EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

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?

0/0 results on this thread for "Better Than Ezra"

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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

a man can go far in life by simply never asking the question "is this just eugenics"

Peter Singer has a lot to answer for

Because that excerpt reads like a This American Life parody voiceover I’m now with lagoon on Ezra being worse.

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

― lag∞n, Friday, December 2, 2022 11:50 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

eh i think this is a bit of a misread. the center-left/left split in media has polarized a lot in the last few years--matt got pushed out of vox for being too far to the right of its younger staff--and matt has clearly gone "mask off" since the 2020 election, during which he randomly endorsed Bernie (a position he's since recanted). but matt was always the troll/contrarian attack dog of the center-left/technocratic wonk faction who would frequently (and gleefully) punch left. but he's still in good standing with all people (eric levitz, matthew zeitlin, john chait, josh barro, noah smith, kevin drum, josh marshall, dave weigel, paul krugman and all other media-adjacent economists). but jeet heer was never really part of that crew. he started out somewhat unaligned (before being a pundit he was an indie-comics critic) but after getting bullied on twitter for writing a critical article of chapo sided with the left, and is now on staff at the nation

jeet is just an example of a guy who was matty tolerant in the past but now considers him a total clown you could slot any number of writers in there

i dont follow that group containing many of the worst guys online too closely but it would be hard to see that as anything but a narrowing audience for mattys schtick considering he used to play pretty much clear across the technocratbloggosphere

o to be in good standing with this chucklehead

"Conservative" should mean what it meant in 2003 -- a chubby middle-aged real estate guy watching Fox News while chopping meat on his granite kitchen island, complaining about welfare moms and crime and kids these days just hooking up instead of settling down with a real job.

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇦 (@Noahpinion) December 3, 2022

Ezra Klein still finds value in effective altruism, though offers some critiques in his latest column:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/04/opinion/charity-holiday-gift-givewell.html

Velvet-gloved eugenics imo

Ezra seems disinclined to recognize that the whole concept is just telling people that their greed is, in fact, good.

ezra is a classic npr paradox, like how with david sedaris it needs to be true to be funny, you have to believe he tried to understand his topic when any normal person would be incredulous at effective altruism, coddled oxford professors, crypto con men and so forth; its no more than entertainment, low quality too

selling some ersatz thoughtfulness, lol sad

Ezra seems disinclined to recognize that the whole concept is just telling people that their greed is, in fact, good.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Sunday, December 4, 2022 10:11 PM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think that's the whole concept.

I think Ezra is attracted to the idea that some forms of altruism are more effective than others, in terms of where an individual can make the most impact. He likes GiveWell because it assesses charities on those kinds of metrics and thus helps him and others decide where their charitable spending will go the furthest. But in that column he is explicitly critical of the "earn to give" philosophy, which "adds a darker possibility of rationalizing unethical means in service of virtuous ends."

hes a professional apologist for power, no more and no less

That's a bizarre takeaway

apologetics is an interesting an i think under examined aspect of media, its imho prob the primary form of the opinon economy or whatever you want to call it, like for instance if i made the same claim about daivd brooks no one on here would bat an eye, but the posters to ilx are not the target audience for david brooks apologetics, our parents are, theyd say hes reasonable

people are generally blind to apologetics aimed at them, its entertainment but its serous but dont take it too serious its just entertainment, a podcast to fall asleep to, but in order for it to work you have to believe its serious ideas, but also its just to fall asleep to so dont take it too serious

ezra klein is exactly as much of a serious thinker as daivd brook, which is to say not at all, they are both completely vacuous, they exist to compliment their audience for listening to their podcasts/opinon columns

this is obvious to me since im not their audience

anyone who took sam bankman fried, various effective altruists, paul ryan (had graphs) etc etc is it should go without saying not worth dirt, they did let him interview obama tho lol

*scales fall from my eyes*