>I am reminded of Galileo’s comment right before being put to death for declaring the earth was round
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be parody or not, but he was sentenced to house arrest, not execution, and the controversy was about his claiming the Earth revolved around the Sun; the Earth being round had already been settled science for millennia.
Ah, yes, the infamous execution of Galileo for saying the earth was round, aliens existed, and he personally had visited Section 51.
The pope, being in negotiations with the Zeta Reticulans about admission to the Galactic Federation, had to silence him immediately before the Truth could come out and so he was burned at the stake on the same day as Joan of Arc and Tickle Me Elmo 🙄
Some people have expressed their concern in this thread that if Scott blocks too many people on Twitter, he will lose access to some unique insights of those people. You recommend leaving Twitter entirely, which is kinda like blocking literally everyone. From that perspective, this is even *worse* solution.
If Scott instead just immediately blocks everyone who annoys him on Twitter, he will still get the benefit of interacting with the remaining ones. The problem is when he *hesitates* blocking people, because that increases his costs.
Basically, we have a situation where the golden middle way of "giving people many second chances before blocking them" is worse than the extreme solutions of "blocking people immediately at the first moment of feeling annoyed" and "not blocking anyone -- but leaving Twitter entirely".
Honestly, the position espoused in this article seems so far from my mental model of Scott that I assumed it was a troll / parody with a reversal waiting to drop... And then the article ended.
I boost people if their ideas are good, and expressed courteously. I would prefer that the people around me do likewise. If an idea is good, there will be people who express it courteously, and people who express it rudely. And the number of people expressing good ideas courteously, is far greater than I have time to read.
Why would I want my information space to include even one good idea expressed rudely, when I could instead have a good idea (possibly the same good idea) expressed courteously?
a) There are always tradeoffs. If you cut yourself off from anything you deem discourteous, you are going to miss ideas/arguments of value, unless you happen to believe that all the discourteous ideas/arguments are also (by happenstance) less intellectually worthy and practically valuable than all of the courteous ideas/arguments. But frankly, the idea of a perfect separation like that is ridiculous, so there will be a cost. Denying that tradeoffs exist is an easy cheat code but isn't very compelling.
b) Many arguments are in fact made in bad faith (especially defenses of erroneous arguments once their flaws have been pointed out. A classic example is A says something wrong, B demonstrates the error, A doubles down and refuses to admit error, attempts to muddy the waters and potentially engages in personal attack against B. What is B justified in doing in response?). Many people believe that ridicule is a perfectly appropriate response in this scenario. You are free to read whatever you want, of course, but your preferences are not a general argument against the validity of a form of communication.
I believe that almost all worthwhile ideas are held by multiple people, some courteous and some not. If I filter out the discourteous ones, I'll still get the same idea in a courteous form before too long.
Or, given random selection, maybe a *different* valuable and courteous idea. But unless there's a positive correlation between value and rudeness, it's hard to see how I'm losing anything.
No, Scott is doing mistake theory of the variety that assumes the other person is making a stupid mistake and that it is not worth his time to fix it. Mistake theory is one of the things popular in these circles that tends towards immensely bad faith but which people have convinced themselves is the epitome of charitable discourse. Conflict theory, if the goal is an amicable settlement, prescribes de-escalation, getting an accurate view of eachother's situations, and negotiating terms. In this view, even their bad faith argumentation can be seen as part of a conflict that can be defused to find a reasonable person underneath. Mistake theory instead says the person is acting stupidly for no reason other than making a mistake.
Interesting - what about your mental model of Scott is contrary to this? What he has said here is not only typical but illustrative of my model of him.
I'm not sure that this is a "mental model" strictly speaking, but a substantial proportion of SSC/ASC are articles explicitly critiquing a position espoused by some person, in what (to me) appears to be an attempt at good faith, but contains a standard amount of snark and invective. Which is to say, far more than none. And people who Scott critiques often seem to take umbrage at things he writes - they think he has mischaracterized them, or made errors, or has been unnecessarily rude. Because that's what people usually do in the face of criticism!
Simply put, I would expect people who are well known for arguing with people about controversial stuff to have pretty thick skin (and be prepared to take as good as they give), and accept that being on the receiving end of not-completely-polite criticism is a perfectly valid part of the process. And to recognise that smart people can say stupid things at times, and not block anyone who uses slightly-more-than-an-arbitrary-amount of snark on one occasion in their earshot.
To be perfectly blunt, I don't think Scott Alexander has a particularly accurate notion of what good faith is. Steel manning, for example, is basically bad faith argumentation but clothed in well-intentioned sounding words that mask it as some epitome of charity. In practice it is merely an extra pernicious type of straw man. Combine it with mistake theory and you have the perfect recipe for bad faith argumentation disguised as being in good faith.
It's been years since I stopped hanging around in communities where steel manning is widespread, but I can elaborate on the general mechanism and you can see how it applies to examples you've seen.
If you are aware of an opposing argument that is sufficiently sound to convince you, you must ipso facto already be convinced by that argument, and so it is no longer an opposing argument. Therefore, the strongest opposing argument you can think of is necessarily an argument you believe to be wrong, so the practice of steelmanning is implicitly assuming that the opposing side is wrong. This is in contrast to the principle of charity which entails, among other things, an assumption that the opposing side has some insights to share with you that you are not yet aware of. Mistake theory digs the hole deeper by encouraging people to assume that the other side is making a mistake, rather than for example facing different concerns pertaining to different situations than the ones you encounter.
He doesn’t ban people here for disagreeing within him, or disagreeing with his ideologies: EA, the perils of AI. Twitter is more personal of course, Scott may not read most of the comments.
"I know a guy who donates 10% of his income to an African anti-malaria charity. Seems like a good thing to do."
"Nah. he's probably just some selfish asshole pretending to be good."
At some moment the difference in modeling reality is probably so big that it cannot be overcome by words, so you might cut your losses and block/ban the other person.
There is nothing a priori implausible about a world in which charity is mainly engaged in for reasons of virtue signalling - though in my model this usually springs more from neuroses than from selfishness.
Large differences in reality models among intelligent people are precisely the places where you ought to be paying attention if you are even the slightest bit serious about your beliefs.
If you respond to such large differences by blocking, then you are keeping yourself stuck in a cult.
Regardless, you are to be commended for having clearly illustrated that Scott Alexander's community is indeed a hub of groupishness and prejudice and close-mindedness, that has somehow convinced itself that it is open-minded and charitable.
I think Scott's just a human. With emotions and things, even though he doesn't seem to express those emotions in the standard way. Dealing with loads of ... stuff ... day in and day out can be exhausting. Perhaps he's trying to give us, one of the evolutions of the community formed around his writings, a hard reset toward less snark and more thoughtful, polite discussion. I had been noticing that he doesn't participate in the comment threads as much as he used to, and perhaps this is why.
I read it as the kind of thing Scott feels, not thinks - "I hate you" is an emotional reaction, not a rational deduction, and this is clearly in the realm of emotional responses.
Interesting, I’ve read Scott since two blogs ago and this article is the most Scott thing I’ve ever read.
He doesn’t get offended by opposing viewpoints. But he is viscerally offended by attacks on his character or ability to reason. For instance, the comments that annoyed him the most on the Housing article were those stating that he was making an Econ 101 level mistake.
Do you believe Scott doesn't know that's the effect this article will have? If so, sure, go ahead; you might even change his mind if he doesn't block you first.
I think he DOES know, and such a "chilling effect" is precisely the POINT of writing this.
Is "conflict theory" basically the same as the friend–enemy distinction? If so, it's a perfectly sound position, and I'm skeptical of proposed alternatives.
Rationalist and utilitarian aren't interchangeable: the former is for maximizing one's own utility function, while the latter is moralizing about what one's utility function OUGHT to be. I believe Scott tries to be a rationalist. I do not believe Scott tries to be a utilitarian; I don't think anyone really does.
I am indeed curious what kind of "personal philosophy" leads one to criticize a man using a value system he has very clearly demonstrated he doesn't subscribe to, but do not expect it to be a coherent one. It's a lot like exhorting an atheist to repent lest he be damned to hell.
My model of Scott on this point is that the is a conflict theorist who has self-deceived himself into believing he's a mistake theorist, which earns him a lot of social credit within a crowd that strongly believes conflict theory to be evil. Cf. eg. the comment section in the post you linked.
The practice of steel manning is illustrative of this dynamic. If you already knew of an opposing argument that you found convincing, you'd already be convinced, so your strongest steel man must be an unconvincing argument, yet steel manning is widely held as an example of charitable discourse. In practice, however, it is almost always a straw man, but is much worse than a conventional straw man because being called out on it will result in a response of intensely indignant self-righteousness.
My model of Scott is that he is an immensely uncharitable person who has a habit of deceiving himself into believing he is much more charitable than he is, and that he has gotten so good at it that he is able to convince others to share this view of him.
"within a crowd that strongly believes conflict theory to be evil"
This seems odd. I think that, for any two people who disagree on some pair of policies, I'd expect either conflict theory or mistake theory to be more accurate for that pair (basically depending on whether they disagree on preferences or whether they disagree on facts/predictions). For any disagreement with more people involved, I'd expect that typically _both_ conflict theory and mistake theory will be right, depending on which specific pairs of disagreeing people one focuses on. For conflict theory as a whole to be evil sounds like ... a mistake.
That's a very interesting view on steelmanning. I will say that sometimes Scott's steelmans of positions convinve me more than the original positions do, or at least they elaborate on some points that I wouldn't have thought of before.
There are two things going on here: Scott's emotional response to minor insults on Twitter, which you and he both agree can be irrational, and Scott's blog post about them, which appears intended to reduce the amount of snark on Twitter and hence advance the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
I have known Scott for almost a decade, and I am fairly certain that he would rather engage with someone who disagrees with him politely than with someone who agrees with him while being rude to someone he and they jointly disagree with. I have no trouble understanding this post in that light.
In particular, I note that Scott never uses the word "disagree" in his post, nor refers to anything that could be interpreted as a courteous disagreement. He instead consistently describes deliberately rude and insulting statements as being the cause of his ire.
If people who don't understand the difference decide to leave this forum, this forum will be improved.
Some situations are obvious rudeness, some situations are obvious disagreements, but how would you classify e.g. situations where someone finds absurdly uncharitable interpretations of what the other person said, and writes "I think he actually meant this"?
I would find such comments very annoying. On a blog I would probably try to argue first and block later, but on a medium like Twitter (assuming I used it) I would probably just block immediately. But from some people's perspective, this would qualify as "blocking disagreement".
In other words, rudeness is not the same as disagreement, but some disagreements *are* rude.
"This isn’t out of some kind of principle. It’s how my emotions naturally work. I think it’s a natural human urge, and a lot of other people work the same way."
Scott isn't trying to be a Rationalist Ubermensch here, he's trying to explain how Twitter dunks affect him. And he's far from alone.
Or is it blocking people? I don't think Scott has a responsibility to be reachable on Twitter. An individual's reachability is necessarily inversely proportional to the number of people who want to reach them, and I'm honestly astounded that he gets to all the comments on his blog.
What is supposed to be deeply irrational here? Encouraging people to interact kindly, and hiding from people who don’t in a public forum, seems eminently rational. It’s not like there’s that much to be gained by radical openness to randos on social media.
I will second your low value comment. Twitter is a foreign country to me so I am reading this with interest but really don’t have a clue what the underlying controversy is.
This is every day on Twitter. A high proportion of the most liked Tweets are dunks, often unfair dunks by people who don't understand the argument they are attacking or fair dunks on hapless nobodies who said dumb things. "Look at this idiot I found" is the most popular activity on Twitter. Because people enjoy getting "likes", they dunk on each other constantly and malevolently. If you take the time to read the linked article or understand the argument you are dunking on, you Tweet at lower throughput and harvest fewer likes.
The standard twitter personality operates as follows:
1. Post rage-bait
2. Filter replies for stupidest, most-stereotypical example of outgroup
3. Mock stupid stereotypical example of outgroup
4. Develop following because members of your ingroup enjoy watching you mock, stupid stereotypical example of outgroup.
The risk is that you step over the line at step 1 and alienate a larger audience than you expected. When you hear about some twitter personality making some abject apology for something they posted, they invariably overplayed step 1.
The amusing thing about referencing Y. is that he is a primo example of this loop. He lives to post rage bait. But he plays the game cautiously. His rage bait is typically an absurdly extreme position on a dry technical topic. This is less rewarding, but also less risky.
My galaxy brain take is that Yglesias does rage-bait in order to raise the salience of boring but important issues. Example: lots of innocent people are killed by reckless drivers, and post-George Floyd cities increasingly rely on cameras/no-contact enforcement. Some drivers have realized they can beat the cameras by using fake tags, installing devices that partially obscure tags etc. Police aren't doing anything about this. So Yglesias goes around DC photographing tag violators, reporting them to a police tip line, and showing off his exploits on Twitter. Some people scream at him for being a snitch, some people defend him, but regardless he's brought more attention than to the issue of licence plate violations than any amount of normal tweeting about the issue could ever have accomplished.
His positions typically flow directly from his self-interest. Nakedly, almost amusingly directly from his self-interest. For example:
- He wants to convert his garage to an accessory dwelling unit so that he can rent it out. Therefore accessory dwelling units should be of-right!
- He wants to replace his windows, but doesn't want to spend the money for replacement windows that comply with historical preservation requirements. Therefore historical preservation requirements are "financially costly, logistically annoying, and antithetical to the District of Columbia’s stated goals in terms of ecological sustainability and housing affordability."
- He's thinking about moving to the suburbs. Therefore zoning requirements should be relaxed to enable developers to build denser buildings. With the pleasant side effect that land will become more valuable, which means current landowners can sell for more.
I'm not buying this argument. "He might move to the suburbs someday, so his support for denser zoning in the suburbs must stem from his desire to very modestly increase the value of his hypothetical future land holdings". If you're going to reason like that, you could find a way to paint anyone's positions on anything as being motivated by self-interest. As I recall, his gripe re: historic preservation was that he wasn't being allowed to install energy efficient windows, and he thinks global warming is bad. Beyond this, his positions on all three issues are completely consistent with YIMBY positions, which he applies universally and seems to care a great deal about, even when talking about cities or countries where he is unlikely to ever live. Maybe all of his YIMBY positions derive from a desire to make an extra $10k a year renting out his garage, and he is pretending to care about building policies in Vancouver or the UK in pursuit of garage rent, but I am inclined to assume sincerity and engage with his opinions as such.
This is almost literally what I do. I use Twitter as the world's most complicated FTP server for moving screenshots from my game consoles to my PC, with a Python script that downloads any images attached to my Tweets every night. I follow 0 people, and AFAIK 0 people follow me.
I don't think it is at all controversial that the Twitter environment and culture encourage an awful lot of low-effort dunking by people who don't understand the issue that they are trying to "destroy" the other side over. The controversy is over whether it is possible to still find useful information or interesting discussion in the margins of Twitter; I lean towards "yes" but you have to be ruthlessly selective in culling out the noise. Which means blocking anyone who ever dunks on you or yours, or dunks too often even on your enemies.
Twitter is rarely worth it, though as I've noted elsewhere it is sometimes the only place to get timely information in some subjects. For entertainment, no. Wherever you are, blocking/muting/killfiling someone who is conspicuously annoying and rude, is going to be less effort than dealing with future annoyance, but you're generally going to be better off in the places you don't have to do that as often.
Hah, me, too! My guess is that it probably hasn't caught on because it's already a generic insult, and that fact makes it difficult to distinguish in usage what kind of twit is meant -- the Twitter version or the regular version.
I'm a non-native English speaker so I assume I'm missing something, can someone please explain to me why the platform is called "Twitter" but the messages are called "Tweets"? Shouldn't it be either tweeter/tweet or twitter/twit?
The two words are related; "twitter" and "tweet" are two different words describing the sounds a bird makes. Meanwhile, "twit" is a mildly derogatory term for someone who's silly and annoying.
So, yeah, it's a little confusing, but in English we say birds "tweet" (or "chirp" or probably many other sound words) and a succession of tweets is a "twitter", or the verb form "to twitter" which is maybe more common. From this you get the phrase that someone is "atwitter" from how a bird angrily or anxiously chirping away sounds. Point being, English is weird and tweet goes with twitter. I'm sure a linguist could explain the change in the vowel sound, but I struggle with even the IPA so... Hope that helped some!
I actually hadn't heard that definition of "twitter" before, as another non-natice speaker. I kind of just assumed, "okay, I know birds make tweeting noises, so a platform that allows you to tweet would be a Tweeter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue and that's why it's Twiter. Add an extra t so people don't read the 'wi' as 'why'. There we have Twitter." Which is fairly convoluted now that I've actually written it out.
Some of the old languages that came together into English had vowel changes like this. As native English speakers we never learned any grammatical rules for how to do these correctly, but sometimes changing the vowel can feel like it fits naturally, without really understanding why. In this case I think its the "umlaut" system from Germanic languages that is coming through. "Twitter" (noun) --> "tweet" (verb) feels similar to "blood" (noun) -> "bleed" (verb), and there is a related shift between "foot" and "feet". We have forgotten why, but twitter/tweet seem to match more comfortably than e.g. twitter/twoot would.
The other vowel change that English sometimes uses is the ablaut system from Proto-Indo-European. If a native English speaker wanted to make the past tense of the verb "tweet", the most obvious choice might be "tweeted", but "twote" could also feel correct. However, "twite" just feels wrong.
Interestingly, I instinctively find "twought" to sound better than "twote". I don't know how I even have an opinion on this but it somehow just feels right.
In the elder days of BBSes and FidoNet, a lot of message board reader software used the term "Twit Filter" or minor variations thereof for a user-defined list of people whose messages you want hidden from you. The Usenet equivalent was "killfile".
Obvious explanation: Twitter is the cloaca of the internet, everybody and everything ends up there. So an insult that, without very hard to convey further context, seems targeted at people on Twitter generally will never catch up, because everybody who might spread it is also insulted by it.
'Hey, but isn't "redditor" the most common insult on reddit?' Yes because redditor have a penchant for self loathing, and also the anonymous format allows everybody, even the most terminally online users, to prendendo they're casuals who are there for puppy pics and only stumbled on meta-meta-meta reddit drama bc of the insidiousness of the algorithm
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.
Man, I'm glad to see someone else say this. I've actually come to feel less frustrated by this failing of mine exactly for the reasons introduced in this post.
I have this, but it does have the downside of forgetting people who were pleasant to converse with, too.
Also, there's a thing around traumatic memory, I'm not sure what, but I think it's summed up in the "for me, it was Tuesday" quote. The things that stick in our mind don't necessarily seem rational to the rest of the world.
I've occasionally used the line and that link at work. Usually as an apology. "I know your project checked in and got approval 2 years ago, and I know it's been consuming your life every day since then, but... For Me It Was Tuesday. What is your project about again?"
Once I was at a convention where I began talking with a guy as we were walking towards the same place. We talked for a few minutes before I remembered his name (which was on his nametag): he was the guy I'd gotten into the biggest, nastiest flamewar of my life a few weeks previously.
I started to laugh, and he flinched at first--I think he thought I was going to hit him--but then he saw the humor of it, and we've been on very good terms since. So for once, forgetting someone's name did me good.
While true, this just causes me to avoid entire environments that feel irritating. If it weren't for ad blockers, I'd probably avoid the web. I DO avoid TV and, to a lesser extent, radio.
I don't want to remember annoying people, so I like the option to hide them using a button.
Though my preferred functionality would be something like "show this person's comments with smaller font and gray color". Just in case I would want to change my mind, or if other people react to them and I am curious.
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.
I don't remember where I first heard the phrase "now you could claim that that's out of context, but it's hard to imagine any context that would make it acceptable," but it definitely applies here!
Caricatures of George W. Bush usually depict him with a circular head. The villain has a very tall head. It wouldn't have occurred to me that that might be supposed to represent George W. Bush. 🫤
One of my favorite Daily Show lines, from Steven Colbert long before he had a Report: "If she weren't evil, could we quote her THIS FAR out of context?"
I mean, yes, you totally could. For example, I've seen people who really should know better present someone else's sarcastic statement as if it were sincere.
E.g. Person A: I don't think fetuses have the same moral worth as adult humans, they're about the same as animals.
Person B: I guess we should rip puppies apart and turn them into biowaste then.
Person C: OMG Person B wants to horribly murder puppies! This is unspeakable evil!
I think part of the point of her article requires demonstrating the sort of thing that can be found controversial; you could slot in a joke that's only funny in a conservative, or grey tribe, or whatever kind of in-group context you care to think about, and the point would still work.
I assume the parent comment is talking about her other tweets.
I think the coup/superspreader tweet is fine, but it's not a good example of a tweet taken out of context. Anyone unaware of the context (someone who doesn't know about covid or Jan 6) won't think anything of that tweet. Anyone who's angry about it is angry *because* they understand the context.
That is not one of the tweets people were calling for her firing over, and I didn't see any context presented that made *those* tweets seem any more defensible.
I suspect you were not a fan of the song that it referenced. His basic point is that humor only works for the audience that shares your references, which is why it is a tool for establishing and reinforcing intimacy. It’s not surprising if it falls flat outside it’s target audience.
I hadn't even heard of the song or the band. Basically he is saying "everyone in *my* tiny bright blue bubble thought it was hilarious" which, yeah, in-jokes.
But if you don't get the references and don't think Sarah Jeong needs her boots polished by your tongue, it's not funny.
The German food joke is sort of funny but he is very quick to point out how Racist it is. He's not so understanding of bubbles there, is he?
What do you mean by him being “not so understanding of bubbles there?” He understands it and explains it and uses it as his example. He’s pretty explicit about the fact that intimacy is inherently exclusionary, so that it’s going to have complex mixtures of things you might call good or bad.
The issue is that Twitter’s short word limit makes you assume intimacy, but then also exposes you to the rest of the world while you’re doing it, which is why it’s so primed for these vital cancellations or whatever.
The best explanation I've heard is that... well... your gut reaction was absolutely right the very first time you looked at Twitter's minuscule character limit and instinctively wondered how anything good could possibly come from it. Twitter incentivizes people acting like Twits by leaving them no room to express nuance.
I tried to use it in 2014 or so, and never got anywhere with the wacky byzantine interface. I tried again after Musk bought it and made a bunch of grandiose claims about free speech, and it's just been terribly frustrating and annoying..
Everyone treats it like they're performing for their fans. Every time you try to talk to someone about something, they respond the way you'd expect an actor to respond to someone yelling at them from a crowd of fans as he passes by. I can't even consistently find anything really interesting and cool to read about, since you have to subscribe to individual people rather than topics.
Reddit is a lot more interesting when it's not terribly broken. I think even Facebook is actually better, since you can at least find fun groups to read relevant posts in. In either one, you can build a community without any bizarre parasocial performer/fan dynamics.
All I've gotten out of Twitter is some entertainment at seeing the bizarre shit a few random mini-celebrities post with zero meaningful response to anything I've ever said on there.
I know people say it about everything, but it actually *was* better before [x] year (definitely before 2014, for your specific case). However, better is very relative and it was only actually GOOD at one thing: one or two line jokes. No nuance. Just jokes. (And maybe getting breaking news but ONLY if it actually led to something with more information..., but since, like Reddit, no one reads the article... . At least Reddit usually has SOMEONE explain the article in the thread. Usually. ?)
During my first couple of years on Twitter, 2011-2013 plus or minus, it was regularly very funny. Lots of sharp witty people taking advantage of the form (at that time was 140 characters) and generating LOLs in my household on a daily basis.
Also one's Twitter feed back then was largely in your own control, the algorithmic-pushing aspect was pretty easily ignored or blocked if you cared to which I very much did.
My Twitter feed is entirely under my control - I only see tweets from people I follow, and there is no algorithm involved. The algorithmically determined feed is optional. I don't know why anyone uses it.
True, but (a) lots of Twitter users aren't aware that they can exercise that control, (b) in my experience a lot of them aren't interested in having to do that, and (c) in recent years it became more effort (and more annoying) to block the tweets that are either outright ads or "boosted".
Well a lot of what I used to enjoy about Twitter wasn't strictly speaking "jokes". Running satire was a thing on there that I always enjoy when done well, and also sometimes just commentary done in a witty way.
That said, definitely agree regarding the discipline imposed by 140 characters, it's beneficial to all of those forms of rhetoric including actual wisecracks. When it went to 280 Twitter lost some content quality along this dimension.
Only half agree regarding serious discussion, though. Depends on the topic and/or the flavor of discussion and/or the writer. I certainly saw good informative discussions which really benefitted from that same discipline imposed by 140/280 characters per tweet.
(And I'm old enough to have lived the reverse, e.g. Usenet newsgroups could be great or this or just as frequently horrendous in part because of zero limit on verbiage. Same later with BBS's, Facebook, whatever.)
It’s the social media equivalent of PowerPoint. I was fortunate to have read this back in college, and I’ve been wary of tools that render the short form into something like a memetic hazard ever since:
They character limit seems critical to me, too. All online forums get comments of the type that offend Scott on Twitter, but if you want to write something with any nuance on Twitter you have to split it up into a series of tweets, which makes it annoying to read. I don't think it's an accident that Scott addresses this post specifically to Twitter users.
I absolutely agree. The way people think and react on Twitter is sort of like the way they do while driving -- muttering in their car interior grotesquely mean-spirited takes on people with very little data: "Come on grandpa . . .look at this moron !. . ." etc. EXCEPT THAT on Twitter all the drivers can hear each other. Just as we are not wired to comprehend exponential growth, we're not wired to grasp the impact of having our private irritable unfair takes of things broadcast to many people, nor to hear the lots of people's private irritable takes on us.
Thin-skinned people like Scott (and me) should just stay off fucking Twitter.
I think there's a second factor at work, one that doesn't have a real life equivalent, which is the especially powerful splitting of people into warring tribes. I'm sure this is greatly facilitated by misinformation, bot amplification of same, and algorithms that expose people either to true believers in their cause or to the most infuriating of the members of the opposing cause. I'm on medical Twitter -- went on it because last year was doing volunteer work on a site that put up info for the immunocompromised. If I say a single optimistic word about some covid-related issue, or question some crapola study that supports catastrophic views, I get attacked as a red state heartless moron covid denier.
I quit Facebook about 2014 and Twitter last fall -- after some time as an active daily participant in each -- and each of those decisions has clearly been a net positive for mental health and general quality of life. I also now know several other people in my age bracket [old enough to remember rotary phones] who say the same; definitely seems as if those platforms each peaked a while ago now in terms of general social influence at least in the U.S.
(Also Rupert Murdoch as an example of journalists' motivations doesn't really work. I have _big_ problems with each of those categories but, they are really not at all the same.)
Or they just don't care if some guy who takes Twitter much more seriously than they do blocks them because of some casual insult they dropped on an inherently casual online platform.
Exactly! I try to instill this understanding into my children, will be easier to live in the "post-digital age". Don't say online that you won't say outside of the company of your few best buddies and you'll be happy!
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 always follow #2, but people on the internet are often confused about how aggressive it's possible to be IRL without the interaction devolving into actual violence.
It's also very hard to judge how snarky/aggressive someone is trying to be in a text-based medium. Losing facial expressions and body language. I've had people respond very emotionally to comments I didn't intend to be confrontational at all.
I've noticed this from the other side. I'm pretty unflappable IRL, but pretty mildly critical internet comments can get my heart moving. You're right that facial expressions and body language are huge, I also think people tend to levy critical comments with a lot of deliberate tact IRL - "that's an interesting thought, though I'm not sure I totally agree because..."
But we do, surprisingly, talk about charged issues with loved ones and often without realizing we're offending people. (Fish->Water)
My mother was visiting recently and when she left she was going to go see some relatives but was chagrinned to find out some other relatives would be there. Her comment to me, "They're just so Republican." as in they would say things that were just offensive and if you wanted to keep the peace you couldn't say anything back.
As I got older I got less and less concerned with arguing with Wrong Guy on the internet. In my teens through early 30s I couldn't stop. Now in my mid 40s I mostly let it go.
"don't generally often discuss charged topics with strangers"
I have to remind myself that when I click on an retweet that I'm often entering an entirely different subculture of acceptable behavior. It stung that first time.
Really good observation. It’s so easy to throw a finger and a fuck you at someone when you’re driving by in a car at 40 miles an hour but are you willing to pull over and say it to their face? I don’t know but it sure feels to me like this has a lot in common with road rage.
It's probably evolutionary -- you can see videos of dogs being vicious with one another when separated by a fence, and then stopping immediately when a gate is opened. Or consider chimp threat displays (yes chimps are far more violent than we are per capita in the wild but they're also massively noisy and love threat displays to an extent no humble twitter journo can ever match).
Well, how aggressive it's possible to be IRL without it developing into physical violence depends a lot on relative capacity in a fight.
I'm a 6'2" tall, physically fit man. 90% of the total population would be at a disadvantage against me in a hand to hand altercation. I can get pretty aggressive (or hold my ground against aggression) without it developing into a physical fight because I'd obviously come out on top if it went physical.
This totally ceases to apply when I'm talking to a dude who outweighs me by a hundred pounds, and now applies to him instead. (May help to explain why some of those big boys also have such big mouths)
I'm bigger than you and probably more deranged- and dangerous-looking and I meant (as far as I can tell) the opposite of your point. People constantly act IRL as though nothing bad could ever possibly happen to them right this moment. Sometimes you can jog them out of this illusion (next time some person is being rude you can quietly ask what he thinks the police response time in this neighborhood is), but it's usually not worth it.
Also, for what it's worth, I find that smaller people have a tendency to be ruder, shriller, and have overall bigger mouths. I wonder if we live in very different parts of the world.
I realize that "shrill" is partially intended as a description of character, but in its literal meaning it is probably just plain true as a consequence of how voices work.
It is always good to be smarter than anything that is bigger than you. Physical conflict has its place in existential matters. Having a physical fight about anything less than that just means some people like to fight. With the caveat that maintaining one’s place in the world can be existential. I.e. if I don’t fight him, no one will respect me in this community anymore..
