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Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
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6 May, 4 tweets, 1 min read
This is my favorite metaphor from @juliagalef's book. This kind of thing happens constantly in political debates.
Responses to this thread for example. Liberals pointed out a number of differences between these two issues. They aren't crazy arguments and I'm sure liberals believe them sincerely.
I'm also sure that in a world where MySpace was the dominant social platform and Rupert Murdoch was de-platforming Democratic politicians, liberals would be calling for social media to be regulated as common carriers and conservatives would be invoking the First Amendment.
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More from @binarybits

Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
6 May
I feel like I have a better sense for why contact tracing hasn't gone well in the US after being on the receiving end a couple of times. In recent weeks each of my two kids has had a covid case in their classrooms. (They didn't get it.)
In DC, the first thing a contact tracer does after introducing themselves is to demand that you give them your kid's date of birth and home address. They won't tell you anything about why they called until then.
I found this a little offputting, especially since they hadn't authenticated themselves to me. I didn't seriously doubt they were legit since we had just had a covid case, but still it seems unnecessary since they're mostly seeking information from me.
Read 9 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
5 May
There's some... tension between the 2011 progressive view that the Supreme Court was wrong to rule corporations had free speech rights in Citizens United and the 2021 progressive view that corporations have an absolute First Amendment right to deplatform politicians.
I'm not going to say the positions contradict each other because there are coherent distinctions you could draw between and spending and moderation policies. But it's a bit jarring.
A similar point applies with respect to net neutrality. "Net neutrality infringes telecom providers' free speech rights" used to be a right-wing position, whereas "no, telecoms are common carriers" was the left-wing response.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
4 May
Thread! I talked to a dozen well-connected people in the patent world about who Biden might pick as the next director of the Patent Office. Rumors suggest the administration is considering three candidates with dramatically varying backgrounds. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Some important background: in 2011, Obama signed a bill creating a new process called Inter Partes Review that's become a key way for defendants to get rid of bad patents. Trump's pick to lead the patent office, Andre Iancu, limited defendants' access to IPR process.
Sources tell me that two leading leading candidates for the job are Ellisen Turner and Jannie Lau. Both have spent much of the last decade representing companies that make almost all of their money from patent licensing fees.
Read 5 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
22 Apr
On most policy issues I can articulate the main arguments on both sides even if I don't agree. Antitrust is an exception. I know that antitrust skeptics love "the consumer welfare standard," but I don't think I could explain it to say nothing of making a coherent case for it.
It's not even that I'm strongly on the other side. I'm really how the law should be enforced differently. But the idea that everything has been going great for the last 40 years is hard to take seriously.
I think there is something to this. Pre-1980s antitrust laws was a mess and bork proposed a lowest common denominator of situations where everyone agreed action was needed.
Read 4 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
18 Mar
Annalee is a former Ars colleague and I enjoyed working with her, but I didn't fid this persuasive. Substack's pitch is that their platform makes it possible for some writers to build up a large enough paying audience to make a living as a newsletter writer.
As far as I can tell, that's true. @mattyglesias, for example, said in February that he had around 9,000 paid subscribers. At $8/month with a 10 percent Substack cut that works out to almost $800,000 in annualized income. And that was after just three months.
However, the New Yorker has reported that he took a Substack Pro deal where he gets $250,000 over the first year and only 15 percent of his first-year subscription revenue. In retrospect that was a bad deal, but he presumably didn't know how successful his newsletter would be.
Read 9 tweets
Timothy B. Lee Profile picture
17 Mar
This @Noahpinion case that we're in for massive productivity growth is great. He talks about how electric inventions in the late 1800s drove productivity growth in the 1920s and suggests we might see similar delayed productivity benefits from the Internet. noahpinion.substack.com/p/distributed-…
I actually expected him to make a slightly different analogy: to the 1929-1960 period. In the 1930s scientists and engineers were inventing stuff, but weak aggregate demand prevented them from being adopted rapidly.
Then the pressure of war accelerated innovation in manufacturing. When the war ended we applied military innovations (like new manufacturing techniques and better airplanes) to civilian uses. I could see a similar sequence happening today.
Read 7 tweets

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