β-redex's Shortform

β-redex

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.

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.

2Joseph Miller1y

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. [...] 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.

I’d be interested in discussing examples, I expect I will disagree.

4Ben Pace1y

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.