On Having Good Hot Takes

This is my first post for Meandering with Speed, my place for posts that are more about life in general than considered AI policy perspectives. Subscribe if you’re interested in more.Someone recently said that I was good at generating Hot Takes. As regretful as I was to disappoint an attractive woman, I demurred that I couldn’t generate one on demand. Less than 20 minutes later I pitched a Princeton student on spending a summer founding a food truck or reselling Etsy products in public or anything else that requires buying physical inputs and selling physical outputs to people in person, without anyone else acting as a manager or director or source of authority and responsibility, instead of what we might call a more conventional summer internship. It’s not CV-maxxing, but the elite educational pipeline leaves its graduates deficient in agency more than anything else, and running a physical micro-business is an excellent way to fix that.You can get more takes by subscribingSo I decided I should explain my approach to having good Hot Takes, in part because I think that a good Hot Take is a valuable thing to craft and offer.What makes a Hot Take?What makes a Hot Take a take? If you can’t explain the high-level form in a sentence to your audience, it’s not a take. It might be an intriguing or provocative position paper, but it’s not a take. This is why Hot Takes tend to be bad. That said, if you just propose obviously terrible ideas you’re making the conversation boring. As stated, “businesses should have to pay employees for time spent commuting” reveals that you lack the ability or willingness to think about second-order effects. Your take should not be obviously silly.A Hot Take has to be simple.What makes a good Hot Take hot? It has to actually be novel, by the standards of your audience. “We should have open borders” is a serious view, and I think more people should seriously engage with Bryan Caplan’s thinking on the topic. I have two copies of his Open Borders: