EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

SBF then went to work at Jane Street Capital, a proprietary trading firm notorious for employing smart weirdos, giving half his salary away to animal welfare charities.

people really abuse the word notorious

matty could totally rescue this for me by going to bat for polycules

wait that's the polycule on the lower rolley traintrack isn't it

trolley

trofl

one track has a polycule on it the other has baby hitler which one do you choose

rockefeller figured this one weird trick out a century and a half ago and iirc his dad was only a snake oil salesman. idk whom he might have had lunch w later tho.

also you could purchase petroleum from him, and ignite it to make things go.

The fact that even Republicans are now realizing that transphobia is bad politics makes it even more shameful that reactionary centrist Matt Yglesias (among others) urged Dems to throw trans people under the bus just a few weeks ago. https://t.co/AGgpAdEW5Q pic.twitter.com/ko5OCsPmvi

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) November 11, 2022

ah matt replied to the jeet tweets yesterday asking for constructive criticism via email and everyone was telling him to stop being such a loser lol he deleted tho shouldve screencapped

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FhZTanMXEAEua37?format=jpg&name=large

love how any time something happens that matty was absolutely wrong on, the alarm sounds and everyone shows up

“It’s plausible that without SBF’s money, Trump would still be in the White House.”

Wasn't sure whether to post this in the outbreak thread or the Ezra/Matt thread but I decided to post it here because (and I say this as someone who generally likes Yglesias's work) this one really highlights a very particular way in which he sometimes misses

There’s a faction on US Twitter that insists we could have had Xi Jinping’s Covid policies if not for David Leonhardt and Emily Oster. https://t.co/5B2UpVbiW9

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 26, 2022

truly cannot imagine liking this slug at this point

we’ve got some fans left it seems!

ride or die

ah well

You can post pepe memes because you're the richest person on the planet and nobody can tell you what to do or you can convince brand advertisers that you're a safe bet they can count on but you can't do both at the same time.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) November 28, 2022

matty in his role as The Littlest Echo

is lagoon prepared to apologize for the time he said klein was just as bad as this guy

im prepared to do a yglesias level galaxy brained take on why klein is just as bad if it comes to that

klein is a very dull writer imo

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/11/21/business/00VOX-print/00VOX-articleLarge.jpg

pretty funny how klein has become an "ideas" podcaster and matty has become a substacker, the two perfect paths for vacuous blogger scoundrels

even tho matty is the laziest person in the world ezra is more likely to get caught in a plagiarism scandal

was thinking the other day about how when vox started their big idea was to have little linked explainers you could click through to get more info on various topics, this was going to save journalism

omg its ok to say ur wrong, the two guys are literally not in the same orbits at all right now, matty is a sad clout-chasing blogger, ezra for all his faults tries to understand stuff, they’re not the same!

if youre a sucker for ezras shtick thats 100% your problem not mine

i don't see much difference between them. ezra doesn't really write about politics as regularly anymore (seems to be positioning himself as a post-wonk ira glass figure) and is now attached to a legacy media company while matt writes constantly about politics and is an independent blogger

matt is better cause he stayed true to blogging, ezra became a professional apologist for power which is the lowest form of writer, even lower than a worm (matt yglesias)

Dunno why you would need to read either of these guys when you can just read a book

a book about how america should get a billion people?

Idk whatever book you want, there’s dozens of em

like when it comes down to it, who actually are these guys?

Has Ezra ever written about effective altruism?

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Has Ezra ever written about effective altruism?

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, December 1, 2022 7:53 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

excellent question! he has a podcast with the longtermism philosopher and crypto hanger on William MacAskill https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-will-macaskill.html

this one also seems to be about that shit https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-holden-karnofsky.html

im sure ezra thinks very deeply on this obvious garbage

Dunno why you would need to read either of these guys when you can just read a book

― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, December 1, 2022 7:37 PM (twenty-nine minutes ago) book

the thing is ezra actually reads books and interviews ppl about them smh they’re not even the same species

Yglesias broods like a champ

I'm a sucker for Ezra's shtick, but you knew that

I even listened to his podcast interview with MacAskill when it dropped, while on a pleasant late summer walk.

should listen to podcasts while snaking your sink, bathtub, and sewer lines to make sure you're not letting the outside leak in

I even listened to his podcast interview with MacAskill when it dropped, while on a pleasant late summer walk.

― jaymc, Thursday, December 1, 2022 8:31 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the people demand to know what ezra thinks about effective altruism

marveling at how incredible it is that matty's podcast is called bad takes. is he trolling his haters? or just his archetypal obliviousness as always

genuinely surprised you think he has any self-awareness

matt is 100% a troll hes being doing it his whole career and its worked out very well for him

tho i do think hes gone too far since going on substack, he is no doubt making some obscene high six figures salary, but he seems to have totally lost all his peers in the thinky bloggy community, like jeet heer who is someone that has in the past engaged with matty is now regularly calling him a piece of shit on main just total disrespect, long term careerwise it doesnt seem great

the people demand to know what ezra thinks about effective altruism

― lag∞n, Friday, December 2, 2022 10:21 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I'd say he's largely sympathetic, if not entirely bought in. Or at least he was. IIRC, he didn't talk about his own broad views on the movement too much in the MacAskill interview, which was mostly about MacAskill's new book. But about a year ago, he interviewed another EA figure, Holden Karnofsky, and said this up front:

Over the past — I don’t know — five, six years, I’ve been very influenced by the effective altruism movement. On one level, effective altruism is simple. It asks, how do we do the most good we can with the money and the resources we have? That turns out to be, one, a deceptively difficult question and, two, weirdly, one that we don’t ask all that often, one that oftentimes you think people are asking and they are not.

But the difficult parts are maybe more interesting. How do you measure the most good? What about when you think something is good, but it cannot really be measured? Who defines good? Who verifies impact? How do you judge the value of, say, supporting art against the value of building housing for the poor?

Effective altruism has roots in the academy. Philosophers like Toby Ord and Will MacAskill and Peter Singer, they’ve been central in creating the movement. And importantly, they’re central in the way the movement thinks and reasons. The culture of effective altruism, in my experience — and this is both its best and worst quality, in a way — can feel like a philosophy grad seminar that never ends.

By that, I mean it delights in taking the logic of its questions as far as it will go. It’s unafraid, even ecstatic, to follow answers that strike others as very strange or unintuitive, sometimes even cruel. It’s always, always questioning its own assumptions and everyone else’s. It can, in my view, sometimes be performatively cold or logical in a way that’s actually quite narrow about human flourishing. But as I’ve said, I have learned a lot from these thinkers.

lmao perfect ezra no notes