I think it’s easy to denigrate (almost exclusive) trackers of social reality. But they are people who experienced conditioning that most of the variance in the outcomes they care about were controlled by social reality inputs. It makes sense that they constantly have to track changes in social reality because social reality is anti-inductive/​adversarially optimizing out from under you constantly. Being able to ignore large swaths of social reality and thus bootstrap more permanent wins (since solutions in causal reality often stay wins) is something of a privilege. People mostly tracking causal reality also pay an often invisible cost related to having social reality treat you as a defector.
I think it’s easy to denigrate (almost exclusive) trackers of social reality. But they are people who experienced conditioning that most of the variance in the outcomes they care about were controlled by social reality inputs. It makes sense that they constantly have to track changes in social reality because social reality is anti-inductive/​adversarially optimizing out from under you constantly. Being able to ignore large swaths of social reality and thus bootstrap more permanent wins (since solutions in causal reality often stay wins) is something of a privilege. People mostly tracking causal reality also pay an often invisible cost related to having social reality treat you as a defector.