This is a special post for quick takes by β-redex. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
β-redex's Shortform
36β-redex
13Joseph Miller
18Said Achmiz
4Ben Pace
13Said Achmiz
2Ben Pace
4Said Achmiz
2Ben Pace
2Ben Pace
2Zack_M_Davis
4Ben Pace
4Said Achmiz
4Ben Pace
2Joseph Miller
2Ben Pace
2Viliam
5quetzal_rainbow
3β-redex
15quetzal_rainbow
2habryka
1Guive
1β-redex
4habryka
2briangriffinlover420
1CstineSublime
4Viliam
2Gunnar_Zarncke
3CstineSublime
3Gunnar_Zarncke
1CstineSublime
1β-redex
Why is a significant amount of content by some rationality adjacent people only posted on X/Twitter?
I hope I don't have to explain why some people would rather not go near X/Twitter with a ten foot pole.
The most obvious example is Eliezer, who is much more active on Twitter than LW. I "follow" some people on Twitter by reading their posts using Nitter (e.g. xcancel.com ).
What triggered me to post this today is that it seems @Aella set her account to followers-only (I assume due to some recent controversy), so now the only way for me to read her tweets would be to create a Twitter account.
Why can't some of this content be mirrored e.g. as LW Quick Takes, or on basically any other platform outside Twitter's walled garden? A lot of internet personalities cross-post their stuff to multiple platforms these days. One of the best examples I have seen is Molly White, she has her own self-hosted microblog feed which is pushed to Twitter, Bluesky, and Mastodon simultaneously: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro
I think even just having Eliezer's content available somewhere else would be valuable enough to the community for the LW team to possibly assist with some technical solution here.
I hope I don't have to explain why some people would rather not go near X/Twitter with a ten foot pole.
Right. So for me the even bigger question is "why is someone like Eliezer on twitter at all?" If politics is the mind killer, twitter is the mind mass-murderer.
It delivers you the tribal fights most tailored to trigger you based on your particular interests. Are you a grey tribe who can rise above the usual culture war battles? Well then here's an article about NIMBYs or the state of American education that's guaranteed to make you seethe with anger at people's stupidity.
When I read Eliezer's sequences I feel like I've learned some interesting ideas and spent my time well. When I read Eliezer's twitter I feel frustrated by the world and enraged by various out-group comments.
Or Aella, whose blog is exciting and interesting. But who posts comments on twitter like "I'm shocked that people are offended by [highly decoupled statement] / [extremely norm-breaking behavior]" when it is completely obvious that most highly-coupling / norm-following people would be triggered by that.
Or Aella, whose blog is exciting and interesting. But who posts comments on twitter like “I’m shocked that people are offended by [highly decoupled statement] / [extremely norm-breaking behavior]” when it is completely obvious that most highly-coupling / norm-following people would be triggered by that.
Of course it’s obvious, and of course she knows it. It’s engagement bait. You get money for having followers on Twitter. And it’s a way to promote your other stuff, too; to create “hype”, etc. All of that requires having more followers, and you get more followers by posting toxoplasma-style bait.
1
1Actually, I confidently believe she (and other autistic rationalists) who ask these questions often are earnestly confused, and do not easily empathize with the other minds on these topics. I think there’s still selection effects on why such people’s comments are selected for, but it is not conscious “engagement-bait”.
That hypothesis is wildly consistent with the facts. Aella is a professional self-promoter. She has built her entire career on using various forms of social media to “build her brand”. Self-promotion is what she does. From Wikipedia:
Aella moved out at age 17 after a fallout with her parents, and in 2012, after quitting a job as an assembly line worker in a factory, began working as a camgirl, initially on MyFreeCams.[2][5] She eventually became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, making over $100,000 in some months.[5] By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6] After camgirling, she began work as an escort.[3] As of 2024 her main source of income was her writing on Substack.[7] She has also been involved in several startups.[2][6]
The idea that this is a person who does not know exactly what is and is not engagement bait simply cannot be credited. It just has no plausibility whatsoever.