I've recently realized that I've turned into a massively snarky bitch over the years spent on the internet and I'm kind of shocked by how I haven't noticed the change.
I think mistakes happen and one of the best rules we could cultivate as the internet community as a whole is to look out for each other. If you see someone in your circle of friends make a post that violates these guidelines, please ask them to reconsider their words. If you don't want to do that in public (in fact, I suggest you don't, that will inspire them to defend themselves because now it's a reputation issue; if you do it in public, it has to be very, very, very gentle, much more than you might think is actually reasonable, and even then might fail), reach out to them through some other medium.
Another good rule is to precommit to walking away after you made your argument the first time. Even if the site notifies you of responses, resist the urge to read them. If you must read them, resist the urge to respond to them. If you absolutely must respond to them, because they're not completely bad faith but there's an obvious recurring misunderstanding with your initial post, if you're not already certain you're chill about the response, rewrite your response a few times. But ideally, just stick to the precommitment and disengage. It's fine. Better get in a good word than a last word.
I try to live by those guidelines. It doesn't always work (see very start of this very post), but I think it's helped me not be a complete jerk.
I've thought in the past that sarcasm is non constructive and tried to avoid it
but then you realize that you have no influence over the world anyways and whether or not you're maximally polite all the time has no apparent impact because no one pays attention to you or cares what you say one way or the other.
Sarcasm is fun. Humor is the spice of life, someone said. People who get along with each other often tease each other a bit, and I don't think it's out of the question to rib an internet stranger a bit, esp. when they do the same thing to others.
What is the point of trying to be constructive on twtiter? Pretty much no one else is. It's a clown world. A lot of people are just there to have fun, sometimes at each others' expense. Some people take twitter seriously, but those people are always going to wind up miserable because twitter is an inherently toxic silly and clowny space. And the rrest of social media likewise, to a lesser extent
Yep, this is what I tell myself to feel better about being a snarky bitch to people that I feel deserve it, because I'm not going to change their minds anyway so I might as well try to call out their bullshit in a way that's salient to other people even if it means being rude to the person I'm addressing. I haven't convinced myself with this argument.
"... I'm not going to change their minds anyway so I might as well try to call out their bullshit in a way that's salient to other people ..."
This is really real though - like, hardly anyone ever changes their mind about anything on twitter, and the rest of social media isn't much better. But there _is_ real value in seeing someone out their who acknowledges your feelings about something. The person that you snark at spilled out their raw, unfiltered feelings, right? And those likeminded to them got some sense of validation or community or vicarious catharsis from it. So why shouldn't you and those likeminded to you get the same thing, by giving the OP a taste of their own medicine? You're not escalating anything that way, you're interacting in the same way with them that they are interacting with others. I think that's fair game, and no one learns anything or becomes any wiser but at least anyone (if not everyone) can get some catharsis and find some like minded people.
I think the problem is that "interacting in the same way with them that they are interacting with others" is also exactly what escalating feels like when you're tempted to escalate.
> 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 looks like nominative determinism: Jennifer probably means "fair one" and Stephen means "crown, honour, fame, renown", and would be a great name for someone obsessed with status.
As far as I can tell, he lost whatever was special about him when he stopped trying to be a parody of the other side. It may be like what happens when an author gets too popular for editors to do their job. Perhaps Colbert's "special sauce" was the discipline of fitting his humor into a particular type of parody.
Some of the best comics are the ones that are able to poke fun at both sides. You don't just rant and rave about how stupid your opponents are, you also acknowledge your own stupidity and that of people you normally ally with.
Colbert's parody was able to do this, because he could make fun of the right by exaggerating their stupid opinions, and he could make fun of the left directly by pointing out their stupid opinions explicitly as his character. And he could do both simultaneously, or he could tune one up and the other down as the scenario warranted.
Every so often they still do The Word, and it is excellent.
Colbert without the audience is/was much funnier - a lot of the apparent bias is just the massive cheering by the audience for stuff that does not warrant it.
I was going to link Stephen's opening monologue at the 2010 Grammy Awards, but video of that is turning out to be much harder to find than I was expecting. All I could find was a 45-second clip of him pulling out an IPad. What's the deal, Google/Grammys?
At least Stephen Holmes is a nice guy, and writes well. I still remember his opening line in a comment to the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (of "communicative action and gradual consensus" fame) back in the 1990s: "Dear Mr Habermas, I have listened intently to your lecture, and I cannot find anything to disagree with. Having said that, I am quite certain that if we discuss long enough, we will find something on which we cannot agree." (Moral: Even the exact opposite of Twitter (Bizarro-Twitter), i.e. long-winded discussions with lots of room to put in nuances, is no guarantee we will end up agreeing more, rather than disagreeing more, at the end of the day.)
Yeah, and it's probably taken more seriously than 'microaggression' because it's Yglesias saying it and his annoyances aren't of a constant pattern linked to an inescapable identity.
Reminds me of the way we nod thoughtfully when reading about 'AI-style prompts for human intelligence', daily affirmations, and a whole range of Cialdini-esque priming effects, but dismiss as fatuous wokery any push to boost positive minority representation.
It's practically Russell's conjugations at this point.
It's also easier to take seriously because he's honest enough to call them "trivial annoyances" instead of a misleading term like "microaggressions". Being trivially annoying is not a lesser form of being aggressive, they're qualitatively different things.
Was he? So called micro aggressions are usually unintentional. And you don’t get thousands of them in a single day. I think he was describing how “there’s always one asshole” looks when you multiply the room by thousands.
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.
There's definitely overlap, but a distinction worth making between "all publicity is good publicity" incentives (because net approval is meaningless) and "my target is a public figure, but I am not" randos (so nobody is going to bother attacking me). The asymmetries mean you can't treat the interlocutor as though they were a peer to be reasoned with, but there are different kinds of usefulness to be wrung from each group.
It’s possible to engage and convince people who don’t disagree with you about fundamental things. That’s what most of intellectual life is about - finding people who agree with you about enough presuppositions that you can discuss novel and interesting things that go beyond those that haven’t yet been figured out.
What makes you think that this attitude only extends to ‘fundamental’ things?
Most people with the ‘I block with prejudice’ attitude tend to loudly proclaim that they do it just for jokes that don’t land or misunderstanding an issue, two things that Scott talks about here directly and don’t seem particularly ‘fundamental.’
I don’t think I agree with you, anyway. Part of being out in the world with a mission to convince and engage is encountering people who *might* have a fundamental disagreement. If you block them more-or-less prejudicially on first contact, you’ll never find out. This attitude assumes clairvoyance of intent towards everyone else, or conflict theory; it’s not compatible with the engage/convince mission.
No, but when this discussion started, it was about specifically people who say both (a) i am here to engage and convince and (b) i block with prejudice, not everyone.
No—I co-sign Brian’s comment about this being the beginning of the discussion.
But I would also say that it’s a very curious decision personally to choose to be shouting through an enormous megaphone in a public square about issues of public concern and division, and then get frustrated when people assume that you’re there to engage in debate and discussion.
If you don’t want to engage with opinions that disturb you, maybe a) don’t be one of the extremely vocal people of the public square, and b) hold your discussions in a place where only the like-minded go and can hear you, so you won’t get criticism or hear jokes about your beliefs.
That is only advice of course. Twitter and social media writ large are unique environments where it’s possible to shout at the top of your lungs to the entire world while simultaneously *trying* to blind and deafen yourself to anybody whose shouting rubs you the wrong way, but given that there are literally billions of people in the world, this effort strikes me as Sisyphean masochism. But, sure, if it works for you.
I'd imagine Scott and whoever else does this is blocking a tiny, tiny fraction of their 100k+ followers, and it makes little practical difference on the number of people they convince.
>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.
That's probably my least favorite post on ACX for a reason. I'm not going to give it a rousing defense, even if some brief virality made it is one of the highest-profile things here.
(Reminder: Scott is a journalist.)
But even if trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, someone who imperfectly but consistently puts in the effort can end in the black. If someone only knows ACX from that post they might reasonably write it off, but they'd still be losing out compared to a longer, more tempered engagement.
There are people I give money to that I've blocked on Twitter. Tying reputational effects to individuals is imperfect. To individual + platform combinations, more effort but better results.
ETA: earnestly, it *is* tough. Whether or not Scott asked for them, whether or not you like his writing, Scott is well above the profile where standard journalistic incentives matter. It's one thing to say he passes a higher level of scrutiny, but special pleading to say it isn't applicable.
I am using the word in the typical way. Those other words would make for a very different statement.
Scott does journalism and gets paid like a journalist. He makes money based on the raw number of people who particularly like his work and the number of people who dislike his work is irrelevant, to a first approximation. (At a second approximation, they help too. Toxoplasma!) Even going back to the early SSC days, the data is consistent that his most "successful" posts on the metrics that generate revenue are the ones that flirt with controversy, *not* the straightforward informative pieces.
(He's a psychiatrist too, but he's successful enough as a journalist that it's not hard to argue for its primacy.)
The market forces are entirely beyond Scott's control; neither his self-image nor what his readers title him matters. He can choose not to write, of course, and can choose even when writing to focus on things that he values above revenue. But the incentive is there regardless, and if we are to judge journalists as a category for being subject to such incentives then it behooves us to remember that Substack is not outside The Media.
That’s like Jon Stewart back in the day saying the Daily Show didn’t need to be balanced or informative about things because they were a comedy show, not journalism. Of course these are both journalism, because they are treated as such by plenty of people and usually do a good job of it too.
I don't feel that Scott intends to please everyone on the internet with his writing. In some sense, offending someone is the cost of doing business, when you are famous for expressing views on complex issues. But I'm sure he thinks carefully about what he does and does not talk about, and how he talk about them.
I think this post has got to be some sort of joke or social experiment. I think ACX in general - both the posts and the comments sections - have never been pure. He's trying to make a point about people who are too trigger-happy with the block button ... I think .....
That's hard for me to understand given how consistently in the past he has advocated for hearing out heretics, and against tribalism and cancel culture and censorship. Blocking is very different from cancelling and censorship of course, but to me if I block someone I am retreating deeper into my existing echo chamber and I am effectively censoring their opinions, not from everyone, but from myself. I think that doing a ton of this is definitely going to make a person more aligned with their existing tribe as they hear less from anyone whose views challenge them. Like, I'm not saying never block anyone, but I would think that a light handed approach to blocking goes hand in hand with a desire to hear more people out and be more open to challenging opinions or outgroup perspective.
Like he said in this post, he's not blocking people out of some principle. Dealing with seeing thousands of toxic Twitter comments is emotionally hard. They make you angry, and they distract you. They can ruin your evening. Blocking them is just practical.
He is not advocating blocking people who disagree with you. There's a difference between disagreement and toxicity.
People change. I notice a trend of less free speech, less willingness to call out the woke, more banning for ever smaller offenses. Every time I protest the last one in the comments, people tell me they're in favor of the bans. Search "if people who don't understand the difference decide to leave this forum, this forum will be improved" on this very page. If the readers want this forum to devolve into another echo chamber, well, I suppose all good things have to end.
I don't think there's a particular viewpoint being signaled out by the banning that would create an "echo chamber" - I've read through the ban/warning lists, and they genuinely seem to be for "high heat, low value" sort of comments.
I strongly believe in the freedom to express unpopular opinions; much less in the freedom to do so in a way that is actively unpleasant for other people to interact with.
And more so when I agree with the person in general principal! I don't want jerks to be the spokespeople for my viewpoints. e.g. I'm not a Marxist, but I can't imagine that a certain high-profile commenter was doing their philosophy any favors by their comments here.
Right, I think he would claim that there is a difference between abusive mean tweets (dunking) and critisizing someone's ideas.
That's where I think he goes wrong. Yes, that distinction makes perfect sense IRL where we all have a certain shared context and can distinguish between someone directly calling you a fascist and someone saying that your view helps oppress ppl and holding it demonstrates insufficient concern for oppressed groups. Even if both of them have the same logical implications you can choose to frame it as a direct insult/accusation or that you choose not to do so.
But Twitter blurs that line bc of the limitations of character limits and the fact that ppl are both talking to you and responding to your tweets to talk about you to others. That plus the lack of clues like facial expressions about how a person is interpreting your remarks make it very hard if not impossible to make such a distinction on Twitter.
In particular, I think it would be very hard to render Scott's articles talking about the bad ways ppl who claim to be concerned about sexism etc have treated him and Aaronson as tweets in a way that didn't come across as a direct attack on the ppl who made or agreed with those criticisms.
Just because twitter's structure makes it hard to deliver a message in a polite way doesn't absolve people from making an effort. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, you may be better off saying nothing at all. I expect your point about the difficulty of rendering Scott's posts in tweet form is a primary contributor to Scott *not* choosing to share those ideas as tweets.
Meanwhile, if someone is using using twitter as a substitute(/supplement) for a blogroll, I think it's fair for them to limit their follows to twits whose tweets meet the compositional standards of any other blog they'd want to follow.
But different people have different things they want to get out of a platform like Twitter. I don't think it's right to say that anyone who wants to use Twitter to vent about shit which annoys them are doing something wrong bc it upsets some users (Scott's posts themselves upset many ppl but that doesn't make them wrong).
Given that Twitter makes it effectively impossible to segregate into different communities based on how you want to use Twitter I think that means often no one is objectively 'to blame' or in the wrong. Tho ofc some ppl are just assholes too but not all of them.
I mean, if Scott was right it would effectively render it impossible to use Twitter to discuss/vent about politics or divisive issues. As that's probably the primary use case I didn't think the ppl using it that way can be said to be violating an accepted behavioral norm.
I think the right solution is to use mute or block buttons. I didn't mean to critisize that part of Scott's remarks. I only meant to critisize the strongly implied negative moral judgement about those people he blocks for saying hyperbolic shit like "Anyone who X's is a Nazi".
Indeed, if that negative moral judgement was justified it would undermine the blocking itself as any number of comments have indicated that is something they find upsetting.
Scott can block any one of us without losing anything. In fact, we lose something as consumers.
We can't block Scott because this is where we get our content from.
Ironically, I think this demonstrates Scott's point: you can't act like someone with power (a journalist or media company) when you don't have any.
You can only get away with snark (the literal opening to this blog post, "unfortunately I hate many of you" is snarky and exactly the kind of thing Scott said he would block for) and dunking on people when you have the social power to be immune to the consequences (and even then, piss off enough people, and your power won't protect you -- e.g. cancel culture)
He's not just getting away with snark because he's immune to the consequences; he's getting away with snark because his snark is *put in context*. He knows that anyone reading a snarky comment he makes in a post is the sort of person who will read more than six words before passing judgment. Those who don't are exactly the sort of person he doesn't want to engage with in the first place.
Here's a comment that (I hope) would make Scott (or anyone else in this thread) block me:
"White people are genetically superior to Asians"
If I then followed up that comment with some nonsense about how eye size is actually the most important human trait and that I'm not trying to dunk on Asians -- I'm just trying to be constructive and suggest a good eugenics program.... does it matter?
I think what you're really getting at with "context" is "is this constructive snark? Does this contribute to a productive dialogue?"
If I'm getting you right, then I would challenge you with the fact that everyone's own fan base thinks they're doing productive dialogue. (and that's why, in my opinion, the real question is "Do you have a big fan base?")
That's one of my favorite posts, and while I acknowledge there are a lot of comments that may read as dunks if you look at them in isolation, every criticism is set in the context of a constructive critique. He doesn't dunk for the sake of dunking, in contrast to the tweets he describes that set him off.
I just glanced over the class proposal article, and it does not seem so bad.
I mean, he says (about the GOP):
> I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck.
In general, his commentary on the (Democrat-defining) upper class is unflattering, but still fair, I guess? I think the smoke to light ratio in that post is rather ok.
There is a big difference between writing an article-length text arguing that the Democrats are ruled by an upper class minority and tweeting "Lol, all the Dems are elitist snobs".
You can not write anything without stepping on someones toes. Nor should that be the goal. The kind of text Scott seems to argue against is the one which is going out of their way to step on peoples toes out of spite or to signal group membership.
A better example of a dunk article by Scott might be https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/28/pope-and-change-an-atheists-guide-to-vatican-decision-2013/ . Scott is quite open about the article judging papal candidates for their potential to be hilarious. He is certainly not going out of his way to avoid stepping on the toes of Catholics (e.g. using an image of Death Star commander Tarkin for one candidate). He is explicitly targeting one of his ingroups (the atheist community). There is little in the way of deep insights compared to other SSC articles. The article does not feel necessary. It certainly is not kind. Truth is more debatable, a parody might be literally untrue but point to a deeper metaphorical truth, while there are also statements which are literally true but deeply misleading. Depicting anti-positivist Cardinal Adalbert as Count von Count does not seem true on either level.
Still, this is not quite the same level of offensiveness as a tweet of "Only idiots would believe in Catholic dogma". And Scott has certainly become less offensive in the decade since that post.
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
I think that ppl who are kinda famous like EY also block just to manage the content of their tweet threads.
I managed to get blocked by him for a time simply arguing that he was missing some important details in some of his arguments and that I didn't find them convincing. No personal attacks, no insults just calling some arguments unconvincing and misleading. I suspect he just didn't want that arg clogging up his threads (while I think he clearly hasn't made his case I'm sure he thinks he has and probably doesn't want his threads full of relitigation).
Anyway, I just mention it to let you know it was just as likely a: I don't want this shit in my threads not a judgement of insult.
Actually, I once had the opposite experience with him. But it was a bit before this whole ChatGPT boom which might have really changed his experience on Twitter.
Given his views on AI x-risk etc I almost feel it would be inconsistent of him not to block me given my views. But who knows.
It's certainly true that I don't hold EY's args in particularly high regard. IMO his arguments are too often good narratives that appeal to the storytelling parts of our nature but often don't hold up when you try to make them rigorous. Don't get me wrong, he's done great work at community building but I think his style of argument is very much something rationalists should be wary about (especially the parables)
Anyway, point is that while I've always been respectful in Twitter threads with him I suspect if I had his beliefs I'd think it was in the greater good to block me as well. And I think he accused me of making an arg that was an info hazard at one point.
I guess I think Twitter is basically the equivalent of getting to hear the way your friends talk about you and the things you care about when you aren't around.
There is a reason this is such a common trope in kid shows. The way we bond as humans is often by talking about the faults of others or what we don't like about them often in an exaggerated style (to clearly assures our conversation partner we're on their side). And even good people tend to discuss those who aren't there in ways that would be very hurtful if they were: even close friends and family.
I think Twitter especially creates the feeling that you're just there with the people who agree with you and some faceless crazies. Unfortunately, the nature of the interaction means that when you do hurt someone you don't perceive them as being hurt (who admits weakness) but as attacking you.
Indeed. I find the premise of this article very confusing, and spent the entire read waiting for the flip to come. And then, nope.
So what is the point being made here?
1) don't engage in bad, lazy critical interactions - calling everyone who disagrees a Nazi, judging an article just from the title etc. Ok sure, that seems like a truism
2) Don't say anything that annoys me / I find ridiculous/ does the same to my friends. But aren't clever dunks sometimes in fact, clever and correct? Or at least have some facial plausibility? The existence of satire is premised on "you can not only make a valid point while being harsh towards someone in a humourous way, the use of humorous attack can help deliver the valid point".
I just struggle to imagine treating (2) as a extinction-level "you don't exist to me anymore" event. Having people disagree on ways that you don't like seems like a mandatory price of partaking in the marketplace of ideas. Or differently put, to paraphrase Sirius Black, "the twitter world isn't divided up into good people and death eaters"
"2) Don't say anything that annoys me / I find ridiculous/ does the same to my friends. But aren't clever dunks sometimes in fact, clever and correct? "
So what? Lots of things are clever, correct, and not worth saying. Some things are clever, correct, and worth actively not saying. Dunks, however clever and correct, usually fall into that category. What is the benefit of saying/writing/tweeting them? A brief endorphin rush reinforced by the likes of like-minded twits, that will not likely be remembered in a day or two? I hope you're not expecting dunk-tweets to actually *convince* anyone who didn't already agree with you.
The cost, is what Scott is trying to explain. You effectively permanently alienate someone you decided was your mortal foe based on maybe 15 seconds' exposure. And you might have made a mistake in those 15 seconds. What probability of alienating a would-have-been friend, is worth the low brief pleasure of a clever dunk-tweet?
"Having people disagree in ways that you don't like seems like a mandatory price of partaking in the marketplace of ideas."
If "ways that you don't like" mean dunk-tweets, then no - it is possible to partake of the marketplace of ideas without having to put up with that. Same goes for personal insults, gratuitous obscenity, etc. There are marketplaces with norms of civility and decorum which do not tolerate such, and which still offer the full range of ideas by people who are less obnoxious about expressing them. Like, for example, this one.
The problem is that Twitter is basically designed to be a space where you can't institute any particular norms.
I know many ppl who absolutely believe in some spaces in the importance of respectful careful disagreement w/o dunking but also want a place to vent about their frustrations and use Twitter for that purpose.
Is it just a 'temporary rush of endorphins'? Well sure, but a friendship or romantic relationship is just a bunch of endorphin rushes strung together. I think some people gain real utility from having a place to vent and no longer feel they have those in their IRL lives (which is a broader social I'll).
So I fully grant that it imposes the costs Scott mentions on some but I don't think that means we should all be respectful at all times (for the record I personally don't get much out of dunking but some do).
Rather, I think the right answer is that Twitter needs to die a horrible firey death or at least be used only sparingly and more conversations need to happen in spaces where ppl can choose a space whose norms they like for that content.
Maybe I just use "dunking" in a more general way than others do, but I don't think most (successful) dunks are "actively not worth saying". Imho, if something is true, clever and makes a relevant point, then provided it isn't egregious in its rudeness (aka within the bounds of academic seminars or parliamentary debates in parliamentary systems like the UK etc, both of which can be pretty brutal), it's presumptively fine to say it.
Once you get into "sure, but you still shouldn't have said it" you often see situations like the following:
A: "Position X is good"
B: "Clever witty point that is quite damaging to position X and makes person A look rather foolish"
A: "Sure, your point is clever and correct, but you still shouldn't have said it"
That basically has always seemed like cope to me, along the lines of "why do you even care about this topic" and similar attempts at deflection.
Now sure, a lot of "dunks" on twitter are lame and are poorly executed - they are often neither clever nor correct (one sees many attempted dunks along the lines of "look at this inconsistency", when in fact, upon the most scant investigation, there is none). But that is an argument against bad logic and poor argument, not against properly executed dunks.
A brilliantly and devastatingly executed one - NJR has always come across as someone with about a 17 levels too high opinion of his own cognitive skills, and this seemed like a well justified dressing down. I would be pretty confident that NJR (if he read it) would not have been happy with Scott for writing it. Few people take criticism well, especially valid criticism! I just don't see why that means Scott shouldn't have written it.
And that is why I disagree with this: "What is the benefit of saying/writing/tweeting them? A brief endorphin rush reinforced by the likes of like-minded twits, that will not likely be remembered in a day or two? I hope you're not expecting dunk-tweets to actually *convince* anyone who didn't already agree with you."
A simple, well executed point can devastate a position, and likely convince far more people than dry analysis. A substantial fraction of SSC and ASC (and many other news/opinion bloggers) is "person X is wrong about Y", and I would bet that almost all the targets of the pieces take umbrage at various characterizations. I imagine few are convinced. I also think that's rarely the aim - when A and B argue, they are usually trying to persuade spectators, not each other.
Consider Republican governors, after years of being lectured by progressives for complaining about illegal immigration, flying/bussing illegal immigrants to blue "hate has no home here" sanctuary cities. Yes, obviously it was analogous to dunking. Yet it took all of 24 hours and said city leaders were complaining about how unreasonable it was to dump this burden on their cities, local "progressive" citizenry were trying to get rid of them in true NIMBY style, and left-wing activists were being recorded sounding like hardline anti-immigration types. Point very successfully made.
I think the more relevant Harry Potter paraphrase would be, "There is no good or evil; there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." (Okay, I lied: that's an exact quote.) Or if you like your allusions a tad more classical, "The strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must." Scott can block whomever he wills, unbounded by any previously stated principle. If you don't wish to be on the receiving end, fall in line.
Of course Scott can do what he likes. But "you should listen to me, I say smart and insightful stuff" and ""I can do what I like, without any principle" are not exactly positions that sit will with each other. That latter will tend to damage reputation regarding the former.
Suppose I read an essay on a topic I don't know that much about. I have some ability to judge the argument, based on general intelligence, but it's limited. The writer may be able to fool me into making the same mistakes they may have made (that's assuming good intent, let's stick with that). If I know that the person is very quick to rely on power dynamics when challenged, or tends to block people who offend him on the slightest whim, then I will rationally have less confidence that the person has iterated to the correct view.
I should only stop caring about the epistemology of the person I'm reading if either: a) I have perfect cognition (but limited knowledge) or b) I know the person I'm reading has perfect cognition/knowledge (whatever their other foibles).
> the use of humorous attack can help deliver the valid point
That only works if the valid point is actually delivered, and 280 characters isn't enough for most valid points. There's a reason this post is targeted specifically at twitter users. Even if they do explain in follow-ups, that's not what gets retweeted. You really have to dig to get context on twitter, and it's more often than not a fruitless struggle. The twitter world isn't divided into good people and death eaters, but tweets themselves are.
I think for a lot of people, the motivation to comment is essentially the same motivation for quickly blocking the people who upset you - trying to find your own tribe. Some shout their opinions at a group, hoping to hear some echos, some listen to the babble and try to silence the parts of it that aren't an echo of their own thoughts. It's effectively the same.
What's fun is that this article assumes that the people shouting at the crowd are motivated by activism rather than tribe finding, but activists wouldn't want to block trivially either. "I will never get a chance to consider it or change my mind or feature your ideas on ACX", "lose 99% of the potential people who could listen to you".
There are certainly some people for whom that would be sad. People who are genuinely trying to affect the world, or operate in the realm of ideas, but convincing the mass to agree with you on some topic is not usually the best way to find your tribe. In some ways if you succeed you lose the whole value of a tribe anyway.
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.
This site goes into the idea of fixing mainstream media that wishes to target the whole market by using AI to help nudge the content biased journalists create towards neutrality to regain the public's trust. It notes the puzzle that you have a badly broken industry that hasn't fixed its product:
'A study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that in 2020 only 26% of Americans reported a favorable opinion of the news media, and that they were very concerned about the rising level of political bias. In the 1970s around 70% of Americans trusted the news media “a great deal” or a “fair amount”, which dropped to 34% this year, with one study reporting US trust in news media was at the bottom of the 46 countries studied. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that newspaper publisher’s revenue fell 52% from 2002 to 2020 due to factors like the internet and dissatisfaction with the product.
A journalist explained in a Washington Post column that she stopped reading news, noting that research shows she was not alone in her choice. News media in this country is widely viewed as providing a flawed product in general. Reuters Institute reported that 42% of Americans either sometimes or often actively avoid the news, higher than 30 other countries with media that manage to better attract customers. In most industries poor consumer satisfaction leads companies to improve their products to avoid losing market share. When they do not do so quickly enough, new competitors arise to seize the market opening with better products.
An entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the early commercial internet and is now a venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, observed, the news industry has not behaved like most rational industries: “This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect..” The news industry collectively has not figured out how to respond to obvious incentives to improve their products. '
The problem is that what people and/or advertisers will pay for and what people ought to be told are often two different things. "Reality has a well-known liberal bias", etc. If strongly partisan news media makes more money, is it a better product?
There is a market for both strongly partisan news media, and more neutral news media. Its easier to be partisan and chase the long hanging fruit, but there appears to be a market that isn't well served fro more neutral media. It seems partisan media might make more money by admitting their bias rather than pretending to be neutral since people are wising up to the reality and they may as well go all in on targeting the demographic they appeal to. Then others might steer to be more neutral.
I don't think there is a market for neutral news because someone correctly figured out you can cheaply get all the supposed benefits with a curated blend of strongly partisan news, and offer that instead. (Ground News is the example I'm thinking of.)
There was only a brief period from maybe 1950-1990 when media consolidation had proceeded to the point that journalists had the monopoly incentive to play to everyone. The marketplace is just inherently difficult, and someone who tries to play to everyone is going to lose out to media that play to niches.
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).
Does muting someone still allow them to reply to a tweet and just not give the muter a notification? In that case if someone is leaving critical comments the writer might feel like their cause or standing would increase more without a critique, valid or not.
The argument I've seen is that muting means that they can piggyback onto your followers by @ing you, and if you've muted them you're basically amplifying them at their discretion while removing your own ability to know about it or respond.
Not something I have much direct experience with, but it seems like a plausible argument for someone with a large following.
That's reasonable for especially obnoxious responses, but not for something that could otherwise be okay or mildly irritating at best and is only especially bad for you because of the volume.
The point of blocking someone as opposed to interaction-muting them is precisely to make them see the "You're blocked :)" screen. There's no reason for Twitter to have ever implemented or continue to have the feature, sure.
(Go away, edge-case nitpickers. Private followers-only accounts can get a "remove as follower" button. If they don't already have it, I bet they do.)
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?
B) to your example, I struggle to reconcile the position laid out in this article with "Yglesias has not been blocked". Among the set of people I mostly find myself disagreeing with, he does not seem "above average for avoiding bad faith arguments and/or petty snark".
I think the difference is that he was already a known quantity to Scott by the time Scott saw petty snark. I agree that Yglesias’s Twitter presence is quite problematic, but you block people on ratio, not on total volume, at least when you’re a person who deals with lots of strangers on Twitter.
Indeed, as Ash rather suggests, my prior is that Yglesias' snark coefficient is reasonably high. (To be clear, I don't read him much. Have never been particularly impressed with what I have seen, and thus have not thought the investment is merited. But that's on the quality of the ideas, not the snark).
