Reacting to Matt Yglesias's Confession that A.I. Progress Is Giving Him Writer’s Block
Matt’s subhead: “It’s hard to write good articles when you have no idea if everything is about to change”. In short, Matt has half-drunk the AI-psychoactive koolaid. My view: Matt should talk to Ezra Klein, and have Ezra Klein recount to him Ezra’s days in San Francisco, when it seemed every day made him stupider as he found himself rubbing elbows with yet another bunch of crypto-enthusiast grifters and self-grifters. while BitCoin is still a thing today, nobody sees it as anything societally transformative, or indeed as having any other serious use case other than “digital gold!” and “number go up!” “AI” will have more of an impact, yes, and the balance between cynical grifters and self-grifters on the one hand and genuine technologists exploring use cases on the other is very different. But the vibe is the same: in both cases the evidence of the rapid total overturning of human society is not present…
And yet Matt thinks there is a genuine fork here, and stands transfixed, like Buridan’s Ass:
MATT YGLESIAS: A.I. progress is giving me writer’s block
It’s hard to write good articles when you have no idea if everything is about to change.
Feb 18, 2026
...Here’s an idea for an article that I had recently:
One of the most underrated aspects of education policy is the impact that second-wave feminism had on the K-12 workforce. It used to be the case that an enormous fraction of the smartest and most ambitious women in America were working as public school teachers, and were doing so at depressed wages because of limited opportunities for women to have white-collar careers. Some of this was formal, but a lot of it wasn’t. Jeannette Rankin entered Congress in 1917 and Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from medical school in 1849, so it’s not like women “couldn’t” have careers in politics or medicine before 1970. But they rarely did. And there wasn’t one specific formal policy change that unleashed the entire transformation of women’s professional opportunities. There were formal changes in public policy, of course, but the most important changes were the shifts in attitudes and social values
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