One year on Substack

Reflections

Photo by Luca Onniboni on Unsplash

I published my first article on this Substack on January 1st 2024. Overall, I’ve now published 52 posts (i.e., one a week throughout 2024). Because I typically write long articles, that’s over 150,000 words of content on a wide range of topics, including politics, evolution, artificial intelligence, social epistemology, philosophy, “misinformation”, and much more.

Although this has involved a lot of work, almost none of it felt like work. I thought I would like blogging—hence why I started—but it’s been even more rewarding than I thought it would be.

I would like to thank all those who read, support, recommend, and engage with the blog.

In this post, I will:

• Review some stats

• Identify some factors explaining the blog’s success

• Briefly review the topics covered this year, including my most popular—and my personal favourite—essays

• Reflect on why blogging is both rewarding and challenging

• Describe my plans for the blog this year

Stats

As of January 2nd 2025, I have 11,000 subscribers. This is what the graph depicting the growth of subscribers over time looks like:

I’ve had 65,100 views over the past 30 days.

The blog is read across 50 states in the US and across 125 countries. A majority (51%) of subscribers come from the US. Surprisingly, I have as many subscribers in Italy as in the UK.

I have the most audience overlap with Nate Silver’s ‘Silver Bulletin’ (37%), Scott Alexander’s ‘Astral Codex Ten’ (18%), ‘The Free Press’ (18%), Noah Smith’s ‘Noahpinion’ (17%), Matt Yglesias’s ‘Slow Boring’ (17%), and Erik Hoel’s ‘The Intrinsic Perspective’ (13%).

Reasons for success

When I started blogging, my aim was to reach 500 subscribers by the end of the year. Relative to this goal, the blog has been a success. I think the blog has also been broadly successful relative to other metrics as well.

What explains this?

Because humans instinctively interpret the world in self-serving and self-aggrandising ways, we tend to take excessive credit for our successes and blame external factors (bad luck or other people) for our failures.

Let me try to avoid this tendency: by far the biggest reason this blog has been successful is simply good luck.

The main factor has been getting “recommended” by other writers. (When you recommend another writer on Substack, this directs some of your new subscribers to their newsletter).

7,000 (over 60%) of my subscribers have come from recommendations. Over 3,600 of these resulted from being recommended by Substack superstar

Nate Silver

. I’ve also benefitted from being recommended by many other great writers, including

Eugenio Radin

,

Lionel Page

,

Ruxandra Teslo

,

Musa al-Gharbi

,

David Pinsof

,

Awais Aftab

,

Arnold Kling

,

Seeds of Science

,

Dan Gardner

, and many more.

In addition, many other writers (especially

Rob Henderson

) have directed a large amount of traffic to the blog by linking to my articles.

I’m extremely grateful to all those who recommend and support the blog in these ways.

In terms of other factors explaining the blog’s success, I have the following traits, all of which seem to be conducive to successful blogging:

• A high level of intellectual self-confidence that is no doubt frequently arrogant, if not outright delusional. (It’s good to be intellectually humble but publishing a blog involves an implicit assumption that you have something valuable to tell other people).

• An ability to be unbothered by harsh criticism and occasional personal attacks. (Most of those who comment on your articles do so because they think you got something wrong. Although most of the feedback I get is high-quality, thoughtful, and respectful, I also receive a lot of outright hostile responses in absolute terms, which I think is pretty common among anyone who takes controversial stances on heated topics).

• Obsessive interests in a wide range of ideas and topics. (This has many obvious benefits but also less obvious ones. For example, readers are much more likely to be interested in blogposts if the author is clearly passionate about the topic, which is especially important for, say, abstract philosophical issues).

• An ability to write quickly, consistently, and relatively clearly. (I can write much more quickly and eloquently than I can speak, and I always have multiple different things I’m writing at the same time).

• What I would call “conscientious anti-perfectionism”. (It’s difficult and maybe impossible to be a blogger if you’re a perfectionist. At the same time, the most common way of not being a perfectionist is by being lazy and tolerating mediocrity, which will result in bad work. What’s needed, then, is an ability to be highly conscientious at the same time as recognising when you hit rapidly diminishing returns when writing articles).