(This is not an attack on Aella. It’s just—well, if you said of, say, a seasoned corporate lawyer for a major PR firm, that his public statements about some person or organization was simply him earnestly reporting his personal opinion with no thought whatsoever to how his comments would be perceived… that would be outrageously naïve. No, someone like that doesn’t just earnestly say things without any conscious thought about how they’re going to be received. Their professional specialization is in not doing precisely that.)
(No comment about any other “autistic rationalists”, since I wasn’t talking about anyone else.)
A couple of notes:
- I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
- I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets, in that she is often confident and wrong, or very surprised. So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.
As for this:
I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
Statements of the form “I don’t understand X” (where X is a thing such that literally not understanding it is very weird) are a well-known genre of engagement bait (with several well-defined subgenres, such as “I don’t understand what [specific type of bad person, such as ‘racists’] even believe”, “I don’t understand why people [do common thing that basically everyone does]”, “I don’t understand why people don’t just [do some absurd thing or apply some absurd solution to some problem]”, etc.)
With such things, the greatest engagement will only come if you can appear to be totally innocent and sincere in your incomprehension. (If it looks like a “work”—a performance piece, posted for engagement—then people will mostly be reluctant to engage.) Now, as you no doubt well know, the best and most surest way to convince other people that you believe something is to actually believe it yourself.
And the outcome of these incentives is…
One answer is that people who genuinely have a hard time understanding other ppl are selected for heavily.
To be clear I regularly have a hard time understanding other people, including on the internet, I don’t think it’s that unusual a state of affairs to be explaining.
Additional point: The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says "I don't understand how someone can say/think/do X" where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior. I think I first read it pointed out by Julia Galef that it is not virtue to fail to understand someone, it does not make you superior to it. But I think honestly admitting you don't understand someone's behavior is a virtue and I believe is a very common experience.
Yep. From my perspective it's pretty common to not understand or be able to easily empathize with minds that you interact with regularly (e.g. see Different Worlds by Scott). Especially in certain levels of depth, there are many people whose psychology confuses me, or people for whom I've puzzled over for a long time before understanding their basic attitude/mood in most interactions. I'd happily generate some examples if you find this surprising?
I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets
It’s true of Aella? This Aella right here:
By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6]
I remain skeptical.
But note that you seem to be responding to what seems like a strawman:
So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.
If you post 10 things that are all written so as to have the properties of “things that often—at least 10% of the time—go viral”, and 1–2 of them go viral, then even if (as is likely the case) you could not have predicted in advance which of those 10 things would be the ones that went viral, it is nonetheless absurd to say of you that you “have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not”, or that you are not consciously posting engagement bait.
I expressed myself somewhat poorly. I of course should not imply that a twitter account with 200,000+ followers that has built a following on twitter does not have unusually good models about how to get engagement from twitter users, and doesn't employ heuristics developed in order to maintain and increase the engagement.
But I stand by this: the reason Aella posts genuine-seeming confusion by people's reactions to her writing, is not that she has goodharted on engagement at the cost of truth/honesty, but because she has found a part of her genuine+honest self that creates a lot of engagement. In the same way that people were not lying about whether a certain dress appeared to them as black & blue or orange & gold, Aella is not lying about whether she understands others' behavior or interpretations of text, even though she may be writing about these specific subjects on twitter due to them being the sort of thing that gets a lot of engagement (as the dress did).
If you merely mean to say that Aella is aware that posting this sort of text will get a lot of engagement, then we have no disagreement. If otherwise, I'd be happy to discuss and defend specific examples, though I can no longer search them myself because her account is private.
The thread under this comment been yourself and Said seems to conflate two different questions, resulting in you talking past each other:
1. Can Aella predict that people will be offended by things.
2. Can Aella empathize with the offended people / understand why they are offended.
My guess would be that Aella can generally predict people's reactions, but she cannot empathize with their point of view.
The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says "I don't understand how someone can say/think/do X" where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior.
I think the reason I find these tweets of Aella's highly engaging and rage-baity is that they generally read as criticisms to me. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I expect this is also how most others read them.
who posts comments on twitter like "I'm shocked that people are angry about [highly decoupled statement] / [extremely norm-breaking behavior]" when it is completely obvious that most highly-coupling / norm-following people would be triggered by that.
Perhaps someone who didn't read (the relevant part of) the Sequences?