A lot of it depends on the target, I imagine. Yglesias is often snarky towards Republicans and far-leftists, but tends to be nice to Scott's rationalist/EA in-group.
That's not a principled difference, but Scott is talking about his emotional reaction, and it's completely natural to have a different emotional reaction when someone is mean and unfair to you or someone you care about vs when they are mean and unfair to someone else.
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?
Not to mention Trump. I almost think that world leaders need to be banned from Twitter, both from reading and from posting. They can have people print out paper copies, if it becomes necessary.
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.
I hear from a friend that TikTok can be good for expanding one's awareness of the world. Like, some kid in Kenya does a cool dance move. You see it. Now you've seen the inside of an actual human's home, in a country and on a continent that you may never set foot in. That kid, smiling and enthusiastic, that's your new reference for "Kenyans". Repeat for Bangladesh, Slovakia, and everywhere else on the planet.
It's still not enough to get me to sign up, but I was briefly tempted. :-)
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.)
Yes, I mean the people who disagree are the ones most likely to benefit from changing their minds. Why deny them the chance for redemption with a block? Just because you’re annoyed? Mute is the correct action. The rest is just vindictiveness.
The downside to choosing pithy slogans that scan well is that they can give the impression that I'm not 100% in support of blocking as a valid implementation of said slogan.
A block is directly discoverable, which strikes me as preferable when there's an option. Mute is more akin to a shadow ban.
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."
Yeah, if he wants to join my debating society he has to leave his gun at home. ;)
There can be value to third parties in debating Nazis, creationists, and other purveyors of nonsense and/or evil - if they're clearly wrong, there should be convincing evidence or arguments against them (bullshit asymmetry principle notwithstanding) - but nobody has the obligation to get down into the mud with them if they don't want to.
"I am a quasi-lobbyist for a major religious organization so my job does require this and let me tell you, it is brutal"
Ouch! I believe you and I sympathize. I'm lucky: My personal interaction with Twitter is limited to 3 or 4 rarely visited bookmarks. Everything I've heard about it (starting from the space limit on a tweet and going on from there) sounds awful.
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.
>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?
There's a lot of possible variation here to just what "alienation" entails, and making sure it's distinct from "not appealing to people". I find it hard to imagine that there are many situations where offending huge swathes of the population is going to generate better outcomes. It just makes the person an asshole. Assholes can be popular, even successful, but I wouldn't be envious of such a position.
>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 really shouldn't be that hard of a question, though! And yet- look at Twitter, look at the mediasphere- it does seem the cruelty is the point, as the saying goes.
There's a list I keep in my head of certain words and phrases that, if used, I no longer consider the speaker/writer worth any attention. Clearly, those people think it's worth the tradeoff to use their shibboleths.
I don't think anyone aims to alienate 99% of the population, although in certain despised or disfavored subcultures it might be worth it because it binds you closer to the 15 (or however many) people in your niche. (EDIT: sorry, not trying to motte and bailey here. I should have just waited to reply when I had more time. Basically "F what people think, X is right" is a common rhetoric, and if you end up with people who you can form real human relationships, then as long as the cost isn't your livelihood and life, most people would probably be fine with being seen as repugnant by "the outgroup" compared to never reaching out at all and forming those strong connections.)
Think criminal groups, extreme social revolutionaries, and teens (I originally wrote "dorky edgy teens" but after thinking about it more it probably applies more generally.)
Back off from 99% to a more reasonable no_pitchfork level and it's probably much easier to find a 20-something who says things that might offend/insult/hurt 70% of the US population if it were to be signal boosted properly but goes over just fine with their target social audience.
> 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?
Does this actually happen? Most people make friends by:
1. Being generally socially tolerable
2. Finding someone that they have a reasonable rapport with, and
3. Seeing that person repeatedly
They don't do it by alienating the other 99% of the population. If you have alienated 99% of the population then even if I'm in the remaining 1% then I'm probably not going to invite you to any parties or risk being seen with you; I need to maintain positive interactions with at least some of those 99%.
I dunno. I see a lot of people make friends and deepen relationships by: Engaging in pranks together. Engaging in crime together. Bullying people weaker than them. Bullying people perceived by their group as evil. Talking about how all Democrats/Republicans/Libertarians/Communists should die. Making crass jokes about men/women and reporting on sexual conquests. Going to punk concerts and talking about how people over 40 should just kill themselves. Hanging out in support groups for people that are an extreme minority and are well-hated by the majority. Does 4chan count? Surely some of the others -chans and related do. Glorifying Ted Kaczynski. Talking about how Mao didn't go far enough. Creating / commissioning / consuming 2d art many would find abhorrent. Murder/snuff video fangroups. Goonswarm. People who spend all day dumping on Star Wars / Marvel / whatever. People who spend all day defending Star Wars / Marvel / whatever. Shock humorists. Real life versions of Jackass. Do Billionaires count in the US? Some versions of economists and ethicists.
(Note, please don't see my list above as condemning or condoning any particular group, just listing people as examples of those where the strong connection with a small group of individuals or small tribe is more important to them than the acceptance of the masses.)
There are millions of people out there to make connections with. Billions, but I've been mentally narrowing it down to same-language, similarish cultures. Even if you exclude 99% of them, there are still many for you to connect with, and in fact since you've just signaled that you are part of that 1%, the other 1%s will feel more connected to you AND since their friend-pool is similarly as limited as yours means they are all the more motivated to make that connection.
Lepers got to stick together, right? Because they can't change their spots.
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.
Once you leave twitter the culture wars end. I had an account from the early days. It started off dull, then got great, until a few years before trump. Then the wombats of both political persuasions found about it and it was forever September.
They end because people aren't pushed together, or when they are pushed together one side quickly and quietly goes dark.
I don't know how many coversations I've set through with one half of relatives / friends who sit there and trash Christians and Republicans and people who hate education and (insert villain of the week, yes sometimes this will cause contradictions with previous weeks), and then next week visit with the other half or relatives / friends and they just trash-talk Democrats and people who hate education and (insert villain of the week, yes sometimes this will cause contradictions with previous weeks).
Then every conversation I have to figure out "do I change the subject, bail on the conversation, or do I have a chance to "yes-and" to get this person to think a little more.
The culture wars are (sadly) everywhere, and if they aren't then perhaps that's because you're on the winning side in the room you're in.
There are people who do culture wars in real life, but my bubble does not contain them. (Once I met a person like this, it was a friend of a friend. Afterwards, my friend apologized for their friend's behavior.)
I imagine there are situations where you cannot escape culture wars in real life, for example some colleges.
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 think the idea of being blocked by a writer you respect enough to regularly read his blog is something of a disincentive... at least the majority of regular readers. Parasocial relationships and such. And if this writer does it, then you should assume others do to. And possibly people in positions that a good relationship could help you in the future (jobs, contacts, potential partners).
I don't know, I've had people brag to me repeatedly about being blocked by more-famous-person on twitter.
It's a bit like getting an autograph, a more famous person (but not famous enough to have someone else handling their twitter account) has bothered to take time out of their day to block you personally! Your existence is acknowledged!
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.
I don't have a Twitter account, but I like reading it for news tidbits about some subjects (Ukraine war) or to get a behind-the-scenes / additional-content look at some writers that I wish would write more.
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.
You didn't evolve for truth, you evolved for survival. Every now and then there are mutants who pursue truth directly and you kill them. It's not really your fault but you are still a lesser being in a sense. Om Svabhava Shuddha Sarva Dharma Svabhava Shuddho Ham
>Every now and then there are mutants who pursue truth directly and you kill them.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"
"It's not really your fault but you are still a lesser being in a sense"
I was wondering if your gnosis was just trendy but yeah, we have a genuine Gnostic in the house. You are the pneumatic and the rest of us poor boobs are just the hylics.
That's fine, I do understand the impulse to salve one's wounds with "they don't matter anyway, I'm so much better and finer than they are, so what if they are the majority, they're idiots and fools and I am the only true smart perceptive higher more sensitive being!"
I just love Westerners dropping their cool little takes on Eastern traditions into a conversation in order to show off how deep and scholarly they are!
My withers remain unwrung, my feelings are as ever they were, and you're not suffering as you are enjoying your martyrdom too much.
"Alas and alack and woe is me! 99 people out of a hundred hate me, and I alone am the hundredth!"
I could get into a pointless debate with you, but what use is that? You have a vision, and I will grant you this much - you're honest about being the "transsexual" part which has been elided in recent controversy. You're a man who thinks you're a woman. That is mental illness. There may indeed be a module of the brain associated with gender, and yours is malfunctioning. I don't have the medical knowledge about the brain structure to say. But we see people with damaged brains everyday, and they are not in fact the sole possessors of the one mystic truth. If 99 people say you're crazy, there's a good chance you are crazy.
I hope that your uniqueness is rare enough that it at least doesn't come up in most conversations. You have my deepest empathy. I hate that people so easily spout whatever water they swim in they don't see when others are allergic to water. That came out weird, I'll workshop it later. As I get older I try harder and harder to "first, do no harm" in conversation but it isn't easy.
This isn't me trying to say I'm "sorry" for you, but instead me acknowledging faults in our culture and in myself and wishing you the best. Take from it what you will.
If it's not too emotionally sensitive of a subject, is it ok to ask what this aspect/blind spot is? If anywhere would listen to it without throwing it back at you it would probably be here. Again, you don't have to share if this is a personally identifying or especially painful issue, which it sounds like it might be, but I am really curious now.
Ok, I can see how that would be frustrating. I'm sorry you have to deal with the current hostile discourse surrounding the issue, I can imagine how that would get tiresome.
I think there's one etiology for all genders and that's the brain, so it's not to try and invalidate anyone's phenomenology, but it is a deliberate and aggressive choice to try to disambiguate myself from bad ontology. That rarely comes across though so thank you for giving me a chance to be explicit.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too dumb for big words, but I honestly don't know what any of this means. Are you making the point that what you have "transitioned" is your physical body as opposed to your "gender identity" or something like that?
Gender = specific neural circuitry or brain anatomy. There are probably many more than two of these, but short of brain damage they're fixed and immutable. There is nothing unnatural or socially constructed about them. There is nothing spiritual about them. There is nothing essential about them. There is no hierarchy of them.
Gender identity = how a person processes their gender internally. I don't fucking care about this at all.
Gender presentation = How a person acts in relation to social gender roles, most of which are completely baseless nonsense. I also don't fucking care about this at all.
All of this is physical. Physical does not always mean immutable, but these things go from very immutable to pretty mutable in the order I have written them. Physical also does not always mean material, because energy =/= matter.
I reject as nonsense all of the following dogma:
* Gender is a construct
* You can pray to change your gender
* You can change your gender through will
* A consistent gender identity can "loosen" and become fluid in the absence of severe trauma to the brain
* Identity is all that matters (it actually doesn't matter at all)
* Presentation is all that matters (it actually doesn't matter at all)
* Identity is an aspect of gender
* Presentation is an aspect of gender
* Gender can be downstream of choice or will
* Gender is a superset of a person's entire being
* Gender is meaningful
* Gender colors or determines action
Basically I think of gender as a single monad-type function existing somewhere deep in the brain. It is broadly immutable. There are no feedback loops between it and anything else. Everything else people associate with gender is either downstream of it (plus whatever else) or a hallucination. There might be many things that correlate to some degree with gender and there are things to which gender is an input but the only thing for which gender is an output is natal development.
"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..."
I mean, yes? That's literally the case for every human being who ever lived? Are you a Christian? The vast majority of the world is not. Are you a liberal democrat (small l, small d)? Most of the world is not. Are you a Catalan nationalist? Good luck finding another one who isn't Catalan. Are you a utilitarian? Most people find that philosophy repulsive in at least its strong forms. Are you in favor of gender equality, in the way modern feminists define it? Almost nobody who isn't a westerner is. Whatever you believe, if I find a random human and place him next to you, there's a >99% chance there will be some fundamental conviction on which you differ strongly. That conviction will differ depending on who I happen to pick, but it will exist.
You know what they say: if you meet one asshole in the morning, you've met one asshole. If everyone you meet all day is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole?
Or, if 99% of people think A is wrong and you think A is right, maybe you are the person who is wrong?
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.
Yeah, being a real jerk to a lot of people while claiming good reasons for that can win the most easygoing and cooperative people as friends. I've seen it happen. Only, if you are an asshole, you can't avoid alienating all your nicer friends sooner or later.
The question is whether that 1 person is somehow significantly different from the 99, and whether you want to make your bubble out of this type of people.
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.
Actually, precisely because people hate criticism, public criticism is very effective at influencing behaviour. If you are part of a group that wants to change people's behaviour in some way, repeated nasty criticism is an adaptive behaviour.
You want more conservative sexual mores? Shame the sexual progressives as sluts.
You want more progressive sexual mores? Shame the sexual conservatives as dinosaurs.
You want more acceptance of LGBT? Shame opponents as bigots.
You want less acceptance of LGBT? Shame supporters as groomers.
It crappy and nasty and no one enjoys the endless shit-flinging. But it works.
> It crappy and nasty and no one enjoys the endless shit-flinging. But it works.
Until everyone in the world is divided into two lines, each flinging shit at each other. In the grim darkness of the present, imagine shit being flung at a face, forever. :-(
I was thinking about examples in my social environment, but I have built for myself a bubble of nice people. My strategy for people who are not nice is simply to avoid them when possible.
I can only think of two examples, which are/were friends of my friends, so that I meet/met them repeatedly when we are both invited to the same events. Both are highly intelligent and skilled, but also quite unpleasant to interact with. Some people think that it's worth to endure the interaction with them, because there is a lot you can learn from them. I used to think the same, but the learning has diminishing returns, and their behavior is constant, so I quickly switched to "not worth it".
One of them, whose behavior was more offensive, succeeded to thoroughly burn all his social capital during a few years. He started in a situation where a few people were okay with him, and many other people were like "I don't really like him, but he is a friend of my friends, so I will try to be tolerant and charitable, and will behave nicely to him"; and ended in a situation where most of those people are like "if he is invited somewhere, I am definitely not going there no matter what, let this be publicly known", which of course results in him never being invited anywhere. His jobs, as far as I know, consist of doing some remote IT work, where no one has to interact with him in person. He also has a long history of unemployment, which is almost impossible to achieve for a person with IT skills.
(The approach "he is a friend of my friends, so I will try to be nice to him, even if he sucks" originally created a lot of false consensus, where a person X was nice to him because they believed that he was a friend of Y, but Y was only nice to him because they believed that he was a friend of X. But at some moment it was too much; X and Y and many others voiced their complaints to each other and the bubble has burst.)
(Writing this made me wonder: where did he actually acquire his social capital in the first place? But I think it's because when you are young, a lot of social capital comes to you for free, for example you have classmates, or you go to summer camps, so many people remember you as "someone I spent time with". Furthermore, if the summer camp was good, many will associate the good memories with everyone who was there.)
The other guy is less offensive and way more skilled, so his fate is less dramatic. He has very interesting jobs, and many cool stories to tell. On social networks whatever he writes will be liked and shared. But as far as I know, he doesn't have much social interaction in real life that is not related to work, and also his wife left him.
So in my opinion there are great costs to not being nice, and probably even greater costs if you do not have superior skills to compensate for your behavior.
"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.
I personally think this was pretty mean-spirited in a similar fashion to what Scott describes. I’m not sure if that’s deliberate and you’re trying to get yourself banned. I will say, in defense of overreacting against petty cruelty, that perhaps this is the type of “drawing lines in the sand” problem that demands an overwhelming reaction. Petty cruelty sucks, and I would like for it to not be a norm in online discussion.
This person said they've been reading Scott for 15 years while also saying everything else they said in the tone they said. There's something very wrong here.
Don't engage. Don't touch with a 10-foot stick. Back away and wish peace on their soul.
Mind you I'm not saying it's wrong to block people who are petty towards you or who say nasty thing about a group of people you belong to. (I do it absolutely all the time)
It's not even wrong to actively dislike those people. It's probably not healthy to hold grudges but (as Scott says) it's only human.
But complaining about people being mean and hyperbolic and then go on to compare them to Rupert Murdoch seems hypocritical, not to mention ridiculous (the implication that Murdoch's motivations begins and ends at money is ridiculous also).
(I wouldn't use the word cruelty here incidentally, I have seen pettiness in plenty of online discussions but I think genuine cruelty is a different thing. Coordinated harassment campaigns are cruel. Quote-tweets that dunk on people are just petty.)
I reported his comment. It meets 0 out of 3 criteria for legitimate comments: It's unkind, it serves no useful purpose, and writer offers no evidence to back up his claims.
Ugh, Typhon. I'm not crazy about Scott's take on Twitter either, but in real online life everybody loses it a bit sometime. I certainly have --either by feeling very demoralized and self-doubting, or by just *hating* somebody. Your post has a a distinctive gotcha quality, like you're been hanging around waiting for Scott to post something that gave you a chance to pillory him . While you throw in a piece of "helpful feedback" psychobabble now and then ("maybe you should reassess . . ."), basically you're just saying "haha, you're an asshole," and accusing Scott of having various character defects such as low self-awareness and a habit of constantly inflating the importance and gravity of various ideas. I've been reading Scott's posts for quite a while, and I do not see the character defects you're talking about. Character defects show up in pretty much all of somebody's communication. While Scott may very occasionally show they defects you're talking about, so does everybody else. In general, he does not. For instance in the post before this one, about a model of mental illness, he said he did not understand some parts of the articles he was summarizing, and felt a bit embarrassed about that. So there we have some self-knowledge on display, and no evidence that Scott's presenting his ideas as important and grave. In fact, he makes clear they are not his ideas -- they are other people's, but he finds them interesting, though he's not sure they're valid.
And one other thing, buddy. Your post fully meets the criteria for a ban. You offer no evidence for your points (saying "remember Ganaj and Baby Twix ," which I do not, by the way, does not count as evidence), it is unkind, and it is not clear that it serves any useful purpose. So I'm going to report it.
I don't think I'm saying "haha you're an asshole" so much as saying "you're the pot calling the kettle black", which is I think a bit different.
I'm aware of the irony that I myself seem to be writing angry, which is not a good sign but as you say we all show some character defects.
I don't understand why you're bringing up the previous post as some kind of counter-evidence when what I'm discussing is the current post (especially when I bring up a lack of self-awareness).
Does it itself meet the criteria of being necessary and/or kind ? All I can say is I don't believe the theory it presents is particularly true.
But it's Scott's blog, he can write whatever he wants and ban whoever he wants. I don't care, I'm a frequent reader (less frequent as of late), I've never been a frequent commenter.
I'm just disappointed by what I'm reading but I guess it's my problem.
I guess this illustrates Scott's point about alienating readers though I wouldn't be so bold as to quantify like he does, I have no evidence that I represent any kind of majority
Once you include a single hyperbole in your otherwise meaningful article, it (arguably) changes its entire tone, it's like putting drops of ink in water.
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
Of course. They are fighting a memetic battle and through dunks and namecalling are appealing to the part of population who are into this stuff instead of reasonable well articulated arguments.
Frankly, I'm not even sure they are wrong. It seems that there are a lot of people more susceptible to status arguments than object level discussions. If your side doesn't have the content for them they will join your outgroup who does. And yes, appealing to this category of people may cost you some amount of intelligent and well intentional people with an allergy to low level discourse. But 1) it may be worth it if there are much more people of the first group than the second 2) there is the hope that intelligent people who are into truthseeking more than status are intelligent enough to understand this dynamics and tolerate this approach despite how low status it feels due to their aesthetical preferences.
I, myself, am torn here. Aesthetically I hate this. I'm not participating in such activities and cringing when I see people from my ingroup do it. And I'm not sure that the math actually works out. Maybe if you are alienating more reasonable people the second order effects such as alienating their auditory cancel out all the gain of more status oriented people. But if the math does work out, then I guess I have to shut up and multiply.
I just realized Scott leveraged the very thing he was writing about in the opening sentence: "Unfortunately I hate many of you." is a tribalistic sentence.
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?
Or, even better, read it in-context (to avoid Gell-Mann) but publicly disavow it, thereby gathering knowledge to yourself while still disincentivising for others.
Scott has a pretty good track record engaging with difficult thinkers (difficult to deal with, not necessarily difficult to read, although that too). He even has a Yglesias tweet in this post, therefore not blocked (theoretically).
But if you want to see less of people being petty and cruel you should speak out against pettiness and cruelness.
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.
>[Talking about Republicans:] I hate you, and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything.
I think that is intended to be somewhat humourous, but also it starts with "Dear Republican Party" which I take to be talking specifically about the Republican politicians, not every person who voted for a Republican.
That was written to the “Republican party”, as in the elites, not the everyday voter. You can’t honestly read the sentences before that and assume that any of the “You”s here are referring to Trump voters:
“Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.”
Reasonable point, though if you are in the Republican Party, it doesn’t feel like it is aimed separately from you. If it was intended as satire, then I did not (and still do not) get that humor. One of the things I like best about Scott is his combination of wit, humor, intelligence, and general kindness: I loved when he wrote years ago, “…I have no horse in this race except the horse named Principle of Charity, which has lost its past two hundred ten consecutive derbies and is widely suspected of being dead.” Words to live by!
You and almost everybody else have lost track of the fact that Scott is mostly complaining about people who attack articles he admires without fully reading them and people who attack his friends. And by the way Yudkowsky, whom I'm pretty sure is a friend of Scott's, comes in for savage mockery on Twitter. People make fun of his weight, his beard, the hat he wore in one interview -- and not gentle fun, either, real cruel you're-a-loser mockery. People tweet to him that he's crazy and looks and sounds like a wacko subway bum. I'd be furious at people who attacked a friend of mine that way, too. And even if you don't much like Yudkowsky and his ideas, bear in mind that he really believes they are true. What's he supposed to do -- NOT go on places like Twitter and try to warn the world?
Yudkowsky is a deliberately provocative thinker who makes sweeping dismissals of large groups and ideas, though—he gives as good as he gets, and invites controversy to a much greater extent than Scott does. I agree that people are harsh in response to him, but I don’t know that you can be as opinionated as Yudkowsky about the idea that most people are morons full of ridiculous ideas and not invite serious blowback.
I have been following him for a while, and he does argue back hard, but I have not seen him engaging in the kind of savage personal mockery he gets: " fat boy," "look and act like a subway station crazy" etc. Even if he gets personal satisfaction from being, in his view, The Person Who Saw the Danger, I doubt that protects him from being wounded by the cruel mockery he gets, some of which has to be slamming hard right into personal sensitivities. He has a waterfall of turd-filled venom thundering onto his head basically all the time. I admire his courage in hanging in and continuing to broadcast his view.
That describes every public figure in the world, even minor ones. I have a platform incomparably smaller than his, and I could provide countless examples of savage personal mockery, much more extreme than the examples you provide, directed at me. I'm not saying that sort of mockery is reasonable or pleasant, but it's the cost of doing business. So--it's trivially true that there are people who go to a more extreme and personal level than he does when responding to him, because there's a horde of unpleasant anons willing to go to extreme and personal levels in response to all public thinkers.
Yudkowsky is a perceptive thinker who's done a lot for spaces like this; he also has an extremely low opinion of most people's intellect and ideas cherished by them (see some of his takes on religion for examples of this), and isn't shy about making that clear. He may even be justified in his low opinion, but to make that clear is to invite emotive, defensive responses.
I mean, you're right that that's the cost of doing business, but I do think he comes in for exceptional persistent and cruel responses. The only other person I've seen getting slammed as viciously and personally as he does is Zeynep Tufekci, and she is quite civil and not aggressively argumentative the way Yudkowsky is, and does not do the Yudkowsky thing of making clear she thinks she's smarter than everyone else or sneering at people's deeply held beliefs -- religion, etc. She's getting it because she's a woman with strong opinions who doesn't back down. I dunno -- I think I find the Yudkowsky situation especially disturbing because he's both a brilliant guy and an impaired person. Seems to me he's on the autism spectrum, and a ways further up that scale than people who qualify as Asperger's. And he had a brother who died suddenly in a gruesome way and I think he was permanently damaged by that in a way some of us would not have been. So seeing Yudkowsky kicked in the face (metaphorically speaking, obviously) is just very painful, and gives me a terrible feeling about human nature.
With respect, if Zeynep is the only other you've seen get slammed as viciously and personally, my impression is that you simply aren't paying attention to many corners of the internet. As the most immediate example from my sphere, I work for journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, both of whom attract incandescent rage from various corners of the internet, particularly Singal. They get it because they tread on various progressive sacred cows in their reporting. But there are many who get it yet worse.
I think your sympathy for Yudkowsky reflects well on you, and I don't know that staring deep into the bowels of the internet will give anyone a great deal of confidence in human nature, but I really don't think his situation is particularly unusual.
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).
It's not about what is more likely for a randomly selected person from a population. It's specifically about Scotts beliefs.
Take the positive stance on embrio selection, for instance. There are those who are saying that it makes you a Nazi. It doesn't matter that it's not the most popular thing that is equivocated with Nazism.
Well, it really depends on who does the embryo selection and who's being made to pay for it, doesn't it?
So, it's OK for Scott to be upset about his beliefs being equivocated with Nazism by people who believe that the state cannot be prevented from selecting embryos 'for the freedom and welfare of the people' and then dump on Fox News viewership whose beliefs are being equivocated with Nazism, because they're against the state overriding the parents refusal to give children sex changes?
I can't believe that the same guy who wrote "I CAN TOLERATE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE OUTGROUP" is now inspired by tweets from 'Journalist' Matt Yglesias, an intolerant, unprincipled, dishonest piece of garbage.
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 was a bit surprised he was as open and direct about being block trigger-happy, but tbh I'm the same way. My twitter feed constantly devolves into the worst kind of snark if I'm really vigilent about pruning.
I don't think you end up missing out much because of the amount of content on twitter. The more snark I block, the more actually thoughtful tweets I'll get to see.
If you've somehow managed to cultivate a twitter account that is conducive to intelligent and thoughtful discussion, that's pretty impressive, but i tend to think of that as being nearly impossible in the twitter wild (as people have noted, it's mechanically non-conducive to that largely because of character limits). I tend to think that if someone is looking for something like that, they'd be better off going to not Twitter (like, here, perhaps? or certain subreddits?). Twitter is for clowning, because that's what it is mechanically conducive to.
The thing is though, even if you manage to hone your twitter crowd to a group of philosophical types who have "eloquent and scholarly" discussions about society and politics, couldn't you have an alternative twitter account where you just do whatever you feel like, and have fun or whatever? You could block people on the first account and dunk on them in the second account. Doing so requires a bit of compartmentalization, which humans aren't great at, but people do have to do some compartmentalization anyways with their colleagues or their families or other groups of people where the person who drives you crazy in one respect is someone you have to get along with in another. Scott is here saying that someone says something irritating to him on Twitter and then he meets someone else in real life with a similar name and he feels that sting - ok, lots of people have that kind of visceral reaction, but then they think "I'm being a bit unreasonable, I should try not to carry around the one thing that annoyed me into all situations in my life, I should try to think about this situation neutrally since it's a different situation from that other situation". That's hard to do and never totally effective, but it's also just a part of getting along in the world. I am sure that Scott does this, I mean, he's a psychiatrist, I'm sure he's had patients who have said all sorts of terrible ridiculous or outright insane things and he had to think "It drives me crazy to hear this but I have to remember to try and treat this patient as well as I can regardless of how they're behaving."
IDK. Sometimes humor and sarcasm are the most efficient or most poignant ways to drive home a point. I guess someone can cast it all out if they get good results doing so, but something is lost. And to try and restore what is lost maybe requires some compartmentalization, and what Scott is saying if taken literally sounds like he's compartmentalizing almost not at all.
One percent of twitter still produces more tweets than Scott will ever be able to read. What do you think he is missing out on, that he isn't able to promptly replace with something of equivalent value but with less annoyance on the side?
yea, it's not like anyone is ever not deep in some echochamber on twitter, regardless what they do. But Scott himself in this very article has suggested that or the blocked person are missing out on things. He's saying in the article that the people he blocks are missing out on the whole ACX experience - why can't they just shrug it off and say "There's lots of content on twitter, who cares if I can't engage w/ ACX anymore?" Does Scott have a point to these people, when he says they're missing out on ACX, if he himself is not worried about missing out on their opinions? But he even says, in the article itself that if he blocks someone over their one bad take "I will never get a chance to consider it or change my mind or feature your ideas on ACX". So Scott is saying that he's missing out on views he himself might learn something from because of his own tendencies to block quickly, and suggesting that this is a mistake on the parts of the people he's blocking quickly. This is hard for me to reconcile with the kinds of things he's said in the past, like that whole article he wrote about how if someone has a lot of bad takes but a few exceptionally good ones, we should be open to hearing them out. Scott is apparently blocking people that have a single bad take, regardless how many good takes they have. I don't get it.
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.
Gresham's Law occurs when the state forces you to use bad money. Nobody on twitter is forced to dunk on others. Toxoplasma of Rage was a more descriptive mechanism, imo.
There is one good thing about it: Depending on who you follow you can get much more up-to-date news. During covid I was on Twitter following a bunch of epidemiologists, infectious disease docs, microbiologists, etc. and I learned about new developments and new research way before it was in the newspapers, and learned a more accurate and in-depth version. I agree that the toxicity level on Twitter is high. It was even with the people I was following, because tweets by scientists would get a bunch of covid-deniers and ivermectin fanatics replying to them with hate and contempt.
I'm not convinced that knowing any news in such an up-to-date manner is a net win.
Like, did it make your life better to learn that stuff when you did rather than a week later or whatever? What concrete actions were you able to take because you learned some info that you couldn't have just taken later?