Not all successful bloggers have these traits, and they’re not sufficient for success. Nevertheless, my sense is that they’re fairly common among successful bloggers and—collectively, at least—quite unusual.

The year in review

The best thing about blogging is that you can write about whatever you want to write about. This year, the main things I wrote about were:

• Why influential ways of thinking about problems like “misinformation” and “disinformation” are misguided

• The psychological, social, and economic factors that explain why people believe what they believe

• What evolution tells us about human nature and sociality

• The role of experts in society

• Politics (in the broadest possible sense)

By number of readers, my three most popular articles were:

1. Why do people believe true things?

2. America’s epistemological crisis

3. There is no “woke mind virus”

My three most popular articles for paid subscribers were:

1. On becoming less left-wing (Part 1)

2. Contra critical theory

3. Can experts save the public from error?

Excluding the ones already mentioned, the three essays I’m most proud of were:

1. Socialism, self-deception, and spontaneous order

2. How dangerous is misinformation?

3. The social construction of bespoke realities

Reflections on Substacking

Reflecting on the past year, here are some of the things that are most rewarding about blogging:

1. It’s difficult to overstate the benefits of being able to write about whatever you want to write about and to write about it in whichever way you want. You can achieve the former freedom as an academic once you’ve secured a permanent job (although the dream of a “permanent” academic job in the UK is looking increasingly fragile at many universities, including mine). However, you still need to write articles that conform to a very specific set of expectations to publish them in good journals. Here, you have absolute freedom. Moreover, in academia you will typically have to wait several years to publish a novel idea. Here, you can publish it immediately.

2. There are no formal “gatekeepers” here. This has disadvantages, obviously, including the lack of external quality control. However, it has countless advantages. The main one for me concerns my writing process. Whenever I know an article will need to be approved by some external authority to be published, it dramatically reduces my passion for the project.

3. One of the best things about Substack is the ability to find a community of highly intelligent, knowledgeable, like-minded thinkers with broadly similar interests. I benefit enormously from the feedback I get on my posts here. For this and other reasons, blogging is not just a means of communicating ideas. On Substack specifically, it provides a useful context for thinking through, developing, and revising ideas as well.

Here are some of the things I’ve found most challenging:

1. To build your blog’s audience, you will probably need to engage in self-promotion. This feels awkward. Self-promotion looks like—because it is—an attempt to raise your status and influence. Because status is relative and hence zero sum, people typically resent that. I struggle with this.

2. I have a full-time academic job that I take extremely seriously. I want to produce high-quality academic research and teaching. For this reason, I make sure that blogging doesn’t undermine these other goals. For the most part, that’s not an issue: because of substantial overlap in the focus of my research, teaching, and popular writing, these activities function as complements rather than substitutes. Moreover, I do most of my blogging in my spare time, which is easy because I enjoy it so much. However, maintaining this blog on top of a full-time, difficult job undoubtedly involves an enormous amount of hard work, which can sometimes be challenging.

2025

I have many things planned this year that I’m excited about.

In the immediate future, I will complete my “Debunking disinformation myths” and “Becoming less left-wing” series. I’m also planning a seven-part series on the theme of “Politics, truth, and ideology”, which will overlap with an advanced undergraduate course I’m teaching that connects abstract philosophical and social-scientific debates in political epistemology, broadly construed, to current political events and controversies. I’m also going to be writing more about issues that arise in connection with my forthcoming book, “Why it’s OK to be cynical”.

Reflecting on how I approach blogging, I think my biggest weakness is that I’m allergic to being concise. Nevertheless, one of my main goals with this blog is to produce in-depth articles on big-picture questions that will retain their value over time. Given this, I’m going to keep writing lengthy articles but I’m also going to publish more short posts, especially when it comes to politics and “current affairs”.

Once again, THANK YOU to all those who read, support, and engage with the blog. I’m looking forward to another year on Substack.