Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…... this is hurt journalism. When Mike Kinsley founded Slate, he said to me... This is how long ago this was. He said, "Do you realize we're gonna now have statistics on how many people read each individual article?" And he said, "And you know, I think I'm gonna try to keep that information away from the writers." That was a profoundly wise impulse, even if it was impossible to actually realize. And you see the damage now. I mean, the, the standard business model of mainstream media has just become tribal on one side or the other because they're paying attention to, you know, they, they're looking for the headlines that get the clicks and because these are challenging times for media, even for The New York Times, and New York Times is playing this game. You know, I did a, a piece for The Washington Post several years ago actually arguing Right, right, right around the time GPT-4, I said, "You know, we really need to start pursuing rapprochement with China." That was kind of the argument. And there was this headline and they said, "How do you, what do you think of this headline?" I said, "Great." I... and then I go look at the piece, you know, hours later, and it's no longer the headline. What had happened is they did A/B testing and, and the first line was now, "AI is dangerous, so blah," and, and i- it was a headline that would not actually succeed in attracting the kind of readers who would, who would read the whole piece, actually. It wasn't even a good version, in a way, of pay per click. But it was... This is the game now in media and, and, you know, media become a, a tribaliz- you know, a tribalizing force partly by virtue of just trying to remain profitable. So yeah, beware of, beware of, of anything that is click-driven, and unfortunately everything is click-driven, certainly including social media algorithms. You know, but, but manicure your... You know, like use lists on Twitter, you know? I, I, I've learned a lot from my AI list and it's, I think, algorithm free. It's just the people in the list in the order of their tweets. Again, easier, easy, easy for me to say, I guess I'll say, 'cause I think I've been very fortunate with this podcast and the fact that there's like a ton of money flowing around the AI space means that, you know, we can get sponsors in a way that would probably be very difficult for many other people in many other niches. But I've had pretty good luck with just, first of all, just trying to keep the true north of the whole thing my own personal learning. I always try to keep that in mind. And then also having specific individuals that I respect in mind as the audience is another- Mm. Mm-hmm…

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