I was volunteering on a project to help immunocompromised people access Evusheld (it's a vaccination alternative for people who can't make antibodies -- gives them a supply of antibodies directly). Became available at beginning of 2022, but as year wore on and new variants began to come through, I needed to stay up to date on evidence of how well Evusheld performed against new variants. Part of my job was to transmit this info to 2 large groups of immunocompromised people on Facebook. The newspapers were saying blah blah concerns about new variants, is vax still effective, and half the time they were scaring. people unnecessarily and half the time they weren't passing on concerning info that people needed to have. And in any case, they were giving few updates on Evusheld, which is a niche drug for a small group who need it. On Twitter I was following the scientists who in the lab were putting samples of the new variant into media with Evusheld in it (and also some of the other treatment drugs) and reporting a numerical value that's a measure of a drug or antibody's effectiveness against a variant. Immunocompromised people were very scared but didn't have into about whether the Evusheld they had on board was useless or still was protective. i was able to give the accurate, up to date info, explained in layman's language. Some of the scientists on there were clearly there for same reason I was -- you got the info on the results somebody got last night, you know? I have read that many journalists are on Twitter for a similar reason -- best way to get very latest info on whatever it is you're following.
Yeah, back when I was actively assessing North Korean missile programs, Twitter was genuinely useful in that it could e.g. provide notice of an ICBM launch while the ICBM was in flight. In your face, CONELRAD. And for those of us who would predictably be called by reporters looking for a not-stupid take on the matter, that sort of notice and the technical back-and-forth that quickly followed, was really useful.
I hate that the blogs, mailing lists, and slack channels that used to fill that function have all migrated to Twitter. Twitter knocks twenty points off the IQ of anyone who uses it, and rocket science really wants all the IQ points. But it is so, and so I had to learn how to very carefully follow Twitter in certain areas.
Like you I went on Twitter only because I needed access up-to-date technical information. Up til then I think I'd wandered over there a few times out of curiosity, but didn't know that the key to using Twitter was choosing who to follow. So I just read whatever random tweets Twitter showed me, and thought, "what's the point of this?" and rapidly wandered away. Once I was following a bunch of doctors and scientists, I was delighted by the access I had to info -- had not know that was possible -- but then gradually I became aware of the vile underbelly of medical Twitter: several grotesquely dishonest, grandstanding, catastrophe-predicting docs, with tens of thousands of doom-addicted followers; plus many many furious people convinced that Covid was the Big Lie, or that Vax was the Big Lie, or that Covid filled every cell in your body with killer spikes that were going to go zap zap zap your insides all over and make all your blood coagulate. And if. you didn't agree with any of these factions they wanted to rip your face off and eat it. It's extremely hard not to give in to the craving to rebut this kind of vicious, stoopit shit, and I definitely got sucked into trying. But the best evidence and the most cutting repartee in the world make no difference whatever to what these people think, and I eventually yanked myself free. The indignation-maximizing algorithms work well on me. But I'm sure AI will change all that (heh).
I think that good communication is opt-in, not opt-out. In real life, you mostly communicate with your friends, and the people introduced to you by your friends (who may also become your friends in turn). So the communication is mostly friendly, and if it is not, you simply stop interacting with certain person.
An offline analogy to internet forum would be like meeting your friends in a room with open doors where strangers constantly keep coming and joining your debate, sometimes one by one, sometimes dozen of them together. Soon you need to hire a bouncer. But everyone seems to believe that the only acceptable way is to make an explicit list of rules the bouncer has to follow. But there are so many different forms of annoying behavior. Some people swear all the time, some people attack others without using swear words, some people constantly lie, some people always try derailing the debate to their favorite topic, some people are just crazy and keep yelling random things. You are also supposed to explicitly define how often it is allowed to forgive people who are otherwise nice, only occasionally do a minor annoying thing. Now your bouncers also need to be part-time lawyers.
I imagine that a good solution would be a form of "barrier to entry" where people are somehow judged before joining; with multiple ways how you can be approved, but ultimately you must use at least one. You can be recommended by a friend. You can provide a link to your writings elsewhere, to be judged by moderators. Or at least, your first 30 comments will be invisible until a moderator approves them.
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.
My thoughts exactly. I'd love to know what triggered this (not that I'm disagreeing, but this is a much less restrained tone than your average ACX post)
An average journalist in the online era is a talentless writer, who must create controversy in order to generate enough page-views... or they get fired. Most journalists are not paid well; actually, many of them are unpaid -- they keep writing hoping that one day it will get them a paid job; what actually happens is that the owner will replace them with another naive person willing to work for free.
(No, I am not saying that *all* journalists are like this. However, talent is rare, and internet is large, so most of it is filled by people with no talent. The talented journalists -- with talents other than creating online controversies -- are expensive, and can't write dozen articles every day because they also need some time for research. This is why many online media do not hire them.)
Scott has a unique voice, so his best strategy is to follow what worked for him so far. At this moment he is paid much better than the average journalist, so it would be stupid for him to copy their strategy. A part of Scott's unique voice is being nice and charitable.
(Again, this is not a general rule for bloggers; there are people who have controversy as a part of their unique voices. For them, the best strategy is to continue being controversial. For example Nassim Taleb should remain a troll.)
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 don't think this is a "liberalism" thing: I lean conservative, but I also resonate with what Scott is describing here. Honestly I don't think "people being jerks makes me angry, and I don't want to see that" is really a "unreasonable concession to mental health" due to the "emotional fragility of liberalism".
Specifically, I stay away from a lot of the popular subreddits because there's a ton of smug, condescending comments about stuff or groups I agree with. And yeah, obviously I understand that it doesn't matter; but it still puts me in a worse mood, and I sometimes find myself 'arguing' with that person in my head later.
I agree, it'd be better (and I'd be a better person) if I could just completely shrug those kind of comments off. And maybe with some personal growth, I'll get to that point someday; but I'm not there and so I limit my exposure to those kinds of comments.
I think everyone's just wired differently this way. That whole "arguing in my head with the person later" is a good thing when the person I'm arguing in my head with isn't a jerk: it's a big part of how I think through issues and try to view things from a different angle... but it's also hard to turn off.
I agree "you can't control what others do, you can control what you do", but then I fail to see what relevance there is to this post, as this is exactly what Scott is doing: using the "tools he has control over" to block people: he's not like messaging them and telling them they need to be nicer or whatever.
I'm guessing you're going to say that publishing this post itself is somehow a "power-move", but I don't really see that: he's not talking about specifics, (though all the Alfreds are on notice, now), he's just saying "if you're too quick to dunk on people you're restricting your audience and that may not be a trade you want to make". I think that's just advice, (and frankly seems like good advice to me)
I kinda think you're reading way too much into a fairly simple point. "Think about your incentives, it may not be in your best interest to cultivate a small following that intensely agrees with you and alienate everyone else, unless you're a journalist who makes their money that way".
I think that point is fairly simple, largely correct, and something worth remembering in our interactions with other people: scoring the quick 'zinger' is always tempting, but might not always be a good move in the long run.
---
I think Straussian readings of the post as Scott trying to signal how to better curry favor with him are unnecessary for understanding the point and unnecessarily cynical.
He talks about himself only to illustrate that people are emotional, not always rational, and can be quick to react negatively when people are jerks.
I think he could have replaced all references to himself to generalized statements about how people behave on the internet and the point he was making would still stand: it's just more effective writing to humanize the point rather than speaking in generalities.
(... but it seems like that would have been a good move in retrospect, because a huge chunk of the comments seem to be psychoanalyzing Scott for, IMO, stating the obvious)
I think it's not political at all. It's about what you prefer. Someone people enjoy yelling at each other, some don't. In offline life, they typically sort themselves out into groups of friends, everyone getting the kind of interaction they prefer.
Online it is more dramatic, because the choices are binary, there is often no software support for "interact with this person less, but not zero"; you either take 100% of what they give, or switch to zero. Also, in real life it is easy for a group to naturally split into two parts; the only ways to do it online involve a lot of drama.
Now I am thinking about a commenting system with upvote and downvote buttons, where downvoting someone also reduces their visibility (and upvoting them increases it again). Reduced visibility means that you will only see N% of their comments, sorted by karma. For example, visibility 50% means that you only see the better half of their comments. Each downvote would reduce visibility by 5%, each upvote restore 10% (capped at 100%). So you would stop seeing the worst comments first, but if even the best comments are annoying, you would gradually stop seeing all when the visibility drops to 0%. -- Well, this is the asperger approach to the problem.
If someone is a jerk online, my reaction is to think: "There are eight billion people on this planet, most of them I will never get a chance to interact with. Why exactly am I wasting my time with this one?"
>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.
I cling to the hope that the industry of journalism selects for negative character traits. This is not necessarily unreasonable; the difference between "news" and "gossip" is after all a matter of taste.
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.
Want to get Bill Gates' attention? Write lots of stuff about Bill Gates. He's in the top percentile of "people who are interested in what random strangers have to say about Bill Gates".
He might not *care* about what you say, but do it enough and he'll probably see it.
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.
Perhaps there should be *two* places: a public place for everyone to discuss Scott (completely unmoderated, or moderated by a third party), and a private place for Scott to chat with his friends (moderated by Scott, or people he appoints).
In which case, Scott would probably publicly announce that he is not reading the former place.
(Which is perfectly okay in my opinion, and is probably what I would do, too.)
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."
"But you only need one world-changing revelation to be worth reading."
Indeed. Option value and convexity is a thing. (I guess there are ideas with huge negative value too, but those are ones that are extremely popular but wrong).
"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.
I follow about ~1000 people on twitter and have never seen any of them call someone an idiot or a nazi. I've never seem a single vicious insult. If they're ruining other people's days they're not doing it on twitter 🤷
The reason I'm saying this is because I'm genuinely curious to know why my experience is so atypical (if it even is!)
I mean post your twitter account or some of your top follows and we can audit it and see.
Without any actual data, my bet would be you're not seeing the more toxic interactions that inevitably arise in large Twitter groups. Maybe the algorithm is blocking them, but ime it typically does the exact opposite. More likely your own curation is the cause.
What's a "top follow"? I only follow people I've met in real life, usually at concerts or DJ events. Anyway having people "audit" my account doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd enjoy so no thanks?
"Audit" was being used as a synonym for "investigate" here -- but feel no pressure to sacrifice privacy for science lol. I'm just saying no one can answer your question without actually seeing what your Twitter activity is like.
I haven't used Twitter in a while, but (I think) it used to rank the people you follow by how much you interacted with them. Your top follows would be the people you engage with/read the most. You could also just name the accounts you follow that have the most followers.
But actually, since you mention it, I also used to only follow people I met in real life, and my experience was that generally there was very little toxicity (there was very little activity period!). I think that's the key factor. If you use Twitter as a pseudo-forum or micro-blog (as it was intended?), the toxicity is inevitable. If you just use it as a pseudo-facebook or LinkedIn, it seems much better (until someone you follow crosses into that other world, anyway)
I was on a different site, not Twitter, and this is how I engaged, and it worked great for a while. But then friends of friends of friends got involved in the culture war, which eventually meant that my friends' friends did. And with this filling up their feeds, my friends got involved. And then it was filling up my feed.
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.
I don't think they're posing, but I am skeptical that they're right.
I think fame is probably amazing, but you get tired of the benefits quickly. It's probably amazing in small doses (think being on stage at a big concert) but, like any pleasure, you get bored with time.
I go back and forth honestly. Which is why I'm asking Scott who I expect to be more honest than average and who is to some extent famous. Maybe not really famous but then I have a greater chance of being Scott famous than famous famous.
Yes. Being anonymous and having a job where you're not famous at all are not the same thing. Besides, I'm asking exactly about whether such pain is worth what he's gained.
I think I've heard someone say that the best situation is when people know your name, but don't know your face. I assume it meant that the fame can be turned on at will (by introducing yourself), but remains turned off for most of the day. (This probably doesn't work online, because even if you use a pseudonym, if you are famous, the pseudonym will be known, too. But might work e.g. for a writer who doesn't use internet much.)
I imagine that the greatest downside of fame is the potential to attract attention of someone crazy who becomes obsessed with you for reasons that don't even have to make sense. In extreme case, imagine a person who literally should be locked somewhere and get psychiatric help, and imagine that the person repeatedly hears your name and suddenly decides that you are somehow responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to them. (Despite the fact that you two have never met. Some people blame space aliens. Some people blame the Jews. This person decides to blame *you*, personally.) So one afternoon you are sitting somewhere in a café talking to your fans and giving autographs, and suddenly a stranger stabs you with a knife, yelling: "that's what you deserve for ruining my life, asshole". Or instead of the café, they approach you at the street in the evening, after having followed you for weeks. Or they somehow enter your house and wait for you there.
The problem is that such people exist, statistically, so if you are famous enough, it becomes a question of "when" rather than "if". If you are famous enough, you need to live surrounded by bodyguards. Scott is not there, I think; this mostly applies to movie stars.
Another downside is that everyone assumes (correctly or not) that "famous = rich", so you automatically become a target for various criminals. Some of them may kidnap your children for ransom. Some of them will sue you for made up reasons, expecting that you will pay them to go away, rather than spend money on lawyers and be reported by newspapers as "the celebrity accused of X" (which in eyes of many readers means that you are guilty; and even if you ultimately win the lawsuit, they will assume that you just used your money and fame to avoid fair punishment). As soon as you write a Harry Potter novel, everyone who ever wrote a short story about a boy wizard will automatically accuse you of theft.
Before DNA testing, famous men were often accused of being fathers to children of women they have never met before. Some of those women were scammers, some were delusional. That was quite dangerous in the era when the only thing to check was the blood type, and then it became "he said / she said" (with everyone assuming that of course a famous man would exploit many naive women).
And these are just the most dramatic things that can happen. Then there are many people who will simply hate you, make it publicly known that they hate you, and try to take revenge in various small ways, without trying to literally kill you. For example, David Gerard (an administrator of RationalWiki and Wikipedia) spent more than a decade constantly attacking Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander across the internet, simply because he decided that they are pseudo-scientific and therefore it is his sacred duty to stop them. Imagine that the person who hates you has full control of your Wikipedia page, which many people will take for a fact. (Recently, someone mentioned on LW or ACX that they wanted to apply for one of Scott's grants for their research at university, but the university said no, because someone googled Scott and concluded that he is "controversial". It only takes one dedicated hater to make you controversial in Google results.)
By the way, Scott actually tried to do this kinda-pseudonymously, as "Scott Alexander" is not his full name, and at that time he wasn't even the most famous person using this name (quick google search reveals a baseball player and a movie producer both called "Scott Alexander").
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.
I'm amazed this "punching up" idea is still being used, since it's one of the most Orwellian terms in the context of its actual use. Imagine you're at a university or large corporation where people are routinely fired for questioning any element of progressive orthodoxy. Which of these statements is punching up?
1. Yeah, get the bastards! There's no place here for non-conformists or anyone who doesn't know the meaning of the words 'appropriation', 'misgendering' and 'deconstruction'.
2. The bullies delighting in hurting and humilating dissenters should be ashamed of themselves.
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.
You could also try manually editing your hosts file. I haven't done this with Twitter, so I don't know if there would be side effects, but I've done this with a few other sites. It works well for me.
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?
> There’s often a haphazard logic that determines how much a writer will be paid for a piece of writing, something that’s almost always insufficient to the work required to research, write, edit, and fact-check the story. Gawker’s rates for freelance stories can vary from a free exchange for exposure to around $250 for a 1,500 word story for an “on the ground reporter piece.” Salon’s rates are equally low, with a standard fee of $150 to $200 for stories that vary from an 1000 word opinion piece to a 4,000 word reported feature. Vice’s rates are also highly variable for online stories, ranging from $75 to $500 for a long investigative story. Even august publications like The New Yorker pay only $250 and The Atlantic paying between $100 and $200.
> Rates these low are often justified by the abysmal business of traffic-driven ad sales. In an essay for The Awl, Noah Davis argued that even paying a writer $100 for a web story is a losing proposition for the average digital publisher. “Assume an editor pays a writer $100,” Davis argues. “Taking as a random decent example a $5 CPM, the piece would need 20,000 pageviews to make that $100. That doesn’t take into account the editor’s salary, the salaries of any developers, or any other costs beyond getting letters into a Word document. (In particular, the people selling the ads tend to get paid more than all the rest of those people.)”
This is largely a consequence of internet changing everything. People used to buy newspapers to learn things; now they can find most information online for free. Newspapers used to sell advertising space; now the entire internet is an advertising space. There is simply less total money for newspapers. Newspapers respond by paying journalists less. The less paid journalists are more desperate.
Some newspapers provided especially insightful analysis in the past. Most newspapers did not -- they just wrote, using different words, the content they got from press agencies. Or maybe 90% of their content was like this, plus they had a journalist or two who wrote the more insightful parts. With internet, this business model is no longer profitable. Why would you pay for something you can google? Why would you pay someone for printing it on paper, together with other things you are not interested in, and bringing it to your home?
Clickbait is a consequence of "pay per view" advertising. As long as the advertisers are okay with paying to promote their products in clickbait articles, the market will provide the clickbait articles.
> Some newspapers provided especially insightful analysis in the past. Most newspapers did not -- they just wrote, using different words, the content they got from press agencies. Or maybe 90% of their content was like this, plus they had a journalist or two who wrote the more insightful parts.
This isn't accurate. Newspapers had lots of reporters, who covered lots of things, most of them local. They'd have some reporters working a regional beat, fewer statewide, even fewer national, and fewer than that international. They could pick up coverage about faraway places from syndicates and news agencies and sometimes bigger papers. The bigger newspapers, mostly from bigger cities, had more of the non-local coverage themselves. And this was great, because local news was important, and worldwide, national, or statewide news was not as important, unless it was "WAR".
What happened, and I don't have a firm grasp on causality, is that people stopped paying attention to local news. Maybe it was nationalization after WWII, and then globalization. Maybe national broadcast news. Definitely the Internet. And of course there was the revenue crunch, predicted by McLuhan, when the classified ads and stock tickers moved online. Plus, at some point around the 80s, various investment firms saw that newspapers had large profit margins and started milking them for cash, depriving them of the resources to adapt to the Internet.
The result today is that most of what's in my hometown's local paper is not about my hometown, and is sourced from the AP or other papers in its conglomerate. I think there may literally be only 4 non-sports reporters working there now. No one is holding the city or county government accountable, no one is catching things before they become a problem, no one **cares** anymore. Just some old people who'll be dead soon. The city, as it used to be, is dying, too. It's slowly being replaced in situ by a regional economic hub filled by people who have no sense of civic life in the de Tocqueville sense.
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.
Cohen, since I love your handle I will give a serious answer to you snarky retort. The point here is that these issues are complex and to classify any disagreement as “disrespect” is to fail to read or listen carefully to the critiques. Consequently, the insulter is blocked and further insults or brilliant points never reach the ears of the persons you hope to persuade. I would add that further, the insult cements in the insulter’s mind that people are irredeemable. Else the insulter wouldn’t be so damnably mean. And this is a cynical and pessimistic view of humans indeed.
Wow, first comment and a meaningful reply already! I'm surely doing something right.
The problem, at least for me, is that there is rarely enough time to write an elaborate treatise as an answer in a Twitter (or a blog) conversation. I enjoy talking to people I don't know but usually have like a minute between meetings or tasks or chores to write answers and they become terse and snarky out of necessity. Guilty as charged.
But I understand that other people are under the same constraints so I tolerate on-line something that would sound insulting IRL.
Generally, when I dive in an on-line discussion, I assume all this and never ban anyone. If it is annoying - it is entertaining. If it is dangerous - I better know it in advance.
Even more generally, nothing on-line can possibly insult me. How can anything that, for example, you, an entity that might be not even human, can say, affect me anyhow? It is all twitter, isn't it?
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?
I'm no Scott, but I needed a place to vent after scrolling past hundreds of similar comments, and I probably won't find a better one than under your post. So.
Scott's worldview, as expressed in his work, tends to concentrate on [ought]. This post is about [is]. There is nothing to integrate, because they're not the same thing.
I'm no "rationalist", but one thing that endeared the community to me is the explicit realization that being hopelessly biased is a natural part of being human. A default starting point that needs overcoming.
Look, our conceptual apparatuses are just an enormous (though nowhere near as complex as the real world in all its glory) set of mutually dependent probabilities and heuristics, and it's essentially impossible for them to ever accurately represent the correct knowledge of the world and the best course of action within it. It's not a failure of rationalism to not be perfect, it's only a failure not to realize you're not. This post is precisely about realizing that, making a (reasonable and correct, IMHO) decision that, at least in the particular instance of Twitter, there's no use exerting any energy trying to fight it, and being honest and upfront about it with his audience.
tl;dr: This is just Scott being human. Which should not be surprising, because he is one. (Of course, now that I typed that, I fully expect to eventually learn that the post was an experiment generated by a GPT.)
I am approximately 99% with you. My rhetorical “help me” probably came off a little more “naive/curious” than I meant it.
Given that we are all still meatbags full of emotionsauce, trying to emulate clockwork automata, what can we say about this post?
If this is an attempt to inform his readership, it’s a little heavy on invective language.
If this is more an observation of the “is” of Twitter, then sure. But it needn’t be posted for Scott to simply make those observations himself. So either the intent is to inform, but probably, more likely, it’s a stimulus response. A moment of emotionsauce bubbling over.
I think the point I may be badly trying to make is - you’re absolutely right that none of us are perfect. And because something like this is possible, I think it’s in some way just as important, if not more so, for rationality to speak to how to handle this sort of thing, first.
imo, Scott could have used such advice, and slept on this post in the queue, or something, and served his apparent aims far better than succumbing to the same stimulus response he’s wagging at the Twits about.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. This isn't a post about a Grand Theory of Everything, or an attempt at formulating Universal Deontology, this is Scott talking about what frustrates him, and the only hidden message is "please do better".
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.
It’s also to think of it in terms of the dueling culture. You could go a long way towards attacking someone’s argument, but at the slightest hint of attacking a person’s honor, you are usually called out.
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'm not saying The Daily Mail or Fox are good and people should like them, but I think the hate for them comes from rival media, not themselves being offensive to their readership.
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.
The article sheds light on the disparity between incentives for individuals and media companies in today's digital landscape. While media companies often prioritize engagement and click-through rates to boost revenue, individuals may have different motives and concerns when it comes to their online behavior.This juxtaposition of interests https://educibly.com/buy-personal-statement underscores the importance of crafting a well-structured personal statement when applying for various opportunities, whether it's for college admissions or job applications. Your personal statement is a chance to convey your unique perspective, values, and goals. It's an opportunity to showcase your individuality and explain why you stand out from the crowd.
Look for an "Add Items" or similar button on TrendMe. This may allow you to input the URL of the item you want to add. TrendMe might then https://www.phdresearch.net/ fetch information and images from the external site.
From Your Laptop:
Explore the platform for an "Upload" or "Add" option. This usually allows you to upload images or items directly from your computer. Follow the on-screen instructions to select the files you want to upload.
What's that, do you have a link?
Perhaps the New Testament book of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 3? I would do well to make this a guiding principle of my life. It can be difficult.
Put to death? Man, I've told you a million times not to exaggerate.
>I am reminded of Galileo’s comment right before being put to death for declaring the earth was round
I'm not sure if this is supposed to be parody or not, but he was sentenced to house arrest, not execution, and the controversy was about his claiming the Earth revolved around the Sun; the Earth being round had already been settled science for millennia.
Ah, yes, the infamous execution of Galileo for saying the earth was round, aliens existed, and he personally had visited Section 51.
The pope, being in negotiations with the Zeta Reticulans about admission to the Galactic Federation, had to silence him immediately before the Truth could come out and so he was burned at the stake on the same day as Joan of Arc and Tickle Me Elmo 🙄
> 3) get off Twitter
Some people have expressed their concern in this thread that if Scott blocks too many people on Twitter, he will lose access to some unique insights of those people. You recommend leaving Twitter entirely, which is kinda like blocking literally everyone. From that perspective, this is even *worse* solution.
If Scott instead just immediately blocks everyone who annoys him on Twitter, he will still get the benefit of interacting with the remaining ones. The problem is when he *hesitates* blocking people, because that increases his costs.
Basically, we have a situation where the golden middle way of "giving people many second chances before blocking them" is worse than the extreme solutions of "blocking people immediately at the first moment of feeling annoyed" and "not blocking anyone -- but leaving Twitter entirely".
Honestly, the position espoused in this article seems so far from my mental model of Scott that I assumed it was a troll / parody with a reversal waiting to drop... And then the article ended.
I boost people if their ideas are good, and expressed courteously. I would prefer that the people around me do likewise. If an idea is good, there will be people who express it courteously, and people who express it rudely. And the number of people expressing good ideas courteously, is far greater than I have time to read.
Why would I want my information space to include even one good idea expressed rudely, when I could instead have a good idea (possibly the same good idea) expressed courteously?
a) There are always tradeoffs. If you cut yourself off from anything you deem discourteous, you are going to miss ideas/arguments of value, unless you happen to believe that all the discourteous ideas/arguments are also (by happenstance) less intellectually worthy and practically valuable than all of the courteous ideas/arguments. But frankly, the idea of a perfect separation like that is ridiculous, so there will be a cost. Denying that tradeoffs exist is an easy cheat code but isn't very compelling.
b) Many arguments are in fact made in bad faith (especially defenses of erroneous arguments once their flaws have been pointed out. A classic example is A says something wrong, B demonstrates the error, A doubles down and refuses to admit error, attempts to muddy the waters and potentially engages in personal attack against B. What is B justified in doing in response?). Many people believe that ridicule is a perfectly appropriate response in this scenario. You are free to read whatever you want, of course, but your preferences are not a general argument against the validity of a form of communication.
I believe that almost all worthwhile ideas are held by multiple people, some courteous and some not. If I filter out the discourteous ones, I'll still get the same idea in a courteous form before too long.
Or, given random selection, maybe a *different* valuable and courteous idea. But unless there's a positive correlation between value and rudeness, it's hard to see how I'm losing anything.
No, Scott is doing mistake theory of the variety that assumes the other person is making a stupid mistake and that it is not worth his time to fix it. Mistake theory is one of the things popular in these circles that tends towards immensely bad faith but which people have convinced themselves is the epitome of charitable discourse. Conflict theory, if the goal is an amicable settlement, prescribes de-escalation, getting an accurate view of eachother's situations, and negotiating terms. In this view, even their bad faith argumentation can be seen as part of a conflict that can be defused to find a reasonable person underneath. Mistake theory instead says the person is acting stupidly for no reason other than making a mistake.
Seconding this; this post caught me very off guard.
Interesting - what about your mental model of Scott is contrary to this? What he has said here is not only typical but illustrative of my model of him.
I'm not sure that this is a "mental model" strictly speaking, but a substantial proportion of SSC/ASC are articles explicitly critiquing a position espoused by some person, in what (to me) appears to be an attempt at good faith, but contains a standard amount of snark and invective. Which is to say, far more than none. And people who Scott critiques often seem to take umbrage at things he writes - they think he has mischaracterized them, or made errors, or has been unnecessarily rude. Because that's what people usually do in the face of criticism!
Simply put, I would expect people who are well known for arguing with people about controversial stuff to have pretty thick skin (and be prepared to take as good as they give), and accept that being on the receiving end of not-completely-polite criticism is a perfectly valid part of the process. And to recognise that smart people can say stupid things at times, and not block anyone who uses slightly-more-than-an-arbitrary-amount of snark on one occasion in their earshot.
To be perfectly blunt, I don't think Scott Alexander has a particularly accurate notion of what good faith is. Steel manning, for example, is basically bad faith argumentation but clothed in well-intentioned sounding words that mask it as some epitome of charity. In practice it is merely an extra pernicious type of straw man. Combine it with mistake theory and you have the perfect recipe for bad faith argumentation disguised as being in good faith.
What's an example of a steelman of a position functioning as a strawman?
It's been years since I stopped hanging around in communities where steel manning is widespread, but I can elaborate on the general mechanism and you can see how it applies to examples you've seen.
If you are aware of an opposing argument that is sufficiently sound to convince you, you must ipso facto already be convinced by that argument, and so it is no longer an opposing argument. Therefore, the strongest opposing argument you can think of is necessarily an argument you believe to be wrong, so the practice of steelmanning is implicitly assuming that the opposing side is wrong. This is in contrast to the principle of charity which entails, among other things, an assumption that the opposing side has some insights to share with you that you are not yet aware of. Mistake theory digs the hole deeper by encouraging people to assume that the other side is making a mistake, rather than for example facing different concerns pertaining to different situations than the ones you encounter.
He doesn’t ban people here for disagreeing within him, or disagreeing with his ideologies: EA, the perils of AI. Twitter is more personal of course, Scott may not read most of the comments.
I am pretty sure I've seen him ban people for questioning the sincerity of the feelings of altruism behind EA.
I wonder what exactly was the argument:
"I know a guy who donates 10% of his income to an African anti-malaria charity. Seems like a good thing to do."
"Nah. he's probably just some selfish asshole pretending to be good."
At some moment the difference in modeling reality is probably so big that it cannot be overcome by words, so you might cut your losses and block/ban the other person.
There is nothing a priori implausible about a world in which charity is mainly engaged in for reasons of virtue signalling - though in my model this usually springs more from neuroses than from selfishness.
Large differences in reality models among intelligent people are precisely the places where you ought to be paying attention if you are even the slightest bit serious about your beliefs.
If you respond to such large differences by blocking, then you are keeping yourself stuck in a cult.
Regardless, you are to be commended for having clearly illustrated that Scott Alexander's community is indeed a hub of groupishness and prejudice and close-mindedness, that has somehow convinced itself that it is open-minded and charitable.
I think Scott's just a human. With emotions and things, even though he doesn't seem to express those emotions in the standard way. Dealing with loads of ... stuff ... day in and day out can be exhausting. Perhaps he's trying to give us, one of the evolutions of the community formed around his writings, a hard reset toward less snark and more thoughtful, polite discussion. I had been noticing that he doesn't participate in the comment threads as much as he used to, and perhaps this is why.
I read it as the kind of thing Scott feels, not thinks - "I hate you" is an emotional reaction, not a rational deduction, and this is clearly in the realm of emotional responses.
