It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.
This author wrote a number of pretty influential essays during the early pandemic advocating for mask use, social distancing, and other mitigations. He's a trained educator, so the effectiveness of communication is definitely no accident:
My gf is a trained educator too with two masters somehow related to education. She teaches 8th grade English but has also taught highschool.
She can't write or communicate at any level beyond typical hairdresser. Considering it's very hard to fail out of most upper level education unless you simply don't do the work at all, we really should stop giving people so much credit for just getting degrees.
It's what you do with it that matters and how you devote yourself on your own time that makes people great. And that's what the previous commenter was doing. Trying to give credit to some education system someone went through is taking away from the person that actually made something of themselves, almost always by themselves.
Side note, I graduated with a MechE degree from UC Berkeley. Decent grades. I can honestly say I learned almost nothing. I just did a ton of work they wanted. If I made something of myself in the engineering field, I promise it wasn't because of UC Berkeley.
Okay, fair. Some people are naturally gifted at these things, and others acquire the skills through extensive work in a non-academic context. I've been told I'm a pretty effective communicator/storyteller, and I certainly never studied it formally.
Apart from a few other factors, the biggest one that stands out is not stringing you along in a click-baity way, instead just asking a question and giving a direct answer right after the question and in simple direct words.
No dark patterns to make you spend a longer time on the webpage for ad metrics.
The author Tomas Pueyo grew up in a family of filmmakers. For his Stanford MBA he specialized in behavioral psychology, design, storytelling, and scriptwriting. I have to imagine that has some influence on his writing
Bingo. For all its flaws, Twitter threads can be a nice way of delivering a point. I think the character limit implicitly encourages a kind of brevity which you wouldn't get anywhere else.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the post. A breath of fresh air among all the click-bitey and false buildup so common in content these days. PLEASE DO TRAIN THE GPTs ON THIS GUY
I thought it would be dense, but it was lighthearted and didn't take itself too seriously, and both shared information and fun questions to ask. I enjoyed the speculation which had not even a shred of political or social agenda anywhere in sight. Just pure fun.
I hate it. Seems to me it's full of clickbaits. "Find out what happens next", "What's going on?", "What's happening?", "So why is Chile so long, but not longer?".
I can't stand it to be honest and stopped reading because of this.
It reminds me of the style of pop science books written in the late 19th and early 20th century. There's a nice charm in it, like it's trying not to be pretentiously complex.