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Who does this guy think he is! I've never seen someone directly advocate jurors to violate their directions like this so widely
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1709271113962852747 pretty serious claims from Patrick McKenzie that Michael Lewis has lost it or was never legit in the first place
@StrayClimb IMHO even more importantly for this market Molly White's review (https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/review-michael-lewiss-going-infinite) claims Lewis paints SBF as a misunderstood genius. Given the very public trial and evidence for fraud, negligence and general misconduct this might be a pretty hard sell..
@MartinModrak There was also this part where Lewis confidently proclaims the x-risk from AI to be smaller than from asteroids. I can’t imaging a book with such glaring inaccuracies ever gaining commercial success.
@1941159478 dude, that was clearly a tongue in cheek burn on the x-risk crowd. He wasn't even comparing Asteroid strikes to AI, he was joking about SBF's quirky thought process that defaults to assigning an x-risk value to everything he thinks about because that is how the dudes signal to each other in Silicon Valley and at Oxford. That excerpt is about everything except asteroids or AI. It's about SBF SOPs from the perspective of a fly on the wall. You feel me?
@BTE I feel ya and too was trying to joke because since when does a book being inaccurate (if it is) hurt sales.
@nic_kup Wikipedia lists NYT #1 by year e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_New_York_Times_number-one_books_of_2023
From skimming this unscientifically, the non-fiction books with most weeks at #1 in last few years:
2023 — Spare, 9 weeks
2022 — The Body Keeps the Score, 9 weeks
2021 — American Marxism, 8 weeks (or Promise Land, 10 weeks inc. Dec-2020)
2020 — Untamed, 9 weeks (or Promise Land, 10 weeks inc. Jan/Feb-2021)
If this is correct, then only 1 book (Obama's Promised Land) has achieved this feat in the last ~4 years. Hence my conviction that this market has been very overpriced.
While many Lewis books were NYT best sellers, being #1 for 10 whole weeks seems a much higher bar.
Question for @StrayClimb: does this mean #1 in any of the lists (eg paperback, hardcover, combined), or just combined Print & E Book nonfiction?
@wustep good question. I think we want to count the number of weeks the book is on top of any of the lists here:
https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/
So 8 weeks topping one list, 1 week topping two lists would be a total of nine weeks and wouldn't count yet.
@StrayClimb Just to clarify, the monthly lists "Audio Nonfiction" / "Business" are not included, right?
https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/audio-nonfiction/
@wustep hmm I hadn't realized those existed. They're really only updated once a month? That seems like it would mean they were excluded
Most other Michael Lewis books are not NYT best sellers I think. I think ftx and crypto is not as universally interesting as 2008 crash?
@NoaNabeshima I think NYT best seller can be gamed and being a past NYT best seller helps? but I don't think his pandemic book will be a nyt best seller