Interesting, I’ve read Scott since two blogs ago and this article is the most Scott thing I’ve ever read.
He doesn’t get offended by opposing viewpoints. But he is viscerally offended by attacks on his character or ability to reason. For instance, the comments that annoyed him the most on the Housing article were those stating that he was making an Econ 101 level mistake.
You are mistaken about his stance being "irrational": this is a values difference.
Do you believe Scott doesn't know that's the effect this article will have? If so, sure, go ahead; you might even change his mind if he doesn't block you first.
I think he DOES know, and such a "chilling effect" is precisely the POINT of writing this.
Is "conflict theory" basically the same as the friend–enemy distinction? If so, it's a perfectly sound position, and I'm skeptical of proposed alternatives.
Rationalist and utilitarian aren't interchangeable: the former is for maximizing one's own utility function, while the latter is moralizing about what one's utility function OUGHT to be. I believe Scott tries to be a rationalist. I do not believe Scott tries to be a utilitarian; I don't think anyone really does.
I am indeed curious what kind of "personal philosophy" leads one to criticize a man using a value system he has very clearly demonstrated he doesn't subscribe to, but do not expect it to be a coherent one. It's a lot like exhorting an atheist to repent lest he be damned to hell.
My model of Scott on this point is that the is a conflict theorist who has self-deceived himself into believing he's a mistake theorist, which earns him a lot of social credit within a crowd that strongly believes conflict theory to be evil. Cf. eg. the comment section in the post you linked.
The practice of steel manning is illustrative of this dynamic. If you already knew of an opposing argument that you found convincing, you'd already be convinced, so your strongest steel man must be an unconvincing argument, yet steel manning is widely held as an example of charitable discourse. In practice, however, it is almost always a straw man, but is much worse than a conventional straw man because being called out on it will result in a response of intensely indignant self-righteousness.
My model of Scott is that he is an immensely uncharitable person who has a habit of deceiving himself into believing he is much more charitable than he is, and that he has gotten so good at it that he is able to convince others to share this view of him.
"within a crowd that strongly believes conflict theory to be evil"
This seems odd. I think that, for any two people who disagree on some pair of policies, I'd expect either conflict theory or mistake theory to be more accurate for that pair (basically depending on whether they disagree on preferences or whether they disagree on facts/predictions). For any disagreement with more people involved, I'd expect that typically _both_ conflict theory and mistake theory will be right, depending on which specific pairs of disagreeing people one focuses on. For conflict theory as a whole to be evil sounds like ... a mistake.
That's a very interesting view on steelmanning. I will say that sometimes Scott's steelmans of positions convinve me more than the original positions do, or at least they elaborate on some points that I wouldn't have thought of before.
So why read him?
There are two things going on here: Scott's emotional response to minor insults on Twitter, which you and he both agree can be irrational, and Scott's blog post about them, which appears intended to reduce the amount of snark on Twitter and hence advance the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
FWIW, I don't Twitter, but I've been reading Scott for over a decade, and this seems like a very wrong take on the reason he'd post this.
I have known Scott for almost a decade, and I am fairly certain that he would rather engage with someone who disagrees with him politely than with someone who agrees with him while being rude to someone he and they jointly disagree with. I have no trouble understanding this post in that light.
In particular, I note that Scott never uses the word "disagree" in his post, nor refers to anything that could be interpreted as a courteous disagreement. He instead consistently describes deliberately rude and insulting statements as being the cause of his ire.
If people who don't understand the difference decide to leave this forum, this forum will be improved.
Some situations are obvious rudeness, some situations are obvious disagreements, but how would you classify e.g. situations where someone finds absurdly uncharitable interpretations of what the other person said, and writes "I think he actually meant this"?
I would find such comments very annoying. On a blog I would probably try to argue first and block later, but on a medium like Twitter (assuming I used it) I would probably just block immediately. But from some people's perspective, this would qualify as "blocking disagreement".
In other words, rudeness is not the same as disagreement, but some disagreements *are* rude.
"This isn’t out of some kind of principle. It’s how my emotions naturally work. I think it’s a natural human urge, and a lot of other people work the same way."
Scott isn't trying to be a Rationalist Ubermensch here, he's trying to explain how Twitter dunks affect him. And he's far from alone.
What is? Asking people not to be jerks on Twitter?
Or is it blocking people? I don't think Scott has a responsibility to be reachable on Twitter. An individual's reachability is necessarily inversely proportional to the number of people who want to reach them, and I'm honestly astounded that he gets to all the comments on his blog.
I'm not familiar with "flying monkey attacks" and probably don't want to be.
I agree that getting off Twitter is a better solution (something I considered adding to the last comment).
(comment deleted by author)
What is supposed to be deeply irrational here? Encouraging people to interact kindly, and hiding from people who don’t in a public forum, seems eminently rational. It’s not like there’s that much to be gained by radical openness to randos on social media.
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 will second your low value comment. Twitter is a foreign country to me so I am reading this with interest but really don’t have a clue what the underlying controversy is.
This is every day on Twitter. A high proportion of the most liked Tweets are dunks, often unfair dunks by people who don't understand the argument they are attacking or fair dunks on hapless nobodies who said dumb things. "Look at this idiot I found" is the most popular activity on Twitter. Because people enjoy getting "likes", they dunk on each other constantly and malevolently. If you take the time to read the linked article or understand the argument you are dunking on, you Tweet at lower throughput and harvest fewer likes.
The standard twitter personality operates as follows:
1. Post rage-bait
2. Filter replies for stupidest, most-stereotypical example of outgroup
3. Mock stupid stereotypical example of outgroup
4. Develop following because members of your ingroup enjoy watching you mock, stupid stereotypical example of outgroup.
The risk is that you step over the line at step 1 and alienate a larger audience than you expected. When you hear about some twitter personality making some abject apology for something they posted, they invariably overplayed step 1.
The amusing thing about referencing Y. is that he is a primo example of this loop. He lives to post rage bait. But he plays the game cautiously. His rage bait is typically an absurdly extreme position on a dry technical topic. This is less rewarding, but also less risky.
My galaxy brain take is that Yglesias does rage-bait in order to raise the salience of boring but important issues. Example: lots of innocent people are killed by reckless drivers, and post-George Floyd cities increasingly rely on cameras/no-contact enforcement. Some drivers have realized they can beat the cameras by using fake tags, installing devices that partially obscure tags etc. Police aren't doing anything about this. So Yglesias goes around DC photographing tag violators, reporting them to a police tip line, and showing off his exploits on Twitter. Some people scream at him for being a snitch, some people defend him, but regardless he's brought more attention than to the issue of licence plate violations than any amount of normal tweeting about the issue could ever have accomplished.
His positions typically flow directly from his self-interest. Nakedly, almost amusingly directly from his self-interest. For example:
- He wants to convert his garage to an accessory dwelling unit so that he can rent it out. Therefore accessory dwelling units should be of-right!
- He wants to replace his windows, but doesn't want to spend the money for replacement windows that comply with historical preservation requirements. Therefore historical preservation requirements are "financially costly, logistically annoying, and antithetical to the District of Columbia’s stated goals in terms of ecological sustainability and housing affordability."
- He's thinking about moving to the suburbs. Therefore zoning requirements should be relaxed to enable developers to build denser buildings. With the pleasant side effect that land will become more valuable, which means current landowners can sell for more.
Most people should base more of their political positions on self-interest, and avoid being one of Caplan's "voters as mad scientists".
https://betonit.substack.com/p/voters-as-mad-scientists-essays-on
I'm not buying this argument. "He might move to the suburbs someday, so his support for denser zoning in the suburbs must stem from his desire to very modestly increase the value of his hypothetical future land holdings". If you're going to reason like that, you could find a way to paint anyone's positions on anything as being motivated by self-interest. As I recall, his gripe re: historic preservation was that he wasn't being allowed to install energy efficient windows, and he thinks global warming is bad. Beyond this, his positions on all three issues are completely consistent with YIMBY positions, which he applies universally and seems to care a great deal about, even when talking about cities or countries where he is unlikely to ever live. Maybe all of his YIMBY positions derive from a desire to make an extra $10k a year renting out his garage, and he is pretending to care about building policies in Vancouver or the UK in pursuit of garage rent, but I am inclined to assume sincerity and engage with his opinions as such.
I just assume all of Twitter is a controversy I'm unaware of.
Twitter is write-only memory. The mistake is in reading it in the first place.
This is almost literally what I do. I use Twitter as the world's most complicated FTP server for moving screenshots from my game consoles to my PC, with a Python script that downloads any images attached to my Tweets every night. I follow 0 people, and AFAIK 0 people follow me.
"Sub-blog"? This isn't just any blog, shouldn't it be a "sub-sta--"
Oh.
Sub-substack? Metasubstack? Hypostack?
perfect
Ultrastack or hypostack, I guess.
speculating, but I feel this may be a response to bryan caplan
https://betonit.substack.com/p/the-szaszian-fork-another-reply-to
Caplan's twitter account mostly just links to his blog posts.
I don't think it is at all controversial that the Twitter environment and culture encourage an awful lot of low-effort dunking by people who don't understand the issue that they are trying to "destroy" the other side over. The controversy is over whether it is possible to still find useful information or interesting discussion in the margins of Twitter; I lean towards "yes" but you have to be ruthlessly selective in culling out the noise. Which means blocking anyone who ever dunks on you or yours, or dunks too often even on your enemies.
Sounds like a lot of work? I'm not sure it's worth it, if you can get your entertainment elsewhere with less hassle?
Twitter is rarely worth it, though as I've noted elsewhere it is sometimes the only place to get timely information in some subjects. For entertainment, no. Wherever you are, blocking/muting/killfiling someone who is conspicuously annoying and rude, is going to be less effort than dealing with future annoyance, but you're generally going to be better off in the places you don't have to do that as often.
It's not a low-value comment if you learn something :) Especially if other people learn something too.
I've always been a bit astounded at the failure of the seemingly-obvious epithet "Twits" to become a part of the lexicon.
Hah, me, too! My guess is that it probably hasn't caught on because it's already a generic insult, and that fact makes it difficult to distinguish in usage what kind of twit is meant -- the Twitter version or the regular version.
That's why you capitalize it. 😉
Nobody in the US at least actually uses "twit" in the generic sense so that doesn't seem like a major blocker for it catching on.
I don't find that true to my experience at all, and I'm American.
Huh, interesting. If you don't mind me asking, what region/subculture?
I've moved around some, but primarily west of the Rockies.
I'm a non-native English speaker so I assume I'm missing something, can someone please explain to me why the platform is called "Twitter" but the messages are called "Tweets"? Shouldn't it be either tweeter/tweet or twitter/twit?
The two words are related; "twitter" and "tweet" are two different words describing the sounds a bird makes. Meanwhile, "twit" is a mildly derogatory term for someone who's silly and annoying.
So, yeah, it's a little confusing, but in English we say birds "tweet" (or "chirp" or probably many other sound words) and a succession of tweets is a "twitter", or the verb form "to twitter" which is maybe more common. From this you get the phrase that someone is "atwitter" from how a bird angrily or anxiously chirping away sounds. Point being, English is weird and tweet goes with twitter. I'm sure a linguist could explain the change in the vowel sound, but I struggle with even the IPA so... Hope that helped some!
I actually hadn't heard that definition of "twitter" before, as another non-natice speaker. I kind of just assumed, "okay, I know birds make tweeting noises, so a platform that allows you to tweet would be a Tweeter, but that doesn't quite roll off the tongue and that's why it's Twiter. Add an extra t so people don't read the 'wi' as 'why'. There we have Twitter." Which is fairly convoluted now that I've actually written it out.
Probably the same logic played out in the origin of the word "twitter".
Some of the old languages that came together into English had vowel changes like this. As native English speakers we never learned any grammatical rules for how to do these correctly, but sometimes changing the vowel can feel like it fits naturally, without really understanding why. In this case I think its the "umlaut" system from Germanic languages that is coming through. "Twitter" (noun) --> "tweet" (verb) feels similar to "blood" (noun) -> "bleed" (verb), and there is a related shift between "foot" and "feet". We have forgotten why, but twitter/tweet seem to match more comfortably than e.g. twitter/twoot would.
The other vowel change that English sometimes uses is the ablaut system from Proto-Indo-European. If a native English speaker wanted to make the past tense of the verb "tweet", the most obvious choice might be "tweeted", but "twote" could also feel correct. However, "twite" just feels wrong.
I am having a really hard time keeping Tweety Bird out of my head.
whack the puddy tat gwanma, whack him...
it works.
Thank you!
Interestingly, I instinctively find "twought" to sound better than "twote". I don't know how I even have an opinion on this but it somehow just feels right.
My wife claims the correct answer is "twutt". I feel reasonably comfortable with twote/twought/twutt, but I still think "twite" feels wrong.
(and now I definitely have Tweety Bird in my head)
In the sense of, "I twought I taw a puddy tat"? Works for me,.
In the elder days of BBSes and FidoNet, a lot of message board reader software used the term "Twit Filter" or minor variations thereof for a user-defined list of people whose messages you want hidden from you. The Usenet equivalent was "killfile".
Twitter, then Metaverse, what's next in our list of regretful nominative determinism in big tech?
Obvious explanation: Twitter is the cloaca of the internet, everybody and everything ends up there. So an insult that, without very hard to convey further context, seems targeted at people on Twitter generally will never catch up, because everybody who might spread it is also insulted by it.
'Hey, but isn't "redditor" the most common insult on reddit?' Yes because redditor have a penchant for self loathing, and also the anonymous format allows everybody, even the most terminally online users, to prendendo they're casuals who are there for puppy pics and only stumbled on meta-meta-meta reddit drama bc of the insidiousness of the algorithm
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.
I'm glad there's no murky complexity. The brevity makes this post perfect for sharing.
This is really an excellent post all around.
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.
To quote Sid from Ice Age, "I'm too lazy to hold a grudge."
Man, I'm glad to see someone else say this. I've actually come to feel less frustrated by this failing of mine exactly for the reasons introduced in this post.
I have this, but it does have the downside of forgetting people who were pleasant to converse with, too.
Also, there's a thing around traumatic memory, I'm not sure what, but I think it's summed up in the "for me, it was Tuesday" quote. The things that stick in our mind don't necessarily seem rational to the rest of the world.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ButForMeItWasTuesday
One of the highest ratios between the quality of a line of dialogue, and the quality of the movie it was in.
I've occasionally used the line and that link at work. Usually as an apology. "I know your project checked in and got approval 2 years ago, and I know it's been consuming your life every day since then, but... For Me It Was Tuesday. What is your project about again?"
Once I was at a convention where I began talking with a guy as we were walking towards the same place. We talked for a few minutes before I remembered his name (which was on his nametag): he was the guy I'd gotten into the biggest, nastiest flamewar of my life a few weeks previously.
I started to laugh, and he flinched at first--I think he thought I was going to hit him--but then he saw the humor of it, and we've been on very good terms since. So for once, forgetting someone's name did me good.
While true, this just causes me to avoid entire environments that feel irritating. If it weren't for ad blockers, I'd probably avoid the web. I DO avoid TV and, to a lesser extent, radio.
I don't want to remember annoying people, so I like the option to hide them using a button.
Though my preferred functionality would be something like "show this person's comments with smaller font and gray color". Just in case I would want to change my mind, or if other people react to them and I am curious.
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.
I thought this was a good explanation of why Twitter interactions often go the way they do: https://ravenmagazine.org/magazine/twitter-the-intimacy-machine/
The "context" for Sarah Jeong in that is only marginally better than her tweets being out of context.
I don't remember where I first heard the phrase "now you could claim that that's out of context, but it's hard to imagine any context that would make it acceptable," but it definitely applies here!
Relevant smbc: smbc-comics.com/comic/context-3
Is it just me, or is the villain in that strip deliberately drawn to look like George W. Bush?
Caricatures of George W. Bush usually depict him with a circular head. The villain has a very tall head. It wouldn't have occurred to me that that might be supposed to represent George W. Bush. 🫤
I don't see the resemblance. It's also from 2022, it would be weird for it to deliberately be George W. Bush.
The squinty eyes is a staple of politicians in the comic. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-11-21
I don't see it.
"Context is that which is scarce."
One of my favorite Daily Show lines, from Steven Colbert long before he had a Report: "If she weren't evil, could we quote her THIS FAR out of context?"
Nice! I'll have to remember that one.
I mean, yes, you totally could. For example, I've seen people who really should know better present someone else's sarcastic statement as if it were sincere.
E.g. Person A: I don't think fetuses have the same moral worth as adult humans, they're about the same as animals.
Person B: I guess we should rip puppies apart and turn them into biowaste then.
Person C: OMG Person B wants to horribly murder puppies! This is unspeakable evil!
It's incredibly stupid.
It's usually just evil, not stupid.
I thought the joke was pretty obvious, but yes, you've exactly explained it.
I think part of the point of her article requires demonstrating the sort of thing that can be found controversial; you could slot in a joke that's only funny in a conservative, or grey tribe, or whatever kind of in-group context you care to think about, and the point would still work.
I thought the “combination coup and superspreader event” tweet was great, and I’m not sure what context you think detracts from it.
I assume the parent comment is talking about her other tweets.
I think the coup/superspreader tweet is fine, but it's not a good example of a tweet taken out of context. Anyone unaware of the context (someone who doesn't know about covid or Jan 6) won't think anything of that tweet. Anyone who's angry about it is angry *because* they understand the context.
That is not one of the tweets people were calling for her firing over, and I didn't see any context presented that made *those* tweets seem any more defensible.
Oh right, she’s someone that cancel culture came after a few years back. I forgot about that, and none of the comments here mentioned it.
Now I'm regretting wasting my time posting a comment that this captured far better.
Read the 'joke'. Read the next line:
"This is a perfect gag; it reduced me, and thousands of people like me, to incredulous tears of laughter."
Brother, if that's your notion of a "perfect gag" you are badly in need of a sense of humour transplant.
I suspect you were not a fan of the song that it referenced. His basic point is that humor only works for the audience that shares your references, which is why it is a tool for establishing and reinforcing intimacy. It’s not surprising if it falls flat outside it’s target audience.
I hadn't even heard of the song or the band. Basically he is saying "everyone in *my* tiny bright blue bubble thought it was hilarious" which, yeah, in-jokes.
But if you don't get the references and don't think Sarah Jeong needs her boots polished by your tongue, it's not funny.
The German food joke is sort of funny but he is very quick to point out how Racist it is. He's not so understanding of bubbles there, is he?
What do you mean by him being “not so understanding of bubbles there?” He understands it and explains it and uses it as his example. He’s pretty explicit about the fact that intimacy is inherently exclusionary, so that it’s going to have complex mixtures of things you might call good or bad.
The issue is that Twitter’s short word limit makes you assume intimacy, but then also exposes you to the rest of the world while you’re doing it, which is why it’s so primed for these vital cancellations or whatever.
The best explanation I've heard is that... well... your gut reaction was absolutely right the very first time you looked at Twitter's minuscule character limit and instinctively wondered how anything good could possibly come from it. Twitter incentivizes people acting like Twits by leaving them no room to express nuance.
This! I couldn't imagine what possible use such a soundbite-oriented system would be, and never signed up.
I tried to use it in 2014 or so, and never got anywhere with the wacky byzantine interface. I tried again after Musk bought it and made a bunch of grandiose claims about free speech, and it's just been terribly frustrating and annoying..
Everyone treats it like they're performing for their fans. Every time you try to talk to someone about something, they respond the way you'd expect an actor to respond to someone yelling at them from a crowd of fans as he passes by. I can't even consistently find anything really interesting and cool to read about, since you have to subscribe to individual people rather than topics.
Reddit is a lot more interesting when it's not terribly broken. I think even Facebook is actually better, since you can at least find fun groups to read relevant posts in. In either one, you can build a community without any bizarre parasocial performer/fan dynamics.
All I've gotten out of Twitter is some entertainment at seeing the bizarre shit a few random mini-celebrities post with zero meaningful response to anything I've ever said on there.
I know people say it about everything, but it actually *was* better before [x] year (definitely before 2014, for your specific case). However, better is very relative and it was only actually GOOD at one thing: one or two line jokes. No nuance. Just jokes. (And maybe getting breaking news but ONLY if it actually led to something with more information..., but since, like Reddit, no one reads the article... . At least Reddit usually has SOMEONE explain the article in the thread. Usually. ?)
During my first couple of years on Twitter, 2011-2013 plus or minus, it was regularly very funny. Lots of sharp witty people taking advantage of the form (at that time was 140 characters) and generating LOLs in my household on a daily basis.
Also one's Twitter feed back then was largely in your own control, the algorithmic-pushing aspect was pretty easily ignored or blocked if you cared to which I very much did.
My Twitter feed is entirely under my control - I only see tweets from people I follow, and there is no algorithm involved. The algorithmically determined feed is optional. I don't know why anyone uses it.
True, but (a) lots of Twitter users aren't aware that they can exercise that control, (b) in my experience a lot of them aren't interested in having to do that, and (c) in recent years it became more effort (and more annoying) to block the tweets that are either outright ads or "boosted".
The character limit is great for making jokes, because it forces you to edit out every syllable that's less than maximally funny.
Terrible for any kind of serious discussion, though.
Well a lot of what I used to enjoy about Twitter wasn't strictly speaking "jokes". Running satire was a thing on there that I always enjoy when done well, and also sometimes just commentary done in a witty way.
That said, definitely agree regarding the discipline imposed by 140 characters, it's beneficial to all of those forms of rhetoric including actual wisecracks. When it went to 280 Twitter lost some content quality along this dimension.
Only half agree regarding serious discussion, though. Depends on the topic and/or the flavor of discussion and/or the writer. I certainly saw good informative discussions which really benefitted from that same discipline imposed by 140/280 characters per tweet.
(And I'm old enough to have lived the reverse, e.g. Usenet newsgroups could be great or this or just as frequently horrendous in part because of zero limit on verbiage. Same later with BBS's, Facebook, whatever.)
It’s the social media equivalent of PowerPoint. I was fortunate to have read this back in college, and I’ve been wary of tools that render the short form into something like a memetic hazard ever since:
https://www.wired.com/2003/09/ppt2/
They character limit seems critical to me, too. All online forums get comments of the type that offend Scott on Twitter, but if you want to write something with any nuance on Twitter you have to split it up into a series of tweets, which makes it annoying to read. I don't think it's an accident that Scott addresses this post specifically to Twitter users.
I absolutely agree. The way people think and react on Twitter is sort of like the way they do while driving -- muttering in their car interior grotesquely mean-spirited takes on people with very little data: "Come on grandpa . . .look at this moron !. . ." etc. EXCEPT THAT on Twitter all the drivers can hear each other. Just as we are not wired to comprehend exponential growth, we're not wired to grasp the impact of having our private irritable unfair takes of things broadcast to many people, nor to hear the lots of people's private irritable takes on us.
Thin-skinned people like Scott (and me) should just stay off fucking Twitter.
I think there's a second factor at work, one that doesn't have a real life equivalent, which is the especially powerful splitting of people into warring tribes. I'm sure this is greatly facilitated by misinformation, bot amplification of same, and algorithms that expose people either to true believers in their cause or to the most infuriating of the members of the opposing cause. I'm on medical Twitter -- went on it because last year was doing volunteer work on a site that put up info for the immunocompromised. If I say a single optimistic word about some covid-related issue, or question some crapola study that supports catastrophic views, I get attacked as a red state heartless moron covid denier.
But I'm sure AI will fix all that (heh).
Well-said, all around.
I quit Facebook about 2014 and Twitter last fall -- after some time as an active daily participant in each -- and each of those decisions has clearly been a net positive for mental health and general quality of life. I also now know several other people in my age bracket [old enough to remember rotary phones] who say the same; definitely seems as if those platforms each peaked a while ago now in terms of general social influence at least in the U.S.
(Also Rupert Murdoch as an example of journalists' motivations doesn't really work. I have _big_ problems with each of those categories but, they are really not at all the same.)
I'm with you.
A major issue with Twitter is that everyone is part of a mob, and they don't realize it.
I thought there was an excellent SSC post on this, and I can't find it, so I'm just going to share this NYT piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html
Could this be it? https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/29/the-spirit-of-the-first-amendment/
Or they just don't care if some guy who takes Twitter much more seriously than they do blocks them because of some casual insult they dropped on an inherently casual online platform.
Exactly! I try to instill this understanding into my children, will be easier to live in the "post-digital age". Don't say online that you won't say outside of the company of your few best buddies and you'll be happy!
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 always follow #2, but people on the internet are often confused about how aggressive it's possible to be IRL without the interaction devolving into actual violence.
It's a hard standard to calibrate. I think because IRL we don't generally often discuss charged topics with strangers and political-outgroups.
Ultimately, there's a 3rd rule that I should, but seemingly can't, follow: "don't argue on the internet."
It's also very hard to judge how snarky/aggressive someone is trying to be in a text-based medium. Losing facial expressions and body language. I've had people respond very emotionally to comments I didn't intend to be confrontational at all.
I've noticed this from the other side. I'm pretty unflappable IRL, but pretty mildly critical internet comments can get my heart moving. You're right that facial expressions and body language are huge, I also think people tend to levy critical comments with a lot of deliberate tact IRL - "that's an interesting thought, though I'm not sure I totally agree because..."
No one bothers with that tact on the internet.
To be fair, mildly critical internet comments have a chance of blowing up to the front page of Twitter overnight, leading to all sorts of problems
But we do, surprisingly, talk about charged issues with loved ones and often without realizing we're offending people. (Fish->Water)
My mother was visiting recently and when she left she was going to go see some relatives but was chagrinned to find out some other relatives would be there. Her comment to me, "They're just so Republican." as in they would say things that were just offensive and if you wanted to keep the peace you couldn't say anything back.
Kind of like she was doing with us....
I've literally heard Republicans referred to as "those people", in a place where not 60 years ago that phrase would have meant "blacks".
As I got older I got less and less concerned with arguing with Wrong Guy on the internet. In my teens through early 30s I couldn't stop. Now in my mid 40s I mostly let it go.
Welcome to the major leagues
"don't generally often discuss charged topics with strangers"
I have to remind myself that when I click on an retweet that I'm often entering an entirely different subculture of acceptable behavior. It stung that first time.
Really good observation. It’s so easy to throw a finger and a fuck you at someone when you’re driving by in a car at 40 miles an hour but are you willing to pull over and say it to their face? I don’t know but it sure feels to me like this has a lot in common with road rage.
It's probably evolutionary -- you can see videos of dogs being vicious with one another when separated by a fence, and then stopping immediately when a gate is opened. Or consider chimp threat displays (yes chimps are far more violent than we are per capita in the wild but they're also massively noisy and love threat displays to an extent no humble twitter journo can ever match).
Well, how aggressive it's possible to be IRL without it developing into physical violence depends a lot on relative capacity in a fight.
I'm a 6'2" tall, physically fit man. 90% of the total population would be at a disadvantage against me in a hand to hand altercation. I can get pretty aggressive (or hold my ground against aggression) without it developing into a physical fight because I'd obviously come out on top if it went physical.
This totally ceases to apply when I'm talking to a dude who outweighs me by a hundred pounds, and now applies to him instead. (May help to explain why some of those big boys also have such big mouths)
I'm bigger than you and probably more deranged- and dangerous-looking and I meant (as far as I can tell) the opposite of your point. People constantly act IRL as though nothing bad could ever possibly happen to them right this moment. Sometimes you can jog them out of this illusion (next time some person is being rude you can quietly ask what he thinks the police response time in this neighborhood is), but it's usually not worth it.
Also, for what it's worth, I find that smaller people have a tendency to be ruder, shriller, and have overall bigger mouths. I wonder if we live in very different parts of the world.
I realize that "shrill" is partially intended as a description of character, but in its literal meaning it is probably just plain true as a consequence of how voices work.
It is always good to be smarter than anything that is bigger than you. Physical conflict has its place in existential matters. Having a physical fight about anything less than that just means some people like to fight. With the caveat that maintaining one’s place in the world can be existential. I.e. if I don’t fight him, no one will respect me in this community anymore..
I've recently realized that I've turned into a massively snarky bitch over the years spent on the internet and I'm kind of shocked by how I haven't noticed the change.
I think mistakes happen and one of the best rules we could cultivate as the internet community as a whole is to look out for each other. If you see someone in your circle of friends make a post that violates these guidelines, please ask them to reconsider their words. If you don't want to do that in public (in fact, I suggest you don't, that will inspire them to defend themselves because now it's a reputation issue; if you do it in public, it has to be very, very, very gentle, much more than you might think is actually reasonable, and even then might fail), reach out to them through some other medium.
Another good rule is to precommit to walking away after you made your argument the first time. Even if the site notifies you of responses, resist the urge to read them. If you must read them, resist the urge to respond to them. If you absolutely must respond to them, because they're not completely bad faith but there's an obvious recurring misunderstanding with your initial post, if you're not already certain you're chill about the response, rewrite your response a few times. But ideally, just stick to the precommitment and disengage. It's fine. Better get in a good word than a last word.
I try to live by those guidelines. It doesn't always work (see very start of this very post), but I think it's helped me not be a complete jerk.
I've thought in the past that sarcasm is non constructive and tried to avoid it
but then you realize that you have no influence over the world anyways and whether or not you're maximally polite all the time has no apparent impact because no one pays attention to you or cares what you say one way or the other.
Sarcasm is fun. Humor is the spice of life, someone said. People who get along with each other often tease each other a bit, and I don't think it's out of the question to rib an internet stranger a bit, esp. when they do the same thing to others.
What is the point of trying to be constructive on twtiter? Pretty much no one else is. It's a clown world. A lot of people are just there to have fun, sometimes at each others' expense. Some people take twitter seriously, but those people are always going to wind up miserable because twitter is an inherently toxic silly and clowny space. And the rrest of social media likewise, to a lesser extent
Yep, this is what I tell myself to feel better about being a snarky bitch to people that I feel deserve it, because I'm not going to change their minds anyway so I might as well try to call out their bullshit in a way that's salient to other people even if it means being rude to the person I'm addressing. I haven't convinced myself with this argument.
