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 subscribing
So 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: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, because I wanted to be able to lend one out and still have another. It is not, however, a Hot Take. A Hot Take is “we should have open borders for women”1.
This rules out both “me and my buddies are right about everything” and “maybe the other side has a point on X” from the category of Hot Takes. It is possible to do “the other side is right about X” as a good Hot Take, but it works best in a social environment and context where you’re willing to bet that the audience is calm about the topic and hasn’t recently seriously considered the perspective you’re advocating for. If you want to make the left-wing case for Trump’s pardons for cash approach or a right-wing case for environmentally motivated degrowth, there are rooms where that can work. Doing it with the topic du jour is not advised.
An observational Hot Take should point out some aspect of reality that people have moral opinions about, like “Ketanji Brown Jackson brings needed diversity to the Court: I think that the majority religion of the country should have at least one good representative”2.
A Hot Take has a normative claim.
“Polyamory is less bad than cheating on your third wife with a porn star” makes a normative claim, but it is not actually a Hot Take because people either agree with you, in which case it’s boring, they disagree with you on facts (in which case you’re not going to convince them)3, or they know they’re twisting their ethics into a Klein Bottle to justify defending their political allies and attacking their foes. It’s the same when you say “Property is bad because it’s theft, which I am neutral to positive about”. There’s nobody who’s actually surprised by the take. It isn’t thought-provoking and it doesn’t bring in a new dimension to the conversation. It’s just a dig. Arguably this falls out of the previous rules, but repeat after me because it’s important.
A dig is not a Hot Take.
The quoted section obviously fails as a Hot Take because it’s not nearly hot enough to justify the inaccuracy the simplification inherently creates.
There are three basic policy motivations, forming an impossible trinity.
We should protect rights (opinions differ on what is and is not a right)
We should be careful and modest in the changes that we make
We should have the power to do good things (many flavors. Good things can be “sports gambling is banned”, “economic growth is enabled by courts that fairly enforce privately made contracts for free”, “Same-sex marriage is banned”, or many others. We has a wide range of interpretations both in who is included and what sorts of procedures generate a “we”)
Look at that, it’s a wordy mess. The third item has two different categories of variation within it! This is so far from a sentence it’s not funny. A Hot Take has to be simple. But let’s say I cut it down.
The three basic motivations in policy are the power to do good, freedom from interference, and, for the wise, thinking it possible they may be mistaken. Unfortunately, you can’t get all three.
This is still two sentences with a list and a subordinate clause, and I haven’t even explained why each impossibility result holds individually. Worse, I’m not actually bringing anything new to a conversation. I don’t have the personal authority to just declare things like this and expect anyone to care. Because it’s a take, I haven’t marshalled evidence to support it. Maybe it’s a mental framework that I find useful, but if so I should have the appropriate level of humility about it.
A Hot Take is an unusual concept, idea, or angle on something conventional.
How to Generate Good Hot Takes
Have a large number of conventional ideas in your head.
Have a large number of different angles that you apply to them.
Finding places where the traditional view or approach is not applied to some group or concept is simplest with political coalitions, which tend to leave blind spots when one component of the coalition has a view that’s less than ideal for another component. People with consistent principles end up in odd places. Generally, I think, better ones, but that’s for a different piece.
Be willing to say the result out loud.
So, let’s work through the generative components of some takes. What makes them work?
My default advice for an Ivy League student at a loss for what to do this summer is to run a small business with physical inputs and outputs.
Marginal benefit is the key animating concept here. I think that your typical Ivy League student at Princeton or Yale has plenty of CV-boosting activities, and very few chances to exercise agency.
The concept of agency is the unexpected angle: it’s something that’s discussed in my social circles as a valuable and important skill, but explicitly training it is nowhere close to the typical set of considerations for a summer internship.
I was in a context where I was being asked for advice.
Econ isn’t the best social science because it has math: it’s the best social science because economists will shred a bad paper in public.
