Discourse is Disappointing
Writers beware
What reward do you get when you are right and someone else is wrong in an internet argument? Smug satisfaction? What if the other person’s position is closer to the population mean or more emotionally satisfying? Do you get a reward or a penalty?
In a free market of ideas, does the truth win out or does something stupid and emotionally appealing win out? I think obviously in most cases it’s the latter. And that’s why discourse is disappointing. Discourse is not meritocratic. It’s democratic.
I was originally drawn to internet discourse by the idea that if I had the smartest, truest ideas, they would inevitably win out and dominate all of the stupid and superficially appealing ideas. That kinda works are you build a niche audience at first that likes things like HBD. Then if you keep going the payoff curve starts going down and even dips below zero. The ideas get too complex and emotionally unappealing to go anywhere even if they’re correct.
You begin to see the boundaries of the box every writer is in. That box is the democracy of the market. Cater or perish. But the market can’t accommodate very high levels intellectual skill. At some point I started mainly reading quantitative textbooks and academic articles, after wishing substack had more math on it. Guess what the popularity of those texts are? They’re barely read of course.
Where do you go with good quantitative, logical, and inferential skills to be rewarded for merit? It’s not Substack. Maybe academia, but the pay is low and PhDs are a hazing scheme. Maybe quantitative finance? Society really does a bad job at allocating and rewarding intellectual skill.
The discourse around my last article was flaccid. Changing everyone’s minds with one article I guess is fantastical, but it would be nice to change a few important minds in my “political camp”. The guy I responded to came into the comment section but there was no energy. Not hating on him, just how it is. It’s an everyone thing.
It’s like that on every topic too. It’s like that on all substacks. All blogs. Everywhere. It’s pretty easy to see why this is: the IQ distribution and opportunity cost. When you have a smart, cutting edge idea, if it’s hard to understand, it better benefit you personally, otherwise it’s worthless, cuz it ain’t spreading anywhere.
But, of course. "We" left Charlie Kirk years ago but he's like a right-wing messiah to average normgroid. Modern political campaigns rely on an industrial level of marketing and psyop momentum.
Though, I believe this is an ontological take - it seems evangelists rarely consider ther breath wasted (though their message isn't exactly above the hoi polloi).
What changes between the Slop Lord and the disaffected writer is frustration tolerance and personal preference - one wishes to maximize clicks, the other wishes to maximize cutting-edge truthfulness. You gotta do it for the love of the game, my nigga.
Another trvke