Was Vaccine Production Actually Delayed?

… for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it .

– David Wallace-Wells, We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

In the weeks since the article’s publication, libertarians have lamented the failures of the FDA, our unwillingness to experiment with human-challenge trials, and the bureaucratic nightmare that is seemingly to blame for the entire pandemic.

According to Moderna’s own timeline, the first clinical batch was shipping February 24th, but didn’t receive emergency use authorization until December 18th. That’s a 10 month gap, and so the righteous indignation seems justified, if not outright required.

But how much faster could production have actually gone?

Take a closer look at the timeline, and you’ll see that by August 11th, the US government had already awarded Moderna $1.5 billion for the manufacture of 100 million doses. So whether or not the vaccine had received approval, Moderna was already ramping up production in parallel, just 6 months after the first clinical batch.

Is 6 months still too long? Look back and you’ll see that by May, Moderna had already planned to produce 1 billion doses. Even earlier in April, the US Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority awarded Moderna another $500 million “to enable large-scale production”.

We can go even further and consider this update from March 23:

While a commercially-available vaccine is not likely to be available for at least 12-18 months, Moderna reported it is possible that under emergency use, a vaccine could be available to some people, possibly including healthcare professionals, in the fall of 2020.

Moderna confirmed that it is scaling up manufacturing capacity toward the production of millions of doses per month, in the potential form of individual or multi-dose vials. [emphasis mine]

So were the delays primarily bureaucratic? From what I can tell, Moderna had the institutional support it required, and began working in March to scale up production, less than a month after shipping the first clinical batch.

Furthermore, regulatory approval aside, Moderna never believed a vaccine could be made available, even for emergency non-commercial use, until fall.

So how much of the delay can be directly attributed to government bureaucracy? I’m not sure, but neither are you.

I accept that there were certainly some needless delays, and these are aggravating to read about, but it matters very much if it is a matter of a couple weeks or of several months.

Appendix: Trust in Vaccines

So long as I am expressing skepticism of bureaucracy as the root of all evil, consider the analogous debate over vaccine rollout.

While some have lamented the bureaucracy entailed in getting the vaccine, I worry this is not as serious an issue as the incredibly high levels of outright rejection.

How high are rejection rates? It depends on who you ask. In ascending order:

  • Kaiser Family Foundation reports a rejection rate of 27%, and 29% for healthcare workers.
  • A global survey published in Nature reports 28% of people do not agree they would get a vaccine.
  • The Public Policy Institute of California reports that 40% of adults and 69% of African Americans “probably or definitely” would not get the vaccine,
  • The Wall Street Journal reports a National Association of Health Care Assistants survey claiming “nearly 72% of certified nursing assistants didn’t want to receive the vaccine”.
  • The AP reports nurses have a rejection rate as high as 80% at some nursing homes.

It is easy to make fun of anti-vaxxers when they are a niche minority, much harder when they are the majority of healthcare workers. It is worth taking their concerns seriously, and at least attempting to understand why some people may be hesitant.

Remember, for example, when the CDC pretended to treat black Americans with syphilis, but secretly denied them care for 40 years. Or much more recently, when the CIA pretended to vaccine people for hepatitis, but was actually taking DNA for surveillance.

Where is the discussion of these historical ills in all the recent complaints?

My point is not that we ought to be suspicious of vaccines, merely that my current levels of confidence are predicated on the clinical trials. There is a long-game to play with regards to establishing trust, and attempting to play fast and loose with established procedures is not the way to win it.

The same PPIC survey also reports that 68% of Californians are “more concerned about approval of a vaccine moving too fast” while merely 26% are “more concerned about approval moving too slowly, delaying access to a vaccine”. Note that this skews liberal, so other states may be less extreme, but even among Republicans, 51% were “more concerned about approval moving too fast.”

None of this is to say that I am against accelerating future development! A recent proposal in Cell to conduct phase I/II trials for the 100 most likely pandemics is a great idea, and well worth the estimated $3 billion investment. I am certainly not advocating in favor of complacency.

And yet, I am not so confident that our behavior over the last 10 months has been such a disaster, nor am I confident that FDA bureaucracy is primarily to blame.

[EDIT: 03/25/2021] MR has shared a couple posts (1, 2) doubting the role of the Tuskegee study in continued vaccine skepticism: “there was no association between knowledge of Tuskegee and willingness to participate.”