"... I'm not going to change their minds anyway so I might as well try to call out their bullshit in a way that's salient to other people ..."
This is really real though - like, hardly anyone ever changes their mind about anything on twitter, and the rest of social media isn't much better. But there _is_ real value in seeing someone out their who acknowledges your feelings about something. The person that you snark at spilled out their raw, unfiltered feelings, right? And those likeminded to them got some sense of validation or community or vicarious catharsis from it. So why shouldn't you and those likeminded to you get the same thing, by giving the OP a taste of their own medicine? You're not escalating anything that way, you're interacting in the same way with them that they are interacting with others. I think that's fair game, and no one learns anything or becomes any wiser but at least anyone (if not everyone) can get some catharsis and find some like minded people.
I think the problem is that "interacting in the same way with them that they are interacting with others" is also exactly what escalating feels like when you're tempted to escalate.
> 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 looks like nominative determinism: Jennifer probably means "fair one" and Stephen means "crown, honour, fame, renown", and would be a great name for someone obsessed with status.
Stephen Colbert? Or does he not count if you haven't personally met him?
It's been noted how many psychopathic killers have Wayne as a middle name.
As far as I can tell, he lost whatever was special about him when he stopped trying to be a parody of the other side. It may be like what happens when an author gets too popular for editors to do their job. Perhaps Colbert's "special sauce" was the discipline of fitting his humor into a particular type of parody.
Some of the best comics are the ones that are able to poke fun at both sides. You don't just rant and rave about how stupid your opponents are, you also acknowledge your own stupidity and that of people you normally ally with.
Colbert's parody was able to do this, because he could make fun of the right by exaggerating their stupid opinions, and he could make fun of the left directly by pointing out their stupid opinions explicitly as his character. And he could do both simultaneously, or he could tune one up and the other down as the scenario warranted.
Every so often they still do The Word, and it is excellent.
Colbert without the audience is/was much funnier - a lot of the apparent bias is just the massive cheering by the audience for stuff that does not warrant it.
In all seriousness, the worst Stephen I've ever known... yeah. Middle name was Wayne. As far as I'm aware he's never murdered anyone, but still...
I was going to link Stephen's opening monologue at the 2010 Grammy Awards, but video of that is turning out to be much harder to find than I was expecting. All I could find was a 45-second clip of him pulling out an IPad. What's the deal, Google/Grammys?
At least Stephen Holmes is a nice guy, and writes well. I still remember his opening line in a comment to the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (of "communicative action and gradual consensus" fame) back in the 1990s: "Dear Mr Habermas, I have listened intently to your lecture, and I cannot find anything to disagree with. Having said that, I am quite certain that if we discuss long enough, we will find something on which we cannot agree." (Moral: Even the exact opposite of Twitter (Bizarro-Twitter), i.e. long-winded discussions with lots of room to put in nuances, is no guarantee we will end up agreeing more, rather than disagreeing more, at the end of the day.)
Does Stephen Hawking count?
...OK, you got me there.
Note that Matt Yglesias's tweet is explaining exactly the phenomenon that was poorly named as "microaggression".
Very good point that I don't think I would have noticed
Yeah, and it's probably taken more seriously than 'microaggression' because it's Yglesias saying it and his annoyances aren't of a constant pattern linked to an inescapable identity.
Reminds me of the way we nod thoughtfully when reading about 'AI-style prompts for human intelligence', daily affirmations, and a whole range of Cialdini-esque priming effects, but dismiss as fatuous wokery any push to boost positive minority representation.
It's practically Russell's conjugations at this point.
It's also easier to take seriously because he's honest enough to call them "trivial annoyances" instead of a misleading term like "microaggressions". Being trivially annoying is not a lesser form of being aggressive, they're qualitatively different things.
That’s why I think “microaggression” is such a bad word for this concept that is actually quite important for understanding minority experiences.
Nobody can pronounce my name and I couldn’t give an excrement. I suppose it does get aggressive if you continue to do it.
Was he? So called micro aggressions are usually unintentional. And you don’t get thousands of them in a single day. I think he was describing how “there’s always one asshole” looks when you multiply the room by thousands.
I don't think so. Tweets don't have to be aggressive at all for him to find them to be an annoyance unworthy of his time.
Microaggressions aren't aggressive either.
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.
Not just that, but media companies have to really care about appealing to at least a reasonably large audience
There's definitely overlap, but a distinction worth making between "all publicity is good publicity" incentives (because net approval is meaningless) and "my target is a public figure, but I am not" randos (so nobody is going to bother attacking me). The asymmetries mean you can't treat the interlocutor as though they were a peer to be reasoned with, but there are different kinds of usefulness to be wrung from each group.
Also, if you're blocking people who disagree with you, you aren't actually posting to engage or convince either, even if that's your stated goal.
It’s possible to engage and convince people who don’t disagree with you about fundamental things. That’s what most of intellectual life is about - finding people who agree with you about enough presuppositions that you can discuss novel and interesting things that go beyond those that haven’t yet been figured out.
What makes you think that this attitude only extends to ‘fundamental’ things?
Most people with the ‘I block with prejudice’ attitude tend to loudly proclaim that they do it just for jokes that don’t land or misunderstanding an issue, two things that Scott talks about here directly and don’t seem particularly ‘fundamental.’
I don’t think I agree with you, anyway. Part of being out in the world with a mission to convince and engage is encountering people who *might* have a fundamental disagreement. If you block them more-or-less prejudicially on first contact, you’ll never find out. This attitude assumes clairvoyance of intent towards everyone else, or conflict theory; it’s not compatible with the engage/convince mission.
Is everyone always supposed to be engaging and convincing everyone?
No, but when this discussion started, it was about specifically people who say both (a) i am here to engage and convince and (b) i block with prejudice, not everyone.
No—I co-sign Brian’s comment about this being the beginning of the discussion.
But I would also say that it’s a very curious decision personally to choose to be shouting through an enormous megaphone in a public square about issues of public concern and division, and then get frustrated when people assume that you’re there to engage in debate and discussion.
If you don’t want to engage with opinions that disturb you, maybe a) don’t be one of the extremely vocal people of the public square, and b) hold your discussions in a place where only the like-minded go and can hear you, so you won’t get criticism or hear jokes about your beliefs.
That is only advice of course. Twitter and social media writ large are unique environments where it’s possible to shout at the top of your lungs to the entire world while simultaneously *trying* to blind and deafen yourself to anybody whose shouting rubs you the wrong way, but given that there are literally billions of people in the world, this effort strikes me as Sisyphean masochism. But, sure, if it works for you.
I'd imagine Scott and whoever else does this is blocking a tiny, tiny fraction of their 100k+ followers, and it makes little practical difference on the number of people they convince.
"Block conflict-theorists, engage mistake-theorists" seems like a good heuristic to me.
>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.
That's probably my least favorite post on ACX for a reason. I'm not going to give it a rousing defense, even if some brief virality made it is one of the highest-profile things here.
(Reminder: Scott is a journalist.)
But even if trust is hard to earn and easy to lose, someone who imperfectly but consistently puts in the effort can end in the black. If someone only knows ACX from that post they might reasonably write it off, but they'd still be losing out compared to a longer, more tempered engagement.
There are people I give money to that I've blocked on Twitter. Tying reputational effects to individuals is imperfect. To individual + platform combinations, more effort but better results.
I don't think of Scott as a journalist.
I'd be very surprised if Scott thinks of himself as a journalist.
Tough. Incentives do not require consent.
ETA: earnestly, it *is* tough. Whether or not Scott asked for them, whether or not you like his writing, Scott is well above the profile where standard journalistic incentives matter. It's one thing to say he passes a higher level of scrutiny, but special pleading to say it isn't applicable.
Are you using the word "incentive" in an idiosyncratic way? In the context you're using the word, "ethics" or "principles" makes more sense.
I am using the word in the typical way. Those other words would make for a very different statement.
Scott does journalism and gets paid like a journalist. He makes money based on the raw number of people who particularly like his work and the number of people who dislike his work is irrelevant, to a first approximation. (At a second approximation, they help too. Toxoplasma!) Even going back to the early SSC days, the data is consistent that his most "successful" posts on the metrics that generate revenue are the ones that flirt with controversy, *not* the straightforward informative pieces.
(He's a psychiatrist too, but he's successful enough as a journalist that it's not hard to argue for its primacy.)
The market forces are entirely beyond Scott's control; neither his self-image nor what his readers title him matters. He can choose not to write, of course, and can choose even when writing to focus on things that he values above revenue. But the incentive is there regardless, and if we are to judge journalists as a category for being subject to such incentives then it behooves us to remember that Substack is not outside The Media.
Ah, I see what you meant: exactly what you said. I agree completely.
I don't think this is a good definition of a journalist.
I agree with your point otherwise -- this is just semantics -- but I think you're describing a celebrity, not a journalist
That's not a journalist, that's a columnist or opinion writer. Unless we mean television journalists of the sort who host talking-head shows?
"Incentives do not require consent" is an excellent aphorism!
That’s like Jon Stewart back in the day saying the Daily Show didn’t need to be balanced or informative about things because they were a comedy show, not journalism. Of course these are both journalism, because they are treated as such by plenty of people and usually do a good job of it too.
I don't feel that Scott intends to please everyone on the internet with his writing. In some sense, offending someone is the cost of doing business, when you are famous for expressing views on complex issues. But I'm sure he thinks carefully about what he does and does not talk about, and how he talk about them.
I think this post has got to be some sort of joke or social experiment. I think ACX in general - both the posts and the comments sections - have never been pure. He's trying to make a point about people who are too trigger-happy with the block button ... I think .....
No, I think he endorses trigger-happiness with the block button.
That's hard for me to understand given how consistently in the past he has advocated for hearing out heretics, and against tribalism and cancel culture and censorship. Blocking is very different from cancelling and censorship of course, but to me if I block someone I am retreating deeper into my existing echo chamber and I am effectively censoring their opinions, not from everyone, but from myself. I think that doing a ton of this is definitely going to make a person more aligned with their existing tribe as they hear less from anyone whose views challenge them. Like, I'm not saying never block anyone, but I would think that a light handed approach to blocking goes hand in hand with a desire to hear more people out and be more open to challenging opinions or outgroup perspective.
Like he said in this post, he's not blocking people out of some principle. Dealing with seeing thousands of toxic Twitter comments is emotionally hard. They make you angry, and they distract you. They can ruin your evening. Blocking them is just practical.
He is not advocating blocking people who disagree with you. There's a difference between disagreement and toxicity.
You are basically saying "Scott can't really mean this--that would imply that he lacks self-awareness."
Maybe he lacks self-awareness.
People change. I notice a trend of less free speech, less willingness to call out the woke, more banning for ever smaller offenses. Every time I protest the last one in the comments, people tell me they're in favor of the bans. Search "if people who don't understand the difference decide to leave this forum, this forum will be improved" on this very page. If the readers want this forum to devolve into another echo chamber, well, I suppose all good things have to end.
I don't think there's a particular viewpoint being signaled out by the banning that would create an "echo chamber" - I've read through the ban/warning lists, and they genuinely seem to be for "high heat, low value" sort of comments.
I strongly believe in the freedom to express unpopular opinions; much less in the freedom to do so in a way that is actively unpleasant for other people to interact with.
And more so when I agree with the person in general principal! I don't want jerks to be the spokespeople for my viewpoints. e.g. I'm not a Marxist, but I can't imagine that a certain high-profile commenter was doing their philosophy any favors by their comments here.
Some people seem to follow the strategy:
- be an asshole;
- people ban you;
- "they are sheep who cannot handle my heresy".
Right, I think he would claim that there is a difference between abusive mean tweets (dunking) and critisizing someone's ideas.
That's where I think he goes wrong. Yes, that distinction makes perfect sense IRL where we all have a certain shared context and can distinguish between someone directly calling you a fascist and someone saying that your view helps oppress ppl and holding it demonstrates insufficient concern for oppressed groups. Even if both of them have the same logical implications you can choose to frame it as a direct insult/accusation or that you choose not to do so.
But Twitter blurs that line bc of the limitations of character limits and the fact that ppl are both talking to you and responding to your tweets to talk about you to others. That plus the lack of clues like facial expressions about how a person is interpreting your remarks make it very hard if not impossible to make such a distinction on Twitter.
In particular, I think it would be very hard to render Scott's articles talking about the bad ways ppl who claim to be concerned about sexism etc have treated him and Aaronson as tweets in a way that didn't come across as a direct attack on the ppl who made or agreed with those criticisms.
Just because twitter's structure makes it hard to deliver a message in a polite way doesn't absolve people from making an effort. As the saying goes, if you can't say something nice, you may be better off saying nothing at all. I expect your point about the difficulty of rendering Scott's posts in tweet form is a primary contributor to Scott *not* choosing to share those ideas as tweets.
Meanwhile, if someone is using using twitter as a substitute(/supplement) for a blogroll, I think it's fair for them to limit their follows to twits whose tweets meet the compositional standards of any other blog they'd want to follow.
But different people have different things they want to get out of a platform like Twitter. I don't think it's right to say that anyone who wants to use Twitter to vent about shit which annoys them are doing something wrong bc it upsets some users (Scott's posts themselves upset many ppl but that doesn't make them wrong).
Given that Twitter makes it effectively impossible to segregate into different communities based on how you want to use Twitter I think that means often no one is objectively 'to blame' or in the wrong. Tho ofc some ppl are just assholes too but not all of them.
I mean, if Scott was right it would effectively render it impossible to use Twitter to discuss/vent about politics or divisive issues. As that's probably the primary use case I didn't think the ppl using it that way can be said to be violating an accepted behavioral norm.
I think the right solution is to use mute or block buttons. I didn't mean to critisize that part of Scott's remarks. I only meant to critisize the strongly implied negative moral judgement about those people he blocks for saying hyperbolic shit like "Anyone who X's is a Nazi".
Indeed, if that negative moral judgement was justified it would undermine the blocking itself as any number of comments have indicated that is something they find upsetting.
Power. That's the difference.
Scott can block any one of us without losing anything. In fact, we lose something as consumers.
We can't block Scott because this is where we get our content from.
Ironically, I think this demonstrates Scott's point: you can't act like someone with power (a journalist or media company) when you don't have any.
You can only get away with snark (the literal opening to this blog post, "unfortunately I hate many of you" is snarky and exactly the kind of thing Scott said he would block for) and dunking on people when you have the social power to be immune to the consequences (and even then, piss off enough people, and your power won't protect you -- e.g. cancel culture)
He's not just getting away with snark because he's immune to the consequences; he's getting away with snark because his snark is *put in context*. He knows that anyone reading a snarky comment he makes in a post is the sort of person who will read more than six words before passing judgment. Those who don't are exactly the sort of person he doesn't want to engage with in the first place.
I don't see why context matters.
Here's a comment that (I hope) would make Scott (or anyone else in this thread) block me:
"White people are genetically superior to Asians"
If I then followed up that comment with some nonsense about how eye size is actually the most important human trait and that I'm not trying to dunk on Asians -- I'm just trying to be constructive and suggest a good eugenics program.... does it matter?
I think what you're really getting at with "context" is "is this constructive snark? Does this contribute to a productive dialogue?"
If I'm getting you right, then I would challenge you with the fact that everyone's own fan base thinks they're doing productive dialogue. (and that's why, in my opinion, the real question is "Do you have a big fan base?")
That's one of my favorite posts, and while I acknowledge there are a lot of comments that may read as dunks if you look at them in isolation, every criticism is set in the context of a constructive critique. He doesn't dunk for the sake of dunking, in contrast to the tweets he describes that set him off.
I just glanced over the class proposal article, and it does not seem so bad.
I mean, he says (about the GOP):
> I hate you and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck.
In general, his commentary on the (Democrat-defining) upper class is unflattering, but still fair, I guess? I think the smoke to light ratio in that post is rather ok.
There is a big difference between writing an article-length text arguing that the Democrats are ruled by an upper class minority and tweeting "Lol, all the Dems are elitist snobs".
You can not write anything without stepping on someones toes. Nor should that be the goal. The kind of text Scott seems to argue against is the one which is going out of their way to step on peoples toes out of spite or to signal group membership.
A better example of a dunk article by Scott might be https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/28/pope-and-change-an-atheists-guide-to-vatican-decision-2013/ . Scott is quite open about the article judging papal candidates for their potential to be hilarious. He is certainly not going out of his way to avoid stepping on the toes of Catholics (e.g. using an image of Death Star commander Tarkin for one candidate). He is explicitly targeting one of his ingroups (the atheist community). There is little in the way of deep insights compared to other SSC articles. The article does not feel necessary. It certainly is not kind. Truth is more debatable, a parody might be literally untrue but point to a deeper metaphorical truth, while there are also statements which are literally true but deeply misleading. Depicting anti-positivist Cardinal Adalbert as Count von Count does not seem true on either level.
Still, this is not quite the same level of offensiveness as a tweet of "Only idiots would believe in Catholic dogma". And Scott has certainly become less offensive in the decade since that post.
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
I think that ppl who are kinda famous like EY also block just to manage the content of their tweet threads.
I managed to get blocked by him for a time simply arguing that he was missing some important details in some of his arguments and that I didn't find them convincing. No personal attacks, no insults just calling some arguments unconvincing and misleading. I suspect he just didn't want that arg clogging up his threads (while I think he clearly hasn't made his case I'm sure he thinks he has and probably doesn't want his threads full of relitigation).
Anyway, I just mention it to let you know it was just as likely a: I don't want this shit in my threads not a judgement of insult.
Actually, I once had the opposite experience with him. But it was a bit before this whole ChatGPT boom which might have really changed his experience on Twitter.
Given his views on AI x-risk etc I almost feel it would be inconsistent of him not to block me given my views. But who knows.
It's certainly true that I don't hold EY's args in particularly high regard. IMO his arguments are too often good narratives that appeal to the storytelling parts of our nature but often don't hold up when you try to make them rigorous. Don't get me wrong, he's done great work at community building but I think his style of argument is very much something rationalists should be wary about (especially the parables)
Anyway, point is that while I've always been respectful in Twitter threads with him I suspect if I had his beliefs I'd think it was in the greater good to block me as well. And I think he accused me of making an arg that was an info hazard at one point.
I guess I think Twitter is basically the equivalent of getting to hear the way your friends talk about you and the things you care about when you aren't around.
There is a reason this is such a common trope in kid shows. The way we bond as humans is often by talking about the faults of others or what we don't like about them often in an exaggerated style (to clearly assures our conversation partner we're on their side). And even good people tend to discuss those who aren't there in ways that would be very hurtful if they were: even close friends and family.
I think Twitter especially creates the feeling that you're just there with the people who agree with you and some faceless crazies. Unfortunately, the nature of the interaction means that when you do hurt someone you don't perceive them as being hurt (who admits weakness) but as attacking you.
Indeed. I find the premise of this article very confusing, and spent the entire read waiting for the flip to come. And then, nope.
So what is the point being made here?
1) don't engage in bad, lazy critical interactions - calling everyone who disagrees a Nazi, judging an article just from the title etc. Ok sure, that seems like a truism
2) Don't say anything that annoys me / I find ridiculous/ does the same to my friends. But aren't clever dunks sometimes in fact, clever and correct? Or at least have some facial plausibility? The existence of satire is premised on "you can not only make a valid point while being harsh towards someone in a humourous way, the use of humorous attack can help deliver the valid point".
I just struggle to imagine treating (2) as a extinction-level "you don't exist to me anymore" event. Having people disagree on ways that you don't like seems like a mandatory price of partaking in the marketplace of ideas. Or differently put, to paraphrase Sirius Black, "the twitter world isn't divided up into good people and death eaters"
"2) Don't say anything that annoys me / I find ridiculous/ does the same to my friends. But aren't clever dunks sometimes in fact, clever and correct? "
So what? Lots of things are clever, correct, and not worth saying. Some things are clever, correct, and worth actively not saying. Dunks, however clever and correct, usually fall into that category. What is the benefit of saying/writing/tweeting them? A brief endorphin rush reinforced by the likes of like-minded twits, that will not likely be remembered in a day or two? I hope you're not expecting dunk-tweets to actually *convince* anyone who didn't already agree with you.
The cost, is what Scott is trying to explain. You effectively permanently alienate someone you decided was your mortal foe based on maybe 15 seconds' exposure. And you might have made a mistake in those 15 seconds. What probability of alienating a would-have-been friend, is worth the low brief pleasure of a clever dunk-tweet?
"Having people disagree in ways that you don't like seems like a mandatory price of partaking in the marketplace of ideas."
If "ways that you don't like" mean dunk-tweets, then no - it is possible to partake of the marketplace of ideas without having to put up with that. Same goes for personal insults, gratuitous obscenity, etc. There are marketplaces with norms of civility and decorum which do not tolerate such, and which still offer the full range of ideas by people who are less obnoxious about expressing them. Like, for example, this one.
The problem is that Twitter is basically designed to be a space where you can't institute any particular norms.
I know many ppl who absolutely believe in some spaces in the importance of respectful careful disagreement w/o dunking but also want a place to vent about their frustrations and use Twitter for that purpose.
Is it just a 'temporary rush of endorphins'? Well sure, but a friendship or romantic relationship is just a bunch of endorphin rushes strung together. I think some people gain real utility from having a place to vent and no longer feel they have those in their IRL lives (which is a broader social I'll).
So I fully grant that it imposes the costs Scott mentions on some but I don't think that means we should all be respectful at all times (for the record I personally don't get much out of dunking but some do).
Rather, I think the right answer is that Twitter needs to die a horrible firey death or at least be used only sparingly and more conversations need to happen in spaces where ppl can choose a space whose norms they like for that content.
This.
Maybe I just use "dunking" in a more general way than others do, but I don't think most (successful) dunks are "actively not worth saying". Imho, if something is true, clever and makes a relevant point, then provided it isn't egregious in its rudeness (aka within the bounds of academic seminars or parliamentary debates in parliamentary systems like the UK etc, both of which can be pretty brutal), it's presumptively fine to say it.
Once you get into "sure, but you still shouldn't have said it" you often see situations like the following:
A: "Position X is good"
B: "Clever witty point that is quite damaging to position X and makes person A look rather foolish"
A: "Sure, your point is clever and correct, but you still shouldn't have said it"
That basically has always seemed like cope to me, along the lines of "why do you even care about this topic" and similar attempts at deflection.
Now sure, a lot of "dunks" on twitter are lame and are poorly executed - they are often neither clever nor correct (one sees many attempted dunks along the lines of "look at this inconsistency", when in fact, upon the most scant investigation, there is none). But that is an argument against bad logic and poor argument, not against properly executed dunks.
For example, I would characterize this entire article as an extended dunk, full of implicit and explicit snark. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/21/current-affairs-some-puzzles-for-libertarians-treated-as-writing-prompts-for-short-stories/
A brilliantly and devastatingly executed one - NJR has always come across as someone with about a 17 levels too high opinion of his own cognitive skills, and this seemed like a well justified dressing down. I would be pretty confident that NJR (if he read it) would not have been happy with Scott for writing it. Few people take criticism well, especially valid criticism! I just don't see why that means Scott shouldn't have written it.
And that is why I disagree with this: "What is the benefit of saying/writing/tweeting them? A brief endorphin rush reinforced by the likes of like-minded twits, that will not likely be remembered in a day or two? I hope you're not expecting dunk-tweets to actually *convince* anyone who didn't already agree with you."
A simple, well executed point can devastate a position, and likely convince far more people than dry analysis. A substantial fraction of SSC and ASC (and many other news/opinion bloggers) is "person X is wrong about Y", and I would bet that almost all the targets of the pieces take umbrage at various characterizations. I imagine few are convinced. I also think that's rarely the aim - when A and B argue, they are usually trying to persuade spectators, not each other.
Consider Republican governors, after years of being lectured by progressives for complaining about illegal immigration, flying/bussing illegal immigrants to blue "hate has no home here" sanctuary cities. Yes, obviously it was analogous to dunking. Yet it took all of 24 hours and said city leaders were complaining about how unreasonable it was to dump this burden on their cities, local "progressive" citizenry were trying to get rid of them in true NIMBY style, and left-wing activists were being recorded sounding like hardline anti-immigration types. Point very successfully made.
I more often see:
A: "Position X is good"
B: "Clever witty point that makes person A look rather foolish"
A: "That's awfully rude of you."
[click through several links to find context]
B: "Elaboration on clever witty point that may or may not explain how it is actually damaging to position X"
B: "Dunk on A's reply for being insufficient to rebut the entirety of the elaborated position in all of 280 characters."
A: "Blocked."
"A: Position X is good
B: Clever witty point that makes person A look rather foolish"
It occurs to me that this is an old problem. It reminds me of Socrates complaining that the sophists "make the weak argument appear the stronger".
A thorough refutation/mockery of someone else's writing used to be called a "fisking".
I think the more relevant Harry Potter paraphrase would be, "There is no good or evil; there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." (Okay, I lied: that's an exact quote.) Or if you like your allusions a tad more classical, "The strong do what they can, and the weak endure what they must." Scott can block whomever he wills, unbounded by any previously stated principle. If you don't wish to be on the receiving end, fall in line.
Of course Scott can do what he likes. But "you should listen to me, I say smart and insightful stuff" and ""I can do what I like, without any principle" are not exactly positions that sit will with each other. That latter will tend to damage reputation regarding the former.
The reputation is only good for finding the blog in the first place. The "smart and insightful stuff" speaks for itself and does not rely on it.
No, that is not true.
Suppose I read an essay on a topic I don't know that much about. I have some ability to judge the argument, based on general intelligence, but it's limited. The writer may be able to fool me into making the same mistakes they may have made (that's assuming good intent, let's stick with that). If I know that the person is very quick to rely on power dynamics when challenged, or tends to block people who offend him on the slightest whim, then I will rationally have less confidence that the person has iterated to the correct view.
I should only stop caring about the epistemology of the person I'm reading if either: a) I have perfect cognition (but limited knowledge) or b) I know the person I'm reading has perfect cognition/knowledge (whatever their other foibles).
> the use of humorous attack can help deliver the valid point
That only works if the valid point is actually delivered, and 280 characters isn't enough for most valid points. There's a reason this post is targeted specifically at twitter users. Even if they do explain in follow-ups, that's not what gets retweeted. You really have to dig to get context on twitter, and it's more often than not a fruitless struggle. The twitter world isn't divided into good people and death eaters, but tweets themselves are.
I think for a lot of people, the motivation to comment is essentially the same motivation for quickly blocking the people who upset you - trying to find your own tribe. Some shout their opinions at a group, hoping to hear some echos, some listen to the babble and try to silence the parts of it that aren't an echo of their own thoughts. It's effectively the same.
What's fun is that this article assumes that the people shouting at the crowd are motivated by activism rather than tribe finding, but activists wouldn't want to block trivially either. "I will never get a chance to consider it or change my mind or feature your ideas on ACX", "lose 99% of the potential people who could listen to you".
There are certainly some people for whom that would be sad. People who are genuinely trying to affect the world, or operate in the realm of ideas, but convincing the mass to agree with you on some topic is not usually the best way to find your tribe. In some ways if you succeed you lose the whole value of a tribe anyway.
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.
This site goes into the idea of fixing mainstream media that wishes to target the whole market by using AI to help nudge the content biased journalists create towards neutrality to regain the public's trust. It notes the puzzle that you have a badly broken industry that hasn't fixed its product:
https://societyandai.com//p/fix-journalism-using-ai
'A study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that in 2020 only 26% of Americans reported a favorable opinion of the news media, and that they were very concerned about the rising level of political bias. In the 1970s around 70% of Americans trusted the news media “a great deal” or a “fair amount”, which dropped to 34% this year, with one study reporting US trust in news media was at the bottom of the 46 countries studied. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that newspaper publisher’s revenue fell 52% from 2002 to 2020 due to factors like the internet and dissatisfaction with the product.
A journalist explained in a Washington Post column that she stopped reading news, noting that research shows she was not alone in her choice. News media in this country is widely viewed as providing a flawed product in general. Reuters Institute reported that 42% of Americans either sometimes or often actively avoid the news, higher than 30 other countries with media that manage to better attract customers. In most industries poor consumer satisfaction leads companies to improve their products to avoid losing market share. When they do not do so quickly enough, new competitors arise to seize the market opening with better products.
An entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the early commercial internet and is now a venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, observed, the news industry has not behaved like most rational industries: “This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect..” The news industry collectively has not figured out how to respond to obvious incentives to improve their products. '
The problem is that what people and/or advertisers will pay for and what people ought to be told are often two different things. "Reality has a well-known liberal bias", etc. If strongly partisan news media makes more money, is it a better product?
There is a market for both strongly partisan news media, and more neutral news media. Its easier to be partisan and chase the long hanging fruit, but there appears to be a market that isn't well served fro more neutral media. It seems partisan media might make more money by admitting their bias rather than pretending to be neutral since people are wising up to the reality and they may as well go all in on targeting the demographic they appeal to. Then others might steer to be more neutral.
I don't think there is a market for neutral news because someone correctly figured out you can cheaply get all the supposed benefits with a curated blend of strongly partisan news, and offer that instead. (Ground News is the example I'm thinking of.)
There was only a brief period from maybe 1950-1990 when media consolidation had proceeded to the point that journalists had the monopoly incentive to play to everyone. The marketplace is just inherently difficult, and someone who tries to play to everyone is going to lose out to media that play to niches.
Polls of the public suggest differently. Regardless of which market is larger, there are markets for niche and neutral/mainstream.
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).
Does muting someone still allow them to reply to a tweet and just not give the muter a notification? In that case if someone is leaving critical comments the writer might feel like their cause or standing would increase more without a critique, valid or not.
The argument I've seen is that muting means that they can piggyback onto your followers by @ing you, and if you've muted them you're basically amplifying them at their discretion while removing your own ability to know about it or respond.
