Competing in FITs opened my eyes to how easy it is to listen to thinkers that appeal to my own biases rather than the highest intellectual standards. Where before I experienced an aggressive takedown of an opposing point of view as exciting, I now often come away disappointed. I have found a new way of keeping score.
Read the whole essay. I think that the May version of Fantasy Intellectual Teams provided solid proof of concept. We demonstrated that using a scoring system could help raise the status of intellectuals who engage in constructive discourse. It was gratifying to see that the leading scorers were at least as numerous on the left as on the right.
Fantasy Intellectual Teams is a worthwhile institutional innovation. It is the anti-Twitter.
The fact that Twitter is overwhelmingly on the left means that most of the intellectual spoilage that Twitter generates afflicts the left. In that sense, the left has the most potential to raise its intellectual caliber by shifting the spotlight to something other than Twitter. An institution like Fantasy Intellectual Teams could help rescue the left, and along with that the rest of us.
I really wish that I could convince Substack to offer subscription bundles to owners of Fantasy Intellectual Teams. Something like a 25 percent discount to an owner who picks five Substack subscriptions. I think it could be a win-win, in that it would help Substack, help authors, and help improve intellectual discourse.
FITs is a great idea but I predict such discourse is unsustainable long term. Anybody whose following grows, for example as a result of a FITs type system will invariably feel pressured or be asked for their opinion on every new development. These opinions will start be formed more quickly as their reader base grows and thus the thought itself will be less likely to be well formed. More likely, it will start to become an off the cuff version of the red meat that conservatives/leftists get from the Hannity/Maddow types. So I think FITs only works as long as the intellectual’s following is relatively small.
I disagree and I think recent intellectual history in the US disagrees also. Fame doesn’t destroy intellectual rigor, misbegotten ideology does. And the Twitter yelling matches/ yelling in unison against the scapegoat games are not the cause of the decimation of the social sciences and the humanities in US universities.
I also think the substack bundle concept is a stroke of brilliance.
It does, and it seems to vindicate why we had magazines in the first place.
Most people aren’t going to pay $5-$10 a month for 10 substack subscriptions, but I think quite a few would pay $20 a month for access to their favorite 10 authors. It’s a much better value and that type of deal would create the volume necessary for that structure to be beneficial to the writers. Getting $2/month from 15,000 subscribers is much better than $10/month from 1,500 subscribers.
But the ability to choose your bundle avoids the problems of editors feeling pressured to censor/cancel writers over the complaints of a vocal minority.
As I recall, in the very early days of computers, so far back that there was a vision of a big central computer and individual terminals, a number of people talked about “personalized” newspapers. You would tell the central computer what you were interested in and it would feed you the relevant stories. John Kemeny was a big proponent.