Isolated Demands for Rigour in New Optimism

I leave on vacation for a week, and you all go wild. Apparently, The Great Stagnation ended while I was away, and we are now celebrating a brave new era of progress.

Graciously compiled by Caleb Watney, we have:

This recent wave of anti-stagnation writing consists largely of anecdotes, supported by scant evidence, and without any sign of serious thought.

The problem is not even that the ideas are wrong.

The problem is the blatantly imbalanced and isolated demands for rigour.

Three years ago, to be convinced that there was actually a Great Stagnation, we required:

And of course, The Great Stagnation itself, a book length treatment of the question.

These were not luke-warm proposals. Bloom et al concludes “Our robust finding is that research productivity is falling sharply everywhere we look.” Collison and Nielsen write: “the evidence is that science has slowed enormously per dollar or hour spent”. And from Cowen and Southwood:

To sum up the basic conclusions of this paper, there is good and also wide-ranging evidence that the rate of scientific progress has indeed slowed down, [in] the disparate and partially independent areas of productivity growth, total factor productivity, GDP growth, patent measures, researcher productivity, crop yields, life expectancy, and Moore’s Law we have found support for this claim.

In contrast, each of the new anti-stagnation posts consists largely of one-off innovations that the authors happen to think are cool. There is no evidence that they are indicative of more generalized trends. Noah Smith leads with a meme comparing Juicero to SpaceX Starship, Caleb throws out a heartwarming video of a self-driving Tesla.

I don’t think it’s controvertial to say that the pro-stagnation evidence was of dramatically higher caliber.

But today, all it takes is some guy tweeting out a few bullet points, and everyone loses their minds. Seriously, how credulous are you?

Has the Evidence Shifted?

If you actually care about overturning the stagnation hypothesis, start with the papers that proved it in the first place.

Is science accelerating once again? Are we in a new era of progress? If so, it should show up in the data.

In 2017, Bloom et al concluded that ideas were getting harder to find on the basis of R&D data from semiconductor companies. By infering headcount from R&D spending, they produced this chart:

What’s changed since in the last 3 years?

I don’t have access to Bloom’s data provider, but I was able to grab Intel’s recent R&D spending from their 10-K filings, and append it onto Bloom’s historical data:

It does actually look like costs might be slowing! Hurray for progress, and hurray for the end of stagnation!

But wait a minute, Intel is no longer the most Moore’s Law-relevant company. Their 7nm process was delayed to 2022, and they no longer lead the pack.

Instead, TSMC is now one of only two fabs (including Samsung) able to keep up with Moore’s Law. (For what it’s worth, they also manufactured the Apple M1 chip.) This is their R&D data from Bloom, with the last few years added.

Data here, collected from TSMC SEC Filings.

Costs continue to rise exponentially, with no clear break in trend since 2017. If you believed the Bloom et al paper when it was published three years ago, you have no legitimate reason to turn your back on it now.

What about the other fields Cowen/Southwood cite as proof of stagnation?

Here’s their data on life expectancy up to 2016:

As you can see, there’s a plateau starting around the early 2000s, with expectancy actually dropping off in the most recent data. When you all saw this data in 2019, you seemed pretty darn convinced that science was slowing down. Upon reading the monograph in its entirety, Scott Alexander wrote:

I had previously argued technological progress wasn’t slowing down; based on the work of Tyler Cowen and Ben Southwood I now think it is; my previous position was mistaken.

Okay, so the data up until 2016 was convincing. What’s happened since then? Here’s life expectancy again, extended to include data up to 2020:

So sure, there is a slight uptick, but basically it is still at a plateau with growth far below historical levels.

If you believed in stagnation when the paper first came out, you had better continue believing it in now.

Is the New Evidence Exceptionally Compelling?

So fine, none of those factors have changed. But surely these new discoveries still constitute categorical shifts in our trajectory?

Let’s take a closer look. Aggregated across the aforementioned posts plus more from Tyler Cowen and Eli Dourado, here is some of the evidence presented in favor of progress (full list in the appendix):

  1. Affordable Solar Power
  2. Crypto Going Mainstream + Ethereum 2.0
  3. China Announces Quantum Supremacy

1. Affordable Solar Power
Here’s the cost per watt for solar power:

Can you show me where The Great Stagnation was? Maybe there was one from 1990 to 2006, but you can’t reasonably look at this graph and infer that 2006-2017 was a bad decade.

