At least 5 interesting things in July

1. Book Review: Good Inside

This is the most personable book review I’ve ever read. Though not funny in a comedic way, it’s both amusing and satisfying to watch the post-author self-awaredly and disproportionately spin out about certain writing choices from the book-author (which are admittedly (and I would even hazard “objectively”) annoying).

I’m ranting because the book is mostly sensible, and thus the stuff I hated made me feel like a weird overanalytical alien. I’m dysregulated. Someone needs to sit with me, quietly looking at the floor (but in the same room as me!!!) until I calm down. So let’s move on from my complaints, to the fun bits.

2. How to measure the decline of a YouTube channel

Folding Ideas is my favorite YouTube channel bar none, thanks to creator Dan Olson’s thoughtful and detailed exposés of everything from crypto scams to the artistic merit of the 50 Shades film adaptations. I’ve shared each of his videos that have come out since I started doing link roundups, including his most recent one on Mr. Beast, so it was cool to see write thoughtful and detailed feedback pushing against one of Dan Olson’s major claims in that video about whether Mr. Beast’s channel is in decline.

When we look at individual videos, we would naturally expect older videos to have higher viewcounts because they’ve been up longer. Olson’s metric is biased against the present.

But when we look at an entire channel, we should also naturally expect the channel to get more views per month, because the back-catalog is growing over time. This metric is biased toward the present

3. How many people did Brexit kill?

Here’s another post involving graphs and the difficulty of measuring a certain kind of decline, in a way that’s well-written and fun to read… if you can compartmentalize the sobering subject matter.

When we think about economic impact we tend to think of things in terms of struggle rather than outright deaths. People lose jobs, they lose luxuries, they endure the psychological…