Scott Alexander: uncertainty

Transcript context

…There was this recent Financial Times article about how have you reached peak cognitive power? Where it was talking about declining scores in PISA and SAT and so forth. On the Internet especially, it does seem like there might have been a golden era before I was that active on the forums or whatever. Do you have nostalgia for a particular time on the Internet when it was just like, this is an intellectual mecca? I am so mad at myself for missing most of the golden age of blogging. I feel like if I had started a blog in 2000 or something, then- I don’t know, I’ve done well for myself, I can’t complain- but the people from that era all founded news organizations or something. I mean, God save me from that fate. I would have liked to have been there. I would have liked to see what I could have done in that area. I mean, I wouldn’t compare the decline of the Internet to that stuff with PISA because I’m sure the Internet is just more people are coming on, it’s a less heavily selected sample. But yeah, I could have passed on the whole era where they were talking about atheism versus religion nonstop. That was pretty crazy. But I do hear good things about the golden age of blogging. Anybody who was sort of counterfactually responsible for you starting to blog or keeping blogging?…

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