Probability theory tells us that surprise is the measure of a poor hypothesis; if a model is consistently stupid—consistently hits on events the model assigns tiny probabilities—then it’s time to discard that model.
I think it's because these people don't consider their Twitter content fitting for LW? LW has strict requirements for signal-to-noise ratio and a lot of Twitter stuff is just shitposting.
Not even fitting for Quick Takes? We could have a "Quicker Quick Takes" or "LW Shitposts" section for all I care. (More seriously if you really wanted some separate category for this you could name it something like "LW Microblog".)
Also a lot of Eliezer's tweets are quite high effort, to the point where some of them get cross-posted as top level posts. (E.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fPvssZk3AoDzXwfwJ/universal-basic-income-and-poverty )
My strictly personal hot take is that Quick Takes became a place of hiding from responsibility of top level posts. People sometimes write very large Quick Takes which certainly would be top level posts, but, in my model of these people, top level posts have stricter moderation and cause harsher perception and scarier overall, so people opt out for Quick Takes. I'm afraid if we create even less strict section of LW, people are going to migrate there entirely.
2I post a good amount on Twitter (mostly replying to other people) and think it wouldn't make any sense to post approximately any of that to LW. They are just very different platforms with very different cultures.
Agreed. Some of the content I post on Twitter could eventually make its way into a LW post or comment, but it would have to be completely rewritten. I think I have seen some people crosspost Twitter threads on LW, and found it annoying.
1Out of curiosity, why do you post on Twitter? Is it network effects, or does it just have such a unique culture that's not available anywhere else? (Or something else?) Do you not feel any kind of aversion towards the platform, which would potentially discourage you from interacting? (I don't mean this to sound accusatory, if your position is that "yes Twitter is awesome and more rationalists should join" I would also like to hear about that.)
I mostly reply to people on Twitter. Also, the shape of my reply tends to be definitely much more oriented around "convincing the audience" or "correcting the record" than to have a conversation with the specific person I am replying to. This makes me a bit sad, but I think it overall makes public discourse better.
Sometimes one wants to play around in the mud. I don't think I can provide a better reason for using Twitter than that.
I feel like this is almost identical to the question of "why don't people migrate to [insert social network/platform]?".
I also wonder, provided that you got full consent or permission[1] from a certain number of Rationality Adjacent people, what otherwise is stopping you from setting up a scraper or bot to automate so that they don't have to lift a finger and yet their content is still available elsewhere?
- ^
It may go without saying but: if someone has set their account to followers-only then I would presume that increases the likelihood of their reluctance to allow their content to be mirrored elsewhere. Even if whomever is administering the mirror is well meaning and trustworthy.
It would be an interesting exercise to see how many people would or wouldn't consent to such a project since it promises that they wouldn't need to lift a finger.
If I may express my preference, instead of copying every xeet individually, I would prefer to see weekly or monthly summaries. (Probably weekly for all rationalists together, or monthly for an individual.)
Mirroring selected authors (and hopefully supporting voting/searching/reply etc) seems to be very different from suggesting to migrate. I'd really like to see that. It'd be some form of curating. Linkposts are already possible, but that doesn't scale to tweets. I imagine it to be more like the sync with some forums (the ones like Zvi's and Jefftk's posts that are shown to be linked to their sites).
Mirroring selected authors (and hopefully supporting voting/searching/reply etc) seems to be very different from suggesting to migrate.
I didn't get that from when you asked: "Why is a significant amount of content by some rationality adjacent people only posted on X/Twitter?"
Which to me seems like you're asking why those authors aren't duplicating their content on multiple platforms. Which to me overwhelmingly overlaps with the question of why they don't migrate because it still involves changing their browsing habits, or at the very least the time and energy of choosing a new platform, setting up an account, and then of course - ensuring cross-posting/resharing. Is that incorrect?
No? Curating means that LW moderators would curate and pull the feeds instead of the authors needing to take initiative.
As you highlight, asking everyone to set up their own cross-posting solution is probably not viable. But if there was some service run by the LW team that had a simple guide for setting it up (e.g. go to your LW account, get your Twitter API key, copy it here, grant permission, done.) and it took ~5 minutes, that would lower the barrier to entry a lot and would be a huge step forward.