Hacker News Books

The Conversation is an absolute classic.

> “If Substack is successful, it will remind news consumers that paying for good journalism is worth it,” wrote the University of Maine’s Michael Socolow for The Conversation. “But if Substack’s pricing precludes widespread distribution of its news and commentary, its value as a public service won’t be fully realized.”

Is this basically saying that authors need to keep their content freely accessible so that Substack provides a wider public good? If so then I would say that this is already the case. Most authors keep nearly all their content publicly visible. Those who subscribe do so to support good work, not to gain exclusivity. In that sense, the community/content model is more like Patreon than Only Fans.

In my opinion what makes Substack great is its lack of censorship (encouraging a diversity of thought), the fact that readers pay individual authors (unlike medium where you pay for access to the whole site), and the fact that making/collecting payments is easy for users/authors. Sure you can host your own Wordpress and hook up a payment mechanism and all that - but there’s a certain degree of trust and convenience that Substack offers eager subscribers. I feel its payments appeal is a lot like tipping via rewards in the Brave browser (https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021123971-How...) but more accessible and understandable to the layperson.

That was a fun article, starbeast, but the most interesting part was buried at the end:

"So it seems Zharkova’s justification is based on media extrapolation of her own press release and Wikipedia, not the extensive peer-reviewed literature on the Maunder minimum itself.

I emailed Zharkova and she sent me two studies that support her views, but they aren’t representative of the literature and I don’t believe she has critically evaluated their content."
- Michael J. I. Brown, author of The Conversation article

So the author of the article is upset that the astronomer in question never thought about the correlation between reduced solar activity and a mini-ice age until hearing the connection from the media. After she decides that, yes, "We didn’t mention anything about the weather change, but I would have to agree that possibly you can expect it [a mini ice age]." He determines that a) Zharkova doesn't know what she believes and b) even if she did, her peer-reviewed literature is inferior to his own and she obviously doesn't what she's talking about.

Mr. Brown then concludes by declaring there will be no mini-ice age, without any proof, drawing from the weasly "More recent studies, including those by Lean, find the solar irradiance varies less than was thought in 1997."

I prefer the version published in The Conversation [1] by the researches themselves. It contains more details including one part left out of the NYTimes version: that the work was done with the approval of the Aboriginal people who control the site:

"To make new research possible, a landmark agreement was reached between the University of Queensland (and associated researchers) and the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation representing the Mirarr traditional owners of the site.

The agreement gave ultimate control over the excavation to the Mirarr senior custodians, with oversight of the excavation and curation of the material. The Mirarr were interested to support new research into the age of the site and to know more about the early evidence of technologies thought to be present there."

[1] [ https://theconversation.com/buried-tools-and-pigments-tell-a... ]