And yet somehow, the Stagnation Hypothesis was convincing in 2012 as the price dropped from $1.68 $/W to 0.88 $/W. And it remained convincing in 2017 as they dropped further from 0.55 $/W to 0.46 $/W.

What exactly about the last year feels compelling in a way that previous progress was not?

Noah Smith writes:

…the price drops for solar and wind over the last decade have just been nothing short of revolutionary.

Caleb Watney similarly writes:

the almost ho-hum daily progress in solar, wind, and battery technology where prices have fallen 90, 70, and 87 percent over the last ten years

So both are citing work over the last 10 years, rather than more recent progress. What’s going on here?

How is this “Optimism for the 2020s” as Noah writes or a “Crack in the Great Stagnation” as Watney suggests if it’s been going on for the last 10 years?

More likely, solar power has been making great strides on a pretty consistent basis for decades, and the only recent break is in how high-status it is to say that out loud.

2. Mainstream Crypto / Ethereum 2.0

Again, a big deal, and certainly neat to have crypto adopted by PayPal.

Except that it hasn’t actually happened yet. And also, crypto was already adopted by Stripe, before being subsequently shut down.

And again, I have to ask, is this a bigger deal than when Bitcoin first launched in 2009? Is it a bigger deal than Ethereum 1.0 first going live in 2015?

Here’s some actual data on adoption and usage:

Ethereum Transactions Per Day

Bitcoin Transactions Per Day

Again, please explain to me how 2020 was the year crypto went mainstream. Please explain why you were unconvinced by crypto as a sign of progress in 2017, but have since changed your mind.

3. Quantum Supremacy

  • 2011: D-Wave sells a quantum computer to Lockheed Martin, you all say there is a great stagnation
  • 2019: Google achieves quantum supremacy, you all say there is a great stagnation
  • 2020: China achieves quantum supremacy (but this time with photonics), you all lose your minds

Here are the Scott Aaronson posts for Google and for China. He explains that the latter:

…represents the first demonstration that quantum supremacy is possible via photonics. Finally, as the authors point out, the new experiment has one big technical advantage compared to Google’s: namely, many more possible output states (~1030 of them, rather than a mere ~9 quadrillion). This makes it infeasible to calculate the whole probability distribution over outputs and store it on a gigantic hard disk (after which one could easily generate as many samples as one wanted), which is what IBM proposed doing in its response to Google’s announcement.

So yes, it is a new achievement. Is it a demonstration of progress in a way that the Google achievement was not? I don’t understand enough about quantum computing to say, but critically, neither do any of you.

My point isn’t to celebrate ignorance. It’s to say that the 2019 announcement was clearly a categorical leap forward. Somehow, that was not enough to convince you all of scientific progress.

This year, we have another advance. Because there is not a clear index here, and because the 2019 achievement was so tremendous, it’s difficult to say whether or not this is a break in trend.

Again, unless you have a strong belief otherwise, you should either take both achievements as a sign of progress, or neither. You cannot merely pick and choose what to celebrate based on what is trendy rhetoric.

Conclusion

I say this not because I am “against progress”, but because I am very much in your corner of the internet. I also get all of my news from Marginal Revolution, and consider myself part of the broader Progress Studies community.

And so speaking as an insider, I am saying that we have to do better.

The recent trend of rhetoric against stagnation is not founded in evidence or driven by data. It is pure mood affiliation. You bought into the stagnation hypothesis when it was hip and contrarian, and now buy into the optimism hypothesis to be even more hip and counter-contrarian. At no point did you stop to look at the data or actually think for yourself.

To be clear, none of this is to say that The Great Stagnation is not over! Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe the whole thing was an illusion and reality is driven by the gods of straight lines.

The same month Cowen and Southwood published their monograph on stagnation, Alexey Guzey wrote:

science is not slowing down… I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. We rapidly adapt to technological advances – however big they are – and we always idealize the past – however terrible it was.

If anyone now has the moral authority to speak on optimism (or to identify as a contrarian with a straight face), it is him.

And if you sincerely believe that we are in a new era of progress, then argue for it rigorously! Show it in the data. Revisit the papers that were so convincing to you a year ago, and go refute them directly.

Maybe then I will be happy to celebrate alongside you.

TLDR
Go read this SMBC comic. Then read this SlateStarCodex post. Then go look at yourself in the mirror.

