Does everyone get these? I'd love to stop receiving them since I'm not interested in meetups, and the odds that I live near a place like Lisbon are very, very slim. This is basically spam to me...
You could probably spend time devising some clever scheme where people input their country, and only hear about the meetups in their area.
But that seems like spending a lot of energy over not so much.
I mean. Filtering information, and organizing information, those are _incredibly_ valuable goals. But spending a lot of time implementing specific instances, instead of something more general, seems kind of wasteful.
Maybe someone at Substack sees a broader pattern in all the discussion lists, and might have a more efficient idea.
You can also just use preexisting filtering schemes, such as email filters. For example, filter on the word "meetup" in the title. Kind of coarse, but might do the trick.
Only tangentially related to the above, but I think there's a critique of blogs to be made, and places like Substack. They miss the mark in a profound way with regards to how they organize information.
If you have a valuable things to write, that are relevant beyond the immediate day or week, you should talk care to organize them carefully, so that people can access that information in a meaningful, continued way.
What Google, Wikipedia, Reddit do is brilliant. There is genius there that has not seeped into common knowledge quite yet.
They have understood a profound idea, about organization, that many others have not.
Not being able to find information causes waste at incredible scale. Inefficiencies that are small, but that add up across anyone who has questions, every time they come up.
It causes people to not find the right ideas, or lose good ideas and have to find them again.
Ideas should not be sorted chronogically, most of the time. That is a mistake for ideas that are intemporal.
You do not want to have a long list of ideas, and as a way of looking, only have a list of dates. That tells you very little about how to find what you're looking for.
If you find yourself scrolling a long list of links, or not finding something that you know is there, a structural mistake is wasting your time.
As a starting point, I think there is an obvious critique of Chronology that Substack should be more interested in.
Substack has a lot of chronological sorting, and not much filtering to speak of, beyond manual moderation of inputs.
Both those things are very imperfect, for anything beyond discussing news and events. Anything not meant to be in-temporal.
The way you organize information, matters an enormous deal.
I feel like I could take this as far turning this into an argument that Scott should not use Substack, in its current form.
If you have anything interesting to say at all, you should care how you organize it, so that less time is lost.
Substack is substantial income. There's a monetary argument. But I think I have a generous case that interesting ideas are more important than what you could do with this money, otherwise why not write less and spend more time in Finance. You will gain more measurable societal power (currency), yet you will be heard less.
Then there's an argument about how many people you can reach.
Many Sustack is good, because it spreads ideas faster despite its other flaws.
So if your ideas are good, you may be better off spending them like ammunition, letting them be lost down the chronology, just hoping to make a small impact as they go through.
The opposite of this, might look like building a repository of knowledge. Like Wikipedia does.
Bit of a dodgy place
yes maam
Does everyone get these? I'd love to stop receiving them since I'm not interested in meetups, and the odds that I live near a place like Lisbon are very, very slim. This is basically spam to me...
Yes, everyone gets these. There's only one mailing list.
You could probably spend time devising some clever scheme where people input their country, and only hear about the meetups in their area.
But that seems like spending a lot of energy over not so much.
I mean. Filtering information, and organizing information, those are _incredibly_ valuable goals. But spending a lot of time implementing specific instances, instead of something more general, seems kind of wasteful.
Maybe someone at Substack sees a broader pattern in all the discussion lists, and might have a more efficient idea.
(Disclaimer: Your author is drunk on LSD)
You can also just use preexisting filtering schemes, such as email filters. For example, filter on the word "meetup" in the title. Kind of coarse, but might do the trick.
Only tangentially related to the above, but I think there's a critique of blogs to be made, and places like Substack. They miss the mark in a profound way with regards to how they organize information.
If you have a valuable things to write, that are relevant beyond the immediate day or week, you should talk care to organize them carefully, so that people can access that information in a meaningful, continued way.
What Google, Wikipedia, Reddit do is brilliant. There is genius there that has not seeped into common knowledge quite yet.
They have understood a profound idea, about organization, that many others have not.
Not being able to find information causes waste at incredible scale. Inefficiencies that are small, but that add up across anyone who has questions, every time they come up.
It causes people to not find the right ideas, or lose good ideas and have to find them again.
Ideas should not be sorted chronogically, most of the time. That is a mistake for ideas that are intemporal.
You do not want to have a long list of ideas, and as a way of looking, only have a list of dates. That tells you very little about how to find what you're looking for.
If you find yourself scrolling a long list of links, or not finding something that you know is there, a structural mistake is wasting your time.
As a starting point, I think there is an obvious critique of Chronology that Substack should be more interested in.
Substack has a lot of chronological sorting, and not much filtering to speak of, beyond manual moderation of inputs.
Both those things are very imperfect, for anything beyond discussing news and events. Anything not meant to be in-temporal.
The way you organize information, matters an enormous deal.
I feel like I could take this as far turning this into an argument that Scott should not use Substack, in its current form.
If you have anything interesting to say at all, you should care how you organize it, so that less time is lost.
Substack is substantial income. There's a monetary argument. But I think I have a generous case that interesting ideas are more important than what you could do with this money, otherwise why not write less and spend more time in Finance. You will gain more measurable societal power (currency), yet you will be heard less.
Then there's an argument about how many people you can reach.
Many Sustack is good, because it spreads ideas faster despite its other flaws.
So if your ideas are good, you may be better off spending them like ammunition, letting them be lost down the chronology, just hoping to make a small impact as they go through.
The opposite of this, might look like building a repository of knowledge. Like Wikipedia does.
Or organizing, like Google does.
I wish I knew about this sooner... I hope you enjoy Lisbon and come again in the future! (Or maybe come to Porto next time, it's way better xD!)
I just discovered this now. Pity. I do live in Lisbon, and would have loved to participate