Freddie deBoer

I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. A commitment to free speech means you get more garbage and conspiracy theories, but in exchange you get more intellectual conversations for adults, something you increasingly can't find on Reddit due to its overbearing moderation. Reddit itself has a good track record of banning subs, with only a few exceptions, but it's mostly the moderators and Reddit-enforced mod policies that have caused its decline. As far as recommendations, it depends what you're interested in. I'd generally agree with the first two and disagree with the last two, but they are all high-quality reads (for me). https://www.slowboring.com https://jessesingal.substack.com https://freddiedeboer.substack.com https://fakenous.substack.com

Scam might be too strong a word but it certainly has far higher false positive rates than they are claiming, and their output is at best misleadingly presented: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-b…

Some people get into it. This guy writes intelligently about it when he's between his manic and depressed phases: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/ I appreciate that he faces up to being bipolar rather than being fashionably autistic or pill-seeking ADHD.

Maybe instead governments should pursue resource equalization. Some posts on a linked blog (https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20) suggest that the differences in achievement between different demographic groups can be due to environmental differences. Unequal "head starts" due to economic circumstances are an obvious one. It may be that the best way to "pursue excellence" has nothing to do with education; it may have to do with taking money away from very wealthy people and giving it to less wealthy people.

It's So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-so-sad-when-old-people-romant…

Fair point, I can see where you're coming from and I'm aware of the origins of the word on 4chan. I use the term not with the intention of placing anyone above others, but denoting the difference between insular forum culture and every day people you see when you go outside. In the political world this word has taken on a similar meeting for the difference between commentariat and every day people and that's the way I use it in conversation. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/towards-a-normie-politics https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-lot-of-the-best-political-messages

Right, but you hear "everyone should be in therapy" from all corners; there's at least one dating app (Bumble, I think) that has an "In therapy" tag you can put on your profile; and BetterHelp advertises themselves with a commercial where girls at brunch talk about a guy one of them has been seeing, and they agree she should stop seeing him once they realize he's not in therapy, even though they know almost nothing else about him ( https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-not-trying-to-be-dramatic-but)… That isn't really a view of therapy as a specific intervention, but as an almost mandatory practice for adults, kind of like going to the gym. The view of the psychologist you mention is actually sadly rare. Obviously, I think the widely shared view of therapy is a total bastardization of any worth therapy might have had in the first place.

The author has bipolar disorder and has been involuntarily hospitalized a few times due to mania and psychosis. He wrote this really different but great piece about his own experience: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-weight

"Jazz drew from ragtime, also “coded” Black, but ragtime drew from marches, drawn in great measure from white men John Philip Sousa and (eep) Wagner."[1] In your view, is this appropriation or cultural mixing or exchange? [1]: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/theres-no-alternative-to-cultural

No matter what one might think of Freddie deBoer, it is worth being aware of his own experience with psychosis. While this is not the same thing as DID, it did give him relatively deep personal insight into aspects of serious psychiatric disorder: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/since-you-asked There re still plenty of people who have a severe distaste for his writing, his political views and his behavior, and I think that's fine. However I think it's unfair to claim that this article is "all based on an article or two he found."

Three Quarks Daily often surfaces high-quality long form content from a broad ideological cross-section. As others have mentioned, Arts and Letters Daily is often interesting too. https://3quarksdaily.com/ https://www.aldaily.com/ And, while I'm commenting, some of my favorite Substacks who tend to write long content are: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/ https://justinehsmith.substack.com/ https://astralcodexten.substack.com/ https://razib.substack.com/ https://www.theinsight.org/

He's pretty passionate about education policy; this article is one of his better ones on that topic, IMHO: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-at-the-sat… The discussion of Robertson et. al.'s 2010 paper is worth reading the article just for that. But it's true that his writing seems to drift between extremes -- some sober, well-researched and very interesting, and others almost as if a different person was writing it.

yeah but antipsychotics severely retard every mental process and have a high risk of permanent motor and intellectual disability (it really sucks to have tardive dyskinesia). There’s absolutely no reason that should be prescribed. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-weight Freddie explains it in this article - he deems it worth it for him to be able to keep a job and friends, but it is in no way called for for random old folks to be disabled like that to make them easier to handle

I think it's a fair point that bots should strive to be useful and not just mock people's mistakes, but in the 8 years since this was written the whole "punch up, not down" idea in comedy has gotten a lot of criticism and is kind of passe at this point, at least in my experience. Human beings simply do not exist on a single monolith spectrum of power; who is "up" or "down" often depends quite a lot on context. If an underemployed white male comedian makes a joke about Kamala Harris, is that punching up or down? _Parasite_ is a movie that mocks a rich family even as it portrays their poorer help as scheming and untrustworthy - is that up, or down? To steal an example from this excellent Freddie de Boer post on the topic, if an adjunct professor runs afoul of a student, are they really the ones in the position of power? Anyway Freddie sums the whole thing up much better than I could: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/punching-up-and-punching-down-hav…

I'm not talking about free speech absolutism. What I'm describing here is a specific US-centered cultural phenomenon - thin-skinned, hypocritical tribalism that has turned people against each other, where every conversation that strays outside of narrow doctrinaire bounds, however innocuous or well-intentioned, might be reported on by a remorseless army of cruel snitches ever hungry to find some way to elevate themselves by destroying others. It's the very opposite of being kind or considerate, and, having seen its effects on colleagues, I can't imagine anything more damaging to "team morale". Freddie De Boer has a pungent phrase for this - "planet of cops" - and his essay is worth reading: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/planet-of-cops I feel focus on the first amendment gives people of this bent cover: it lets them exert incredible power over speech in every practical way, while claiming that free speech is intact because there's no violation of the constitution. The fact that we need to clearly rebut people like this is exactly one of the reasons why I feel over-indexing on the constitution is unhelpful.

