Endorsed in full, top to bottom. There's more to be said regarding the copious way turning someone else's incentives into your own sincere beliefs can go wrong, but the murky complexity can wait until another day.
This would never have occurred to me because of the typical mind fallacy. I have a horrible memory for names and so I can't imagine holding such a long term grudge against someone I just briefly interacted with, and I kind of implicitly assumed other people were similar.
The last paragraph came out of nowhere for me — I don't think Twitter is the way it is because people imitate journalists; I think people treat Twitter as if they're just talking to an acquaintance. Scope insensitivity means they can't conceive of the fact that millions of people could see their message, and there's no real evolutionary basis for the expectation that your private thoughts could be seen by people dramatically different from you in every way. People are simply unprepared for the way social media amplifies and diffuses their idle thoughts.
I think about the way I talk in my own life: "that guy is a fucking idiot," I'll say about someone who mildly disagrees with me on a topic that I know to be complex and multifaceted. It's expressive language that doesn't capture my true, deliberative thoughts on the topic.
I think the most charitable interpretation of people who act this way on Twitter is that they haven't internalized the reality of the situation.
Two rules that've helped me: 1) No snark. 2) Write what I'd say to the person if they were across a table from me.
#1 is really hard to follow, because snark is the easiest and most immediately gratifying way to respond to something I don't agree with. I really wish "no snark" would catch on as a general rule of internet etiquette.
#2 is actually pretty easy to follow once I internalize #1.
> I’ve sometimes found myself being irrationally uncharitable to everyone named Albert or Allen or Alvin just because a totally different guy named Alfred was a jerk on Twitter.
Some names just seem to correlate well with certain traits. I don't think I've ever met a Jennifer who wasn't of above-average attractiveness, nor a Stephen who didn't turn out to be a terrible human being. (Captain America doesn't count, being a fictional character.)
This post makes me think that most people's incentives are more or less exactly like media companies. Most people aren't posting to engage or convince, they are posting to get high fives and little endorphin bumps by collecting likes.
>If you don’t have one of those, you’re fine. But if you do have one, there’s a good chance you said something which horribly offended me. You said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and I believed X. You read the title but not the body of an article about some group I care about, and viciously insulted them based on your misunderstanding of their position. You spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone who happened to be a friend of mine trying really hard to make the world better, and ruined their day.
The motivation is the same as the motivation to comment here: many (most?) people like to express themselves and share how they feel about something and often bond with others about that. One of the best ways to form social bonds is to agree on some common complaint against someone else.
And in person this actually works quite well. You usually have a sense of where they stand and if not you can proceed cautiously. If you get it right there is good chance to bond over a shared complaint/view. If you get negative feedback from them you you usually drop the hyperbole and give enough context to make it clear you aren't attacking them and let it go.
The problem is that social media gives us very confusing clues: especially Twitter. We tend not to see the people we really upset (they block us) and grow some level of familiarity with those who egg us on. For the person posting the complaint or attack it feels like the usual hyperbolic grossing we all do with ppl we know share our views
Niche media have an incentive to preach to the choir with emotional click bait that attracts their audience. Unfortunately many mainstream outlets copied that approach since they have biased journalists or social media or editing staff that see such clickbait targeting 1 side as a way to get viewers.
However doing so then means they go from appealing to the whole media market to appealing to only say a half or a third or less of the full market. The news media's reputation and revenue have suffered because of this.
The size of their potential market share is drastically decreased due to a short sighted focus on easy clickbait marketing or giving into journalists desire to advocate. Of course that backfires on journalists who would like their publication to be ready by everyone so that they can convert the other side: but they've scared them away. Fox News scares away liberals and MSNBC scares way conservatives. It seems like there is a market opening for news outlets that target a general audience and don't give into that temptation, while the outlets that are biased should admit it in their marketing to go all in for their target demographic rather than pretending to be neutral in a way people don't trust.
Minor point, but I really do think that for journalists, it makes no sense to block instead of mute for minor irritations. If you're a public figure where people get benefit from seeing your work, It's a bit unfair to ban them from seeing it over any minor thing (banning them from interacting with you in ways that bother you is totally reasonable, and the mute button does that without the first part).
The incentives aren't the same but I wonder if they converge -- people don't need hundreds of friends, and people love to bond over hating the out-group. I don't have a twitter and I never write anything superficial or nasty on substack comments except in resonse to insults, but I get why people do it: it's easier than being insightful or making friends the hard way. Someone who sounds like a journalist on twitter might just be writing to impress his four equally-nasty friends, and care nothing about our opinion of him.
Doesn’t having a firm stance like this invite another annoying kind of monitoring where people point out other’s bad behavior and pressure you to disavow them? I say this because my first thought was “Yglesias can be pretty disingenuous”. I guess you can just block these people too?
Sure it's understandable, but I don't like it as a position. It's perfectly possible to be so afraid of upsetting someone that you never say anything interesting at all. I was even nervous making this comment, because of course, I don't want someone whose writings I normally think are fantastic to get upset and block me over me making some unimportant remark.
For your mental health, some people absolutely have to be blocked, I'm fortunate not to have the world trying to shame, attack or make friends with me, so I get that the problem is probably particularly acute for some people. And I never read twitter, so I suppose that's sort of like blocking all of them? But ultimately some of the most interesting people I talk to are challenging, and my life would be impoverished by blocking them.
The threat is probably ineffective too. For many people, finding the 3 people who agree with them is way closer to what they value than having a load of strangers they disagree with listen to them. And their value system in prioritising that rather than breadth and diversity of opinion is probably not very unlike that of those who block for minor infractions.
what twitter drama caused this? Its awful hard to hear something is emotionally important on the addictive website without googling "scott alexander twitter" and reading until I see something interesting but then Id be hate-worthy; kinda a catch 22 here
I should probably be charitable and presume that given your profession, you may have a much better idea than I do about how the modal person reacts, and farthermore didn't intend to claim that *all* human beings react in the same way you say you do. Or perhaps I should assume you were engaging in hyperbole, and didn't intend to be understood as accurately describing your feelings. Either of these seem plausible.
But I admit that my first reaction was to think about suggesting that you consult a colleague about possible treatments for your overreaction.
OTOH I'm not on Twitter. Maybe if I were the experience would have shredded my sense of proportion too. But probably not - I've been online for a long time, starting with Usenet. I long ago developed expertise with whatever tools were available to remove junk from my reading queue, including persistent *ssh*les. But I don't generally remember who they were, unless the software tools are ineffective at blocking them - why would I want to?
I'll add that the arrival of Twitter Blue prioritization has made this phenomenon worse, as some of the worst offenders have chosen to pay to bump their replies up to the top.
Each platform has it's uses: Twitter was designed to encourage trolling and drama, Reddit favors group think and bland memes, Facebook is good to keep in touch with people you know but never talk with, Instagram to watch celebrities and wannabees, Twitch for parasocial friendships and OnlyFans for parasocial simping. I know nothing about Tik Tock beyond dances. Now get off my lawn.
Re: the media companies' incentives, it's a real shame that negative partisanship is stronger emotionally that positive partisanship (see Scott's review of Why We're Polarized for a discussion of this). Thus, a piece pointing out how Bad the Other Side is is likely to bring in support, more than looking at positive developments. It feels like some sort of mutated prisoner's dilemma, where more negative press, put out by both sides, results in higher payoffs to the media (more engagement, more people afraid of the side they oppose who might see paying for Heroic Opposition to be a good use of their money) but worse outcomes for society as a whole, both for the Left and the Right.
I don't have a solution to this, but I certainly agree that the media's incentives aren't well aligned with either the incentives of any individual reader, or those of a flourishing society writ large. My appreciation goes to those in the media who actively struggle against these incentives, even when it hurts financially.
This is an interesting insight. Not convinced it completely explains it, but Twitter *does* seem to have a uniquely quippy & smug culture that I really, really detest. (Broken record at this point but I think the character limit is probably also a big part of it.)
Social Media dynamics are weird and annoying. I guarantee you've incidentally isolated folks without meaning to as well. It's because when we write for our audience (even if that audience is absurdly small) we now put it into the world for others to react to as well.
Also as much as I appreciate the whole idea of mechanics vs. soldiers, the truth is that sometimes it is appropriate to be a soldier. I'm starting to get sick to death of people who 1) Believe they have a right to inject themselves into every conversation just because conversations are now public (social media dynamics are weird and annoying), and 2) constantly break their backs playing devil's advocate in a context where someone is clearly expressing a frustration or advocating rather than discussing. As irritated as I am by people who say "Walruss is a Nazi" on a whim, I'm actually a million times more irritated by people standing next to a dude with a Swastika on one arm and a gun in the other going "Obviously I don't agree but let's hear him out."
I like what you have to say here, but I think you might be wrong... in some specific way.
If you are a normal person and not someone aiming to have a massive audience, then how many people do you really need to avoid alienating? Isn't alienating 99% of the online population but forming 15 good friendships worth it on an individual level? I guess at some point the pitchforks turn on you... so some large number (but still under pichfork_target) of alienation is worth it for a very small number of people you can form a strong relationship with, or a larger-but-still-relatively-small number of social contacts.
And this kind of scales up? I mean which is better: a milquetoast artist who makes content to offend the least number of people, or someone that pursues a vision/niche/target_audience and delights them even as outsiders may ignore or be offended by it?
Maybe this is even wrong about media companies? At a certain point you become Disney and if you offend anyone you lose a customer, so you carefully manage your offensiveness levels to avoid hurting your bottom line.
I think a very important question is how do you become the (person, artist, media company) that builds with your (vision/niche/target_audience) in mind without also (hurting/alienating/inciting) others. It seems morally wrong to just say "find the anti-audience that is so small that alienating them won't hurt me and isn't organized enough to strike back". I think for most people that ends up being "the kind of people who I don't ever see in real life" (going back to your essay about how many pro-life people do urban pro-choice people actually know), and/or defenseless/despised minorities.
I mean, I'd also like it if we just didn't hurt people, but even your essays sometimes make snarky jabs.
I think this essay deserves being expanded upon in a follow-up. Even though many of the themes here echo throughout your work, I think it is worth saying again.
Just for perspective, less than 20% of US is active on Twitter and globally it’s around 5%. The media blows Twitter comments way out of proportion. I refuse to care too much about anything posted there, or on most any social media for that matter, IMHO. But agree with you completely. It’s a pathetic, social media opium den really.
To what extent is being blocked really a disincentive? If someone's dunking on me, chances are we wouldn't be friends even if they had managed to hold back. And if I block them, they won't have to see the posts they hate. (Sure, they could block me themselves, but maybe they don't have the self-control - someone is wrong on the Internet.) So if anything, liberal blocking helps users sort into bubbles with fewer annoying posts.
I don't understand this impulse at all but maybe it's because a majority of my major life interactions feature abuse and I'm expected to make peace with it and do.
My fingers are shaking as I type this. I often find in people's writing some quirk, contradiction, or reminder of something odd or funny ("Unfortunately I hate many of you"), to which I respond with a joke or aphorism of my own, mostly funny or pithy only to me. Could be interpreted as "snark" and get me banned forever.
But I don't have a twitter account. Something I have never wanted to have, nor do I understand why people want, use, or like a social media program, seemingly designed only for non-nuanced click bait communication that Scott says he hates.
When I listen to politicians on the radio, I tend to shout abuse at them. It makes me feel better, and in general it doesn't do any harm (though I once had downstairs neighbours who told me, very reasonably, that they could think of better ways to start their mornings than by listening to a stranger scream obscenities into the ether).
It took me a while to realise that I couldn't do the same on Twitter, because I'm an idiot. But I did eventually get better at not being a scumbag. I suspect new etiquette is already building up to deal with the new methods of communication, and that things will continue to improve. The internet is a much more civil and pleasant place than it used to be; 2 girls 1 cup could never happen now, for instance.
It's not that we're becoming journalists, it's that we're new at this stuff. We'll adjust.
I'd push back on the observability bias. You don't see most of the responsible, intelligent and vanilla commentary. A writer (or commenter) has to skim the event horizon of edginess to get enough visibility to even risk being blocked by prominent readers.
"Always play it safe and smart" can be effective if you have an audience's trust but I really doubt it will get you to the point of notability anymore, unless you bring massive value-add along with the writing (you're famous for something else already).
But Scott, you have this backwards! It's journalists and activists (birm) that want maximal reach. If I make a witty comment that annoys 99 people but get one good friend to joke around with, that's a win! I don't need to be friends with everyone on my block, and I'd rather have two guys who like me than twenty who don't recognize me because I never bother to have a personality (though getting any of them mad enough to actually hate me could suck).
The problem isn't that people are imitating journalists, it's that journalists have lowered themselves to hacks that are loyal to popularity or dollars rather than truth, although one questions if there was ever a large group of anyone devoted to the truth.
Now, that's not to say Twitter style ignorant dunks are good... just that the entire premise of the article is wrong.
But I'll also note that people's perceptions of who is offending in this regard tend to be highly indexed to their in-groups and out-groups. Humans have a natural and strong tendency to amplify their evaluation of offense to an in-group, while diminishing that evaluation for an out-group. Also, the matter gets tangled up with factual disputes about what the target "really did" do or say. "No, in this case those guys *really are* fascists!"
Do you know what it's like to live in a world where 99% of the population have the bone deep conviction that a fundamental aspect of your being is wrong in some way, to have the knowledge of their error at hand but to have every attempt to communicate it thrown back at you, and to begrudgingly realize that many of those most guilty of this are actually right about basically every other subject of consequence? To have to show up to spaces full of abusive irrational psychopaths every single day just for a small chance at improving your world models because actually, no, at core they aren't abusive irrational psychopaths, they just have this weird blindspot that happens to correspond to exactly you and your life and nothing else. And to have to do it anyway, because you are obligated to truth.
Do you know what that does to a person's priors and general disposition Scott? Nevermind, you're probably not even going to read this because I once insulted Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I wish I were sure the thing you complain about is actually a bad strategy. It seems plausible to me that alienating 99 people in order to make 1 friend is actually a good trade for the average person, because iterating that will give you an adequate number of friends long before you run out of people to alienate on Twitter.
Journalist here; watcher of twitter but less frequent twitterer. I try not to block people unless they extremely abusive. I don't mean "you're wrong", I mean "you're wrong and you should be executed and your children should be sold as slaves you fuckwit". (That's kind of on the mild side actually). I periodically go through my list of blocked to see if I can remember why i blocked them, if i can't, they get unblocked. I do realize that this is atypical behavior. It's just a shame that anger and lust are so well rewarded, which I guess is why I'm commenting here.
The solution is to stop using Twitter. Don't read people's garbage hot takes. Only read actual thought-through blog posts or articles and decide on that.
This is why my Twitter account is almost entirely drivel and jokes of no use to anyone. I have such an abhorrence of accidentally offending people that I preemptively defend myself by not saying anything interesting. You haven't blocked me because I neither reply to well-known people nor write anything that would be retweeted into their timelines.
Your point here might be made clearer with some examples of hurtful things people said on Twitter to friends of yours. I'm sure you're not too keen on actually, like, dredging those up- but exhibiting the mildest instances for which you blocked someone might set a clearer ceiling for the level of rudeness/politeness you consider appropriate from others on Twitter.
The costs of criticizing people are way higher than most people understand. People hate being criticized, hate it when their friends are criticized. This is true even if it is fair reasonable criticism. Most people would be better off never publicly criticizing others.
"many of the people you most want to reach and befriend and keep on your side will hate you and never affiliate with you again."
You may want to consider the possibility that some of the people you are scolding here are not trying to reach or befriend or keep anybody on their side; they may simply be venting. There is also the possibility that they do want to reach, befriend, and keep people on their side, and that their tweets are meant to further that end, but that you are not one of those people.
Way to neatly encapsulate much of what is wrong with you and your writing Scott, I couldn't have done it better if I had tried.