Appendix: Notes on Herd Mentality and Mood Affiliation
As much as I hesitate to make essentialist remarks, I do believe that there are fundamentally two types of people. Those who see a bunch of people agree, and think “wow, everyone believes this, it must be correct!”

And then those who think “hmm, suspicious”.

It’s not that I’m positing any kind of coordinated conspiracy, it’s that I don’t even have to. Because humans are basically apes and prone to shallow mimicry, it only takes one very prominent ape to have an opinion, and everyone else will rush to share it.

More specifically, additional opinion pieces don’t qualify as additional evidence for your cause unless they actually make different points than each other. All four of those articles cite the Moderna vaccine as evidence. That’s fair, it is a strong piece of evidence. But as a reader, you get to count it exactly once.

To make matters worse, many of the pieces cite each other. Noah reads Caleb, who reads Tyler. If you trace the intellectual lineage, it quickly becomes clear that approximately one person has any original ideas, and everyone else is just piling on.

The Wisdom of Crowds only functions when each individual is capable of thinking and acting independently. Absent this vital condition, it is just madness.

Appendix: All Innovations Cited in Favor of Progress
Aggregated across all sources listed above, here are all the innovations:

  • mRNA Vaccine
  • Apple M1 Chip
  • SpaceX Launch / SpaceX Starship (delayed until Monday)
  • GPT-3 / AI
  • Electric Cars
  • Mainstream Crypto / Ethereum 2.0
  • Operation Warp Speed
  • Affordable Solar Power / Green Energy
  • The Eggplant
  • Remote Work
  • V-Shaped Recovery
  • Tons of cool companies IPO’ing and tons more getting started,
  • DeepMind Protein Folding
  • Lab-Grown Meat Lab Grown Meat Approval
  • Sight Restored in Mice

I’ve done a few already, showing that the rest are not an obvious departure from existing trends is left as an exercise to the reader.

To be clear, the question is not “is this innovation very cool”, but rather “does this innovation depart from the previous decade’s trend of progress”.

For example:

  • The mouse study is cool, but is this a bigger deal than the 2012 discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 programming?
  • GPT-3 is very cool, but we’ve been on a sharp trajectory of progress in ML since 2012. GANs have seen enormous progress every year since 2014, as have many other tasks.
  • The Starship hop is very impressive. But is this a bigger leap forward than in 2008 when SpaceX became the first private company to ever launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft? Is it bigger than in 2015 when they achieved the first vertical landing, or in 2017 when they achieved the first vertical landing of an orbital rocket?
  • Electric cars have seen substantial progress with more competition from mainstream automakers, but surely the biggest breakthroughs were the General Motors EV1 in 1996, the Tesla Roadster in 2008 and perhaps the Tesla Model 3 in 2017? Here’s some actual data, if you care at all about that kind of thing. It demonstrates steady progress, with no clear inflection point or recent change of trajectory.

About Applied Divinity Studies

Applied Divinity Studies is going on hiatus, effective immediately.

Some people ask why he’s screaming on “I Am a God.” It’s not like a James Brown scream — it’s a real scream of terror. It makes my hair stand on end. He knows they could turn on him in two seconds.

– Lou Reed

Applied Divinity Studies began 3 months ago, and so far, it’s going well:

Growth is generally consistent, with two obvious anomalies.

Can you guess what they are? I’ll give you a hint. It is not “spent a lot of time and effort writing a very good post”.

It’s getting featured by Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution.

Okay, but maybe subscribers aren’t my objective function. Maybe what I really care about is making money. Here’s another chart of cumulative revenue.

The vertical line is getting an Emergent Ventures grant. Also from Tyler Cowen.

From this analysis, I conclude that there is no point in joining Twitter, writing clickbait [1], or anything else. I am free.

Having Money as Existential Crisis

I’m kidding, but only a little bit.

Obviously getting featured on MR or winning an EV grant produces its own incentives, but they’re largely ones I already agree with.

I suppose the expectation is that I’ll just save the money or spend it on rent. The implicit assumption being that I have a burn rate, this defines my runway, and money is used to extend the time I have to continue to do what I’m already doing.

But that’s crazy. This isn’t how any ambitious person spends money, nor is it a path to long term growth. Surely there’s some way I can spend this money to actually do better work, earn more money, and grow exponentially?

As Peter Thiel once said:

In a definite world, money is a means to an end. Because there are specific things you want to do with money. In an indefinite world, you have no idea what to do with money, and so money simply becomes an end in itself. Which seems always a little bit perverse, you just accumulate money, and you have no idea what to do with it, that seems like sort of a crazy thing to do.