> Regardless of any internet-level understanding or resentment, the millennial/zoomer understanding of mental health is completely destroying people's lives. > I work and have worked in mental health for my entire adult life (late 20s now). I have my own mental health diagnoses. I was diagnosed with severe OCD when I was 11. Since then I've gone through periods of generalized anxiety, agoraphobia, panic disorder, you name it. It has destroyed my life once every three or four years without fail. Losing jobs, friendships, my grades in college, everything. Just utter ineptitude and catatonic inability to take care of myself. I have been blessed with the most supportive family anyone could ask for. I do not fail to see the differences between myself and those who I now serve. But there is an intense illness that is permeating through our younger generations that is destroying the possibility of recovery for these people suffering through legitimate mental health issues. > I have met and helped and treated numerous individuals now who are my peers in age - anything from 18-early 30s. And so many have internalized a generational "understanding" of mental illness that is toxic and worthless beyond condemnation. Our youngest generations' understanding of mental health enables, encourages, and at worst glorifies mental illness. I can not understate the number of times I've met a young woman who has made being mentally ill, and polysexual, and queer, and autistic, et cetera, their…

The formal definition according to Google is "a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality", so I guess technically, a dream meets that definition. I think the commenter you're responding to is also referring to the way that in a psychotic state, all actions make sense to the psychotic person. The "psycho" stops following a deductive/conscious/scientific logic chain, and starts following inductive/subconscious/superstitious logic chain, all while perceiving internally a consistent narrative of reality. Examples in the difference in logic chains: - In a non-psychotic state, when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I do not start a fire, because (a) fire is dangerous inside; (b) I remember that I have blankets, an HVAC system, etc. - In a psychotic state (either dreaming or awake), when I'm in my bedroom and notice that I am cold, I might start a fire, because (a) an angel told me to; (b) it will protect me from the spirits in the darkness; (c) I believe the heating system is broken (even if I haven't looked at it) and I'm worried I'll freeze to death... One cannot personally perceive psychosis while psychotic--reality always makes sense in the moment. Even the most demented Alzheimer's patient will construct a narrative of what's happening to them, even if it's just a vague sense of prehistoric fear and rage at the strange object invading their space (which in reality is a nurse trying to give…

Traditional newspapers and newer media (like Buzzfeed, Huffpost, Vox...) are scared, especially their journos. The clickbait, garbage content factory approach just doesn't cut it anymore, and it doesn't raise their profile as journalists offering anything of value. They despise Substack because it threatens to erase the last thing they have left in this business, a kind of ill-perceived legitimacy that they demand their work at a major outlet should give them. The success of independent Substack writers just vaporizes this entirely. They are stuck in a low-paying job, have no prospects in this industry, and no one to appreciate their pathetic work except their like-minded media colleagues. That's why they hate Substack writers. Substack writers pull traffic, the average journos @nyt, wp, you name it, don't. I highly recommend this post from ferddie de boer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement

This is on Pangram 3 which is very very old now and the founder responded below https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-b… What about on Pangram 4? https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-4-technical

"I Wouldn't Say Pangram is Broken, But I Would Say That It's Brittle": https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-b…

Not my article, but this is quite convincing of the brittle nature of these tools. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-b…

On the other hand, see https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-is-broken-b… where Freddie deBoer shows some instances where Pangram is definitely giving wrong or misleading results. (Somewhat-plausible-to-me explanation: It's looking for various stylistic features; older writing very rarely has the most AI-like features, or perhaps almost always has some non-AI-like features that outweigh whatever signs of AI-ness might be there. Present-day writers are more likely to get wrongly flagged as AI.)

Possibly things are worse, but here’s an argument that we’ve gotten unrealistically ambitious about universal education through college: What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-our-schools

Okay, well you can look at the wikipedia page referenced above: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States) You can read Freddie deBoer's (notable communist writer) article: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/antifa-is-a-fatherless-child Or this article on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/black-clad-anarchists-swarm-anti-h… Or google it or ask an LLM to google it for you and put 10 minutes into actually participating in this conversation?

You should read: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-call-that-compassion

The notion that the British A levels have “cultural bias” is absurd, given that Asians outperform white British: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-an… In the U.S., research shows the SAT is highly predictive of college performance: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-week-educational-assess… (summarizing research).

Definitely not budget cuts. School budgets have surprisingly little to do with educational outcomes. See Abbott districts in New Jersey for one of the starkest examples of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district Despite having better per-pupil funding than the wealthiest districts in the state (thanks to a court order mandating increased funding) student performance has stayed the same and even worsened in these districts. The single biggest determiners of school performance seems to be the level of parental involvement and the average IQ of the students. Well those, plus selection effects to bump up numbers: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-po…

Because "studying for the SAT" is a mythological left-wing trope: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-arent-actually-mad-at-the-sat…

I've actually found these takes quite interesting, though I wouldn't say I am in agreement. You might find some of Freddie de Boer's writing on disability interesting, such as this piece [1], this one [2], and others. [1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/your-mental-illness-beliefs-are-i… [2] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-gentrification-of-disability

Counterpoint. I just met someone who started telling me about their bipolarity within the first five minutes of meeting. It was pretty obviously functioning as a trophy for them. This is a pretty stereotypical kind of modern bore. See also https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/trauma-is-indeed-like-a-car-crash…