From "I'm upset about people being petty and hyperbolic and snarky on Twitter" to writing the completely normal and not at all insulting or hyperbolic sentence "I worry that normal humans are imitating journalists".
This of course then turns into a whole paragraph of assumptions about why "journalists" are mean and why it's irrational to write like them. Maybe you would get a better theory of why people write mean and inflammatory stuff if you looked at yourself and at what specific mechanism pushed you toward this specific piece of drivel.
I mean at least, most people who write hyperbolic takes on Twitter limit them to a normal tweet length.
However I guess that there are a number of people who lack self-awareness and have time to inflate them to editorial length, you're not the only one. This is not the first time either, and I should know, I've been reading your stuff for close to 15 years at this point (remember Ganaj and Baby Twix ? I sure do).
Maybe you should reassess the way you consistently inflate (in your writing, in the theories you present, in your worldview) the importance and gravity of stuff, even the pettiest shit that merely happen to personally upset you.
The best decision I made was to tweet under my own name and always remember my boss, friends and people I respect but have different views can see my tweets. I’m still snarky sometimes but I hope never actually rude.
If I'm supposed to care about being blocked for "some tiny, trivial annoyance" then the only reasonable thing to do is to never comment, right? Even here.
I've been down voted (not here!) for providing (accurate! sourced!) data to back up a position not my own. I have no idea if the down vote was because the person didn't like the data. Or the position (that I hadn't adopted). Or something else. But if this is a deal breaker then I just stop participating, right?
"More words, please," to quote a SlateStarCodex commenter from a few years back. I don't know what actionable thing anyone is supposed to do
I'm 100% supportive of disincentivizing the kinds of tweets mentioned here.
That being said...I don't think it's desirable to have the position "I should never read anything somebody writes if I have have ever seen them make a certain kind of mistake on Twitter". Matt Yglesias is most definitely guilty of attacking strawmen, but he still has interesting ideas!
This post doesn't outright defend that position (it seems to be saying "this is how I work", not "this is how I *want* to work), and I'm curious how you'd like to behave. Like, let's say you could become the sort of person who can read half an article you find interesting, notice the byline, recognize it as somebody who was unfair on Twitter, and *not* close the article (and finish reading it instead, and perhaps engage with it) -- would you want to become that person?
I am sorry for whatever hurt your feelings, and imagine you must receive an awful lot of ugliness as a public figure. I recall being so hurt years ago that I almost unsubscribed to this blog when you said in a post you HATED everyone who voted for Trump and they hated you. I was actually surprised at how sad that made me. I voted for Trump for a variety of complicated reasons, even while I wished I saw a better alternative. But I don’t hate those who disagree with my choice, and liked to imagine that most others didn’t hate me. Reading that from you was like being sucker punched.
I don’t think I could be a public figure like you, receiving so much anger daily. That said, I hope you can leave a space for the possibility for kinder approaches to such disagreements.
I was really nervous about this article until I read the part that said "Only the ones with Twitter accounts". Now I feel gratified that Scott probably doesn't help me.
And yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't even want to make the effort to articulate why you're right (hypocritical as that is). Fuck that noise, and fuck the people adding to it.
If you were told by someone that everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and you believed X, odds are that you were a Fox News viewer, but not because you were a fan of Rupert Murdoch.
You have Glenn Greenwald showing up on Fox News, the first thing you should be thinking "WFT is Glenn Greenwald on Fox News???"
And the second thing you should be thinking about is why he's claiming that 'journalist' is now practically a euphemism for 'shill for the D.C. establishment, particularly the Democratic party, and passive-thinking tool the CIA'.
The most confrontational thing about Fox News was that it had Tucker and Hannity back-to-back and that it alienated 1/3rd of its viewers by silencing the former for wondering why we're giving $100B to defend a country whose head of state is a guy in a track suit that was hand-picked by Victoria Nuland (the guy, not the track suit).
I read this whole thing waiting for the part where you say "I don't actually feel this way or block people this quickly, I was just trying to make a point about X" ....
But if you're at all serious, by blocking people so readily aren't you the one missing out? By blocking the 99% of people who at some point in their lives make a single transgression or a joke that's a bit sus or are a little bit too presumptuous about a complex issue?
I mean the ACX comments can't possibly be that pure.
Or is that your point that Matt Yglesias is too block-happy and he gets to get away with it because he's a big deal who expects others to listen to them and doesn't care if he listens to others? That's the whole point of this whole thing right? And you just never broke character right? You're doing an experiment on us right?
At the risk of this sounding like the sort of snarky twitter comment you're describing, this sounds like a really solid reason to not use twitter. If you admit that it leads to an uncontrollable urge to shut off people and movements who might have later said something interesting and worthwhile, that sounds like a solid argument to stop using it for your own epistemic well-being, not to mention emotional well-being. Sure, you might miss some interesting point they would have made on twitter, but if you're admitting there's a high chance you would have cut them off beforehand anyways, then it seems like the best option would be to avoid twitter where the incentives are in favor of making these low-value, enraging posts, and hope that they end up posting something useful on another platform that doesn't have these perverse incentives. This isn't just for Scott, I think for most people in general there's very little reason to still read twitter, the effect described here overrides any additional information you might find through it.
Oh man, this could have been such a great essay ... if only.
Media Company's incentives ... like when Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post, or Laurene Jobs owns controlling share of Atlantic, or philanthropic journalism, which means wealthy people paying for puff piece essays in major papers.
So yes, journalists don't have the same incentives as your or I, they could be getting paid to write pieces that take away our rights, effectively selling us down the river. Maybe not even getting paid, but being flattered with invitations to attend WEF global governance forums, write something nice about us. Are there wealthy corporation owners who would like to see a corporation sponsored global governance ala UN / WEF ? Yup. To save the climate, we'll eat bugs, won't travel, own nothing, locked in our 15 minute city ... and be happy :) Which is how the corporate overlords and their journalistic fiends wish to steer things.
Hm. Like some others who replied here, I wasn't impressed with this article, and think it's at odds with other elements of your approach. A friend reminded me of a previous article of yours—Rule Thinkers In, Not Out:
It's not that there's nothing to your point. Twitter dunks are generally unpleasant and undesirable, and the more of a public figure you are, the more likely you are to run into people criticizing you in unfair and tiresome ways. It's not just Twitter, though. I still remember my first encounter with LessWrong. I was a young, religiously devout teenager, balancing my inclination towards skepticism with my love for my family, culture, and faith. I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky bluntly and rudely (per my recollection; it's been awhile) dismiss the idea of finding any value there. So I shrugged, and left, despite appreciating many of his other posts, because it was clear I didn't fit in.
You are one of the best writers in the Discourse at not conveying that feeling on most topics. You're considerate, careful, and charitable. You go out of your way to avoid contentless dunks. But even here, even among people who read and appreciate your blog, there are people who have felt that same irritation in response to your commentary. Here too, among people who read and appreciate your blog, there are people without ill intent who suddenly worry that by phrasing things in just the slightest wrong way, they will suddenly make an enemy-for-life out of someone they respect.
I think you misunderstand divisiveness for regular people. Taking any sort of stance, at any point, is inherently divisive. It was divisive when I was young and told people I was Mormon, it was divisive when I left and told people I no longer believed, it's divisive when I say I'm gay, it's divisive when I mention any of my political stances—to exist in public in any capacity is to be divisive. You will always push some people away and attract others. Indeed, many people who exist in public fail to attract others most because they're boring, not because they're divisive. Dunks are generally unpleasant, and generally unconstructive, and generally serve little function beyond tribal bonding by shared laughing at opponents. But they are not a uniquely bad strategy to get along with people; that they attract some and repel others is a feature for those who use them rather than a bug. It's a fast way to attract fellow-travellers, and no matter how niche someone's worldview is, it's not so niche that they can't find more than enough fellow-travellers online to have more potential friends than they know what to do with, given enough visibility.
Anyway: nobody controls their instincts, precisely, and as a public figure you should do what's best for your own sanity. Twitter is very often an unpleasant environment where block-early, block-often is a legitimate and understandable strategy. But I worry that by framing uncharitable dunks as a uniquely bad, maladaptive sin worth cutting all contact with someone forever over, you misdiagnose the core issue, create a sense that people should walk on eggshells when criticizing rationalists, and express an attitude at odds with your usual thoughtfulness. This essay just doesn't sit quite right with me.
> Fox News alienates millions of people with its confrontational style
> Journalists have shaped Twitter culture
Are those the same journalists though? I would rather expect most of journalists on Twitter - especially ones shaping the culture - to be members of JornoList rather than Fox News. And the ones who employ the "literally hitler" type of rhetoric - which, again, is not Fox News' invention.
A simpler explanation for the low quality of Twitter noise is Gresham's Law of the Internet: bad traffic drives out good. If you say something calm and sensible on social media, then the vast majority of readers will nod sagely in agreement, smile, and move on. But if you say something stupid and obnoxious, dozens of people will get annoyed and respond--many of them with something at least equally stupid and obnoxious--and the snowball will only grow from there. Note that this doesn't require people online to be any different from people in real life in terms of character, disposition, or motivation--all it requires is that the default response on social media be silence, rather than, say, the reciprocated banter typical of in-person social situations. Or to put it another way, it's very likely that at least 98% of shouts in a library are angry and out-of-control, because a non-angry person--or anyone with sufficient self-control--won't shout there.
There is a problem with this approach: often, a harsh but apt critique may only seem viciously unfair on account of inferential distance, and because inferential distance is strongly associated with illusion of transparency, such misunderstandings cannot straightforwardly be blamed on a lack of clarity on the part of the critic. In such a case, you will hate the critic out of what amounts to mere prejudice. For this reason, I have a heuristic of second guessing my assessment of critiques coming from scholarly people. If a person is generally thoughtful and erudite, it is likely that an apparently unfair critique has more depth than I was able to appreciate in my initial reading of it.
Also, if you're attending the same events with a person you take this kind of view of, and you're being sent their articles by people whose links you are paying attention to enough to click the article, that further suggests that the person should not be completely written off.
Scott hasn't blocked me on Twitter yet, not sure if that means I'm doing good at following his rule or if he just hasn't noticed my existence there yet.
Things are probably different when you're on Twitter and are some random guy nobody knows about and when you're on Twitter and are well-known enough that more than Dunbar's Number of people want to talk to you.
I appreciate the honesty. While it would be easy to write off some of your behavior you describe as an irrational overcorrection, it’s imminently human and I’ve done many of the same things. One troubling thing about this dynamic is that people in your position, engaged heavily in online discourse as a blogger/journalist/“public intellectual” are given the most flak and thus most susceptible to overcorrection and generalization beyond a bad actor to their group or viewpoint and it hurts the general tenor of debate more than if that happened to someone like myself with little reach and thus little direct exposure to online ugliness (but even a small exposure can be toxic).
Uh, was that parody? Hypersensitivity is a cornerstone of wokeness, starting back with micro-aggressions. This is similar to cancel culture, where someone who, intentionally or not, said something offensive is ignored for all-time on all topics.
Can we make a case for thicker skin? Forgiveness? People are complex and can make a mistake or say something I don't like, but *I* should still be willing to listen to them on other topics or even on the same topic later after they or I have cooled down.
<I'm getting blocked forever for posting this, aren't I? 😥>
It seems unfortunate that insult -based trumor is a thing of the past. I guess once all the risk associated with it was gone, once it became the new normal, it just turned into another clickbait.
I'll count that as another unfortunate win for Watts' "maintain nonsensical taboos to have fun,"
This is completely alien to my experience of the world. If I see someone on Twitter saying that everyone who thinks the way I do is an insane idiot who should be killed before they destroy society, I laugh and move on with my life. I kind of respect it, honestly. I read posts by people who hate me all the time, I don't take it personally at all and it's weird to me that anybody does.
Honestly I feel much more comfortable in online spaces where people can be directly confrontational than in spaces where it's taken for granted that everyone is intensely emotionally vulnerable, to the point where a single offensive post can ruin their whole day and create a decades-long grudge, and so we all have to very carefully tiptoe around each other's feelings.
If you're talking about persuading people of your arguments - well, that goes both ways. One of the things that's really put me off liberalism over the years is the way that American liberal culture valorises emotional fragility. I feel that I can't have real conversations in liberal spaces because the other participants get so stressed out by any hint of conflict that I can't express criticisms directly - so I just avoid these spaces.
In my experience, trying to be nice to liberals so they'll feel less threatened by your ideas and you can have an honest conversation doesn't actually work. I've tried it a bunch of times and it has always completely failed. People are very sensitive to subtext and they'll move to shut you down as soon as they detect that you're approaching a disagreement, no matter how non-threatening you try to make yourself.
I don't really understand why people do this. Honestly, if you really are getting mad at guys who have similar names to guys who make fun of people you vaguely know on Twitter - if reading this post is going to leave you with a lingering distaste for people named Matt twenty years later - then I think you are unusually sensitive to conflict, to a degree that's probably not healthy, and it's unreasonable to expect people to make concessions to it.
But almost all online liberalism is people expecting what seems to me to be unreasonable concessions to their mental health. So you're in good company there.
>I worry that normal humans are imitating journalists
No, journalists are imitating normal humans. Normal people started saying dumb shit for attention first, it was only later that journalists realized they could get paid to do it as well.
Oof. As someone whose comments here are far too tilted towards snark for my general comfort, this hits home. I hope I haven't contributed too much to this effect. (I wish substack had a way to view all of one's own comments; that would be useful data for self-improvement.) At least I've never had a Twitter account.
I was going to comment on the canalization entry, but I might as well do it here, although I'm in the depths of a covid fever. I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and my mind somehow wandered to the question of "if I were born knowing everything I know now, what would I do differently?" Aside from money-making schemes, of course, and saving an uncle who died early. Eventually I came up with the idea of trying to summarize the dynamics of the current era's political dysfunction, either descriptively or in a story (a la Eliezer), and sticking it on enough places in the early Internet that it would be remembered and seen as a dystopia to avoid.
It'd go something like this, starting from early days. Networks become connected, access to networks becomes widespread, the cost of hosting information on a server goes up with the number of users, and advertising becomes the way to finance this "Internet". Advertisers track users' behavior to determine what ads to show them. Some people use advertising to make money; they do this by finding the "content" that attracts the most "eyeballs". As access spreads, people have individual accounts, they see a "feed" of posts from other people they choose. This feed starts as all content from the people they chose, but eventually is determined by an algorithm that selects the content that "engages" them the most. Unfortunately, this turns out to be adversarial politics. 1984 is misleading: the government there wants to maintain control, but this is about making money. The best way to generate content is to "crowd-source" it, by letting individual users make the content, and then using a process of natural selection to evolve it into the most "engaging" form possible. The result is a society divided into two roughly equal sides, each of which is fed an endless stream of the horrors that the other side commits, each of which spews vitriol about the other and then is fed that vitriol right back. No one really cared about the 2 minutes of hate, but when half the society is Big Brotherites and half the society is Emmanuel Goldsteinites, they spend every free moment saying horrible things about each other.
There was more, but, well, covid fever. It feels like sunburn.
Regarding canalization, I just want a way to identify what it is that makes us hatescroll, and kill it. That's it, that's all. Just kill that one thing, the urge to log in and see whether my snark has produced any positive reinforcement.
Twitter is optimized to produce stupidity. That's what the character limit is for. It makes it impossible to provide context or have a reasoned discussion. Even smart people must be stupid on Twitter.
You're probably right that making lots of low-value comments is a bad strategy for networking with influencers, such as yourself. But the argument you made implies that it would be a good strategy for becoming an influencer, or for networking with other non-influencers. I think that's what more people are trying to do.
One day a year should be declared "good journalism day", in the same way that there are other days.
Every journalist or serious commentator should write a piece about why they think they're good journalists. What is the evidence they're being objective? How sincere are they? They ought to present that case.
I wonder how many comments I've made that have alienated others. I'd like to think I've learned lessons from each failure, and have grown beyond them. I think the nature of the internet is that people often aren't thinking clearly about the comments they're making, and learning to be a good participant takes time and effort.
