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.
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.)
