015), yet the total population was 148 million then and is 146 million now?
- there is some migration but officialy not enough to replace the decline of natural change ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia ). The numbers just don't add up, and that's not even counting emigration.
I haven't actually found any credible estimate what the 'true' numbers could be.
It seems like, in the course of calling out a perceived assumption, you may have made an assumption yourself. I'm aware of the difference between casualties and deaths. My chosen terminology applies equally to both. And I think both are relevant to a number of related stats like lifetime earnings, mental and physical health, family prospects, etc.
War is hell. And I don't think anyone comes out untouched by it. The stats on vets are brutal.
If Lou Gerstner had put any energy into growing RJR Nabisco's tobacco business, I could see your point. But during that 1989-1993 timespan, RJR Nabisco's leaders at the time (Gerstner plus private equity guys) were focused on wringing cash out of the shrinking tobacco division. Most of their growth strategies involved the Nabisco half, which actually accounted for about 60% of revenue.
There's still nothing heroic about that chapter of Gerstner's career. But if you're seeing public good in having tobacco companies fade from sight, there are bits of Gerstner's stewardship at RJR Nabisco that unwittingly worked out okay.
So a while back, I was interviewing business people still active in their 80s and 90s -- as part of a very intriguing project that got cut short but did produce some fascinating notes. I remember asking one 95-year-old guy still serving (competently) on a bank board if there was anything that he did better now than when he was in his 60s.
His answer: "I'm a better writer."
The Cambridge research cited in this study categorizes late-life changes in brain function as nothing but declining capability, all the way down. My guess is they are mostly right. But I'm intrigued by the notion that some of that elder erosion might lead to new clarity about how everything fits together.
Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.
As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.
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