I’m also reminded of Auren Hoffman’s post about the notable lack of ambition in venture capital. Firms seem largely incapable of deploying their cash reserves to win a competitive advantage. A large firm might hire a few more analysts, but mostly they just take profits, pay them out to partners, and call it a day.

This is held up in contrast to startups who are encouraged to aggressively reinvest their capital as quickly as possible to accelerate growth. [2]

So surely there’s something I can do with the money other than give it to my landlord?

This ends up being a fundamental question about the purpose of this blog, and about my life more generally.

If I care about getting more page views, I could spend the money on ads. If I’m specifically targeting high-status people, I could advertise in The Diff.

If I care about writing output, I could hire a research assistant or an editor.

If I wanted to be a snappier writer, I could pay $150 for David Perell’s How to Crush it on Twitter or $6000 for David Perell’s Write of Passage or $2000 for OnDeck’s Writer Fellowship.

The problem is that I don’t actually want any of this.

Startups often claim to be mission driven, meaning that they exist to fulfil some external purpose. In stark contrast, my inability to spend this money productively suggests that I have no external goal. [3] As it turns out, I am writing this blog entirely for my own pleasure.

Be Nice Until You Can Coordinate Meanness

Either you toil in obscurity until you die, or you become popular enough to get doxxed by the New York Times.

If you’re incredibly lucky, maybe you become popular enough to sell out, work on Substack and become a boring person catering to an analytics-mediated audience. [4]

This isn’t really a complaint about money though, the point is just that if you try to do anything important, people will try to kill you.

If you try to introduce any minimal amount of nuance into a conversation, they’ll slander you as a pedophile apologist. If you invent something great, they’ll sue you until you die of exhaustion. If you try to open access to scientific knowledge, they’ll sue you until you kill yourself.

If I have persecution anxiety, maybe it’s because they’ve persecuted all my heroes. [6]

So I don’t really see the point in trying to be the second coming of SlateStartCodex. I’m not a coward, but I’m also not a martyr.

As Scott once wrote, it is not worth acting unilaterally. Instead, you should act in the shadows, build support for your cause, play respectability politics, and maybe a few generations later you can declare victory.

But wait, isn’t now the time? We have coordinated! Scott’s pseudo-death was a rallying cry, and now the community is united unequivocally in favor of weird internet bloggers. Not only are we aligned, we have powerful voices behind us.

And yet, the attempted boycott has had no discernable effect whatsoever. Scott still lurks in the shadows. Substack tried to fund him (kudos), but whatever the amount, he’s decided it’s not worth it. Apparently, his view from the mount of success has been horrific, and he’s climbing back down.

Even if the undertaking was risky, it could be worth it for sufficient upside. Academic researchers take on risk, but if successful, their work is widely lauded. Startup founders have a high failure rate, but get rich if they succeed.

For weird internet bloggers, there is no throne.

The Unrivaled Joy of Scholarship and Unrivaled Pain of Existence

There’s a wonderful moment from Agnes Callard’s interview with Tyler:

COWEN: …I’m skeptical, but let’s just say I were to live forever. How bored would I end up, and how do you think about this question?

CALLARD: [laughs] I think it depends on how good of a person you are.

COWEN: And the good people are more or less bored?

CALLARD: Oh, they’re less bored… By bad, I don’t just mean sort of, let’s say, cruel to people or unjust. I also mean not attuned to things of eternal significance.

…if we’re talking about eternity, or even thousands of years, you’d better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in the way that I think only eternal things are.

I think that what you’re really asking is something like, “Could I be a god?” And I think, “Well, if you became godlike, you could, and then it would be OK.” [emphasis mine]

I’m not concerned with biological immortality, but even this life is long enough to make me worry. I am already living in that eternity. I can summon any food in the world to arrive at my doorstep, watch any movie, listen to any music. Upper-middle class Americans are already as gods, we just aren’t godlike.

And of course, this is accentuated by social isolation. [7] The vast majority of my time is spent either asleep, or at my computer. I am already in the eternal deathless state Callard describes.

Having lived there for almost a year now, I’ve found that all I really want is to participate in the unrivaled joy of scholarship without the well-documented burdens of institutional academia. To the extent that I have a mission at all, it is merely to prove that this way of living is even viable.