One time on Reddit I made an overly critical comment about a book, and the actual author responded to me. I felt so bad, because it was a really poorly worded glib comment which was taking out frustration from other aspects of my life on their book.
Another time I was trying out a software engineering library, I was tired and frustrated, so I wrote a mean tweet about it which was eventually seen by the library's creator.
There's probably hundreds of small interactions like this which I remember vividly.
Interesting how much of a scissor statement this seems to be. "I block people who I find unpleasant on twitter with fairly low tolerance" and the reaction seems to be like evenly split between "I can't believe Scott would admit to this, this has undermined my faith in them as a rationalist" and "duh".
It seems like maybe the people in the former category see Scott's Twitter Feed as a public space and someone should not be removed from there without good reason, just as someone should not be prevented from speaking in public without good reason, and the people in the "duh" category see Scott's feed as a private thing he can cultivate how he likes.
Four years ago there was this pretty cool author who wrote:
"But I think there’s a similar phenomenon that gets less attention and is even less defensible – a sort of intellectual outrage culture. “How can you possibly read that guy when he’s said [stupid thing]?” I don’t want to get into defending every weird belief or conspiracy theory that’s ever been [stupid thing]. I just want to say it probably wasn’t as stupid as Bible codes. And yet, Newton.
Some of the people who have most inspired me have been inexcusably wrong on basic issues. But you only need one world-changing revelation to be worth reading."
"A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day." -Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
A guy from high school used this as his senior quote in our yearbook. He now writes for the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that incentives may not drive this behavior, just a specific personality type.
I refuse to believe that anyone, including Scott and every commenter here, has not done one of these things at some point:
-said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi
-read the title but not the body of an article about some group and viciously insulted them based on a misunderstanding of their position.
-spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone and ruined their day.
This reminds me of Rationalist self-congratulatory posts on LessWrong that would have titles like "Why do so many people suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" but once you get past the terminology would essentially be "Why are normies so much dumber than me?"
We're ALL dumb. We're ALL assholes on Twitter sometimes. Just sometimes you don't realize it. Blocking people who annoy you probably helps with not realizing that you annoyed them too. Maybe that's fine. Maybe you have a right to decide who is worth your empathy. Maybe that's just how normal social interaction works: we don't associate with people we dislike... and why should we??
But I've no idea where journalists enter the picture here and I see no evidence to support that anyone other than readers of this blog see journalists as evil trolls who just get clicks by exploiting hate.
Hypothetically, if aliens offered you a job with similar hours and pay but you were 100% anonymous would you take it?
I ask because this is often my thought. A lot of people who are famous say that, while the money and power it provides are nice, the actual fame is mostly a downside. I'm not sure if they're posing or not though.
If he hasn't already do so, Scott should invent some sock puppets and experience the joy of being outrageously honest to people on the internet. Just make sure you think hard about which way is punching up. People are often very confused about this.
This hurts a little bit. I do have a Twitter account but only because it's a necessary evil for things I do or am interested in. Accounts like Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker are extremely useful!
Whenever I see americans talking about twitter, it feels like a parallel world. Is it not possible to use twitter and just... don't engage with the culture war?
I've used twitter daily for about 5 years to keep up with what friends and acquaintances are up to and to share random stuff from my everyday life. Not only do I never see culture war or political content, I've never blocked anyone and have never been blocked (to the best of my knowledge).
What am I missing about the anglosphere twitter experience? (Or... the terminally online twitter experience for that matter)
Thanks as always for your writing and your courage Scott in raising this issue. I've had a bit of a think about this and I'm sorry this comment is a bit lengthy. I think I've seen this dismissive swipe most with what I've assumed is online pay-trolls trying to drive culture war stuff. I think this phenomenon is notable and it's not personal horridness, nor just media companies, but also an element in the tactics of the troll armies. Mobbing is a sufficient core (human? social primate? social vertebrate?) activity, I think one of the strategic aims is to start mobbing against anyone who has the capacity to bridge across the most promoted chasms, the ones that have the most potential to help the anglosphere engage with its political problems constructively. I tend to hold in mind that the anglosphere's political enemy has a drive to discredit the anglosphere's, and more generally, democratic nations' courts, government, universities, and medicine, because if those are hopelessly corrupt and damaging to citizens and the economy, it's easier to justify totalitarian subjection of the enemy nations' own populations.
There has been a weird feeling of battleships in the fog for about three and a half years now, so I'm still navigating by principles such as 'back slowly towards people you consider trustworthy' and 'establish lines of communication with possibly friendly entities'. There was so much bad troll mobbing in the lockdowns cf https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda . I just saw it everywhere the last few years, particularly intense 2020/2021. I was watching obscure forums being mobbed by teams driving opinion, either the mind killers that make you feel dead clever or the loony goons whose aim is to make you think anyone who disagrees is a half wit or worse. And anything relevant and evidence based would disappear over the fold pretty fast, either the thread slid or the whole forums slid, this stuff: https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2017/08/21/the-gentlepersons-guide-to-forum-spies/
Mobbing as an art form must have got pretty highly developed under survive or die totalitarian regimes. One hypothesis I have for what I've seen is that people directing the trolls were looking at the social media graphs, had spotted that someone's hidden influencer, spouse or whatever, was on that forum and it was part of an indirect attempt to distort decision makers' judgement and cut them off from useful sources of feedback into the larger social system. I guess that could be what Spalding means by network warfare in 'War without rules', it could mean exactly this kind of manipulation of the social network to achieve outcomes hostile to nations' health and security.
I think enough people are driven by the urge to mob or avoid mobbing that these dismissive swipes are currently effective enough of the time to trigger mobbing. That is discouraging good faith attempts to do adversarial collaborations to address some of societies' more pressing current problems. Without those attempts, the social chasms driven by these forces continue to widen in mutual incomprehension and hence the social body loses the benefit of the error correction that is made possible by being in touch with societies' feedback loops, through adversarial parliamentary processes and so on. So, calling out the behaviours that seem to trigger mobbing, and encouraging the intelligent reader to think about what might be happening, and possibly to orient towards a larger framework of values, might be of strategic important to our nations' health and security, especially because the rationalists hold a fairly influential cultural position in the anglosphere. The values and principles we hold dear have the potential to enable powerful larger scale co-operations or to disable them. It's not just courageous to draw attention to these dismissive swipes out of a longing for humane behaviour, it might be important for humans to operate with some degree of co-operative intelligence.
I was originally going to comment something about "how do I balance this with the need to filter for niche nerds who are like me?", but then I remembered that the post is actually literally about dunks/insults. o_0
This, in a meta way, got to a core problem I have: I want to do smart and nice things with smart and nice people, yet these (especially the social stuff) requires me to be so careful + actually have anything like a self-filter, that even trying to practice/exercise that basic self-filtering skill feels physically draining. (ADHD + poor sleep btw, but just pointing these out doesn't do much!)
A while ago, I generalized some similar observations about incentives, motivations and algorithms into an almost banal, possibly profound, and ultimately very depressing conclusion that has lodged itself like a chicken bone in my morality and wreaked havoc on my productivity:
“If your actions affect people’s well-being, and you optimize for anything other than people’s well-being, you are part of the problem.”
This has always been true to some degree, but its impact and significance stands in relationship to the leverage you have. Harmonious balance is a happy accident that occurs when no one has enough leverage to make a significant difference. But as our leverage (as individuals and organizations) increases to unprecedented, unhealthy levels, so does the damage we cause – and our responsibility to check our motivation and incentives, and to moderate our speech (gasp!), actions and algorithms.
This is relevant to everyone from journalists and philanthropists to Silicon Valley engineers and McDonald’s cashiers. None of us who can read this – and certainly no one on Twitter – are far from the devastating edge of this particular axe.
I’m a bit snarky with my real life friends and we get along great (been 30 years with most of them). Occasionally I’m tempted to be as snarky online but then remember that it comes across very different with people you aren’t already friends with. Then I usually delete the comment.
I've never used twitter, and I agree with this attitude generally--of being charitable and engaging with what someone's actually saying, not a strawman. But there's a big problem here that isn't being addressed.
Some positions really do deserve nothing but vicious mockery. I think the vast majority of people would agree with that. If you call yourself a Nazi or a Marxist-Leninist, there are only two possible things that can be said about you, as far as I can tell: you're completely ignorant of the entire history of the 20th century, or you're a sociopath. The wokeness problem arose when someone said "but what *really* is the difference between defending the holocaust and 'misgendering' me?" and instead of meeting with the mockery they deserved, many people decided that was a reasonable thing to say. And all sanity in our society was destroyed that day.
Scott's response seems to be that the only way to stop new taboos being made up every day to protect insane new ideas that would never survive free rational scrutiny, is to eliminate all taboos entirely, even ones against defending the mass murder of millions. I don't think that's a remotely workable solution. Most people in a healthy society are going to have taboos against horrible things. But also, in an actually healthy society most people are not going to allow these taboos to be transfered to mere criticism of someone's political beliefs or failing to validate their "identity". The fact that this has been allowed to happen shows that something about basic social discourse and common sense has been broken. There's a much deeper problem here.
I think people often confuse the positions ”I block you because you’re bad and deserve it as punishment” and ”I block you because I find you mildly annoying and it’s a way of curating my feed”.
The latter is the Yglesias position; not sure which Scott is going for here, though.
I'm confused about his comfort with blocking people. I enjoy online political conversations with people who are both rude and very politically different from me because that Venn diagram often contains people with valuable data from cultures I rarely experience. I'd prefer these conversations to not be online, but we've sorted ourselves into such bubbles geographically that I usually have to settle for that. Some of my favorite insights have come from listening to the wisdom of these people. I had assumed Scott is doing this too because he has so much of the data and outside the box thinking that I get from these conversations. Is there a more efficient way of getting data about political cultures with very non-rationalist norms?
I'm constantly struggling with some mental health problems. Sometimes it gets better, and sometimes it gets worse, so I'm trying to always be on the lookout for things that help or harm me.
Recently, I've noticed that I'm constantly being on twitter and it constantly makes me miserable. I'm not quite sure why I was so intent on spending so much of my time in a place that has such a negative impact on my quality of life. But I was constantly upset with people saying stupid, cruel, unnecessary things, in a way that this post sort of reminded me of. (I don't mean to say that the post is stupid or cruel; I mean that the description of these traumatizing interactions sounds sort of similar).
So I decided to quit. The problem was that checking out twitter had turned into something of a constant instinct. I'd just open twitter automatically, as a way of procrastination.
I dealt with this in two ways. I deleted the twitter app from my phone, obviously. But on my laptop, I could still open twitter in by browser, and did this automatically, without thinking. So I just logged out. It's not hard at all to log back in, but every time I opened twitter, there was basically a reminder: "hey, remember you wanted to quit this place?"). I guess I should have just deleted my profile, I don't know.
The second way was that I tried to think of something to procrastinate with, instead of Twitter. At first I wanted to read a specific book instead of being a twitter. This didn't really stick; now I'm procrastinating on Manifold ;D
The effects on my mental health were awesome - I could compare it with the periods when I'm able to sleep well: my spirit is just so much stronger. I think anyone who feels miserable on Twitter might want to consider doing this.
Is the business model of being a lying jerk variety of journalist online really that profitable? Doesn't it say as much about the audience then ("normal people"), as the journalist?
Twitter is obviously horrible and net-negative. The fact that the "rationality community" can't seem to be able to stop hitting itself is probably the the most prominent mark against its alleged rationality these days.
I expect most people replying to this won't completely relate to how often Scott has this experience. There are really big differences between 20 followers (boring), 200 followers (ideal), 2000 followers (hosting a big party - I am here), 20k followers (low-key celebrity) and 200k (high-key celebrity - Scott is here). The number of people you have to block in order to have a nice time escalates really quickly
I really hate most social media users because they have no nuance and if you don't follow them in lockstep and believe what they believe and hate whom they hate, they will call you bad names and try to destroy your life. They're just horrible judgemental people in general and part of the reason I radicalize extremists who hate these people and teach my followers how to build cool weapons is because I don't feel like I have any obligation to coexist with people who are unwilling to tolerate me expressing my viewpoints.
What about if I have a Twitter account but never use it, I just got it because someone else was posting something on Twitter and I needed it to see that?
This is a silly post. The only way to avoid alienating anyone is to be silent and if everyone was silent about important issues, nothing would ever get done. Imagine a world where people kept silent about sexual abuse in the Catholic church to avoid being shunned by Catholics! Or a world where nobody discussed the potential side effects of puberty blockers because some members of the trans community might interpret that as an attack!
I think an important part of being a rationalist is to understand that nobody is perfect all the time. We should try to understand people's motives instead of reacting with our emotions. My impression is that people who engage in the behaviors you described are following their natural incentives. From their point of view, the friends they gain are worth more than the enemies they make.
Hate is such a strong word it's easy to forget that in this evidently dichotomous(duelist?) world there is the other extreme and the often preferable middle range.
"Lewis joins Freud in warning that all forms of human love “carry in them the seeds of hate.”... Lewis warns: “It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, ‘I love and hate,’ but other kinds of love admit the same mixture. They carry in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”
There's huge value to cutting this off at the root: those actual media companies which began and still drive this style of discourse, for the dollars and views and clicks and dark whuffies.
The years where I'm on a news blackout and a twitter blackout are largely peaceful. I can get the updates I need from friends, long form books, and occasional long think pieces, with very little of the toxicity. Change my mind.
Scott, please help me integrate this post with the rest of your evident worldview - the rational bits, the overcoming bias bits, and all the other optimistic, humanitarian, or psychological-wellbeing-improver bits.
Do you really hate *these people?* Aren’t you perhaps trying to make a commentary about particular *behavior* or *choices* of people?
Does this argument feel poised for maximal alpha in the marketplace of ideas, or did you maybe just give the sneer clubbers a bunch of red meat, and broadside a bunch of other folks with a sawed-off toxoplasma shotgun?
Are you ok, dude? You wanna take some of them research chemicals and talk about it?
This is true for most twitter users but not all. There's a long tail of people futilely trying to make it in the creator economy or trying to build an audience for other reasons (like to market their startup or because they desire fame).
I personally try to take risks in my social media and write to a niche, because I do want to get a large following, but I try keep my posts positive, honest, and reflective of my actual personality in meatspace. There's a way of baring your soul to the world and viewing your self as something to be mined for engagement. It's fun and it's possible to do while mostly providing a good experience to people
Part of the problem is that Twitter isn't good at distinguishing positive engagement from negative engagement and so it amplifies some really toxic stuff. YouTube is much better at this (they literally ask a sample of users how they feel after watching a video) and as a result, the top individual YouTuber, MrBeast makes content that is positive and doesn't dunk on people at all.
I'm more forgiving because I remember being 14 and not knowing better and reading the op-eds for that delicious feeling of righteous indignation. So I think I know where they're coming from. But it is kind of horrible, that inclination to dunk dunk dunk.
After reading a bunch of the comments, what stands out to me is that people find being blocked pretty upsetting [1] maybe more so than tweets saying groups they belong to are awful. This creates a tension in that Scott seems to be advocating behaving in a way that often has the same hurtful consequences that he critisizes -- and often ppl won't have intended to be hurtful and (often correctly) believe they are behaving appropriately to the medium (and often are simply misunderstood). Ofc there are ppl who are just assholes too.
That doesn't mean that I think Scott or anyone else should be required to endure these annoyances or investigate into weather it was a misunderstanding or not. They can't and don't have the time. Rather, I think it means we just have to accept that the nature of twitter means that even people of goodwill end up hurting each other and that the best we can try to do is understand that it's often not personal -- just a collision of incompatible needs. And I think being clear that blocking isn't a negative moral judgement helps with that.
People who are using Twitter to vent and fuminate about things aren't being anymore evil than Scott is when he blocks you w/o spending a bunch of time to figure out what you really meant by that tweet, who the intended audience was and how serious you were. Scott's just protecting his own wellbeing even if that sometimes means ppl get hurt when he blocks them. I think grousing hyperbolicly especially when you intended audience is people who you see as allies serves a similarly important psychological role for other people.