Not something I have much direct experience with, but it seems like a plausible argument for someone with a large following.
That's reasonable for especially obnoxious responses, but not for something that could otherwise be okay or mildly irritating at best and is only especially bad for you because of the volume.
The point of blocking someone as opposed to interaction-muting them is precisely to make them see the "You're blocked :)" screen. There's no reason for Twitter to have ever implemented or continue to have the feature, sure.
(Go away, edge-case nitpickers. Private followers-only accounts can get a "remove as follower" button. If they don't already have it, I bet they do.)
I stopped reading as soon as I saw your title began with “Your”.
Your onto something :P
You’re right.
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?
Try a daisy.
I have no idea what this means.
He hates me.
He hates me not
.
.
.
What's the endpoint for the Daisy API?
Touch grass.
Oh, this is one of those chains, isn't it? Was never really into cryptography.
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?
A) Yes
B) to your example, I struggle to reconcile the position laid out in this article with "Yglesias has not been blocked". Among the set of people I mostly find myself disagreeing with, he does not seem "above average for avoiding bad faith arguments and/or petty snark".
I think the difference is that he was already a known quantity to Scott by the time Scott saw petty snark. I agree that Yglesias’s Twitter presence is quite problematic, but you block people on ratio, not on total volume, at least when you’re a person who deals with lots of strangers on Twitter.
Indeed, as Ash rather suggests, my prior is that Yglesias' snark coefficient is reasonably high. (To be clear, I don't read him much. Have never been particularly impressed with what I have seen, and thus have not thought the investment is merited. But that's on the quality of the ideas, not the snark).
A lot of it depends on the target, I imagine. Yglesias is often snarky towards Republicans and far-leftists, but tends to be nice to Scott's rationalist/EA in-group.
That's not a principled difference, but Scott is talking about his emotional reaction, and it's completely natural to have a different emotional reaction when someone is mean and unfair to you or someone you care about vs when they are mean and unfair to someone else.
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'm still entertaining the idea that Twitter is a machine that feeds (minor) annoyances to (minor) celebrities until they go insane.
I like this, but I would strip out the "(minor)"s.
(Like, sometimes it's really bad. And Musk is pretty famous, no?)
Not to mention Trump. I almost think that world leaders need to be banned from Twitter, both from reading and from posting. They can have people print out paper copies, if it becomes necessary.
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.
I hear from a friend that TikTok can be good for expanding one's awareness of the world. Like, some kid in Kenya does a cool dance move. You see it. Now you've seen the inside of an actual human's home, in a country and on a continent that you may never set foot in. That kid, smiling and enthusiastic, that's your new reference for "Kenyans". Repeat for Bangladesh, Slovakia, and everywhere else on the planet.
It's still not enough to get me to sign up, but I was briefly tempted. :-)
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.)
I don't remember journalists being quite so quippy and smug until the twitter age.
Mute button best button.
Yes, I mean the people who disagree are the ones most likely to benefit from changing their minds. Why deny them the chance for redemption with a block? Just because you’re annoyed? Mute is the correct action. The rest is just vindictiveness.
The downside to choosing pithy slogans that scan well is that they can give the impression that I'm not 100% in support of blocking as a valid implementation of said slogan.
A block is directly discoverable, which strikes me as preferable when there's an option. Mute is more akin to a shadow ban.
Counterpoint: Delete Twitter 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."
Yeah, if he wants to join my debating society he has to leave his gun at home. ;)
There can be value to third parties in debating Nazis, creationists, and other purveyors of nonsense and/or evil - if they're clearly wrong, there should be convincing evidence or arguments against them (bullshit asymmetry principle notwithstanding) - but nobody has the obligation to get down into the mud with them if they don't want to.
Keep the ballot box, leave the Armalite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armalite_and_ballot_box_strategy
"Leave the gun, take the cannoli." Truly words of wisdom.
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 am a quasi-lobbyist for a major religious organization so my job does require this and let me tell you, it is brutal"
Ouch! I believe you and I sympathize. I'm lucky: My personal interaction with Twitter is limited to 3 or 4 rarely visited bookmarks. Everything I've heard about it (starting from the space limit on a tweet and going on from there) sounds awful.
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.
Yes, exactly. I think Scott is backwards wrt who has what incentives. The trouble is, no one has an incentive to get *everyone* on their side.
>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?
There's a lot of possible variation here to just what "alienation" entails, and making sure it's distinct from "not appealing to people". I find it hard to imagine that there are many situations where offending huge swathes of the population is going to generate better outcomes. It just makes the person an asshole. Assholes can be popular, even successful, but I wouldn't be envious of such a position.
>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 really shouldn't be that hard of a question, though! And yet- look at Twitter, look at the mediasphere- it does seem the cruelty is the point, as the saying goes.
There's a list I keep in my head of certain words and phrases that, if used, I no longer consider the speaker/writer worth any attention. Clearly, those people think it's worth the tradeoff to use their shibboleths.
I don't think anyone aims to alienate 99% of the population, although in certain despised or disfavored subcultures it might be worth it because it binds you closer to the 15 (or however many) people in your niche. (EDIT: sorry, not trying to motte and bailey here. I should have just waited to reply when I had more time. Basically "F what people think, X is right" is a common rhetoric, and if you end up with people who you can form real human relationships, then as long as the cost isn't your livelihood and life, most people would probably be fine with being seen as repugnant by "the outgroup" compared to never reaching out at all and forming those strong connections.)
Think criminal groups, extreme social revolutionaries, and teens (I originally wrote "dorky edgy teens" but after thinking about it more it probably applies more generally.)
Back off from 99% to a more reasonable no_pitchfork level and it's probably much easier to find a 20-something who says things that might offend/insult/hurt 70% of the US population if it were to be signal boosted properly but goes over just fine with their target social audience.
> 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?
Does this actually happen? Most people make friends by:
1. Being generally socially tolerable
2. Finding someone that they have a reasonable rapport with, and
3. Seeing that person repeatedly
They don't do it by alienating the other 99% of the population. If you have alienated 99% of the population then even if I'm in the remaining 1% then I'm probably not going to invite you to any parties or risk being seen with you; I need to maintain positive interactions with at least some of those 99%.
I dunno. I see a lot of people make friends and deepen relationships by: Engaging in pranks together. Engaging in crime together. Bullying people weaker than them. Bullying people perceived by their group as evil. Talking about how all Democrats/Republicans/Libertarians/Communists should die. Making crass jokes about men/women and reporting on sexual conquests. Going to punk concerts and talking about how people over 40 should just kill themselves. Hanging out in support groups for people that are an extreme minority and are well-hated by the majority. Does 4chan count? Surely some of the others -chans and related do. Glorifying Ted Kaczynski. Talking about how Mao didn't go far enough. Creating / commissioning / consuming 2d art many would find abhorrent. Murder/snuff video fangroups. Goonswarm. People who spend all day dumping on Star Wars / Marvel / whatever. People who spend all day defending Star Wars / Marvel / whatever. Shock humorists. Real life versions of Jackass. Do Billionaires count in the US? Some versions of economists and ethicists.
(Note, please don't see my list above as condemning or condoning any particular group, just listing people as examples of those where the strong connection with a small group of individuals or small tribe is more important to them than the acceptance of the masses.)
There are millions of people out there to make connections with. Billions, but I've been mentally narrowing it down to same-language, similarish cultures. Even if you exclude 99% of them, there are still many for you to connect with, and in fact since you've just signaled that you are part of that 1%, the other 1%s will feel more connected to you AND since their friend-pool is similarly as limited as yours means they are all the more motivated to make that connection.
Lepers got to stick together, right? Because they can't change their spots.
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.
Once you leave twitter the culture wars end. I had an account from the early days. It started off dull, then got great, until a few years before trump. Then the wombats of both political persuasions found about it and it was forever September.
They end because people aren't pushed together, or when they are pushed together one side quickly and quietly goes dark.
I don't know how many coversations I've set through with one half of relatives / friends who sit there and trash Christians and Republicans and people who hate education and (insert villain of the week, yes sometimes this will cause contradictions with previous weeks), and then next week visit with the other half or relatives / friends and they just trash-talk Democrats and people who hate education and (insert villain of the week, yes sometimes this will cause contradictions with previous weeks).
Then every conversation I have to figure out "do I change the subject, bail on the conversation, or do I have a chance to "yes-and" to get this person to think a little more.
The culture wars are (sadly) everywhere, and if they aren't then perhaps that's because you're on the winning side in the room you're in.
Well my experience is that the culture wars are online only. So I’ve escaped.
There are people who do culture wars in real life, but my bubble does not contain them. (Once I met a person like this, it was a friend of a friend. Afterwards, my friend apologized for their friend's behavior.)
I imagine there are situations where you cannot escape culture wars in real life, for example some colleges.
FWIW, I'm not sure I've had more than a few conversations IRL in my whole life and I'm now in my 40's.
Sometimes the culture war finds you.
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 think the idea of being blocked by a writer you respect enough to regularly read his blog is something of a disincentive... at least the majority of regular readers. Parasocial relationships and such. And if this writer does it, then you should assume others do to. And possibly people in positions that a good relationship could help you in the future (jobs, contacts, potential partners).
I don't know, I've had people brag to me repeatedly about being blocked by more-famous-person on twitter.
It's a bit like getting an autograph, a more famous person (but not famous enough to have someone else handling their twitter account) has bothered to take time out of their day to block you personally! Your existence is acknowledged!
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.
I am similarly endlessly amused by my own wit and I imagine indulging in it doesn't endear me to other people.
I don't have a Twitter account, but I like reading it for news tidbits about some subjects (Ukraine war) or to get a behind-the-scenes / additional-content look at some writers that I wish would write more.
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).
excellent point
I would love to hear arguments for why this is wrong. But I can't think of any offhand.
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 agree with your point on journalists. I think they also seek in-group credibility, and face severe social consequences for wrongthink.
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.
What are the odds that you are right and everybody else has a weird blindspot?
Conditioned or unconditioned? Or if we're restricting ourselves to Bayes, at what point in the update process?
You didn't evolve for truth, you evolved for survival. Every now and then there are mutants who pursue truth directly and you kill them. It's not really your fault but you are still a lesser being in a sense. Om Svabhava Shuddha Sarva Dharma Svabhava Shuddho Ham
>Every now and then there are mutants who pursue truth directly and you kill them.
"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"
(Sorry, I couldn't help it)
"It's not really your fault but you are still a lesser being in a sense"
I was wondering if your gnosis was just trendy but yeah, we have a genuine Gnostic in the house. You are the pneumatic and the rest of us poor boobs are just the hylics.
That's fine, I do understand the impulse to salve one's wounds with "they don't matter anyway, I'm so much better and finer than they are, so what if they are the majority, they're idiots and fools and I am the only true smart perceptive higher more sensitive being!"
"Om Svabhava Shuddha Sarva Dharma Svabhava Shuddho Ham"
Now, what did this remind me of? Oh yes, I remember now!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bYj2o7y4rk
I just love Westerners dropping their cool little takes on Eastern traditions into a conversation in order to show off how deep and scholarly they are!
I'm sorry my suffering hurts your feelings
My withers remain unwrung, my feelings are as ever they were, and you're not suffering as you are enjoying your martyrdom too much.
"Alas and alack and woe is me! 99 people out of a hundred hate me, and I alone am the hundredth!"
I could get into a pointless debate with you, but what use is that? You have a vision, and I will grant you this much - you're honest about being the "transsexual" part which has been elided in recent controversy. You're a man who thinks you're a woman. That is mental illness. There may indeed be a module of the brain associated with gender, and yours is malfunctioning. I don't have the medical knowledge about the brain structure to say. But we see people with damaged brains everyday, and they are not in fact the sole possessors of the one mystic truth. If 99 people say you're crazy, there's a good chance you are crazy.
I hope that your uniqueness is rare enough that it at least doesn't come up in most conversations. You have my deepest empathy. I hate that people so easily spout whatever water they swim in they don't see when others are allergic to water. That came out weird, I'll workshop it later. As I get older I try harder and harder to "first, do no harm" in conversation but it isn't easy.
This isn't me trying to say I'm "sorry" for you, but instead me acknowledging faults in our culture and in myself and wishing you the best. Take from it what you will.
If it's not too emotionally sensitive of a subject, is it ok to ask what this aspect/blind spot is? If anywhere would listen to it without throwing it back at you it would probably be here. Again, you don't have to share if this is a personally identifying or especially painful issue, which it sounds like it might be, but I am really curious now.
Just being MtF transsexual. Nothing too irregular by 2023 standards.
Ok, I can see how that would be frustrating. I'm sorry you have to deal with the current hostile discourse surrounding the issue, I can imagine how that would get tiresome.
My entire life has been defined in the context of intense hostility. I'd rather not get into that though, it never seems to do anyone any good.
Dumb question, but why do you use the "transsexual" terminology as opposed to the more popular "transgender"? I presume it's a deliberate choice.
I think there's one etiology for all genders and that's the brain, so it's not to try and invalidate anyone's phenomenology, but it is a deliberate and aggressive choice to try to disambiguate myself from bad ontology. That rarely comes across though so thank you for giving me a chance to be explicit.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too dumb for big words, but I honestly don't know what any of this means. Are you making the point that what you have "transitioned" is your physical body as opposed to your "gender identity" or something like that?
So basically this is my position:
Gender = specific neural circuitry or brain anatomy. There are probably many more than two of these, but short of brain damage they're fixed and immutable. There is nothing unnatural or socially constructed about them. There is nothing spiritual about them. There is nothing essential about them. There is no hierarchy of them.
Gender identity = how a person processes their gender internally. I don't fucking care about this at all.
Gender presentation = How a person acts in relation to social gender roles, most of which are completely baseless nonsense. I also don't fucking care about this at all.
All of this is physical. Physical does not always mean immutable, but these things go from very immutable to pretty mutable in the order I have written them. Physical also does not always mean material, because energy =/= matter.
I reject as nonsense all of the following dogma:
* Gender is a construct
* You can pray to change your gender
* You can change your gender through will
* A consistent gender identity can "loosen" and become fluid in the absence of severe trauma to the brain
* Identity is all that matters (it actually doesn't matter at all)
* Presentation is all that matters (it actually doesn't matter at all)
* Identity is an aspect of gender
* Presentation is an aspect of gender
* Gender can be downstream of choice or will
* Gender is a superset of a person's entire being
* Gender is meaningful
* Gender colors or determines action
Basically I think of gender as a single monad-type function existing somewhere deep in the brain. It is broadly immutable. There are no feedback loops between it and anything else. Everything else people associate with gender is either downstream of it (plus whatever else) or a hallucination. There might be many things that correlate to some degree with gender and there are things to which gender is an input but the only thing for which gender is an output is natal development.
"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..."
I mean, yes? That's literally the case for every human being who ever lived? Are you a Christian? The vast majority of the world is not. Are you a liberal democrat (small l, small d)? Most of the world is not. Are you a Catalan nationalist? Good luck finding another one who isn't Catalan. Are you a utilitarian? Most people find that philosophy repulsive in at least its strong forms. Are you in favor of gender equality, in the way modern feminists define it? Almost nobody who isn't a westerner is. Whatever you believe, if I find a random human and place him next to you, there's a >99% chance there will be some fundamental conviction on which you differ strongly. That conviction will differ depending on who I happen to pick, but it will exist.
> Are you a Catalan nationalist? Good luck finding another one who isn't Catalan.
*raises hand*
... They have quite a number of blindspots, actually.
You know what they say: if you meet one asshole in the morning, you've met one asshole. If everyone you meet all day is an asshole, maybe you're the asshole?
Or, if 99% of people think A is wrong and you think A is right, maybe you are the person who is wrong?
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.
Yeah, being a real jerk to a lot of people while claiming good reasons for that can win the most easygoing and cooperative people as friends. I've seen it happen. Only, if you are an asshole, you can't avoid alienating all your nicer friends sooner or later.
The question is whether that 1 person is somehow significantly different from the 99, and whether you want to make your bubble out of this type of people.
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?
There’s no way you don’t know that.
Yeah, I was kidding. :)
And here I was thinking it was a Pontius Pilate reference... :-)
A miserable little pile of clickbait.
But enough talk! Have at you!
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.
Actually, precisely because people hate criticism, public criticism is very effective at influencing behaviour. If you are part of a group that wants to change people's behaviour in some way, repeated nasty criticism is an adaptive behaviour.
You want more conservative sexual mores? Shame the sexual progressives as sluts.
You want more progressive sexual mores? Shame the sexual conservatives as dinosaurs.
You want more acceptance of LGBT? Shame opponents as bigots.
You want less acceptance of LGBT? Shame supporters as groomers.
It crappy and nasty and no one enjoys the endless shit-flinging. But it works.
> It crappy and nasty and no one enjoys the endless shit-flinging. But it works.
Until everyone in the world is divided into two lines, each flinging shit at each other. In the grim darkness of the present, imagine shit being flung at a face, forever. :-(
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 was thinking about examples in my social environment, but I have built for myself a bubble of nice people. My strategy for people who are not nice is simply to avoid them when possible.
I can only think of two examples, which are/were friends of my friends, so that I meet/met them repeatedly when we are both invited to the same events. Both are highly intelligent and skilled, but also quite unpleasant to interact with. Some people think that it's worth to endure the interaction with them, because there is a lot you can learn from them. I used to think the same, but the learning has diminishing returns, and their behavior is constant, so I quickly switched to "not worth it".
One of them, whose behavior was more offensive, succeeded to thoroughly burn all his social capital during a few years. He started in a situation where a few people were okay with him, and many other people were like "I don't really like him, but he is a friend of my friends, so I will try to be tolerant and charitable, and will behave nicely to him"; and ended in a situation where most of those people are like "if he is invited somewhere, I am definitely not going there no matter what, let this be publicly known", which of course results in him never being invited anywhere. His jobs, as far as I know, consist of doing some remote IT work, where no one has to interact with him in person. He also has a long history of unemployment, which is almost impossible to achieve for a person with IT skills.
(The approach "he is a friend of my friends, so I will try to be nice to him, even if he sucks" originally created a lot of false consensus, where a person X was nice to him because they believed that he was a friend of Y, but Y was only nice to him because they believed that he was a friend of X. But at some moment it was too much; X and Y and many others voiced their complaints to each other and the bubble has burst.)
(Writing this made me wonder: where did he actually acquire his social capital in the first place? But I think it's because when you are young, a lot of social capital comes to you for free, for example you have classmates, or you go to summer camps, so many people remember you as "someone I spent time with". Furthermore, if the summer camp was good, many will associate the good memories with everyone who was there.)
The other guy is less offensive and way more skilled, so his fate is less dramatic. He has very interesting jobs, and many cool stories to tell. On social networks whatever he writes will be liked and shared. But as far as I know, he doesn't have much social interaction in real life that is not related to work, and also his wife left him.
So in my opinion there are great costs to not being nice, and probably even greater costs if you do not have superior skills to compensate for your behavior.
I thought I was reading Freddie deBoer for a second. Glad I've never had a Twitter account!
Me too. I have one, though. It seems to have been blocked before I tweeted anything at all. Phew!
"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.
I personally think this was pretty mean-spirited in a similar fashion to what Scott describes. I’m not sure if that’s deliberate and you’re trying to get yourself banned. I will say, in defense of overreacting against petty cruelty, that perhaps this is the type of “drawing lines in the sand” problem that demands an overwhelming reaction. Petty cruelty sucks, and I would like for it to not be a norm in online discussion.
This person said they've been reading Scott for 15 years while also saying everything else they said in the tone they said. There's something very wrong here.
Don't engage. Don't touch with a 10-foot stick. Back away and wish peace on their soul.
Mind you I'm not saying it's wrong to block people who are petty towards you or who say nasty thing about a group of people you belong to. (I do it absolutely all the time)
It's not even wrong to actively dislike those people. It's probably not healthy to hold grudges but (as Scott says) it's only human.
But complaining about people being mean and hyperbolic and then go on to compare them to Rupert Murdoch seems hypocritical, not to mention ridiculous (the implication that Murdoch's motivations begins and ends at money is ridiculous also).
(I wouldn't use the word cruelty here incidentally, I have seen pettiness in plenty of online discussions but I think genuine cruelty is a different thing. Coordinated harassment campaigns are cruel. Quote-tweets that dunk on people are just petty.)
I reported his comment. It meets 0 out of 3 criteria for legitimate comments: It's unkind, it serves no useful purpose, and writer offers no evidence to back up his claims.
Ugh, Typhon. I'm not crazy about Scott's take on Twitter either, but in real online life everybody loses it a bit sometime. I certainly have --either by feeling very demoralized and self-doubting, or by just *hating* somebody. Your post has a a distinctive gotcha quality, like you're been hanging around waiting for Scott to post something that gave you a chance to pillory him . While you throw in a piece of "helpful feedback" psychobabble now and then ("maybe you should reassess . . ."), basically you're just saying "haha, you're an asshole," and accusing Scott of having various character defects such as low self-awareness and a habit of constantly inflating the importance and gravity of various ideas. I've been reading Scott's posts for quite a while, and I do not see the character defects you're talking about. Character defects show up in pretty much all of somebody's communication. While Scott may very occasionally show they defects you're talking about, so does everybody else. In general, he does not. For instance in the post before this one, about a model of mental illness, he said he did not understand some parts of the articles he was summarizing, and felt a bit embarrassed about that. So there we have some self-knowledge on display, and no evidence that Scott's presenting his ideas as important and grave. In fact, he makes clear they are not his ideas -- they are other people's, but he finds them interesting, though he's not sure they're valid.
And one other thing, buddy. Your post fully meets the criteria for a ban. You offer no evidence for your points (saying "remember Ganaj and Baby Twix ," which I do not, by the way, does not count as evidence), it is unkind, and it is not clear that it serves any useful purpose. So I'm going to report it.
I don't think I'm saying "haha you're an asshole" so much as saying "you're the pot calling the kettle black", which is I think a bit different.
I'm aware of the irony that I myself seem to be writing angry, which is not a good sign but as you say we all show some character defects.
I don't understand why you're bringing up the previous post as some kind of counter-evidence when what I'm discussing is the current post (especially when I bring up a lack of self-awareness).
Does it itself meet the criteria of being necessary and/or kind ? All I can say is I don't believe the theory it presents is particularly true.
But it's Scott's blog, he can write whatever he wants and ban whoever he wants. I don't care, I'm a frequent reader (less frequent as of late), I've never been a frequent commenter.
I'm just disappointed by what I'm reading but I guess it's my problem.
I guess this illustrates Scott's point about alienating readers though I wouldn't be so bold as to quantify like he does, I have no evidence that I represent any kind of majority
> I mean at least, most people who write hyperbolic takes on Twitter limit them to a normal tweet length.
Another perspective is that some people include a hyperbole in an otherwise meaningful article, and some people only post hyperboles.
Once you include a single hyperbole in your otherwise meaningful article, it (arguably) changes its entire tone, it's like putting drops of ink in water.
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.
Thank you for remembering people you respect have different views. Your service is recognized.
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.
How would we know if that is true or not?
Love and Hate operate as inverse functions: Lu(Hu(x)) = Hu(Lu(x)) = x, where Lu equals units of Love and Hu equals units of hate.
Is there any famous love advice from Hitler that we all should take?
Wear Hugo Boss? Or Coco Chanel if you swing that way.
Don't split the Poland on your first date with Stalin?
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?
Of course. They are fighting a memetic battle and through dunks and namecalling are appealing to the part of population who are into this stuff instead of reasonable well articulated arguments.
Frankly, I'm not even sure they are wrong. It seems that there are a lot of people more susceptible to status arguments than object level discussions. If your side doesn't have the content for them they will join your outgroup who does. And yes, appealing to this category of people may cost you some amount of intelligent and well intentional people with an allergy to low level discourse. But 1) it may be worth it if there are much more people of the first group than the second 2) there is the hope that intelligent people who are into truthseeking more than status are intelligent enough to understand this dynamics and tolerate this approach despite how low status it feels due to their aesthetical preferences.
I, myself, am torn here. Aesthetically I hate this. I'm not participating in such activities and cringing when I see people from my ingroup do it. And I'm not sure that the math actually works out. Maybe if you are alienating more reasonable people the second order effects such as alienating their auditory cancel out all the gain of more status oriented people. But if the math does work out, then I guess I have to shut up and multiply.
tribalism is both irrational and superrational, depending on your perspective.
I just realized Scott leveraged the very thing he was writing about in the opening sentence: "Unfortunately I hate many of you." is a tribalistic sentence.
Yes, although I don't think Scott is being hypocritical by complaining about dunkards. I would describe the situation as:
A) Tribalism is driving both Scott's emotions, and others' dunking behavior.
B) Dunking has negative consequences.
Dunking on the dunkers...
Reminds me of being intolerant of intolerance.
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?
Or, even better, read it in-context (to avoid Gell-Mann) but publicly disavow it, thereby gathering knowledge to yourself while still disincentivising for others.
Scott has a pretty good track record engaging with difficult thinkers (difficult to deal with, not necessarily difficult to read, although that too). He even has a Yglesias tweet in this post, therefore not blocked (theoretically).
But if you want to see less of people being petty and cruel you should speak out against pettiness and cruelness.
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.
“you said in a post you HATED everyone who voted for Trump and they hated you”
This doesn’t sound like something Scott would say, except maybe tongue-in-cheek.
It's real: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
>[Talking about Republicans:] I hate you, and you hate me. But maybe I would hate you less if you didn't suck. Also, the more confused you are, the more you flail around sabotaging everything.
I think that is intended to be somewhat humourous, but also it starts with "Dear Republican Party" which I take to be talking specifically about the Republican politicians, not every person who voted for a Republican.
"A Modest Proposal" was a famous satire in which the author suggested that many problems could be solved by literally eating babies.
That was written to the “Republican party”, as in the elites, not the everyday voter. You can’t honestly read the sentences before that and assume that any of the “You”s here are referring to Trump voters:
“Trump managed to excite people, but you don't know how to turn his personal appeal into a new platform. Most of what he said was offensive, blatantly false, or alienated more people than it won; absent his personal magic it seems like a losing combination. You seem to have picked up a few minority voters here and there, but you're not sure why, and you don't know how to build on this success.”
Reasonable point, though if you are in the Republican Party, it doesn’t feel like it is aimed separately from you. If it was intended as satire, then I did not (and still do not) get that humor. One of the things I like best about Scott is his combination of wit, humor, intelligence, and general kindness: I loved when he wrote years ago, “…I have no horse in this race except the horse named Principle of Charity, which has lost its past two hundred ten consecutive derbies and is widely suspected of being dead.” Words to live by!
You and almost everybody else have lost track of the fact that Scott is mostly complaining about people who attack articles he admires without fully reading them and people who attack his friends. And by the way Yudkowsky, whom I'm pretty sure is a friend of Scott's, comes in for savage mockery on Twitter. People make fun of his weight, his beard, the hat he wore in one interview -- and not gentle fun, either, real cruel you're-a-loser mockery. People tweet to him that he's crazy and looks and sounds like a wacko subway bum. I'd be furious at people who attacked a friend of mine that way, too. And even if you don't much like Yudkowsky and his ideas, bear in mind that he really believes they are true. What's he supposed to do -- NOT go on places like Twitter and try to warn the world?
Yudkowsky is a deliberately provocative thinker who makes sweeping dismissals of large groups and ideas, though—he gives as good as he gets, and invites controversy to a much greater extent than Scott does. I agree that people are harsh in response to him, but I don’t know that you can be as opinionated as Yudkowsky about the idea that most people are morons full of ridiculous ideas and not invite serious blowback.
I have been following him for a while, and he does argue back hard, but I have not seen him engaging in the kind of savage personal mockery he gets: " fat boy," "look and act like a subway station crazy" etc. Even if he gets personal satisfaction from being, in his view, The Person Who Saw the Danger, I doubt that protects him from being wounded by the cruel mockery he gets, some of which has to be slamming hard right into personal sensitivities. He has a waterfall of turd-filled venom thundering onto his head basically all the time. I admire his courage in hanging in and continuing to broadcast his view.
That describes every public figure in the world, even minor ones. I have a platform incomparably smaller than his, and I could provide countless examples of savage personal mockery, much more extreme than the examples you provide, directed at me. I'm not saying that sort of mockery is reasonable or pleasant, but it's the cost of doing business. So--it's trivially true that there are people who go to a more extreme and personal level than he does when responding to him, because there's a horde of unpleasant anons willing to go to extreme and personal levels in response to all public thinkers.
Yudkowsky is a perceptive thinker who's done a lot for spaces like this; he also has an extremely low opinion of most people's intellect and ideas cherished by them (see some of his takes on religion for examples of this), and isn't shy about making that clear. He may even be justified in his low opinion, but to make that clear is to invite emotive, defensive responses.
I mean, you're right that that's the cost of doing business, but I do think he comes in for exceptional persistent and cruel responses. The only other person I've seen getting slammed as viciously and personally as he does is Zeynep Tufekci, and she is quite civil and not aggressively argumentative the way Yudkowsky is, and does not do the Yudkowsky thing of making clear she thinks she's smarter than everyone else or sneering at people's deeply held beliefs -- religion, etc. She's getting it because she's a woman with strong opinions who doesn't back down. I dunno -- I think I find the Yudkowsky situation especially disturbing because he's both a brilliant guy and an impaired person. Seems to me he's on the autism spectrum, and a ways further up that scale than people who qualify as Asperger's. And he had a brother who died suddenly in a gruesome way and I think he was permanently damaged by that in a way some of us would not have been. So seeing Yudkowsky kicked in the face (metaphorically speaking, obviously) is just very painful, and gives me a terrible feeling about human nature.
With respect, if Zeynep is the only other you've seen get slammed as viciously and personally, my impression is that you simply aren't paying attention to many corners of the internet. As the most immediate example from my sphere, I work for journalists Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal, both of whom attract incandescent rage from various corners of the internet, particularly Singal. They get it because they tread on various progressive sacred cows in their reporting. But there are many who get it yet worse.