Unfortunately, there’s a danger to this kind of triviality as well.

In What is an Explanation?, I give a two sentence summary of meta-rationality. Language is subjective, but not arbitrarily. If you ask a question, first clarify what kind of answer would even be satisfying to you.

The purpose-dependence of truth also happens to be the central failure of internet blogging.

If a “satisfying answer” is just the hottest take or most controversial justifiable opinion, you won’t do good work. A real martyr needs a cause, and dying without one means an afterlife excluded from intellectual Valhalla.

In my defense, my own valuelessness is largely a product of our collective lack of compelling narratives. Everything that was once great is now problematic, everything once eternal now lacking in foundations. As far as I can tell, there are really only three compelling visions for the future:

  • Various Authoritarian Dystopias: Right-wing fascism, surveillance states, left-wing censorship. Things are arbitrarily bad.
  • Left-Wing European Environmentalism: We all bike and recycle. Things are basically the same but with lower consumption.
  • Various Retro-Futuristic Utopias: We have space exploration (but why?), flying cars (but to go where?), higher GDP (to consume what exactly?) and the iPhone 12 (but again, why?) Things are better, but not in a way that matters.

For some reason, we seem to have confused “compelling vision” with “vague overconfident manifestos”, but I don’t think that’s how this works at all. I don’t want someone to tell me what 2030 could look like.

I just want the US to be able to build trains, approve the vaccine, not have the world’s highest incarceration rate, allow high-skilled immigrants to get indefinite work visas, and do more to prevent a Uyghur genocide.

So the joy of scholarship is a good start, but it can’t be the whole thing. As Elon should have said, “Our existence cannot just be about reasons to live. There need to be solutions to one miserable problem after another.”

Hiatus

Looking back, I’m happy with what I’ve written, but it’s also clear to me that the important work lies ahead. I need more time to read, do proper research, and contribute actual knowledge instead of quick takes.

That might sound self-deprecating, but it shouldn’t imply that any of this has been a waste. It is only thanks to these last 3 months and their success that I have the confidence, willpower and practice to undertake more daunting projects.

Thanks for all your support, and I hope you’ll look forward to reading Applied Divinity Studies in 2021.

[1] You might argue that posts only get featured on MR because Tyler hears about them, and so it is still worth growing virally. This is empirically true (Agnes Callard tweeted Beware the Casual Polymath before it was featured on MR), but there’s no reason it has to be. Tyler’s email address is public, and it is still free for you or I to inject content directly into his brain.

For what it’s worth, there is some organic growth, but I have no idea how much. Since the “see mail => get annoyed” loop is faster than the “see mail => read mail => forward mail” loop, the short term effect of every email I send is a net loss in subscribers.

[2] Though if you believe Chamath, “Startups spend almost 40 cents of every VC dollar on Google, Facebook, and Amazon”, supposedly in the form of ad spend or AWS costs. And then you have to include the cost of user acquisition through “competitive pricing”, i.e. selling at a loss.

[3] There are basically two reasons someone might start a blog, neither of them good. Either you’re so arrogant that you feel your every thought must be shared with the world, or you just don’t value your time at all, and there’s no next best alternative.

As far as I can tell, this is why people use Substack. Even if you don’t monetize, writing on Substack at least allows you to pretend that you’re doing it for the sake of networking, improving your personal brand, or one day making money. And so these selfish motivations end up being far more trustworthy than the motivations of a blogger, and Substack ends up being a higher-status option.

[4] The most successful writer I’m actually interested in is Gwern, who makes $1300/month on Patreon. That’s fine, but he’s much more popular and prolific, so this feels like an upper bound. At the rate of $15,600 annually, I would be better off working a corporate tech for 2 years and living off interest. (EDIT: someone else who’s writing I respect tells me they make significantly more on Patreon, and Gwern is probably just not trying very hard.)

[6] Or maybe I’m post-hoc attracted to martyrs? That’s true for Wilbur Wright, but the other three I followed pre-prosecution.

[7] This is also a good time to note that this blog would never have been possible before COVID. Without social isolation, it would have been too hard for me to write without FOMO and too hard to embark on something as inherently silly as blogging without immediate and constant validation.

More practically, starting a blog anonymously would have meant lying to all of my friends pretty much constantly. It’s easy to say I’m “just hanging out” during the pandemic. Much harder to constantly make up stories about what I’ve been doing all weekend.