Perhaps the ideal solution is to fucking burn Twitter to the ground and replace it with a system that allows for more clearly defined norms for various spaces. Short of that, I want to suggest we all just treat behavior on Twitter the way we might treat behavior by someone who is plastered and/or drugged up -- unless of course you say something I find upsetting in which case you and your whole family deserve immediate crucifixion ;-).
--
1: And I understand why ppl find it upsetting, getting blocked especially when you haven't been disrespectful or rude is a jarring experience. If I looked up to and respected EY like I do Scott or a number of other ppl I'd have been quite hurt at being blocked especially when I felt I'd always gone out of my way to be polite. Since I don't find EY particularly admirable or a great thinker (don't dislike him as a person just think he's overrated bc his story skills hide arg weaknesses) I only found it a bit unpleasant.
But I apparently found it sufficiently unpleasant that I included this footnote largely to express my irritation at it. So if it was from someone I did admire that would be quite hurtful.
One might reasonably point out that making the representatives of your outgroup suffer is the point. For example, a random Democrat might take pride in the thought that something they said so wounded Donald Trump that he seethes whenever he sees the random Democrat's name.
So long as this behavior is confined to appropriate contexts (twitter, public executions, etc.) the incentives of the random participant seem perfectly aligned with their behavior. Perhaps the people who are mistaken are those who believe that they are participating in and guiding a National Conversation, rather than merely providing a source of entertainment.
Oh, it’s definitely in our genes that is most fundamental level. Leaving dogs out of it for a second because they have a very limited vocal range and just because they bark doesn’t mean they’re feeling nasty. The face-to-face performative show of aggression has the promise of escalating into something more fundamental, and that serves as a kind of limiter, I feel most of what occurs on the Internet. I would call a form of passive aggression. You can unleash the stream of vitriol on someone and have absolutely no skin in the game. I chose my pen name to remind me of this fact every time I write something down here.
I find this piece really weird. Like, I don’t have Twitter but I do regularly doomscroll it and my main question is…how do you function? Like I think for some groups they have this reaction but they can sustain it because they are part of a closely knit enough ingroup with enough party discipline and well understood/shared sacred cows that people can be careless all they want within well-defined boundaries and not risk losing the readers who were actually going to be reading them in the first place - and in these groups you’ll just get soft or hard cancelled the first time you cross the boundary. I don’t have that luxury because there is just no group of people that I share perfect boundaries with and that doesn’t sometimes annoy me like this, probably pretty often, and yes that includes rationalists, and I kind of suspect you don’t have that luxury either.
Don’t get me wrong, low effort social media dunks and poor reading comprehension are bad etc etc, but you are making a stronger point that this. You are saying that if someone writes some dumb bad dunk once on social media that happens to gore one of your sacred cows, you block them, will avoid reading anything they write again, won’t feature or recommend them on ACX, and will avoid them at parties. Also let’s assume pretty much everyone else does this and so if you do it you’ll lose 99% of your friends. The former comment just comes off to me, no offense, as kind of pathological, and the latter just doesn’t seem true unless you assume everyone else is like that (and again ignore the dynamics of people who can and are willing to completely ensconce themselves in a very insular social bubble with very well established boundaries).
Like, if I’m going to take kind of a stab in the dark, my best guess about this piece is something like: you rarely use social media, because if you did how could you possibly keep this up; you used it recently; someone you really didn’t want to hate forever did a dunk you found particularly annoying and now you are really frustrated that you have to hate even them forever; you decided to write this as basically a plea that people not do this because you really don’t want to lose anyone else you liked again (it won’t work, your norm is too unforgiving, maybe like Julia Galef would pass this bar, but this is Twitter let’s be realistic); you go on a tangent about how people are becoming too influenced by journalists so that it doesn’t look like this is whole point of the post.
This point about journalism might be an interesting post in itself, if you’re right it would even be an interesting reversal! Many people think it’s the other way around and low effort dunks from journalists have gotten to where they are in large part because of the incentives of social media and how people read/interact with content on it. But this piece isn’t that one, the main argument it gives is pointing to your personal, in my opinion weirdly draconian, social media habits, so it’s hard for me to believe that it’s really the point. Again, this is something of a stab in the dark, I really hope this won't come off the wrong way and alienate you. I’m not trying to just take a cheap swipe, I enjoy your content and respect you as a thinker (even though I'm almost certain that I wouldn't still if I followed this rule of yours myself), but maybe consider that this is kind of a problem you should work on? It doesn’t sound pleasant or sustainable, nor like it’s fully fair to flawed people using something like social media in extremely typical ways.
I'm not sure if this is really all that true. Anyone who's ever been to a soccer/football match in Germany (probably applies to UK, Spain, Italy, France as well; animosities in US professional sports have never appeared as aggressive to me, but that may be a misperception) can confirm that hating on Others for their Other-ness is a perfectly valid bonding strategy (even if all potential Others vastly outnumber the own group) that trumps most bonding over positive things in effectiveness, at least for a certain kind of friends/acquaintances.
Luckily, for most fans of Team X, chanting for 12 hours straight how all fans of Team Y are MFs and SoBs does not mean they couldn't be best friends with fans of Team Y. So maybe the issue partially is with taking things all too serious: people like to feel witty and to feel as if they emerge as the winner from a spat, and can't possibly imagine that for their targets it is about anything else. Implying that they're trying to act like Fox News seems far-fetched.
"I’ve sometimes found myself being irrationally uncharitable to everyone named Albert or Allen or Alvin just because a totally different guy named Alfred was a jerk on Twitter."
I feel exactly the same way. I remember being excited to find the rationalist community on Twitter, having read Scott’s content and LessWrong for years. I found a couple great follows, but the vast majority of popular rationality-adjacent Twitter figures were...awful. Low effort dunks, in group signaling, lazy out group hatred, a truly profound lack of insight. Almost all of it is recycled insights from Less Wrong, with a healthy dose of banal or stupid political signaling grafted on.
obviously i didnt ever post say anything critical to them on twitter myself - i try to be very charitable on social media.
But i've never lost respect for a tribe faster than being exposed to the kind of banal, bad-faith shitposts that they apparently think are funny or insightful. before that point i'd strongly considered showing up to LW or SSC meetups.
obviously i feel this way about left and right wing twitter influencers too. Before this point I would’ve thought rationalists would’ve been more immune to this kind of thinking. Twitter was a very rude awakening, ha
It is true that many people on twitter needlessly offend each other and that doesn't help discourse at all.
But equally true is that people hate and block each other also for opinions that are expressed politely because they simply disagree with them.
If I say that covid vaccine mandates were not justified because the scientific data already showed that these vaccines do not prevent the spread of covid, many people get offended and call me antivax. When I object that I am actually pro-vaccine, I am a vaccinator and I am actually more worried that those vaccine mandates have reduced the vaccination rates for routine vaccinations in children, I get blocked.
The same happens when I say that the latest evidence shows that mask mandates were not justified or that lockdowns did more harm than good.
Or even if I say that in my opinion bitcoin was a great idea but in practical implementation it didn't work and we should drop it. When Scott expressed displeasure with my opinion, I learned to keep my mouth shut about this. Apparently I just don't know how to express unpopular opinion. I simply avoid talking about it and take solace that the history shows that I was right. That's probably the best way because it could also be a case when history shows that I am not right.
Other people may not be so patient so they become bitter and refuse to accept all the abuse and respond with the same abuses and the discourse becomes toxic.
The problem still remains – how can we discuss ideas that we think are important but the majority is against them. For example, you are living in Russia and are against the war in Ukraine because you clearly see how it damages both Russia and Ukraine and makes everything worse. How do you talk about that without being called an enemy of the state? It is probably impossible in Russia. You can do it only very discreetly with great risk to your reputation.
Or you can go to twitter, create anonymous account and write offensive things about politicians you hate. Unfortunately it works both ways and many Russians write nasty things about Ukrainian politicians they hate.
I don't have a twitter account, or even read much twitter, but twitter seems to different things. First, a flame war machine running on hot takes and dunks. Also, sometimes serious people post serious stuff on twitter.
The problem is that these two spheres overlap on the same platform.
No reasonable person would complain about seeing someones lewd videos after entering their name on a porn website. (They might object to that person doing porn in the first place, but they can hardly claim to be offended to see it. Going out of your way to find out what kinks a specific person does and then complaining about their kinks seems disingenuous, however.)
Similarly, rage-only twitter would be a an obvious eternal flame war where asbestos underpants on the parts of the audience are implied. Assume everyone taking part to be a terrible human being who will insult anyone. Being personally insulted by anything specific after reading rage-only twitter would be like being offended by some kink on pornhub.
Twitter is then a mixture of rage-only twitter and people trying to be serious, which goes about as well as having a room which is half sex dungeon and half cloister: virtually anything anyone does in the former will personally offend people in the latter.
I would tentatively argue that perhaps, twitter is best suited for rage. The character limit lends itself to hot takes, snarks and dunks. Serious people have to resort to chaining tweets into threads because you can not really make a substantial argument within the character limit.
Of course, neither the serious people nor the flame-warriors will go anywhere, both are deeply entrenched in twitter. Still, I think the best bet would be another platform which offers people with serious contributions a similar reach as twitter, and leaving twitter itself rage-only.
> If you alienate 99 people and get one person to say “Wow! You have exactly the same flavor of hatred for people who plant petunias that I do, but you express it so much more cruelly, I bet you’re literally making them cry, it really made my day!” you will not become the 71st richest man in the world.
Twitter is a messaging service. It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.
I get it, and I also have an itchy block trigger finger. I believe I successfully avoid the dunking activities for the most part.
But there are some people who have become notable and famous on Twitter. And some who have parlayed that into real-world influence. So there is an incentive there. If you have the skills to be "good" at Twitter, that may be the shortest path.
Sorry for upsetting you or alienating you. I can't attend to *everyone* who gets alienated by realities I need humanity to get used to ASAP, but your opinion matters to me. Anytime you wanna shoot me a message so we can negotiate personalized discourse norms and subsequently work through our disagreements, my discord is nervewrangler. You can also reach me at methodicalTelepathy@hotmail.com.
If it's worth anything, I was suspended from twitter last night.
I think you've got it backwards about Fox alienating people. I don't think people who hate Fox watch Fox, it's people who watch networks that hate Fox who hate Fox. Similarly with other media. There are so many times I've heard people say the Daily Mail is evil and they hate it, and generally those people have never actually read the Daily Mail -- they read competing media that tells them to hate the Daily Mail.
I was once in an argument with a sports writer on twitter. The argument involved no name calling or anything from both sides until then. He indirectly called me a person without a deep understanding. But i let that slide as he is a sports writer. The moment I resorted to name-calling on some other related thread, he blocked me and I regret that till now. I probably became a bad example of what happens when famous people interact with laymen.
I hate that Scott's Face-Heel turn happened on my birthday. This is the guy who wrote long spiels against cancel culture and started his whole blog with a manifesto declaring charity for ideas and open debate. And then.... something went wrong. And now he's just fine blocking people for mildly annoying him with the way they express their ideas... never mind that he may not have proof against these ideas or they may be non-neurotypical or not know how to express things without "mildly annoying you". I will say it, and don't care if it gets me blocked. This person has these rights as an anonymous individual, but he does not deserve or is qualified to be a rationalist figurehead. Power and influence comes with responsibilities, and if you openly reject such responsibilities you should find a suitable replacement who is willing to carry them.
"It can’t possibly be worth it for you. The fact that you skimmed the first third of a thinkpiece..."
Scott, mockery and derision have proven value in propaganda and polemics. Mockery can be a quick, easy way to undermine somebody's public reputation.
Let's say you troll Matt Yglesias and he blocks you. So do 40 other American centrists who really care about civility. If you've diminished or discredited MY in the eyes of 60 other Americans, that's a pretty big win. This is a democratic republic after all, and the majority rules.
Ruthless? Sure. But ruthlessness is a famously effective solution to a power imbalance. Yglesias is a centrist, and centrists have inordinate control over the Overton Window of "acceptable discourse." They hold the levers of power. Of course they are polite! You can afford to be polite when you have all the power.
This only works if the public doesn't care about civility, and I don't think they do. They care less and less every day.
Media companies aren't qualitatively more incentivized than individuals to dunk instead of being thoughtful. Individual people are being irrational relative to more ideal versions of themselves when they give in to their instincts to short-sightedly dunk on [ strangers and issues they don't understand ] in public; their lives would get better if they found something more productive to do and stopped doing this. But also, journalists and media companies are being irrational relative to more ideal versions of themselves when they give in to their [ instincts/incentives ] to short-sightedly dunk on [ strangers and issues they don't understand ] in public; they would enjoy a wider audience and make more money if they could instead do journalism that appealed to everyone by covering events honestly and thoughtfully. Yet media companies, as well as individuals, are not covering events honestly and thoughtfully, and instead are dunking.
Our long-term incentives say to be nice to each other - that's why everyone's frustrated that we're failing at it. When we ignorantly dunk in public, we're *all* succumbing to some kind of impediment to our ability to be as far-sighted and reflective as we'd like to be, media companies included.
I think it's likely that to an older generation [ I'm a zoomer ], media companies probably became synonymous with destructive ignorant public dunking because back when the ball really got rolling on the disintegration of society's ability to deliberate, media companies still had the capacity to be way louder than regular people. But now there's a smooth, flattish gradient of audience sizes, *everyone*'s competing for eyeballs, and it should be clear how everyone's incentives look pretty similar.
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I know this is a low value comment but... is that a sub-blog? Is this referring to a Twitter controversy I'm unaware of?
I've always been a bit astounded at the failure of the seemingly-obvious epithet "Twits" to become a part of the lexicon.
Endorsed in full, top to bottom. There's more to be said regarding the copious way turning someone else's incentives into your own sincere beliefs can go wrong, but the murky complexity can wait until another day.
This would never have occurred to me because of the typical mind fallacy. I have a horrible memory for names and so I can't imagine holding such a long term grudge against someone I just briefly interacted with, and I kind of implicitly assumed other people were similar.
The last paragraph came out of nowhere for me — I don't think Twitter is the way it is because people imitate journalists; I think people treat Twitter as if they're just talking to an acquaintance. Scope insensitivity means they can't conceive of the fact that millions of people could see their message, and there's no real evolutionary basis for the expectation that your private thoughts could be seen by people dramatically different from you in every way. People are simply unprepared for the way social media amplifies and diffuses their idle thoughts.
I think about the way I talk in my own life: "that guy is a fucking idiot," I'll say about someone who mildly disagrees with me on a topic that I know to be complex and multifaceted. It's expressive language that doesn't capture my true, deliberative thoughts on the topic.
I think the most charitable interpretation of people who act this way on Twitter is that they haven't internalized the reality of the situation.
Two rules that've helped me: 1) No snark. 2) Write what I'd say to the person if they were across a table from me.
#1 is really hard to follow, because snark is the easiest and most immediately gratifying way to respond to something I don't agree with. I really wish "no snark" would catch on as a general rule of internet etiquette.
#2 is actually pretty easy to follow once I internalize #1.
> I’ve sometimes found myself being irrationally uncharitable to everyone named Albert or Allen or Alvin just because a totally different guy named Alfred was a jerk on Twitter.
Some names just seem to correlate well with certain traits. I don't think I've ever met a Jennifer who wasn't of above-average attractiveness, nor a Stephen who didn't turn out to be a terrible human being. (Captain America doesn't count, being a fictional character.)
Note that Matt Yglesias's tweet is explaining exactly the phenomenon that was poorly named as "microaggression".
This post makes me think that most people's incentives are more or less exactly like media companies. Most people aren't posting to engage or convince, they are posting to get high fives and little endorphin bumps by collecting likes.
