I believe that internet culture influences real culture much more than the other way around. This is quite hard to prove, but I often see an idea start to come up in real-life conversations where I’ve seen it appear on Twitter a few weeks before. I’m not sure if ordinary people don’t realise this (that their ideas are workshopped and take root online), or if they just see it as that important.
Furthermore, the internet is still quite meritocratic. Often one random blogger makes something their pet issue, and they get into the mainstream. Examples include:
The pothole drama in the UK at the moment
The housing theory of everything
YIMBYism overall, to some extent
The rationalist conception of AI safety
Real life vs online idea-spreading
In real life, you’d really pat yourself on the back if you could get your idea in front of a thousand people, including key figures in the field you’re talking about. This would be considered a great outcome of a year of lobbying and politicking. On the internet, this is achievable just by writing a blog post. The real life case has one remaining advantage, which is “the magic of in-person human connection”. People set a lot of store in this. I’m not sure this it’s actually that great.
For one thing, it only happens once and then fades, so people might be convinced at the time you explain something to them, but then forget the details. Secondly, when you’re talking to people, they generally want to appear receptive to your ideas, so you get an inflated sense of how compelled they are. Third, speaking off the cuff will be more meandering and less to-the-point than a well written-up version of an idea; for me, I can generally write a “good” blog post at a rate of ~250 finished-words per hour of writing; speaking fluently will produce ~7500 words per hour, so each word has roughly “30 times less thought put into it”. Fourth, it doesn’t create common-knowledge, unless you do a workshop or something; people can’t talk about “the new idea that is going around” if they have no shared source to refer to.
Online, if you write a LessWrong post, or a Substack that you share on a moderately-popular twitter account, many of the key people you want to read it will read it. Idea-setters in a field tend to be infovores, so they read a lot of blog posts! I have often been surprised by a blog post or tweet, by me or others, getting ~1000 views, of which ~10 are from Big Important public intellectuals it is directly relevant to, who are clearly swayed by the content. If it’s at all good, they’ll be reading something that represents maybe 5-25 hours of your thinking time, compressed into a 5- to 30-minute post. This will do a much better job of getting the point across; they’ll be able to refer back to it; and they’ll see what other people think about it.
Even when you look at AI company CEOs, they like to promote their ideas through nice, polished online essays. They have all the ability to influence people behind the scenes and do clever in-person deal-making and networking. Still, when Dario Amodei goes on the Dwarkesh podcast, he’s always saying “as I said in “Machines of Loving Grace”. Just as the the great leveller of capitalism means billionaires use the same phones as everyone else, the great leveller of the internet means a billionaire’s best way to achieve widespread influence is an online essay with an off-white background, just like the rest of us.
I believe that internet culture influences real culture much more than the other way around. This is quite hard to prove, but I often see an idea start to come up in real-life conversations where I’ve seen it appear on Twitter a few weeks before. I’m not sure if ordinary people don’t realise this (that their ideas are workshopped and take root online), or if they just see it as that important.
Furthermore, the internet is still quite meritocratic. Often one random blogger makes something their pet issue, and they get into the mainstream. Examples include:
Real life vs online idea-spreading
In real life, you’d really pat yourself on the back if you could get your idea in front of a thousand people, including key figures in the field you’re talking about. This would be considered a great outcome of a year of lobbying and politicking. On the internet, this is achievable just by writing a blog post. The real life case has one remaining advantage, which is “the magic of in-person human connection”. People set a lot of store in this. I’m not sure this it’s actually that great.
For one thing, it only happens once and then fades, so people might be convinced at the time you explain something to them, but then forget the details. Secondly, when you’re talking to people, they generally want to appear receptive to your ideas, so you get an inflated sense of how compelled they are. Third, speaking off the cuff will be more meandering and less to-the-point than a well written-up version of an idea; for me, I can generally write a “good” blog post at a rate of ~250 finished-words per hour of writing; speaking fluently will produce ~7500 words per hour, so each word has roughly “30 times less thought put into it”. Fourth, it doesn’t create common-knowledge, unless you do a workshop or something; people can’t talk about “the new idea that is going around” if they have no shared source to refer to.
Online, if you write a LessWrong post, or a Substack that you share on a moderately-popular twitter account, many of the key people you want to read it will read it. Idea-setters in a field tend to be infovores, so they read a lot of blog posts! I have often been surprised by a blog post or tweet, by me or others, getting ~1000 views, of which ~10 are from Big Important public intellectuals it is directly relevant to, who are clearly swayed by the content. If it’s at all good, they’ll be reading something that represents maybe 5-25 hours of your thinking time, compressed into a 5- to 30-minute post. This will do a much better job of getting the point across; they’ll be able to refer back to it; and they’ll see what other people think about it.
Even when you look at AI company CEOs, they like to promote their ideas through nice, polished online essays. They have all the ability to influence people behind the scenes and do clever in-person deal-making and networking. Still, when Dario Amodei goes on the Dwarkesh podcast, he’s always saying “as I said in “Machines of Loving Grace”. Just as the the great leveller of capitalism means billionaires use the same phones as everyone else, the great leveller of the internet means a billionaire’s best way to achieve widespread influence is an online essay with an off-white background, just like the rest of us.