A bad thing about social media is this pattern where a person with expertise starts rebutting bad ideas, and it’s great, but over time it primes them to see everyone who doesn’t hold exactly their opinions as part of a horde of goons with terrible ideas, because that’s who they end up interacting with.
Eventually their online persona is, like, Truth Gladiator. And that’s so much less interesting and important to me than Thoughtful Person With Useful Perspectives.
@vruba the model where social media is basically a machine for generating enough fame to be bad for you is certainly _incomplete_, but it does explain a lot of cases.
@vruba so many dynamics, online and offline, lead high-profile people to split the world into sycophants who want something and enemies who want to watch you die
@vruba so there’s like, a majority, but they’re, you know, silent?
@meetar Would you rather debate one majority-sized bad opinion or
@vruba I feel like this is something @robinsonmeyer and I have tried to hash through from a few directions over the years and I keep coming back to the wisdom of people who mostly withdraw to conserve their subtleties and [idk maybe empathy]. It seems non-ideal but better than hardening into a human spam filter.
@kissane @robinsonmeyer The two of you are prime examples, for me, of people who manage to put themselves out there without hardening into Debate Me Gender-Nonspecific Bros.
@vruba @robinsonmeyer Rob's a good influence.
@kissane @vruba @robinsonmeyer being aloof is a strategy with diminishing returns, but it's one a lot of people take
"Generally speaking they are very smart, they are rather verbose, and they are utterly convinced that they are right and that someone else is wrong."
I've been muting them.
https://vielmetti.typepad.com/logbook/2023/11/muting-the-high-profile-abrasive-famous-person.html
@vruba@everything.happens.horse @jhpot@mastodon.social See also: religion
@vruba https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/why-jonathan-chait-says-outrageous seems relevant
(it’s a Henry Farrell piece so there’s a there there, just breeze through the Chait hook to the actual argument)
https://delibdemjournal.org/article/id/406/
@vruba@everything.happens.horse See: Neil deGrasse Tyson?
@vruba I think this is symptomatic of a big and perhaps related issue.
A lot of people (across all forms of social media and perhaps outside of it) define themselves by one or perhaps a couple of specific areas of interest (personal or professional or political) and then often only share “related” content.
Whether this is a specific fandom or a specific area of expertise. I see it a lot and indeed entire social media platforms reflect this in their design assumptions (algorithms etc)
@vruba this I think the builds into the kinds of one issue/one fight for truth types of personas.
I find this increasingly exhausting - I want to mostly follow and interact with people online (and offline) who have lots of different interests and hobbies and passions. Some of which may overlap with some of my own. But I actively seek out and want to mostly interact with people who will expose me to NEW and different perspectives. Entire fandoms I’m until then unaware of entirely
@Rycaut Yes. As if you went to the café or the pub and there were someone who considered themselves your friend but only ever talked about rabbits.
@Rycaut It might be interesting rabbit material. They probably do it because a lot of people enjoyed their rabbit stories. But if nothing else, thinking you’re only appreciated as The Rabbit Person is pretty sad.
@vruba exactly. Even if I was, in fact, a rabbit person (say like my friend who has rabbits because - she’s a professional magician) it would get old and she would never get to talk with him about her actual passions - like magic. But not just that. (I’m not a magician and my friend though she is one never really talked about her magic when at a dinner party - no more than anyone who makes casual conversation about having work/odd experiences at work etc. but most we talked about everything else
This is adjacent on one side to the corrosive forces of fame. On another side, to something I think of as the Linguist Scicomm Problem, which is a pattern in science communication where you spend so much time rebutting people’s surface-level misconceptions that you never get to anything else. (Thinking of online linguists who keep explaining that linguistics is descriptive and never actually get to the, you know, linguistics.)