>If you don’t have one of those, you’re fine. But if you do have one, there’s a good chance you said something which horribly offended me. You said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and I believed X. You read the title but not the body of an article about some group I care about, and viciously insulted them based on your misunderstanding of their position. You spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone who happened to be a friend of mine trying really hard to make the world better, and ruined their day.
How does this not apply to Astral Codex Ten too? Or to SSC? I mean, posts like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans dunk on at least as many people than calling people thots on Twitter for believing X.
The motivation is the same as the motivation to comment here: many (most?) people like to express themselves and share how they feel about something and often bond with others about that. One of the best ways to form social bonds is to agree on some common complaint against someone else.
And in person this actually works quite well. You usually have a sense of where they stand and if not you can proceed cautiously. If you get it right there is good chance to bond over a shared complaint/view. If you get negative feedback from them you you usually drop the hyperbole and give enough context to make it clear you aren't attacking them and let it go.
The problem is that social media gives us very confusing clues: especially Twitter. We tend not to see the people we really upset (they block us) and grow some level of familiarity with those who egg us on. For the person posting the complaint or attack it feels like the usual hyperbolic grossing we all do with ppl we know share our views
Niche media have an incentive to preach to the choir with emotional click bait that attracts their audience. Unfortunately many mainstream outlets copied that approach since they have biased journalists or social media or editing staff that see such clickbait targeting 1 side as a way to get viewers.
However doing so then means they go from appealing to the whole media market to appealing to only say a half or a third or less of the full market. The news media's reputation and revenue have suffered because of this.
The size of their potential market share is drastically decreased due to a short sighted focus on easy clickbait marketing or giving into journalists desire to advocate. Of course that backfires on journalists who would like their publication to be ready by everyone so that they can convert the other side: but they've scared them away. Fox News scares away liberals and MSNBC scares way conservatives. It seems like there is a market opening for news outlets that target a general audience and don't give into that temptation, while the outlets that are biased should admit it in their marketing to go all in for their target demographic rather than pretending to be neutral in a way people don't trust.
Minor point, but I really do think that for journalists, it makes no sense to block instead of mute for minor irritations. If you're a public figure where people get benefit from seeing your work, It's a bit unfair to ban them from seeing it over any minor thing (banning them from interacting with you in ways that bother you is totally reasonable, and the mute button does that without the first part).
I stopped reading as soon as I saw your title began with “Your”.
The incentives aren't the same but I wonder if they converge -- people don't need hundreds of friends, and people love to bond over hating the out-group. I don't have a twitter and I never write anything superficial or nasty on substack comments except in resonse to insults, but I get why people do it: it's easier than being insightful or making friends the hard way. Someone who sounds like a journalist on twitter might just be writing to impress his four equally-nasty friends, and care nothing about our opinion of him.
Is there an API where I can check whether Scott hates me?
Doesn’t having a firm stance like this invite another annoying kind of monitoring where people point out other’s bad behavior and pressure you to disavow them? I say this because my first thought was “Yglesias can be pretty disingenuous”. I guess you can just block these people too?
Sure it's understandable, but I don't like it as a position. It's perfectly possible to be so afraid of upsetting someone that you never say anything interesting at all. I was even nervous making this comment, because of course, I don't want someone whose writings I normally think are fantastic to get upset and block me over me making some unimportant remark.
For your mental health, some people absolutely have to be blocked, I'm fortunate not to have the world trying to shame, attack or make friends with me, so I get that the problem is probably particularly acute for some people. And I never read twitter, so I suppose that's sort of like blocking all of them? But ultimately some of the most interesting people I talk to are challenging, and my life would be impoverished by blocking them.
The threat is probably ineffective too. For many people, finding the 3 people who agree with them is way closer to what they value than having a load of strangers they disagree with listen to them. And their value system in prioritising that rather than breadth and diversity of opinion is probably not very unlike that of those who block for minor infractions.
for the people you dont hate:
what twitter drama caused this? Its awful hard to hear something is emotionally important on the addictive website without googling "scott alexander twitter" and reading until I see something interesting but then Id be hate-worthy; kinda a catch 22 here
*eyeroll*
I should probably be charitable and presume that given your profession, you may have a much better idea than I do about how the modal person reacts, and farthermore didn't intend to claim that *all* human beings react in the same way you say you do. Or perhaps I should assume you were engaging in hyperbole, and didn't intend to be understood as accurately describing your feelings. Either of these seem plausible.
But I admit that my first reaction was to think about suggesting that you consult a colleague about possible treatments for your overreaction.
OTOH I'm not on Twitter. Maybe if I were the experience would have shredded my sense of proportion too. But probably not - I've been online for a long time, starting with Usenet. I long ago developed expertise with whatever tools were available to remove junk from my reading queue, including persistent *ssh*les. But I don't generally remember who they were, unless the software tools are ineffective at blocking them - why would I want to?
I'll add that the arrival of Twitter Blue prioritization has made this phenomenon worse, as some of the worst offenders have chosen to pay to bump their replies up to the top.
I am safe here since I have nothing bad to say about anybody.
Except rationalists. A den of villainy.
Each platform has it's uses: Twitter was designed to encourage trolling and drama, Reddit favors group think and bland memes, Facebook is good to keep in touch with people you know but never talk with, Instagram to watch celebrities and wannabees, Twitch for parasocial friendships and OnlyFans for parasocial simping. I know nothing about Tik Tock beyond dances. Now get off my lawn.
Re: the media companies' incentives, it's a real shame that negative partisanship is stronger emotionally that positive partisanship (see Scott's review of Why We're Polarized for a discussion of this). Thus, a piece pointing out how Bad the Other Side is is likely to bring in support, more than looking at positive developments. It feels like some sort of mutated prisoner's dilemma, where more negative press, put out by both sides, results in higher payoffs to the media (more engagement, more people afraid of the side they oppose who might see paying for Heroic Opposition to be a good use of their money) but worse outcomes for society as a whole, both for the Left and the Right.
I don't have a solution to this, but I certainly agree that the media's incentives aren't well aligned with either the incentives of any individual reader, or those of a flourishing society writ large. My appreciation goes to those in the media who actively struggle against these incentives, even when it hurts financially.
> Journalists have shaped Twitter culture
This is an interesting insight. Not convinced it completely explains it, but Twitter *does* seem to have a uniquely quippy & smug culture that I really, really detest. (Broken record at this point but I think the character limit is probably also a big part of it.)
Mute button best button.
Social Media dynamics are weird and annoying. I guarantee you've incidentally isolated folks without meaning to as well. It's because when we write for our audience (even if that audience is absurdly small) we now put it into the world for others to react to as well.
Also as much as I appreciate the whole idea of mechanics vs. soldiers, the truth is that sometimes it is appropriate to be a soldier. I'm starting to get sick to death of people who 1) Believe they have a right to inject themselves into every conversation just because conversations are now public (social media dynamics are weird and annoying), and 2) constantly break their backs playing devil's advocate in a context where someone is clearly expressing a frustration or advocating rather than discussing. As irritated as I am by people who say "Walruss is a Nazi" on a whim, I'm actually a million times more irritated by people standing next to a dude with a Swastika on one arm and a gun in the other going "Obviously I don't agree but let's hear him out."
Blessed are they whose jobs do not require knowing what dumb things are being said on Twitter
(I am a quasi-lobbyist for a major religious organization so my job does require this and let me tell you, it is brutal)
I like what you have to say here, but I think you might be wrong... in some specific way.
If you are a normal person and not someone aiming to have a massive audience, then how many people do you really need to avoid alienating? Isn't alienating 99% of the online population but forming 15 good friendships worth it on an individual level? I guess at some point the pitchforks turn on you... so some large number (but still under pichfork_target) of alienation is worth it for a very small number of people you can form a strong relationship with, or a larger-but-still-relatively-small number of social contacts.
And this kind of scales up? I mean which is better: a milquetoast artist who makes content to offend the least number of people, or someone that pursues a vision/niche/target_audience and delights them even as outsiders may ignore or be offended by it?
Maybe this is even wrong about media companies? At a certain point you become Disney and if you offend anyone you lose a customer, so you carefully manage your offensiveness levels to avoid hurting your bottom line.
I think a very important question is how do you become the (person, artist, media company) that builds with your (vision/niche/target_audience) in mind without also (hurting/alienating/inciting) others. It seems morally wrong to just say "find the anti-audience that is so small that alienating them won't hurt me and isn't organized enough to strike back". I think for most people that ends up being "the kind of people who I don't ever see in real life" (going back to your essay about how many pro-life people do urban pro-choice people actually know), and/or defenseless/despised minorities.
I mean, I'd also like it if we just didn't hurt people, but even your essays sometimes make snarky jabs.
I think this essay deserves being expanded upon in a follow-up. Even though many of the themes here echo throughout your work, I think it is worth saying again.
Just for perspective, less than 20% of US is active on Twitter and globally it’s around 5%. The media blows Twitter comments way out of proportion. I refuse to care too much about anything posted there, or on most any social media for that matter, IMHO. But agree with you completely. It’s a pathetic, social media opium den really.
To what extent is being blocked really a disincentive? If someone's dunking on me, chances are we wouldn't be friends even if they had managed to hold back. And if I block them, they won't have to see the posts they hate. (Sure, they could block me themselves, but maybe they don't have the self-control - someone is wrong on the Internet.) So if anything, liberal blocking helps users sort into bubbles with fewer annoying posts.
Yeah, this is part of why I don't use twitter.
I don't understand this impulse at all but maybe it's because a majority of my major life interactions feature abuse and I'm expected to make peace with it and do.
My fingers are shaking as I type this. I often find in people's writing some quirk, contradiction, or reminder of something odd or funny ("Unfortunately I hate many of you"), to which I respond with a joke or aphorism of my own, mostly funny or pithy only to me. Could be interpreted as "snark" and get me banned forever.
But I don't have a twitter account. Something I have never wanted to have, nor do I understand why people want, use, or like a social media program, seemingly designed only for non-nuanced click bait communication that Scott says he hates.
When I listen to politicians on the radio, I tend to shout abuse at them. It makes me feel better, and in general it doesn't do any harm (though I once had downstairs neighbours who told me, very reasonably, that they could think of better ways to start their mornings than by listening to a stranger scream obscenities into the ether).
It took me a while to realise that I couldn't do the same on Twitter, because I'm an idiot. But I did eventually get better at not being a scumbag. I suspect new etiquette is already building up to deal with the new methods of communication, and that things will continue to improve. The internet is a much more civil and pleasant place than it used to be; 2 girls 1 cup could never happen now, for instance.
It's not that we're becoming journalists, it's that we're new at this stuff. We'll adjust.
It was American businessmen of the supposed dark age that gave us this "Four-Way Test":
Is it the TRUTH? Is it FAIR to all concerned? Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS? Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
Nah.
I'd push back on the observability bias. You don't see most of the responsible, intelligent and vanilla commentary. A writer (or commenter) has to skim the event horizon of edginess to get enough visibility to even risk being blocked by prominent readers.
"Always play it safe and smart" can be effective if you have an audience's trust but I really doubt it will get you to the point of notability anymore, unless you bring massive value-add along with the writing (you're famous for something else already).
But Scott, you have this backwards! It's journalists and activists (birm) that want maximal reach. If I make a witty comment that annoys 99 people but get one good friend to joke around with, that's a win! I don't need to be friends with everyone on my block, and I'd rather have two guys who like me than twenty who don't recognize me because I never bother to have a personality (though getting any of them mad enough to actually hate me could suck).
The problem isn't that people are imitating journalists, it's that journalists have lowered themselves to hacks that are loyal to popularity or dollars rather than truth, although one questions if there was ever a large group of anyone devoted to the truth.
Now, that's not to say Twitter style ignorant dunks are good... just that the entire premise of the article is wrong.
I worry that you are imitating media companies. I guess I'll show myself out.
I entirely agree with this, as stated.
But I'll also note that people's perceptions of who is offending in this regard tend to be highly indexed to their in-groups and out-groups. Humans have a natural and strong tendency to amplify their evaluation of offense to an in-group, while diminishing that evaluation for an out-group. Also, the matter gets tangled up with factual disputes about what the target "really did" do or say. "No, in this case those guys *really are* fascists!"
Do you know what it's like to live in a world where 99% of the population have the bone deep conviction that a fundamental aspect of your being is wrong in some way, to have the knowledge of their error at hand but to have every attempt to communicate it thrown back at you, and to begrudgingly realize that many of those most guilty of this are actually right about basically every other subject of consequence? To have to show up to spaces full of abusive irrational psychopaths every single day just for a small chance at improving your world models because actually, no, at core they aren't abusive irrational psychopaths, they just have this weird blindspot that happens to correspond to exactly you and your life and nothing else. And to have to do it anyway, because you are obligated to truth.
Do you know what that does to a person's priors and general disposition Scott? Nevermind, you're probably not even going to read this because I once insulted Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I wish I were sure the thing you complain about is actually a bad strategy. It seems plausible to me that alienating 99 people in order to make 1 friend is actually a good trade for the average person, because iterating that will give you an adequate number of friends long before you run out of people to alienate on Twitter.
This, but replace people/tweets with companies/ads.
This just induced me to check to see if I was blocked by you on Twitter, but fortunately I was not.
Journalist here; watcher of twitter but less frequent twitterer. I try not to block people unless they extremely abusive. I don't mean "you're wrong", I mean "you're wrong and you should be executed and your children should be sold as slaves you fuckwit". (That's kind of on the mild side actually). I periodically go through my list of blocked to see if I can remember why i blocked them, if i can't, they get unblocked. I do realize that this is atypical behavior. It's just a shame that anger and lust are so well rewarded, which I guess is why I'm commenting here.
What is Twitter?
The solution is to stop using Twitter. Don't read people's garbage hot takes. Only read actual thought-through blog posts or articles and decide on that.
Pretty sure the Twitter'ers you're taking offense to are mostly disjoint from your blog readers. (At least I hope)
This is why my Twitter account is almost entirely drivel and jokes of no use to anyone. I have such an abhorrence of accidentally offending people that I preemptively defend myself by not saying anything interesting. You haven't blocked me because I neither reply to well-known people nor write anything that would be retweeted into their timelines.
Hmm. And only an hour ago I put out a twitter rant about a film director I particularly don't like. Point taken.
Your point here might be made clearer with some examples of hurtful things people said on Twitter to friends of yours. I'm sure you're not too keen on actually, like, dredging those up- but exhibiting the mildest instances for which you blocked someone might set a clearer ceiling for the level of rudeness/politeness you consider appropriate from others on Twitter.
The costs of criticizing people are way higher than most people understand. People hate being criticized, hate it when their friends are criticized. This is true even if it is fair reasonable criticism. Most people would be better off never publicly criticizing others.
I nervously wonder if the same is true about comments on the blog :-)
In a normal social environment, being divisive is a bad strategy:
Example 1) At work, if half of your coworkers like you, but the otherhalf of them hate you, you’re screwed
Example 2) In your social life, if half of your circle likes you, but the other half of them hate you, you get invited to nothing
In the market, it doesn’t work that way. If half of consumers like you, you’re rich. It doesn’t matter what the other half thinks
Journalists are living in the market, but you and I are living in a social environment. I think that’s the difference
I thought I was reading Freddie deBoer for a second. Glad I've never had a Twitter account!
"many of the people you most want to reach and befriend and keep on your side will hate you and never affiliate with you again."
You may want to consider the possibility that some of the people you are scolding here are not trying to reach or befriend or keep anybody on their side; they may simply be venting. There is also the possibility that they do want to reach, befriend, and keep people on their side, and that their tweets are meant to further that end, but that you are not one of those people.
Way to neatly encapsulate much of what is wrong with you and your writing Scott, I couldn't have done it better if I had tried.
From "I'm upset about people being petty and hyperbolic and snarky on Twitter" to writing the completely normal and not at all insulting or hyperbolic sentence "I worry that normal humans are imitating journalists".