It’s true that econ does demand more math than other disciplines, and adopting quantitative methods can be dismissed as an unreasonable ask. If economists produce work that is more trusted by policymakers and the public through a process that other disciplines could adopt if they were willing to expose their great figures and junior scholars alike to criticism, that might invite suggestions that they actually do that instead of complaining about their marginalization. That creates an opportunity for a Hot Take from someone who values and cares about sociological and anthropological research and wants it to be higher-quality, without facing any of the personal costs for criticizing leading figures of the field in public or being someone who attacked a doe-eyed innocent junior scholar.
This Hot Take isn’t a dig because non-Econ social scientists know they’re relatively marginalized and want to fix that, and I’m implicitly praising economists. It would be very easy to write it in a way that was unfair or unreasonable.
I’ve seen the shredding happen in person, from papers that told stories about intertemporal variation but actually observed spatial variation to papers that gave two options, controlling for nothing and controlling for a bunch of variables that should not have been controlled for. Being in interesting rooms with smarter people is always a good idea.
If presented seriously, this Hot Take would have to immediately acknowledge the multi-causal nature of reality, the meaningful costs to marginalized scholars, and the arguments coming from qualitative scholars that economics isn’t actually better, it’s just dominant. But as a Hot Take it can have a single sentence that provokes discussion.
Kuiper’s a bit of a film nerd (see his interesting piece on Hallmark Movies). He probably thinks much more than most people do about the films he observes.
Kuiper’s analysis takes a serious and morally thoughtful look at a comedic film that does not, particularly, invite the reading. Bringing in an unexpected moral frame is a great way to produce Takes.
Cultural commentary is generally much safer than political commentary. There’s very little risk of serious backlash.
Note: the argument is all there in the sentence. The entire article explains what the moral blind spot is and provides evidence that the movie has it, but I can recall the single sentence and use it as a hook for my memory of the article. That’s part of why I remembered it over a month later, among many Substacks I have forgotten.
Recap: What Makes a Hot Take?
A Hot Take has to be simple. One sentence.
A Hot Take has to be yours. Something original that you will at least entertain.
A Hot Take has a normative claim. This can be more or less explicit, but if there’s not some moral component you probably have a Cool Fact.
A dig is not a Hot Take. Digs can be fun for you, and sometimes your audience will enjoy them, but they are not virtuous. A proper Hot Take should expand the mind.
A Hot Take is an unusual concept, idea, or angle on something conventional. Novelty is what makes an argument that lacks authority or evidence worth listening to.
The open borders for women case is pretty simple. Firstly, women are oppressed in more of the world than not. If some minority population of men were treated like a young wife is in most of the world, they would obviously qualify for refugee status. It is common for a young married woman to not be allowed the ability to move on her own, not be allowed to keep her pay, and physical and sexual abuse are common. It is only because it is normal that it is accepted. That’s the feminist and liberal case. Many conservatives say that their objection to immigration is crime. The male-female crime rate difference swamps almost anything else: problem solved! If you dislike “economic migrants” who want to come to your country, work for cheap, and send money back to their families, women are much less likely to do that. As an addendum that does sometimes get asked, if you want to say that this program is only for cis women, we can compromise on me getting 99% of what I want.
Gorsuch was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school as a kid, wrote his thesis under the famous Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis, and then got married in an Anglican church, which is the most Catholic form of Protestantism. Every other Republican nominee is actually Catholic.
There are cases where a single link can be sufficient to convince someone of a fact: namely, when they have no pre-existing opinion on the matter. This is perfectly compatible with them reporting an opinion when surveyed, but theoretical debates over polling methodology are beyond the scope of this article even though they are fascinating. The key point is that “did Pete Hegseth sexually assault one woman while married to another a month after a third had his baby” is not really a question about what happened. It’s about whether you have a positive feeling about Pete Hegseth and his actions and vibe. Separately assessing “did Clinton have sex with an intern” and “do I broadly support Bill Clinton” is incredibly rare, at least while it’s an active fight. The approach is sometimes called “Scout Mindset”, and while I strongly recommend it I rarely expect it (and I should practice it more reliably than I do).
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 subscribing
So 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: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, because I wanted to be able to lend one out and still have another. It is not, however, a Hot Take. A Hot Take is “we should have open borders for women”1.
