Scott Alexander: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Thank you. I hope that happens. We’ll see. Slightly pushing back against that. I have statistics for the first several years of Slate Star Codex, and it really did grow extremely gradually. The usual pattern is something like every viral hit, 1% of the people who read your viral hits stick around. And so after dozens of viral hits, then you have a fan base. But smoothed out, It does look like a- I wish I had seen this recently, but I think it’s like over the course of three years, it was a pretty constant rise up to some plateau where I imagine it was a dynamic equilibrium and as many new people were coming in as old people were leaving. I think that with Situational Awareness, I don’t know how much publicity Leopold put into it. We’re doing pretty deliberate publicity, we’re going on your podcast. I think you can either be the sort of person who can go on a Dwarkesh podcast and get the New York Times to write about you, or you can do it organically, the old fashioned way, which is very long. Yeah. Okay. So you say that throwing money at people to make them, to get them to blog at least didn’t seem to work for the FTX folks. If it was up to you, what would you do? What’s your grant plan to get 10 more Scott Alexanders?…

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