This of course then turns into a whole paragraph of assumptions about why "journalists" are mean and why it's irrational to write like them. Maybe you would get a better theory of why people write mean and inflammatory stuff if you looked at yourself and at what specific mechanism pushed you toward this specific piece of drivel.
I mean at least, most people who write hyperbolic takes on Twitter limit them to a normal tweet length.
However I guess that there are a number of people who lack self-awareness and have time to inflate them to editorial length, you're not the only one. This is not the first time either, and I should know, I've been reading your stuff for close to 15 years at this point (remember Ganaj and Baby Twix ? I sure do).
Maybe you should reassess the way you consistently inflate (in your writing, in the theories you present, in your worldview) the importance and gravity of stuff, even the pettiest shit that merely happen to personally upset you.
The best decision I made was to tweet under my own name and always remember my boss, friends and people I respect but have different views can see my tweets. I’m still snarky sometimes but I hope never actually rude.
I'm not on twitter.
But.
If I'm supposed to care about being blocked for "some tiny, trivial annoyance" then the only reasonable thing to do is to never comment, right? Even here.
I've been down voted (not here!) for providing (accurate! sourced!) data to back up a position not my own. I have no idea if the down vote was because the person didn't like the data. Or the position (that I hadn't adopted). Or something else. But if this is a deal breaker then I just stop participating, right?
"More words, please," to quote a SlateStarCodex commenter from a few years back. I don't know what actionable thing anyone is supposed to do
Our capacity for love is equal to our capacity for hate.
I wonder if there's a steel man side to "the people who do these things". Perhaps they truly believe they are fighting some kind of cyber battle?
I'm 100% supportive of disincentivizing the kinds of tweets mentioned here.
That being said...I don't think it's desirable to have the position "I should never read anything somebody writes if I have have ever seen them make a certain kind of mistake on Twitter". Matt Yglesias is most definitely guilty of attacking strawmen, but he still has interesting ideas!
This post doesn't outright defend that position (it seems to be saying "this is how I work", not "this is how I *want* to work), and I'm curious how you'd like to behave. Like, let's say you could become the sort of person who can read half an article you find interesting, notice the byline, recognize it as somebody who was unfair on Twitter, and *not* close the article (and finish reading it instead, and perhaps engage with it) -- would you want to become that person?
I am sorry for whatever hurt your feelings, and imagine you must receive an awful lot of ugliness as a public figure. I recall being so hurt years ago that I almost unsubscribed to this blog when you said in a post you HATED everyone who voted for Trump and they hated you. I was actually surprised at how sad that made me. I voted for Trump for a variety of complicated reasons, even while I wished I saw a better alternative. But I don’t hate those who disagree with my choice, and liked to imagine that most others didn’t hate me. Reading that from you was like being sucker punched.
I don’t think I could be a public figure like you, receiving so much anger daily. That said, I hope you can leave a space for the possibility for kinder approaches to such disagreements.
I was really nervous about this article until I read the part that said "Only the ones with Twitter accounts". Now I feel gratified that Scott probably doesn't help me.
And yeah, you're absolutely right. I don't even want to make the effort to articulate why you're right (hypocritical as that is). Fuck that noise, and fuck the people adding to it.
I'm confused.
If you were told by someone that everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi, and you believed X, odds are that you were a Fox News viewer, but not because you were a fan of Rupert Murdoch.
You have Glenn Greenwald showing up on Fox News, the first thing you should be thinking "WFT is Glenn Greenwald on Fox News???"
And the second thing you should be thinking about is why he's claiming that 'journalist' is now practically a euphemism for 'shill for the D.C. establishment, particularly the Democratic party, and passive-thinking tool the CIA'.
The most confrontational thing about Fox News was that it had Tucker and Hannity back-to-back and that it alienated 1/3rd of its viewers by silencing the former for wondering why we're giving $100B to defend a country whose head of state is a guy in a track suit that was hand-picked by Victoria Nuland (the guy, not the track suit).
I read this whole thing waiting for the part where you say "I don't actually feel this way or block people this quickly, I was just trying to make a point about X" ....
But if you're at all serious, by blocking people so readily aren't you the one missing out? By blocking the 99% of people who at some point in their lives make a single transgression or a joke that's a bit sus or are a little bit too presumptuous about a complex issue?
I mean the ACX comments can't possibly be that pure.
Or is that your point that Matt Yglesias is too block-happy and he gets to get away with it because he's a big deal who expects others to listen to them and doesn't care if he listens to others? That's the whole point of this whole thing right? And you just never broke character right? You're doing an experiment on us right?
I think?
At the risk of this sounding like the sort of snarky twitter comment you're describing, this sounds like a really solid reason to not use twitter. If you admit that it leads to an uncontrollable urge to shut off people and movements who might have later said something interesting and worthwhile, that sounds like a solid argument to stop using it for your own epistemic well-being, not to mention emotional well-being. Sure, you might miss some interesting point they would have made on twitter, but if you're admitting there's a high chance you would have cut them off beforehand anyways, then it seems like the best option would be to avoid twitter where the incentives are in favor of making these low-value, enraging posts, and hope that they end up posting something useful on another platform that doesn't have these perverse incentives. This isn't just for Scott, I think for most people in general there's very little reason to still read twitter, the effect described here overrides any additional information you might find through it.
Oh man, this could have been such a great essay ... if only.
Media Company's incentives ... like when Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post, or Laurene Jobs owns controlling share of Atlantic, or philanthropic journalism, which means wealthy people paying for puff piece essays in major papers.
So yes, journalists don't have the same incentives as your or I, they could be getting paid to write pieces that take away our rights, effectively selling us down the river. Maybe not even getting paid, but being flattered with invitations to attend WEF global governance forums, write something nice about us. Are there wealthy corporation owners who would like to see a corporation sponsored global governance ala UN / WEF ? Yup. To save the climate, we'll eat bugs, won't travel, own nothing, locked in our 15 minute city ... and be happy :) Which is how the corporate overlords and their journalistic fiends wish to steer things.
That is what this essay should have been about.
Hm. Like some others who replied here, I wasn't impressed with this article, and think it's at odds with other elements of your approach. A friend reminded me of a previous article of yours—Rule Thinkers In, Not Out:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
It's not that there's nothing to your point. Twitter dunks are generally unpleasant and undesirable, and the more of a public figure you are, the more likely you are to run into people criticizing you in unfair and tiresome ways. It's not just Twitter, though. I still remember my first encounter with LessWrong. I was a young, religiously devout teenager, balancing my inclination towards skepticism with my love for my family, culture, and faith. I saw Eliezer Yudkowsky bluntly and rudely (per my recollection; it's been awhile) dismiss the idea of finding any value there. So I shrugged, and left, despite appreciating many of his other posts, because it was clear I didn't fit in.
You are one of the best writers in the Discourse at not conveying that feeling on most topics. You're considerate, careful, and charitable. You go out of your way to avoid contentless dunks. But even here, even among people who read and appreciate your blog, there are people who have felt that same irritation in response to your commentary. Here too, among people who read and appreciate your blog, there are people without ill intent who suddenly worry that by phrasing things in just the slightest wrong way, they will suddenly make an enemy-for-life out of someone they respect.
I think you misunderstand divisiveness for regular people. Taking any sort of stance, at any point, is inherently divisive. It was divisive when I was young and told people I was Mormon, it was divisive when I left and told people I no longer believed, it's divisive when I say I'm gay, it's divisive when I mention any of my political stances—to exist in public in any capacity is to be divisive. You will always push some people away and attract others. Indeed, many people who exist in public fail to attract others most because they're boring, not because they're divisive. Dunks are generally unpleasant, and generally unconstructive, and generally serve little function beyond tribal bonding by shared laughing at opponents. But they are not a uniquely bad strategy to get along with people; that they attract some and repel others is a feature for those who use them rather than a bug. It's a fast way to attract fellow-travellers, and no matter how niche someone's worldview is, it's not so niche that they can't find more than enough fellow-travellers online to have more potential friends than they know what to do with, given enough visibility.
Anyway: nobody controls their instincts, precisely, and as a public figure you should do what's best for your own sanity. Twitter is very often an unpleasant environment where block-early, block-often is a legitimate and understandable strategy. But I worry that by framing uncharitable dunks as a uniquely bad, maladaptive sin worth cutting all contact with someone forever over, you misdiagnose the core issue, create a sense that people should walk on eggshells when criticizing rationalists, and express an attitude at odds with your usual thoughtfulness. This essay just doesn't sit quite right with me.
> Fox News alienates millions of people with its confrontational style
> Journalists have shaped Twitter culture
Are those the same journalists though? I would rather expect most of journalists on Twitter - especially ones shaping the culture - to be members of JornoList rather than Fox News. And the ones who employ the "literally hitler" type of rhetoric - which, again, is not Fox News' invention.
A simpler explanation for the low quality of Twitter noise is Gresham's Law of the Internet: bad traffic drives out good. If you say something calm and sensible on social media, then the vast majority of readers will nod sagely in agreement, smile, and move on. But if you say something stupid and obnoxious, dozens of people will get annoyed and respond--many of them with something at least equally stupid and obnoxious--and the snowball will only grow from there. Note that this doesn't require people online to be any different from people in real life in terms of character, disposition, or motivation--all it requires is that the default response on social media be silence, rather than, say, the reciprocated banter typical of in-person social situations. Or to put it another way, it's very likely that at least 98% of shouts in a library are angry and out-of-control, because a non-angry person--or anyone with sufficient self-control--won't shout there.
Don't go on Twitter. It's bad. I've never heard a "actually, it's good" argument that I think holds water.
Planetary-scale speech platforms are just a bad idea
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/why-speech-platforms-can-never-escape-politics
There is a problem with this approach: often, a harsh but apt critique may only seem viciously unfair on account of inferential distance, and because inferential distance is strongly associated with illusion of transparency, such misunderstandings cannot straightforwardly be blamed on a lack of clarity on the part of the critic. In such a case, you will hate the critic out of what amounts to mere prejudice. For this reason, I have a heuristic of second guessing my assessment of critiques coming from scholarly people. If a person is generally thoughtful and erudite, it is likely that an apparently unfair critique has more depth than I was able to appreciate in my initial reading of it.
Also, if you're attending the same events with a person you take this kind of view of, and you're being sent their articles by people whose links you are paying attention to enough to click the article, that further suggests that the person should not be completely written off.
Scott hasn't blocked me on Twitter yet, not sure if that means I'm doing good at following his rule or if he just hasn't noticed my existence there yet.
Probably the second option.
Twitter delenda est.
...are you okay? 🫂
Probably, maybe, you should get off twitter then? That doesn't sound very psychologically heathy to me.
Sam Harris recently got off the juice and he can't seem to stop talking about how much better his life has gotten. Love your blog BTW.
Thank you for writing. I share the sentiment. Kindness and common courtesy are under-rated.
Are the incentives of Scott Alexander, professional blogger, closer to the incentives of a journalist or the incentives of a normal person?
Things are probably different when you're on Twitter and are some random guy nobody knows about and when you're on Twitter and are well-known enough that more than Dunbar's Number of people want to talk to you.
I appreciate the honesty. While it would be easy to write off some of your behavior you describe as an irrational overcorrection, it’s imminently human and I’ve done many of the same things. One troubling thing about this dynamic is that people in your position, engaged heavily in online discourse as a blogger/journalist/“public intellectual” are given the most flak and thus most susceptible to overcorrection and generalization beyond a bad actor to their group or viewpoint and it hurts the general tenor of debate more than if that happened to someone like myself with little reach and thus little direct exposure to online ugliness (but even a small exposure can be toxic).
Uh, was that parody? Hypersensitivity is a cornerstone of wokeness, starting back with micro-aggressions. This is similar to cancel culture, where someone who, intentionally or not, said something offensive is ignored for all-time on all topics.
Can we make a case for thicker skin? Forgiveness? People are complex and can make a mistake or say something I don't like, but *I* should still be willing to listen to them on other topics or even on the same topic later after they or I have cooled down.
<I'm getting blocked forever for posting this, aren't I? 😥>
It seems unfortunate that insult -based trumor is a thing of the past. I guess once all the risk associated with it was gone, once it became the new normal, it just turned into another clickbait.
I'll count that as another unfortunate win for Watts' "maintain nonsensical taboos to have fun,"
This is completely alien to my experience of the world. If I see someone on Twitter saying that everyone who thinks the way I do is an insane idiot who should be killed before they destroy society, I laugh and move on with my life. I kind of respect it, honestly. I read posts by people who hate me all the time, I don't take it personally at all and it's weird to me that anybody does.
Honestly I feel much more comfortable in online spaces where people can be directly confrontational than in spaces where it's taken for granted that everyone is intensely emotionally vulnerable, to the point where a single offensive post can ruin their whole day and create a decades-long grudge, and so we all have to very carefully tiptoe around each other's feelings.
If you're talking about persuading people of your arguments - well, that goes both ways. One of the things that's really put me off liberalism over the years is the way that American liberal culture valorises emotional fragility. I feel that I can't have real conversations in liberal spaces because the other participants get so stressed out by any hint of conflict that I can't express criticisms directly - so I just avoid these spaces.
In my experience, trying to be nice to liberals so they'll feel less threatened by your ideas and you can have an honest conversation doesn't actually work. I've tried it a bunch of times and it has always completely failed. People are very sensitive to subtext and they'll move to shut you down as soon as they detect that you're approaching a disagreement, no matter how non-threatening you try to make yourself.
I don't really understand why people do this. Honestly, if you really are getting mad at guys who have similar names to guys who make fun of people you vaguely know on Twitter - if reading this post is going to leave you with a lingering distaste for people named Matt twenty years later - then I think you are unusually sensitive to conflict, to a degree that's probably not healthy, and it's unreasonable to expect people to make concessions to it.
But almost all online liberalism is people expecting what seems to me to be unreasonable concessions to their mental health. So you're in good company there.
>I worry that normal humans are imitating journalists
No, journalists are imitating normal humans. Normal people started saying dumb shit for attention first, it was only later that journalists realized they could get paid to do it as well.
Oof. As someone whose comments here are far too tilted towards snark for my general comfort, this hits home. I hope I haven't contributed too much to this effect. (I wish substack had a way to view all of one's own comments; that would be useful data for self-improvement.) At least I've never had a Twitter account.
I was going to comment on the canalization entry, but I might as well do it here, although I'm in the depths of a covid fever. I was drifting in and out of consciousness, and my mind somehow wandered to the question of "if I were born knowing everything I know now, what would I do differently?" Aside from money-making schemes, of course, and saving an uncle who died early. Eventually I came up with the idea of trying to summarize the dynamics of the current era's political dysfunction, either descriptively or in a story (a la Eliezer), and sticking it on enough places in the early Internet that it would be remembered and seen as a dystopia to avoid.
It'd go something like this, starting from early days. Networks become connected, access to networks becomes widespread, the cost of hosting information on a server goes up with the number of users, and advertising becomes the way to finance this "Internet". Advertisers track users' behavior to determine what ads to show them. Some people use advertising to make money; they do this by finding the "content" that attracts the most "eyeballs". As access spreads, people have individual accounts, they see a "feed" of posts from other people they choose. This feed starts as all content from the people they chose, but eventually is determined by an algorithm that selects the content that "engages" them the most. Unfortunately, this turns out to be adversarial politics. 1984 is misleading: the government there wants to maintain control, but this is about making money. The best way to generate content is to "crowd-source" it, by letting individual users make the content, and then using a process of natural selection to evolve it into the most "engaging" form possible. The result is a society divided into two roughly equal sides, each of which is fed an endless stream of the horrors that the other side commits, each of which spews vitriol about the other and then is fed that vitriol right back. No one really cared about the 2 minutes of hate, but when half the society is Big Brotherites and half the society is Emmanuel Goldsteinites, they spend every free moment saying horrible things about each other.
There was more, but, well, covid fever. It feels like sunburn.
Regarding canalization, I just want a way to identify what it is that makes us hatescroll, and kill it. That's it, that's all. Just kill that one thing, the urge to log in and see whether my snark has produced any positive reinforcement.