This rules out both “me and my buddies are right about everything” and “maybe the other side has a point on X” from the category of Hot Takes. It is possible to do “the other side is right about X” as a good Hot Take, but it works best in a social environment and context where you’re willing to bet that the audience is calm about the topic and hasn’t recently seriously considered the perspective you’re advocating for. If you want to make the left-wing case for Trump’s pardons for cash approach or a right-wing case for environmentally motivated degrowth, there are rooms where that can work. Doing it with the topic du jour is not advised.
A Hot Take has to be yours.
“Sexual desire plausibly predates desire to breathe” is not a Hot Take, it’s a Neat Fact. A Hot Take has some implicitly or explicitly normative component. A policy Hot Take should have at least one, and ideally more, implicit but compelling reasons to think that it maximizes benefits and minimizes costs. See Kahan: the convicted, the taxpayer, and future victims would be better off if a large fraction of first-offense criminals were punished with public humiliation.
An observational Hot Take should point out some aspect of reality that people have moral opinions about, like “Ketanji Brown Jackson brings needed diversity to the Court: I think that the majority religion of the country should have at least one good representative”2.
A Hot Take has a normative claim.
“Polyamory is less bad than cheating on your third wife with a porn star” makes a normative claim, but it is not actually a Hot Take because people either agree with you, in which case it’s boring, they disagree with you on facts (in which case you’re not going to convince them)3, or they know they’re twisting their ethics into a Klein Bottle to justify defending their political allies and attacking their foes. It’s the same when you say “Property is bad because it’s theft, which I am neutral to positive about”. There’s nobody who’s actually surprised by the take. It isn’t thought-provoking and it doesn’t bring in a new dimension to the conversation. It’s just a dig. Arguably this falls out of the previous rules, but repeat after me because it’s important.
A dig is not a Hot Take.
The quoted section obviously fails as a Hot Take because it’s not nearly hot enough to justify the inaccuracy the simplification inherently creates.
Look at that, it’s a wordy mess. The third item has two different categories of variation within it! This is so far from a sentence it’s not funny. A Hot Take has to be simple. But let’s say I cut it down.
This is still two sentences with a list and a subordinate clause, and I haven’t even explained why each impossibility result holds individually. Worse, I’m not actually bringing anything new to a conversation. I don’t have the personal authority to just declare things like this and expect anyone to care. Because it’s a take, I haven’t marshalled evidence to support it. Maybe it’s a mental framework that I find useful, but if so I should have the appropriate level of humility about it.
A Hot Take is an unusual concept, idea, or angle on something conventional.
How to Generate Good Hot Takes
Have a large number of conventional ideas in your head.
Have a large number of different angles that you apply to them.
Finding places where the traditional view or approach is not applied to some group or concept is simplest with political coalitions, which tend to leave blind spots when one component of the coalition has a view that’s less than ideal for another component. People with consistent principles end up in odd places. Generally, I think, better ones, but that’s for a different piece.
Be willing to say the result out loud.
So, let’s work through the generative components of some takes. What makes them work?
My default advice for an Ivy League student at a loss for what to do this summer is to run a small business with physical inputs and outputs.
Marginal benefit is the key animating concept here. I think that your typical Ivy League student at Princeton or Yale has plenty of CV-boosting activities, and very few chances to exercise agency.
The concept of agency is the unexpected angle: it’s something that’s discussed in my social circles as a valuable and important skill, but explicitly training it is nowhere close to the typical set of considerations for a summer internship.
I was in a context where I was being asked for advice.
Econ isn’t the best social science because it has math: it’s the best social science because economists will shred a bad paper in public.
Economists are often unwilling to defend the superiority of economics. It’s rude, when there’s not exactly a Council of Anthropological Advisors or a Bureau of Sociological Analysis. That creates an opportunity for a Hot Take from someone with fewer concerns.