I think your sympathy for Yudkowsky reflects well on you, and I don't know that staring deep into the bowels of the internet will give anyone a great deal of confidence in human nature, but I really don't think his situation is particularly unusual.
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).
It's not about what is more likely for a randomly selected person from a population. It's specifically about Scotts beliefs.
Take the positive stance on embrio selection, for instance. There are those who are saying that it makes you a Nazi. It doesn't matter that it's not the most popular thing that is equivocated with Nazism.
Well, it really depends on who does the embryo selection and who's being made to pay for it, doesn't it?
So, it's OK for Scott to be upset about his beliefs being equivocated with Nazism by people who believe that the state cannot be prevented from selecting embryos 'for the freedom and welfare of the people' and then dump on Fox News viewership whose beliefs are being equivocated with Nazism, because they're against the state overriding the parents refusal to give children sex changes?
I can't believe that the same guy who wrote "I CAN TOLERATE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE OUTGROUP" is now inspired by tweets from 'Journalist' Matt Yglesias, an intolerant, unprincipled, dishonest piece of garbage.
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?
I was a bit surprised he was as open and direct about being block trigger-happy, but tbh I'm the same way. My twitter feed constantly devolves into the worst kind of snark if I'm really vigilent about pruning.
I don't think you end up missing out much because of the amount of content on twitter. The more snark I block, the more actually thoughtful tweets I'll get to see.
If you've somehow managed to cultivate a twitter account that is conducive to intelligent and thoughtful discussion, that's pretty impressive, but i tend to think of that as being nearly impossible in the twitter wild (as people have noted, it's mechanically non-conducive to that largely because of character limits). I tend to think that if someone is looking for something like that, they'd be better off going to not Twitter (like, here, perhaps? or certain subreddits?). Twitter is for clowning, because that's what it is mechanically conducive to.
The thing is though, even if you manage to hone your twitter crowd to a group of philosophical types who have "eloquent and scholarly" discussions about society and politics, couldn't you have an alternative twitter account where you just do whatever you feel like, and have fun or whatever? You could block people on the first account and dunk on them in the second account. Doing so requires a bit of compartmentalization, which humans aren't great at, but people do have to do some compartmentalization anyways with their colleagues or their families or other groups of people where the person who drives you crazy in one respect is someone you have to get along with in another. Scott is here saying that someone says something irritating to him on Twitter and then he meets someone else in real life with a similar name and he feels that sting - ok, lots of people have that kind of visceral reaction, but then they think "I'm being a bit unreasonable, I should try not to carry around the one thing that annoyed me into all situations in my life, I should try to think about this situation neutrally since it's a different situation from that other situation". That's hard to do and never totally effective, but it's also just a part of getting along in the world. I am sure that Scott does this, I mean, he's a psychiatrist, I'm sure he's had patients who have said all sorts of terrible ridiculous or outright insane things and he had to think "It drives me crazy to hear this but I have to remember to try and treat this patient as well as I can regardless of how they're behaving."
IDK. Sometimes humor and sarcasm are the most efficient or most poignant ways to drive home a point. I guess someone can cast it all out if they get good results doing so, but something is lost. And to try and restore what is lost maybe requires some compartmentalization, and what Scott is saying if taken literally sounds like he's compartmentalizing almost not at all.
One percent of twitter still produces more tweets than Scott will ever be able to read. What do you think he is missing out on, that he isn't able to promptly replace with something of equivalent value but with less annoyance on the side?
yea, it's not like anyone is ever not deep in some echochamber on twitter, regardless what they do. But Scott himself in this very article has suggested that or the blocked person are missing out on things. He's saying in the article that the people he blocks are missing out on the whole ACX experience - why can't they just shrug it off and say "There's lots of content on twitter, who cares if I can't engage w/ ACX anymore?" Does Scott have a point to these people, when he says they're missing out on ACX, if he himself is not worried about missing out on their opinions? But he even says, in the article itself that if he blocks someone over their one bad take "I will never get a chance to consider it or change my mind or feature your ideas on ACX". So Scott is saying that he's missing out on views he himself might learn something from because of his own tendencies to block quickly, and suggesting that this is a mistake on the parts of the people he's blocking quickly. This is hard for me to reconcile with the kinds of things he's said in the past, like that whole article he wrote about how if someone has a lot of bad takes but a few exceptionally good ones, we should be open to hearing them out. Scott is apparently blocking people that have a single bad take, regardless how many good takes they have. I don't get it.
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.
That's what I thought this was going to be about, too!
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.
Just wanted to say I felt this was a remarkably thoughtful and well-written comment.
> 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.
Gresham's Law occurs when the state forces you to use bad money. Nobody on twitter is forced to dunk on others. Toxoplasma of Rage was a more descriptive mechanism, imo.
If you haven't seen it already: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Don't go on Twitter. It's bad. I've never heard a "actually, it's good" argument that I think holds water.
There is one good thing about it: Depending on who you follow you can get much more up-to-date news. During covid I was on Twitter following a bunch of epidemiologists, infectious disease docs, microbiologists, etc. and I learned about new developments and new research way before it was in the newspapers, and learned a more accurate and in-depth version. I agree that the toxicity level on Twitter is high. It was even with the people I was following, because tweets by scientists would get a bunch of covid-deniers and ivermectin fanatics replying to them with hate and contempt.
I'm not convinced that knowing any news in such an up-to-date manner is a net win.
Like, did it make your life better to learn that stuff when you did rather than a week later or whatever? What concrete actions were you able to take because you learned some info that you couldn't have just taken later?
I was volunteering on a project to help immunocompromised people access Evusheld (it's a vaccination alternative for people who can't make antibodies -- gives them a supply of antibodies directly). Became available at beginning of 2022, but as year wore on and new variants began to come through, I needed to stay up to date on evidence of how well Evusheld performed against new variants. Part of my job was to transmit this info to 2 large groups of immunocompromised people on Facebook. The newspapers were saying blah blah concerns about new variants, is vax still effective, and half the time they were scaring. people unnecessarily and half the time they weren't passing on concerning info that people needed to have. And in any case, they were giving few updates on Evusheld, which is a niche drug for a small group who need it. On Twitter I was following the scientists who in the lab were putting samples of the new variant into media with Evusheld in it (and also some of the other treatment drugs) and reporting a numerical value that's a measure of a drug or antibody's effectiveness against a variant. Immunocompromised people were very scared but didn't have into about whether the Evusheld they had on board was useless or still was protective. i was able to give the accurate, up to date info, explained in layman's language. Some of the scientists on there were clearly there for same reason I was -- you got the info on the results somebody got last night, you know? I have read that many journalists are on Twitter for a similar reason -- best way to get very latest info on whatever it is you're following.
That is indeed a fortunate use for the platform. Thank you for your work!
Yeah, back when I was actively assessing North Korean missile programs, Twitter was genuinely useful in that it could e.g. provide notice of an ICBM launch while the ICBM was in flight. In your face, CONELRAD. And for those of us who would predictably be called by reporters looking for a not-stupid take on the matter, that sort of notice and the technical back-and-forth that quickly followed, was really useful.
I hate that the blogs, mailing lists, and slack channels that used to fill that function have all migrated to Twitter. Twitter knocks twenty points off the IQ of anyone who uses it, and rocket science really wants all the IQ points. But it is so, and so I had to learn how to very carefully follow Twitter in certain areas.
Like you I went on Twitter only because I needed access up-to-date technical information. Up til then I think I'd wandered over there a few times out of curiosity, but didn't know that the key to using Twitter was choosing who to follow. So I just read whatever random tweets Twitter showed me, and thought, "what's the point of this?" and rapidly wandered away. Once I was following a bunch of doctors and scientists, I was delighted by the access I had to info -- had not know that was possible -- but then gradually I became aware of the vile underbelly of medical Twitter: several grotesquely dishonest, grandstanding, catastrophe-predicting docs, with tens of thousands of doom-addicted followers; plus many many furious people convinced that Covid was the Big Lie, or that Vax was the Big Lie, or that Covid filled every cell in your body with killer spikes that were going to go zap zap zap your insides all over and make all your blood coagulate. And if. you didn't agree with any of these factions they wanted to rip your face off and eat it. It's extremely hard not to give in to the craving to rebut this kind of vicious, stoopit shit, and I definitely got sucked into trying. But the best evidence and the most cutting repartee in the world make no difference whatever to what these people think, and I eventually yanked myself free. The indignation-maximizing algorithms work well on me. But I'm sure AI will change all that (heh).
Planetary-scale speech platforms are just a bad idea
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/why-speech-platforms-can-never-escape-politics
I think that good communication is opt-in, not opt-out. In real life, you mostly communicate with your friends, and the people introduced to you by your friends (who may also become your friends in turn). So the communication is mostly friendly, and if it is not, you simply stop interacting with certain person.
An offline analogy to internet forum would be like meeting your friends in a room with open doors where strangers constantly keep coming and joining your debate, sometimes one by one, sometimes dozen of them together. Soon you need to hire a bouncer. But everyone seems to believe that the only acceptable way is to make an explicit list of rules the bouncer has to follow. But there are so many different forms of annoying behavior. Some people swear all the time, some people attack others without using swear words, some people constantly lie, some people always try derailing the debate to their favorite topic, some people are just crazy and keep yelling random things. You are also supposed to explicitly define how often it is allowed to forgive people who are otherwise nice, only occasionally do a minor annoying thing. Now your bouncers also need to be part-time lawyers.
I imagine that a good solution would be a form of "barrier to entry" where people are somehow judged before joining; with multiple ways how you can be approved, but ultimately you must use at least one. You can be recommended by a friend. You can provide a link to your writings elsewhere, to be judged by moderators. Or at least, your first 30 comments will be invisible until a moderator approves them.
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? 🫂
My thoughts exactly. I'd love to know what triggered this (not that I'm disagreeing, but this is a much less restrained tone than your average ACX post)
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?
An average journalist in the online era is a talentless writer, who must create controversy in order to generate enough page-views... or they get fired. Most journalists are not paid well; actually, many of them are unpaid -- they keep writing hoping that one day it will get them a paid job; what actually happens is that the owner will replace them with another naive person willing to work for free.
(No, I am not saying that *all* journalists are like this. However, talent is rare, and internet is large, so most of it is filled by people with no talent. The talented journalists -- with talents other than creating online controversies -- are expensive, and can't write dozen articles every day because they also need some time for research. This is why many online media do not hire them.)
Scott has a unique voice, so his best strategy is to follow what worked for him so far. At this moment he is paid much better than the average journalist, so it would be stupid for him to copy their strategy. A part of Scott's unique voice is being nice and charitable.
(Again, this is not a general rule for bloggers; there are people who have controversy as a part of their unique voices. For them, the best strategy is to continue being controversial. For example Nassim Taleb should remain a troll.)
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? 😥>
blocked. blocked. blocked. youre all blocked. none of you are free of sin
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 don't think this is a "liberalism" thing: I lean conservative, but I also resonate with what Scott is describing here. Honestly I don't think "people being jerks makes me angry, and I don't want to see that" is really a "unreasonable concession to mental health" due to the "emotional fragility of liberalism".
Specifically, I stay away from a lot of the popular subreddits because there's a ton of smug, condescending comments about stuff or groups I agree with. And yeah, obviously I understand that it doesn't matter; but it still puts me in a worse mood, and I sometimes find myself 'arguing' with that person in my head later.
I agree, it'd be better (and I'd be a better person) if I could just completely shrug those kind of comments off. And maybe with some personal growth, I'll get to that point someday; but I'm not there and so I limit my exposure to those kinds of comments.
I think everyone's just wired differently this way. That whole "arguing in my head with the person later" is a good thing when the person I'm arguing in my head with isn't a jerk: it's a big part of how I think through issues and try to view things from a different angle... but it's also hard to turn off.
I agree "you can't control what others do, you can control what you do", but then I fail to see what relevance there is to this post, as this is exactly what Scott is doing: using the "tools he has control over" to block people: he's not like messaging them and telling them they need to be nicer or whatever.
I'm guessing you're going to say that publishing this post itself is somehow a "power-move", but I don't really see that: he's not talking about specifics, (though all the Alfreds are on notice, now), he's just saying "if you're too quick to dunk on people you're restricting your audience and that may not be a trade you want to make". I think that's just advice, (and frankly seems like good advice to me)
I kinda think you're reading way too much into a fairly simple point. "Think about your incentives, it may not be in your best interest to cultivate a small following that intensely agrees with you and alienate everyone else, unless you're a journalist who makes their money that way".
I think that point is fairly simple, largely correct, and something worth remembering in our interactions with other people: scoring the quick 'zinger' is always tempting, but might not always be a good move in the long run.
---
I think Straussian readings of the post as Scott trying to signal how to better curry favor with him are unnecessary for understanding the point and unnecessarily cynical.
He talks about himself only to illustrate that people are emotional, not always rational, and can be quick to react negatively when people are jerks.
I think he could have replaced all references to himself to generalized statements about how people behave on the internet and the point he was making would still stand: it's just more effective writing to humanize the point rather than speaking in generalities.
(... but it seems like that would have been a good move in retrospect, because a huge chunk of the comments seem to be psychoanalyzing Scott for, IMO, stating the obvious)
I think it's not political at all. It's about what you prefer. Someone people enjoy yelling at each other, some don't. In offline life, they typically sort themselves out into groups of friends, everyone getting the kind of interaction they prefer.
Online it is more dramatic, because the choices are binary, there is often no software support for "interact with this person less, but not zero"; you either take 100% of what they give, or switch to zero. Also, in real life it is easy for a group to naturally split into two parts; the only ways to do it online involve a lot of drama.
Now I am thinking about a commenting system with upvote and downvote buttons, where downvoting someone also reduces their visibility (and upvoting them increases it again). Reduced visibility means that you will only see N% of their comments, sorted by karma. For example, visibility 50% means that you only see the better half of their comments. Each downvote would reduce visibility by 5%, each upvote restore 10% (capped at 100%). So you would stop seeing the worst comments first, but if even the best comments are annoying, you would gradually stop seeing all when the visibility drops to 0%. -- Well, this is the asperger approach to the problem.
If someone is a jerk online, my reaction is to think: "There are eight billion people on this planet, most of them I will never get a chance to interact with. Why exactly am I wasting my time with this one?"
>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.
One might even go so far as to suggest that journalists are themselves normal humans.
Yes, I do realise this implies we are all damned.
I cling to the hope that the industry of journalism selects for negative character traits. This is not necessarily unreasonable; the difference between "news" and "gossip" is after all a matter of taste.
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.
Best wishes with covid - get well soon!
Re " (I wish substack had a way to view all of one's own comments; that would be useful data for self-improvement.)" I use Google with
site:astralcodexten.substack.com "Jeffrey Soreff"
Thanks!
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.
People are obsessed with themselves.
Want to get Bill Gates' attention? Write lots of stuff about Bill Gates. He's in the top percentile of "people who are interested in what random strangers have to say about Bill Gates".
He might not *care* about what you say, but do it enough and he'll probably see it.
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.
Perhaps there should be *two* places: a public place for everyone to discuss Scott (completely unmoderated, or moderated by a third party), and a private place for Scott to chat with his friends (moderated by Scott, or people he appoints).
In which case, Scott would probably publicly announce that he is not reading the former place.
(Which is perfectly okay in my opinion, and is probably what I would do, too.)
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.
"But you only need one world-changing revelation to be worth reading."
Indeed. Option value and convexity is a thing. (I guess there are ideas with huge negative value too, but those are ones that are extremely popular but wrong).
"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.
I follow about ~1000 people on twitter and have never seen any of them call someone an idiot or a nazi. I've never seem a single vicious insult. If they're ruining other people's days they're not doing it on twitter 🤷
The reason I'm saying this is because I'm genuinely curious to know why my experience is so atypical (if it even is!)
I mean post your twitter account or some of your top follows and we can audit it and see.
Without any actual data, my bet would be you're not seeing the more toxic interactions that inevitably arise in large Twitter groups. Maybe the algorithm is blocking them, but ime it typically does the exact opposite. More likely your own curation is the cause.
What's a "top follow"? I only follow people I've met in real life, usually at concerts or DJ events. Anyway having people "audit" my account doesn't sound like the kind of thing I'd enjoy so no thanks?
"Audit" was being used as a synonym for "investigate" here -- but feel no pressure to sacrifice privacy for science lol. I'm just saying no one can answer your question without actually seeing what your Twitter activity is like.
I haven't used Twitter in a while, but (I think) it used to rank the people you follow by how much you interacted with them. Your top follows would be the people you engage with/read the most. You could also just name the accounts you follow that have the most followers.
But actually, since you mention it, I also used to only follow people I met in real life, and my experience was that generally there was very little toxicity (there was very little activity period!). I think that's the key factor. If you use Twitter as a pseudo-forum or micro-blog (as it was intended?), the toxicity is inevitable. If you just use it as a pseudo-facebook or LinkedIn, it seems much better (until someone you follow crosses into that other world, anyway)
I was on a different site, not Twitter, and this is how I engaged, and it worked great for a while. But then friends of friends of friends got involved in the culture war, which eventually meant that my friends' friends did. And with this filling up their feeds, my friends got involved. And then it was filling up my feed.
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.
I don't think they're posing, but I am skeptical that they're right.
I think fame is probably amazing, but you get tired of the benefits quickly. It's probably amazing in small doses (think being on stage at a big concert) but, like any pleasure, you get bored with time.
I go back and forth honestly. Which is why I'm asking Scott who I expect to be more honest than average and who is to some extent famous. Maybe not really famous but then I have a greater chance of being Scott famous than famous famous.
Is this a question to Scott? Didn't he try so hard to stay anonymous that he deleted his blog?
Yes. Being anonymous and having a job where you're not famous at all are not the same thing. Besides, I'm asking exactly about whether such pain is worth what he's gained.
Sure, it's not the same. What he has gained might be something else than (only) the money/ time unit though. Not for me to answer obviously.
I think I've heard someone say that the best situation is when people know your name, but don't know your face. I assume it meant that the fame can be turned on at will (by introducing yourself), but remains turned off for most of the day. (This probably doesn't work online, because even if you use a pseudonym, if you are famous, the pseudonym will be known, too. But might work e.g. for a writer who doesn't use internet much.)
I imagine that the greatest downside of fame is the potential to attract attention of someone crazy who becomes obsessed with you for reasons that don't even have to make sense. In extreme case, imagine a person who literally should be locked somewhere and get psychiatric help, and imagine that the person repeatedly hears your name and suddenly decides that you are somehow responsible for everything bad that has ever happened to them. (Despite the fact that you two have never met. Some people blame space aliens. Some people blame the Jews. This person decides to blame *you*, personally.) So one afternoon you are sitting somewhere in a café talking to your fans and giving autographs, and suddenly a stranger stabs you with a knife, yelling: "that's what you deserve for ruining my life, asshole". Or instead of the café, they approach you at the street in the evening, after having followed you for weeks. Or they somehow enter your house and wait for you there.
The problem is that such people exist, statistically, so if you are famous enough, it becomes a question of "when" rather than "if". If you are famous enough, you need to live surrounded by bodyguards. Scott is not there, I think; this mostly applies to movie stars.
Another downside is that everyone assumes (correctly or not) that "famous = rich", so you automatically become a target for various criminals. Some of them may kidnap your children for ransom. Some of them will sue you for made up reasons, expecting that you will pay them to go away, rather than spend money on lawyers and be reported by newspapers as "the celebrity accused of X" (which in eyes of many readers means that you are guilty; and even if you ultimately win the lawsuit, they will assume that you just used your money and fame to avoid fair punishment). As soon as you write a Harry Potter novel, everyone who ever wrote a short story about a boy wizard will automatically accuse you of theft.
Before DNA testing, famous men were often accused of being fathers to children of women they have never met before. Some of those women were scammers, some were delusional. That was quite dangerous in the era when the only thing to check was the blood type, and then it became "he said / she said" (with everyone assuming that of course a famous man would exploit many naive women).
And these are just the most dramatic things that can happen. Then there are many people who will simply hate you, make it publicly known that they hate you, and try to take revenge in various small ways, without trying to literally kill you. For example, David Gerard (an administrator of RationalWiki and Wikipedia) spent more than a decade constantly attacking Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander across the internet, simply because he decided that they are pseudo-scientific and therefore it is his sacred duty to stop them. Imagine that the person who hates you has full control of your Wikipedia page, which many people will take for a fact. (Recently, someone mentioned on LW or ACX that they wanted to apply for one of Scott's grants for their research at university, but the university said no, because someone googled Scott and concluded that he is "controversial". It only takes one dedicated hater to make you controversial in Google results.)
By the way, Scott actually tried to do this kinda-pseudonymously, as "Scott Alexander" is not his full name, and at that time he wasn't even the most famous person using this name (quick google search reveals a baseball player and a movie producer both called "Scott Alexander").
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.
I'm amazed this "punching up" idea is still being used, since it's one of the most Orwellian terms in the context of its actual use. Imagine you're at a university or large corporation where people are routinely fired for questioning any element of progressive orthodoxy. Which of these statements is punching up?
1. Yeah, get the bastards! There's no place here for non-conformists or anyone who doesn't know the meaning of the words 'appropriation', 'misgendering' and 'deconstruction'.
2. The bullies delighting in hurting and humilating dissenters should be ashamed of themselves.
As Paul Graham put it:
What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress?
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
I kinda think how it works is that if your Twitter feed has more DOOM than YAY, you're on the down side, therefore any punching you do is up.
If you can get away with punching, you're not "punching up."
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)
Shamus Young had a few posts on it. https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=46541
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.
You could also try manually editing your hosts file. I haven't done this with Twitter, so I don't know if there would be side effects, but I've done this with a few other sites. It works well for me.
Ah, yes! Adding a line like "127.0.0.1 twitter.com" to /etc/hosts, if I recall correctly
You can also do it on Windows. I found that that worked even better, since it was slightly more of a pain to edit the hosts file. ;-)
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?
Profitable for whom? I think it may be profitable for the media, but probably not for (most of) the journalists themselves.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelthomsen/2015/08/24/will-unionizing-gawker-and-vice-help-freelance-writers-earn-a-living-wage/
> There’s often a haphazard logic that determines how much a writer will be paid for a piece of writing, something that’s almost always insufficient to the work required to research, write, edit, and fact-check the story. Gawker’s rates for freelance stories can vary from a free exchange for exposure to around $250 for a 1,500 word story for an “on the ground reporter piece.” Salon’s rates are equally low, with a standard fee of $150 to $200 for stories that vary from an 1000 word opinion piece to a 4,000 word reported feature. Vice’s rates are also highly variable for online stories, ranging from $75 to $500 for a long investigative story. Even august publications like The New Yorker pay only $250 and The Atlantic paying between $100 and $200.
> Rates these low are often justified by the abysmal business of traffic-driven ad sales. In an essay for The Awl, Noah Davis argued that even paying a writer $100 for a web story is a losing proposition for the average digital publisher. “Assume an editor pays a writer $100,” Davis argues. “Taking as a random decent example a $5 CPM, the piece would need 20,000 pageviews to make that $100. That doesn’t take into account the editor’s salary, the salaries of any developers, or any other costs beyond getting letters into a Word document. (In particular, the people selling the ads tend to get paid more than all the rest of those people.)”
This is largely a consequence of internet changing everything. People used to buy newspapers to learn things; now they can find most information online for free. Newspapers used to sell advertising space; now the entire internet is an advertising space. There is simply less total money for newspapers. Newspapers respond by paying journalists less. The less paid journalists are more desperate.
Some newspapers provided especially insightful analysis in the past. Most newspapers did not -- they just wrote, using different words, the content they got from press agencies. Or maybe 90% of their content was like this, plus they had a journalist or two who wrote the more insightful parts. With internet, this business model is no longer profitable. Why would you pay for something you can google? Why would you pay someone for printing it on paper, together with other things you are not interested in, and bringing it to your home?
Clickbait is a consequence of "pay per view" advertising. As long as the advertisers are okay with paying to promote their products in clickbait articles, the market will provide the clickbait articles.
> Some newspapers provided especially insightful analysis in the past. Most newspapers did not -- they just wrote, using different words, the content they got from press agencies. Or maybe 90% of their content was like this, plus they had a journalist or two who wrote the more insightful parts.
This isn't accurate. Newspapers had lots of reporters, who covered lots of things, most of them local. They'd have some reporters working a regional beat, fewer statewide, even fewer national, and fewer than that international. They could pick up coverage about faraway places from syndicates and news agencies and sometimes bigger papers. The bigger newspapers, mostly from bigger cities, had more of the non-local coverage themselves. And this was great, because local news was important, and worldwide, national, or statewide news was not as important, unless it was "WAR".
What happened, and I don't have a firm grasp on causality, is that people stopped paying attention to local news. Maybe it was nationalization after WWII, and then globalization. Maybe national broadcast news. Definitely the Internet. And of course there was the revenue crunch, predicted by McLuhan, when the classified ads and stock tickers moved online. Plus, at some point around the 80s, various investment firms saw that newspapers had large profit margins and started milking them for cash, depriving them of the resources to adapt to the Internet.
The result today is that most of what's in my hometown's local paper is not about my hometown, and is sourced from the AP or other papers in its conglomerate. I think there may literally be only 4 non-sports reporters working there now. No one is holding the city or county government accountable, no one is catching things before they become a problem, no one **cares** anymore. Just some old people who'll be dead soon. The city, as it used to be, is dying, too. It's slowly being replaced in situ by a regional economic hub filled by people who have no sense of civic life in the de Tocqueville sense.
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.
But notice the outrage in the comments when Scott said he started hitting himself less hard.
There's plenty of pro-hitting yourself peer pressure on display indeed. A sad demonstration of how this dynamic perpetuates itself, I suppose.
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.
Cohen, since I love your handle I will give a serious answer to you snarky retort. The point here is that these issues are complex and to classify any disagreement as “disrespect” is to fail to read or listen carefully to the critiques. Consequently, the insulter is blocked and further insults or brilliant points never reach the ears of the persons you hope to persuade. I would add that further, the insult cements in the insulter’s mind that people are irredeemable. Else the insulter wouldn’t be so damnably mean. And this is a cynical and pessimistic view of humans indeed.
> Consequently, the insulter is blocked and further insults or brilliant points never reach the ears of the persons you hope to persuade.
In this line, it's kind of weird to open an article that wishes to make this point with an overly general insult.
> In this line, it's kind of weird to open an article that wishes to make this point with an overly general insult.
Exactly my point! Well said, very eloquently, I'm sure it made the author cry!
Wow, first comment and a meaningful reply already! I'm surely doing something right.
The problem, at least for me, is that there is rarely enough time to write an elaborate treatise as an answer in a Twitter (or a blog) conversation. I enjoy talking to people I don't know but usually have like a minute between meetings or tasks or chores to write answers and they become terse and snarky out of necessity. Guilty as charged.
But I understand that other people are under the same constraints so I tolerate on-line something that would sound insulting IRL.
Generally, when I dive in an on-line discussion, I assume all this and never ban anyone. If it is annoying - it is entertaining. If it is dangerous - I better know it in advance.
Even more generally, nothing on-line can possibly insult me. How can anything that, for example, you, an entity that might be not even human, can say, affect me anyhow? It is all twitter, isn't it?
Thanks for understanding!
And, yes, can't possibly discuss these things with a straight face! :D
User banned for this comment.
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.
Twitter provides zero value. Anything that is important enough to care about you will hear about elsewhere.
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?
I'm no Scott, but I needed a place to vent after scrolling past hundreds of similar comments, and I probably won't find a better one than under your post. So.
Scott's worldview, as expressed in his work, tends to concentrate on [ought]. This post is about [is]. There is nothing to integrate, because they're not the same thing.
I'm no "rationalist", but one thing that endeared the community to me is the explicit realization that being hopelessly biased is a natural part of being human. A default starting point that needs overcoming.
Look, our conceptual apparatuses are just an enormous (though nowhere near as complex as the real world in all its glory) set of mutually dependent probabilities and heuristics, and it's essentially impossible for them to ever accurately represent the correct knowledge of the world and the best course of action within it. It's not a failure of rationalism to not be perfect, it's only a failure not to realize you're not. This post is precisely about realizing that, making a (reasonable and correct, IMHO) decision that, at least in the particular instance of Twitter, there's no use exerting any energy trying to fight it, and being honest and upfront about it with his audience.
tl;dr: This is just Scott being human. Which should not be surprising, because he is one. (Of course, now that I typed that, I fully expect to eventually learn that the post was an experiment generated by a GPT.)
I am approximately 99% with you. My rhetorical “help me” probably came off a little more “naive/curious” than I meant it.
Given that we are all still meatbags full of emotionsauce, trying to emulate clockwork automata, what can we say about this post?
If this is an attempt to inform his readership, it’s a little heavy on invective language.
If this is more an observation of the “is” of Twitter, then sure. But it needn’t be posted for Scott to simply make those observations himself. So either the intent is to inform, but probably, more likely, it’s a stimulus response. A moment of emotionsauce bubbling over.
I think the point I may be badly trying to make is - you’re absolutely right that none of us are perfect. And because something like this is possible, I think it’s in some way just as important, if not more so, for rationality to speak to how to handle this sort of thing, first.
imo, Scott could have used such advice, and slept on this post in the queue, or something, and served his apparent aims far better than succumbing to the same stimulus response he’s wagging at the Twits about.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. This isn't a post about a Grand Theory of Everything, or an attempt at formulating Universal Deontology, this is Scott talking about what frustrates him, and the only hidden message is "please do better".
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
When you've lost your own bot...
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.
It’s also to think of it in terms of the dueling culture. You could go a long way towards attacking someone’s argument, but at the slightest hint of attacking a person’s honor, you are usually called out.
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'm not saying The Daily Mail or Fox are good and people should like them, but I think the hate for them comes from rival media, not themselves being offensive to their readership.
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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