Great cautionary reminder
Hope this is a sin I’ve largely avoided
Anyone else read the first few paragraphs and immediately hop over to Twitter to see if we've been blocked? (I am still in the clear apparently)
Twitter is optimized to produce stupidity. That's what the character limit is for. It makes it impossible to provide context or have a reasoned discussion. Even smart people must be stupid on Twitter.
You're probably right that making lots of low-value comments is a bad strategy for networking with influencers, such as yourself. But the argument you made implies that it would be a good strategy for becoming an influencer, or for networking with other non-influencers. I think that's what more people are trying to do.
Wonderful, truly
One day a year should be declared "good journalism day", in the same way that there are other days.
Every journalist or serious commentator should write a piece about why they think they're good journalists. What is the evidence they're being objective? How sincere are they? They ought to present that case.
I wonder how many comments I've made that have alienated others. I'd like to think I've learned lessons from each failure, and have grown beyond them. I think the nature of the internet is that people often aren't thinking clearly about the comments they're making, and learning to be a good participant takes time and effort.
One time on Reddit I made an overly critical comment about a book, and the actual author responded to me. I felt so bad, because it was a really poorly worded glib comment which was taking out frustration from other aspects of my life on their book.
Another time I was trying out a software engineering library, I was tired and frustrated, so I wrote a mean tweet about it which was eventually seen by the library's creator.
There's probably hundreds of small interactions like this which I remember vividly.
Interesting how much of a scissor statement this seems to be. "I block people who I find unpleasant on twitter with fairly low tolerance" and the reaction seems to be like evenly split between "I can't believe Scott would admit to this, this has undermined my faith in them as a rationalist" and "duh".
It seems like maybe the people in the former category see Scott's Twitter Feed as a public space and someone should not be removed from there without good reason, just as someone should not be prevented from speaking in public without good reason, and the people in the "duh" category see Scott's feed as a private thing he can cultivate how he likes.
Four years ago there was this pretty cool author who wrote:
"But I think there’s a similar phenomenon that gets less attention and is even less defensible – a sort of intellectual outrage culture. “How can you possibly read that guy when he’s said [stupid thing]?” I don’t want to get into defending every weird belief or conspiracy theory that’s ever been [stupid thing]. I just want to say it probably wasn’t as stupid as Bible codes. And yet, Newton.
Some of the people who have most inspired me have been inexcusably wrong on basic issues. But you only need one world-changing revelation to be worth reading."
I wonder what happened to that guy.
"A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day." -Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
A guy from high school used this as his senior quote in our yearbook. He now writes for the Wall Street Journal, suggesting that incentives may not drive this behavior, just a specific personality type.
<quote>I worry that normal humans are imitating journalists.</quote>
I mean, like half of the commenters here are trying to push their own substack
Human nature isn't journalist's fault.
I refuse to believe that anyone, including Scott and every commenter here, has not done one of these things at some point:
-said everyone who believed X was an idiot and a Nazi
-read the title but not the body of an article about some group and viciously insulted them based on a misunderstanding of their position.
-spent five seconds thinking of a clever dunk on someone and ruined their day.
This reminds me of Rationalist self-congratulatory posts on LessWrong that would have titles like "Why do so many people suffer from the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" but once you get past the terminology would essentially be "Why are normies so much dumber than me?"
We're ALL dumb. We're ALL assholes on Twitter sometimes. Just sometimes you don't realize it. Blocking people who annoy you probably helps with not realizing that you annoyed them too. Maybe that's fine. Maybe you have a right to decide who is worth your empathy. Maybe that's just how normal social interaction works: we don't associate with people we dislike... and why should we??
But I've no idea where journalists enter the picture here and I see no evidence to support that anyone other than readers of this blog see journalists as evil trolls who just get clicks by exploiting hate.
Hypothetically, if aliens offered you a job with similar hours and pay but you were 100% anonymous would you take it?
I ask because this is often my thought. A lot of people who are famous say that, while the money and power it provides are nice, the actual fame is mostly a downside. I'm not sure if they're posing or not though.
If he hasn't already do so, Scott should invent some sock puppets and experience the joy of being outrageously honest to people on the internet. Just make sure you think hard about which way is punching up. People are often very confused about this.
Yea why even be on twitter
This hurts a little bit. I do have a Twitter account but only because it's a necessary evil for things I do or am interested in. Accounts like Nancy Pelosi Stock Tracker are extremely useful!
Whenever I see americans talking about twitter, it feels like a parallel world. Is it not possible to use twitter and just... don't engage with the culture war?
I've used twitter daily for about 5 years to keep up with what friends and acquaintances are up to and to share random stuff from my everyday life. Not only do I never see culture war or political content, I've never blocked anyone and have never been blocked (to the best of my knowledge).
What am I missing about the anglosphere twitter experience? (Or... the terminally online twitter experience for that matter)
Isn't it the other way round, media started to imitate 'social media'?
This doesn't take anything from the main argument.
Thanks as always for your writing and your courage Scott in raising this issue. I've had a bit of a think about this and I'm sorry this comment is a bit lengthy. I think I've seen this dismissive swipe most with what I've assumed is online pay-trolls trying to drive culture war stuff. I think this phenomenon is notable and it's not personal horridness, nor just media companies, but also an element in the tactics of the troll armies. Mobbing is a sufficient core (human? social primate? social vertebrate?) activity, I think one of the strategic aims is to start mobbing against anyone who has the capacity to bridge across the most promoted chasms, the ones that have the most potential to help the anglosphere engage with its political problems constructively. I tend to hold in mind that the anglosphere's political enemy has a drive to discredit the anglosphere's, and more generally, democratic nations' courts, government, universities, and medicine, because if those are hopelessly corrupt and damaging to citizens and the economy, it's easier to justify totalitarian subjection of the enemy nations' own populations.
There has been a weird feeling of battleships in the fog for about three and a half years now, so I'm still navigating by principles such as 'back slowly towards people you consider trustworthy' and 'establish lines of communication with possibly friendly entities'. There was so much bad troll mobbing in the lockdowns cf https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/china-covid-lockdown-propaganda . I just saw it everywhere the last few years, particularly intense 2020/2021. I was watching obscure forums being mobbed by teams driving opinion, either the mind killers that make you feel dead clever or the loony goons whose aim is to make you think anyone who disagrees is a half wit or worse. And anything relevant and evidence based would disappear over the fold pretty fast, either the thread slid or the whole forums slid, this stuff: https://ronaldthomaswest.com/2017/08/21/the-gentlepersons-guide-to-forum-spies/
Mobbing as an art form must have got pretty highly developed under survive or die totalitarian regimes. One hypothesis I have for what I've seen is that people directing the trolls were looking at the social media graphs, had spotted that someone's hidden influencer, spouse or whatever, was on that forum and it was part of an indirect attempt to distort decision makers' judgement and cut them off from useful sources of feedback into the larger social system. I guess that could be what Spalding means by network warfare in 'War without rules', it could mean exactly this kind of manipulation of the social network to achieve outcomes hostile to nations' health and security.
I think enough people are driven by the urge to mob or avoid mobbing that these dismissive swipes are currently effective enough of the time to trigger mobbing. That is discouraging good faith attempts to do adversarial collaborations to address some of societies' more pressing current problems. Without those attempts, the social chasms driven by these forces continue to widen in mutual incomprehension and hence the social body loses the benefit of the error correction that is made possible by being in touch with societies' feedback loops, through adversarial parliamentary processes and so on. So, calling out the behaviours that seem to trigger mobbing, and encouraging the intelligent reader to think about what might be happening, and possibly to orient towards a larger framework of values, might be of strategic important to our nations' health and security, especially because the rationalists hold a fairly influential cultural position in the anglosphere. The values and principles we hold dear have the potential to enable powerful larger scale co-operations or to disable them. It's not just courageous to draw attention to these dismissive swipes out of a longing for humane behaviour, it might be important for humans to operate with some degree of co-operative intelligence.
I was originally going to comment something about "how do I balance this with the need to filter for niche nerds who are like me?", but then I remembered that the post is actually literally about dunks/insults. o_0
This, in a meta way, got to a core problem I have: I want to do smart and nice things with smart and nice people, yet these (especially the social stuff) requires me to be so careful + actually have anything like a self-filter, that even trying to practice/exercise that basic self-filtering skill feels physically draining. (ADHD + poor sleep btw, but just pointing these out doesn't do much!)
As someone who does not have a twitter account, this subsubstack is hilarious
A while ago, I generalized some similar observations about incentives, motivations and algorithms into an almost banal, possibly profound, and ultimately very depressing conclusion that has lodged itself like a chicken bone in my morality and wreaked havoc on my productivity:
“If your actions affect people’s well-being, and you optimize for anything other than people’s well-being, you are part of the problem.”
This has always been true to some degree, but its impact and significance stands in relationship to the leverage you have. Harmonious balance is a happy accident that occurs when no one has enough leverage to make a significant difference. But as our leverage (as individuals and organizations) increases to unprecedented, unhealthy levels, so does the damage we cause – and our responsibility to check our motivation and incentives, and to moderate our speech (gasp!), actions and algorithms.
This is relevant to everyone from journalists and philanthropists to Silicon Valley engineers and McDonald’s cashiers. None of us who can read this – and certainly no one on Twitter – are far from the devastating edge of this particular axe.
I mean, if people could stop doing it when you tell them, you also wouldn't hate poor Alfric in the first place?
I’m a bit snarky with my real life friends and we get along great (been 30 years with most of them). Occasionally I’m tempted to be as snarky online but then remember that it comes across very different with people you aren’t already friends with. Then I usually delete the comment.
I've never used twitter, and I agree with this attitude generally--of being charitable and engaging with what someone's actually saying, not a strawman. But there's a big problem here that isn't being addressed.
Some positions really do deserve nothing but vicious mockery. I think the vast majority of people would agree with that. If you call yourself a Nazi or a Marxist-Leninist, there are only two possible things that can be said about you, as far as I can tell: you're completely ignorant of the entire history of the 20th century, or you're a sociopath. The wokeness problem arose when someone said "but what *really* is the difference between defending the holocaust and 'misgendering' me?" and instead of meeting with the mockery they deserved, many people decided that was a reasonable thing to say. And all sanity in our society was destroyed that day.
Scott's response seems to be that the only way to stop new taboos being made up every day to protect insane new ideas that would never survive free rational scrutiny, is to eliminate all taboos entirely, even ones against defending the mass murder of millions. I don't think that's a remotely workable solution. Most people in a healthy society are going to have taboos against horrible things. But also, in an actually healthy society most people are not going to allow these taboos to be transfered to mere criticism of someone's political beliefs or failing to validate their "identity". The fact that this has been allowed to happen shows that something about basic social discourse and common sense has been broken. There's a much deeper problem here.
I think people often confuse the positions ”I block you because you’re bad and deserve it as punishment” and ”I block you because I find you mildly annoying and it’s a way of curating my feed”.
The latter is the Yglesias position; not sure which Scott is going for here, though.
I'm confused about his comfort with blocking people. I enjoy online political conversations with people who are both rude and very politically different from me because that Venn diagram often contains people with valuable data from cultures I rarely experience. I'd prefer these conversations to not be online, but we've sorted ourselves into such bubbles geographically that I usually have to settle for that. Some of my favorite insights have come from listening to the wisdom of these people. I had assumed Scott is doing this too because he has so much of the data and outside the box thinking that I get from these conversations. Is there a more efficient way of getting data about political cultures with very non-rationalist norms?
This reminds me of the time I wrote a comment about AI and Scott wrote a cross reply to mine.
At least I don't use Twitter though.
I'm constantly struggling with some mental health problems. Sometimes it gets better, and sometimes it gets worse, so I'm trying to always be on the lookout for things that help or harm me.
Recently, I've noticed that I'm constantly being on twitter and it constantly makes me miserable. I'm not quite sure why I was so intent on spending so much of my time in a place that has such a negative impact on my quality of life. But I was constantly upset with people saying stupid, cruel, unnecessary things, in a way that this post sort of reminded me of. (I don't mean to say that the post is stupid or cruel; I mean that the description of these traumatizing interactions sounds sort of similar).
So I decided to quit. The problem was that checking out twitter had turned into something of a constant instinct. I'd just open twitter automatically, as a way of procrastination.
I dealt with this in two ways. I deleted the twitter app from my phone, obviously. But on my laptop, I could still open twitter in by browser, and did this automatically, without thinking. So I just logged out. It's not hard at all to log back in, but every time I opened twitter, there was basically a reminder: "hey, remember you wanted to quit this place?"). I guess I should have just deleted my profile, I don't know.
The second way was that I tried to think of something to procrastinate with, instead of Twitter. At first I wanted to read a specific book instead of being a twitter. This didn't really stick; now I'm procrastinating on Manifold ;D
The effects on my mental health were awesome - I could compare it with the periods when I'm able to sleep well: my spirit is just so much stronger. I think anyone who feels miserable on Twitter might want to consider doing this.
Is the business model of being a lying jerk variety of journalist online really that profitable? Doesn't it say as much about the audience then ("normal people"), as the journalist?
If only young me from 20 years ago read this.
Twitter is obviously horrible and net-negative. The fact that the "rationality community" can't seem to be able to stop hitting itself is probably the the most prominent mark against its alleged rationality these days.
I expect most people replying to this won't completely relate to how often Scott has this experience. There are really big differences between 20 followers (boring), 200 followers (ideal), 2000 followers (hosting a big party - I am here), 20k followers (low-key celebrity) and 200k (high-key celebrity - Scott is here). The number of people you have to block in order to have a nice time escalates really quickly
unfortunately almost everything - however nuanced it is - will alienate someone - SSC included. So we can try at best to control it.
I really hate most social media users because they have no nuance and if you don't follow them in lockstep and believe what they believe and hate whom they hate, they will call you bad names and try to destroy your life. They're just horrible judgemental people in general and part of the reason I radicalize extremists who hate these people and teach my followers how to build cool weapons is because I don't feel like I have any obligation to coexist with people who are unwilling to tolerate me expressing my viewpoints.
And the obvious solution is to stay off twitter and ignore the news media. But hardly anyone does that. Why not?
What about if I have a Twitter account but never use it, I just got it because someone else was posting something on Twitter and I needed it to see that?
This is a silly post. The only way to avoid alienating anyone is to be silent and if everyone was silent about important issues, nothing would ever get done. Imagine a world where people kept silent about sexual abuse in the Catholic church to avoid being shunned by Catholics! Or a world where nobody discussed the potential side effects of puberty blockers because some members of the trans community might interpret that as an attack!
I think an important part of being a rationalist is to understand that nobody is perfect all the time. We should try to understand people's motives instead of reacting with our emotions. My impression is that people who engage in the behaviors you described are following their natural incentives. From their point of view, the friends they gain are worth more than the enemies they make.
Hate is such a strong word it's easy to forget that in this evidently dichotomous(duelist?) world there is the other extreme and the often preferable middle range.
"Lewis joins Freud in warning that all forms of human love “carry in them the seeds of hate.”... Lewis warns: “It was of erotic love that the Roman poet said, ‘I love and hate,’ but other kinds of love admit the same mixture. They carry in them the seeds of hatred. If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.”
--Armand M. Nicholi, 2002
There's huge value to cutting this off at the root: those actual media companies which began and still drive this style of discourse, for the dollars and views and clicks and dark whuffies.
The years where I'm on a news blackout and a twitter blackout are largely peaceful. I can get the updates I need from friends, long form books, and occasional long think pieces, with very little of the toxicity. Change my mind.
Scott, please help me integrate this post with the rest of your evident worldview - the rational bits, the overcoming bias bits, and all the other optimistic, humanitarian, or psychological-wellbeing-improver bits.
Do you really hate *these people?* Aren’t you perhaps trying to make a commentary about particular *behavior* or *choices* of people?
