Interesting, the Atlantic article didn’t give this impression. I’d also be pretty surprised if you had to become essentially the cliche of a moderate politician if you’re part of the leadership team of a journalistic organization. In my mind, you’re mostly responsible for setting and living the norms you want the organization to follow, e.g.
epistemic norms of charitability, clarity, probabilistic forecasts, scout mindset
values like exploring neglected and important topics with a focus on having an altruistic impact?
And then maybe being involved in hiring the people who have shown promise and fit?
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren’t required and believed that it shouldn’t be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn’t have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could “avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox,” and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn’t want to abandon their quiet, stable, cushy Substack gig for a risky endeavor that required them to bet on their ability to do it successfully. I think too many of the relevant causes are things that you can’t count on being able to control as the head of an organization, particularly at scale, over long periods of time, and I’d been inferring that this was probably one of the lessons Yglesias drew from his time at Vox.
Interesting, the Atlantic article didn’t give this impression. I’d also be pretty surprised if you had to become essentially the cliche of a moderate politician if you’re part of the leadership team of a journalistic organization. In my mind, you’re mostly responsible for setting and living the norms you want the organization to follow, e.g.
epistemic norms of charitability, clarity, probabilistic forecasts, scout mindset
values like exploring neglected and important topics with a focus on having an altruistic impact?
And then maybe being involved in hiring the people who have shown promise and fit?
Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren’t required and believed that it shouldn’t be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn’t have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could “avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox,” and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn’t want to abandon their quiet, stable, cushy Substack gig for a risky endeavor that required them to bet on their ability to do it successfully. I think too many of the relevant causes are things that you can’t count on being able to control as the head of an organization, particularly at scale, over long periods of time, and I’d been inferring that this was probably one of the lessons Yglesias drew from his time at Vox.