It’s true that econ does demand more math than other disciplines, and adopting quantitative methods can be dismissed as an unreasonable ask. If economists produce work that is more trusted by policymakers and the public through a process that other disciplines could adopt if they were willing to expose their great figures and junior scholars alike to criticism, that might invite suggestions that they actually do that instead of complaining about their marginalization. That creates an opportunity for a Hot Take from someone who values and cares about sociological and anthropological research and wants it to be higher-quality, without facing any of the personal costs for criticizing leading figures of the field in public or being someone who attacked a doe-eyed innocent junior scholar.
This Hot Take isn’t a dig because non-Econ social scientists know they’re relatively marginalized and want to fix that, and I’m implicitly praising economists. It would be very easy to write it in a way that was unfair or unreasonable.
I’ve seen the shredding happen in person, from papers that told stories about intertemporal variation but actually observed spatial variation to papers that gave two options, controlling for nothing and controlling for a bunch of variables that should not have been controlled for. Being in interesting rooms with smarter people is always a good idea.
If presented seriously, this Hot Take would have to immediately acknowledge the multi-causal nature of reality, the meaningful costs to marginalized scholars, and the arguments coming from qualitative scholars that economics isn’t actually better, it’s just dominant. But as a Hot Take it can have a single sentence that provokes discussion.
Pixar’s Hoppers has a moral blind spot
Kuiper’s a bit of a film nerd (see his interesting piece on Hallmark Movies). He probably thinks much more than most people do about the films he observes.
Kuiper’s analysis takes a serious and morally thoughtful look at a comedic film that does not, particularly, invite the reading. Bringing in an unexpected moral frame is a great way to produce Takes.
Cultural commentary is generally much safer than political commentary. There’s very little risk of serious backlash.
Note: the argument is all there in the sentence. The entire article explains what the moral blind spot is and provides evidence that the movie has it, but I can recall the single sentence and use it as a hook for my memory of the article. That’s part of why I remembered it over a month later, among many Substacks I have forgotten.
Recap: What Makes a Hot Take?
A Hot Take has to be simple. One sentence.
A Hot Take has to be yours. Something original that you will at least entertain.
A Hot Take has a normative claim. This can be more or less explicit, but if there’s not some moral component you probably have a Cool Fact.
A dig is not a Hot Take. Digs can be fun for you, and sometimes your audience will enjoy them, but they are not virtuous. A proper Hot Take should expand the mind.
A Hot Take is an unusual concept, idea, or angle on something conventional. Novelty is what makes an argument that lacks authority or evidence worth listening to.
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The open borders for women case is pretty simple. Firstly, women are oppressed in more of the world than not. If some minority population of men were treated like a young wife is in most of the world, they would obviously qualify for refugee status. It is common for a young married woman to not be allowed the ability to move on her own, not be allowed to keep her pay, and physical and sexual abuse are common. It is only because it is normal that it is accepted. That’s the feminist and liberal case. Many conservatives say that their objection to immigration is crime. The male-female crime rate difference swamps almost anything else: problem solved! If you dislike “economic migrants” who want to come to your country, work for cheap, and send money back to their families, women are much less likely to do that. As an addendum that does sometimes get asked, if you want to say that this program is only for cis women, we can compromise on me getting 99% of what I want.
Gorsuch was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school as a kid, wrote his thesis under the famous Catholic legal philosopher John Finnis, and then got married in an Anglican church, which is the most Catholic form of Protestantism. Every other Republican nominee is actually Catholic.
There are cases where a single link can be sufficient to convince someone of a fact: namely, when they have no pre-existing opinion on the matter. This is perfectly compatible with them reporting an opinion when surveyed, but theoretical debates over polling methodology are beyond the scope of this article even though they are fascinating. The key point is that “did Pete Hegseth sexually assault one woman while married to another a month after a third had his baby” is not really a question about what happened. It’s about whether you have a positive feeling about Pete Hegseth and his actions and vibe. Separately assessing “did Clinton have sex with an intern” and “do I broadly support Bill Clinton” is incredibly rare, at least while it’s an active fight. The approach is sometimes called “Scout Mindset”, and while I strongly recommend it I rarely expect it (and I should practice it more reliably than I do).