Does this argument feel poised for maximal alpha in the marketplace of ideas, or did you maybe just give the sneer clubbers a bunch of red meat, and broadside a bunch of other folks with a sawed-off toxoplasma shotgun?
Are you ok, dude? You wanna take some of them research chemicals and talk about it?
This is true for most twitter users but not all. There's a long tail of people futilely trying to make it in the creator economy or trying to build an audience for other reasons (like to market their startup or because they desire fame).
I personally try to take risks in my social media and write to a niche, because I do want to get a large following, but I try keep my posts positive, honest, and reflective of my actual personality in meatspace. There's a way of baring your soul to the world and viewing your self as something to be mined for engagement. It's fun and it's possible to do while mostly providing a good experience to people
Part of the problem is that Twitter isn't good at distinguishing positive engagement from negative engagement and so it amplifies some really toxic stuff. YouTube is much better at this (they literally ask a sample of users how they feel after watching a video) and as a result, the top individual YouTuber, MrBeast makes content that is positive and doesn't dunk on people at all.
Just skimmed the first third of this article and I must say, pretty shitty work Scott
I'm more forgiving because I remember being 14 and not knowing better and reading the op-eds for that delicious feeling of righteous indignation. So I think I know where they're coming from. But it is kind of horrible, that inclination to dunk dunk dunk.
After reading a bunch of the comments, what stands out to me is that people find being blocked pretty upsetting [1] maybe more so than tweets saying groups they belong to are awful. This creates a tension in that Scott seems to be advocating behaving in a way that often has the same hurtful consequences that he critisizes -- and often ppl won't have intended to be hurtful and (often correctly) believe they are behaving appropriately to the medium (and often are simply misunderstood). Ofc there are ppl who are just assholes too.
That doesn't mean that I think Scott or anyone else should be required to endure these annoyances or investigate into weather it was a misunderstanding or not. They can't and don't have the time. Rather, I think it means we just have to accept that the nature of twitter means that even people of goodwill end up hurting each other and that the best we can try to do is understand that it's often not personal -- just a collision of incompatible needs. And I think being clear that blocking isn't a negative moral judgement helps with that.
People who are using Twitter to vent and fuminate about things aren't being anymore evil than Scott is when he blocks you w/o spending a bunch of time to figure out what you really meant by that tweet, who the intended audience was and how serious you were. Scott's just protecting his own wellbeing even if that sometimes means ppl get hurt when he blocks them. I think grousing hyperbolicly especially when you intended audience is people who you see as allies serves a similarly important psychological role for other people.
Perhaps the ideal solution is to fucking burn Twitter to the ground and replace it with a system that allows for more clearly defined norms for various spaces. Short of that, I want to suggest we all just treat behavior on Twitter the way we might treat behavior by someone who is plastered and/or drugged up -- unless of course you say something I find upsetting in which case you and your whole family deserve immediate crucifixion ;-).
--
1: And I understand why ppl find it upsetting, getting blocked especially when you haven't been disrespectful or rude is a jarring experience. If I looked up to and respected EY like I do Scott or a number of other ppl I'd have been quite hurt at being blocked especially when I felt I'd always gone out of my way to be polite. Since I don't find EY particularly admirable or a great thinker (don't dislike him as a person just think he's overrated bc his story skills hide arg weaknesses) I only found it a bit unpleasant.
But I apparently found it sufficiently unpleasant that I included this footnote largely to express my irritation at it. So if it was from someone I did admire that would be quite hurtful.
One might reasonably point out that making the representatives of your outgroup suffer is the point. For example, a random Democrat might take pride in the thought that something they said so wounded Donald Trump that he seethes whenever he sees the random Democrat's name.
So long as this behavior is confined to appropriate contexts (twitter, public executions, etc.) the incentives of the random participant seem perfectly aligned with their behavior. Perhaps the people who are mistaken are those who believe that they are participating in and guiding a National Conversation, rather than merely providing a source of entertainment.
Oh, it’s definitely in our genes that is most fundamental level. Leaving dogs out of it for a second because they have a very limited vocal range and just because they bark doesn’t mean they’re feeling nasty. The face-to-face performative show of aggression has the promise of escalating into something more fundamental, and that serves as a kind of limiter, I feel most of what occurs on the Internet. I would call a form of passive aggression. You can unleash the stream of vitriol on someone and have absolutely no skin in the game. I chose my pen name to remind me of this fact every time I write something down here.
I find this piece really weird. Like, I don’t have Twitter but I do regularly doomscroll it and my main question is…how do you function? Like I think for some groups they have this reaction but they can sustain it because they are part of a closely knit enough ingroup with enough party discipline and well understood/shared sacred cows that people can be careless all they want within well-defined boundaries and not risk losing the readers who were actually going to be reading them in the first place - and in these groups you’ll just get soft or hard cancelled the first time you cross the boundary. I don’t have that luxury because there is just no group of people that I share perfect boundaries with and that doesn’t sometimes annoy me like this, probably pretty often, and yes that includes rationalists, and I kind of suspect you don’t have that luxury either.
Don’t get me wrong, low effort social media dunks and poor reading comprehension are bad etc etc, but you are making a stronger point that this. You are saying that if someone writes some dumb bad dunk once on social media that happens to gore one of your sacred cows, you block them, will avoid reading anything they write again, won’t feature or recommend them on ACX, and will avoid them at parties. Also let’s assume pretty much everyone else does this and so if you do it you’ll lose 99% of your friends. The former comment just comes off to me, no offense, as kind of pathological, and the latter just doesn’t seem true unless you assume everyone else is like that (and again ignore the dynamics of people who can and are willing to completely ensconce themselves in a very insular social bubble with very well established boundaries).
Like, if I’m going to take kind of a stab in the dark, my best guess about this piece is something like: you rarely use social media, because if you did how could you possibly keep this up; you used it recently; someone you really didn’t want to hate forever did a dunk you found particularly annoying and now you are really frustrated that you have to hate even them forever; you decided to write this as basically a plea that people not do this because you really don’t want to lose anyone else you liked again (it won’t work, your norm is too unforgiving, maybe like Julia Galef would pass this bar, but this is Twitter let’s be realistic); you go on a tangent about how people are becoming too influenced by journalists so that it doesn’t look like this is whole point of the post.
This point about journalism might be an interesting post in itself, if you’re right it would even be an interesting reversal! Many people think it’s the other way around and low effort dunks from journalists have gotten to where they are in large part because of the incentives of social media and how people read/interact with content on it. But this piece isn’t that one, the main argument it gives is pointing to your personal, in my opinion weirdly draconian, social media habits, so it’s hard for me to believe that it’s really the point. Again, this is something of a stab in the dark, I really hope this won't come off the wrong way and alienate you. I’m not trying to just take a cheap swipe, I enjoy your content and respect you as a thinker (even though I'm almost certain that I wouldn't still if I followed this rule of yours myself), but maybe consider that this is kind of a problem you should work on? It doesn’t sound pleasant or sustainable, nor like it’s fully fair to flawed people using something like social media in extremely typical ways.
I'm not sure if this is really all that true. Anyone who's ever been to a soccer/football match in Germany (probably applies to UK, Spain, Italy, France as well; animosities in US professional sports have never appeared as aggressive to me, but that may be a misperception) can confirm that hating on Others for their Other-ness is a perfectly valid bonding strategy (even if all potential Others vastly outnumber the own group) that trumps most bonding over positive things in effectiveness, at least for a certain kind of friends/acquaintances.
Luckily, for most fans of Team X, chanting for 12 hours straight how all fans of Team Y are MFs and SoBs does not mean they couldn't be best friends with fans of Team Y. So maybe the issue partially is with taking things all too serious: people like to feel witty and to feel as if they emerge as the winner from a spat, and can't possibly imagine that for their targets it is about anything else. Implying that they're trying to act like Fox News seems far-fetched.
"I’ve sometimes found myself being irrationally uncharitable to everyone named Albert or Allen or Alvin just because a totally different guy named Alfred was a jerk on Twitter."
get fucked, Albert Einstein
I feel exactly the same way. I remember being excited to find the rationalist community on Twitter, having read Scott’s content and LessWrong for years. I found a couple great follows, but the vast majority of popular rationality-adjacent Twitter figures were...awful. Low effort dunks, in group signaling, lazy out group hatred, a truly profound lack of insight. Almost all of it is recycled insights from Less Wrong, with a healthy dose of banal or stupid political signaling grafted on.
obviously i didnt ever post say anything critical to them on twitter myself - i try to be very charitable on social media.
But i've never lost respect for a tribe faster than being exposed to the kind of banal, bad-faith shitposts that they apparently think are funny or insightful. before that point i'd strongly considered showing up to LW or SSC meetups.
obviously i feel this way about left and right wing twitter influencers too. Before this point I would’ve thought rationalists would’ve been more immune to this kind of thinking. Twitter was a very rude awakening, ha
I think it is a bad article.
It is true that many people on twitter needlessly offend each other and that doesn't help discourse at all.
But equally true is that people hate and block each other also for opinions that are expressed politely because they simply disagree with them.
If I say that covid vaccine mandates were not justified because the scientific data already showed that these vaccines do not prevent the spread of covid, many people get offended and call me antivax. When I object that I am actually pro-vaccine, I am a vaccinator and I am actually more worried that those vaccine mandates have reduced the vaccination rates for routine vaccinations in children, I get blocked.
The same happens when I say that the latest evidence shows that mask mandates were not justified or that lockdowns did more harm than good.
Or even if I say that in my opinion bitcoin was a great idea but in practical implementation it didn't work and we should drop it. When Scott expressed displeasure with my opinion, I learned to keep my mouth shut about this. Apparently I just don't know how to express unpopular opinion. I simply avoid talking about it and take solace that the history shows that I was right. That's probably the best way because it could also be a case when history shows that I am not right.
Other people may not be so patient so they become bitter and refuse to accept all the abuse and respond with the same abuses and the discourse becomes toxic.
The problem still remains – how can we discuss ideas that we think are important but the majority is against them. For example, you are living in Russia and are against the war in Ukraine because you clearly see how it damages both Russia and Ukraine and makes everything worse. How do you talk about that without being called an enemy of the state? It is probably impossible in Russia. You can do it only very discreetly with great risk to your reputation.
Or you can go to twitter, create anonymous account and write offensive things about politicians you hate. Unfortunately it works both ways and many Russians write nasty things about Ukrainian politicians they hate.
I don't have a twitter account, or even read much twitter, but twitter seems to different things. First, a flame war machine running on hot takes and dunks. Also, sometimes serious people post serious stuff on twitter.
The problem is that these two spheres overlap on the same platform.
No reasonable person would complain about seeing someones lewd videos after entering their name on a porn website. (They might object to that person doing porn in the first place, but they can hardly claim to be offended to see it. Going out of your way to find out what kinks a specific person does and then complaining about their kinks seems disingenuous, however.)
Similarly, rage-only twitter would be a an obvious eternal flame war where asbestos underpants on the parts of the audience are implied. Assume everyone taking part to be a terrible human being who will insult anyone. Being personally insulted by anything specific after reading rage-only twitter would be like being offended by some kink on pornhub.
Twitter is then a mixture of rage-only twitter and people trying to be serious, which goes about as well as having a room which is half sex dungeon and half cloister: virtually anything anyone does in the former will personally offend people in the latter.
I would tentatively argue that perhaps, twitter is best suited for rage. The character limit lends itself to hot takes, snarks and dunks. Serious people have to resort to chaining tweets into threads because you can not really make a substantial argument within the character limit.
Of course, neither the serious people nor the flame-warriors will go anywhere, both are deeply entrenched in twitter. Still, I think the best bet would be another platform which offers people with serious contributions a similar reach as twitter, and leaving twitter itself rage-only.
> If you alienate 99 people and get one person to say “Wow! You have exactly the same flavor of hatred for people who plant petunias that I do, but you express it so much more cruelly, I bet you’re literally making them cry, it really made my day!” you will not become the 71st richest man in the world.
Twitter is a messaging service. It's not about the money, it's about sending a message.
I get it, and I also have an itchy block trigger finger. I believe I successfully avoid the dunking activities for the most part.
But there are some people who have become notable and famous on Twitter. And some who have parlayed that into real-world influence. So there is an incentive there. If you have the skills to be "good" at Twitter, that may be the shortest path.
Sorry for upsetting you or alienating you. I can't attend to *everyone* who gets alienated by realities I need humanity to get used to ASAP, but your opinion matters to me. Anytime you wanna shoot me a message so we can negotiate personalized discourse norms and subsequently work through our disagreements, my discord is nervewrangler. You can also reach me at methodicalTelepathy@hotmail.com.
If it's worth anything, I was suspended from twitter last night.
I think you've got it backwards about Fox alienating people. I don't think people who hate Fox watch Fox, it's people who watch networks that hate Fox who hate Fox. Similarly with other media. There are so many times I've heard people say the Daily Mail is evil and they hate it, and generally those people have never actually read the Daily Mail -- they read competing media that tells them to hate the Daily Mail.
I was once in an argument with a sports writer on twitter. The argument involved no name calling or anything from both sides until then. He indirectly called me a person without a deep understanding. But i let that slide as he is a sports writer. The moment I resorted to name-calling on some other related thread, he blocked me and I regret that till now. I probably became a bad example of what happens when famous people interact with laymen.
I hate that Scott's Face-Heel turn happened on my birthday. This is the guy who wrote long spiels against cancel culture and started his whole blog with a manifesto declaring charity for ideas and open debate. And then.... something went wrong. And now he's just fine blocking people for mildly annoying him with the way they express their ideas... never mind that he may not have proof against these ideas or they may be non-neurotypical or not know how to express things without "mildly annoying you". I will say it, and don't care if it gets me blocked. This person has these rights as an anonymous individual, but he does not deserve or is qualified to be a rationalist figurehead. Power and influence comes with responsibilities, and if you openly reject such responsibilities you should find a suitable replacement who is willing to carry them.
"It can’t possibly be worth it for you. The fact that you skimmed the first third of a thinkpiece..."
Scott, mockery and derision have proven value in propaganda and polemics. Mockery can be a quick, easy way to undermine somebody's public reputation.
Let's say you troll Matt Yglesias and he blocks you. So do 40 other American centrists who really care about civility. If you've diminished or discredited MY in the eyes of 60 other Americans, that's a pretty big win. This is a democratic republic after all, and the majority rules.
Ruthless? Sure. But ruthlessness is a famously effective solution to a power imbalance. Yglesias is a centrist, and centrists have inordinate control over the Overton Window of "acceptable discourse." They hold the levers of power. Of course they are polite! You can afford to be polite when you have all the power.
This only works if the public doesn't care about civility, and I don't think they do. They care less and less every day.
Media companies aren't qualitatively more incentivized than individuals to dunk instead of being thoughtful. Individual people are being irrational relative to more ideal versions of themselves when they give in to their instincts to short-sightedly dunk on [ strangers and issues they don't understand ] in public; their lives would get better if they found something more productive to do and stopped doing this. But also, journalists and media companies are being irrational relative to more ideal versions of themselves when they give in to their [ instincts/incentives ] to short-sightedly dunk on [ strangers and issues they don't understand ] in public; they would enjoy a wider audience and make more money if they could instead do journalism that appealed to everyone by covering events honestly and thoughtfully. Yet media companies, as well as individuals, are not covering events honestly and thoughtfully, and instead are dunking.
Our long-term incentives say to be nice to each other - that's why everyone's frustrated that we're failing at it. When we ignorantly dunk in public, we're *all* succumbing to some kind of impediment to our ability to be as far-sighted and reflective as we'd like to be, media companies included.
I think it's likely that to an older generation [ I'm a zoomer ], media companies probably became synonymous with destructive ignorant public dunking because back when the ball really got rolling on the disintegration of society's ability to deliberate, media companies still had the capacity to be way louder than regular people. But now there's a smooth, flattish gradient of audience sizes, *everyone*'s competing for eyeballs, and it should be clear how everyone's incentives look pretty similar.
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