I’m an obsessive about voting theory, and have been for over 20 years now. As time passes and my knowledge deepens, I find that while I still feel “this is really important and people don’t pay enough attention to it”, I feel less and less that “this is MORE important than whatever people are talking about here and now, and it should be my job to make them change the subject”. Obviously I think this is a healthy change for me and my social graces, but it also means that you are more likely to hear about voting theory from a younger, shallower version of me than you are from me.
I don’t know how to solve that problem. It’s one thing to be immune enough to evangelists so that you can keep a balance of caring across multiple issues, as discussed in the post above; it’s another harder thing to be immune enough yet still curious enough to find your way past the proselytizers to the calmer, more-mature non-evangelist obsessives.
Find your way past the proselytizers to the calmer, more-mature non-evangelist obsessives.
If you write an excellent post about your obsession that gets 196 upvotes on LW, I’ll find it even if I don’t really share the obsession. That was kinda my point—people discover their own obsessions because they found something important / fascinating, not because someone shamed them into caring about it.
This is tangential, but I should point out that the linked post (while indeed excellent) does not have 196 upvotes—it does not even have 196 votes, of any kind! Hover your mouse pointer over the karma total, and you will see that it has 63 votes (we do not know how many are up vs. down).
This probably does not change your point, but it’s important to keep this in mind when, e.g., comparing one post to another—especially across the history of LW.
I’m an obsessive about voting theory, and have been for over 20 years now. As time passes and my knowledge deepens, I find that while I still feel “this is really important and people don’t pay enough attention to it”, I feel less and less that “this is MORE important than whatever people are talking about here and now, and it should be my job to make them change the subject”. Obviously I think this is a healthy change for me and my social graces, but it also means that you are more likely to hear about voting theory from a younger, shallower version of me than you are from me.
I don’t know how to solve that problem. It’s one thing to be immune enough to evangelists so that you can keep a balance of caring across multiple issues, as discussed in the post above; it’s another harder thing to be immune enough yet still curious enough to find your way past the proselytizers to the calmer, more-mature non-evangelist obsessives.
If you write an excellent post about your obsession that gets 196 upvotes on LW, I’ll find it even if I don’t really share the obsession. That was kinda my point—people discover their own obsessions because they found something important / fascinating, not because someone shamed them into caring about it.
This is tangential, but I should point out that the linked post (while indeed excellent) does not have 196 upvotes—it does not even have 196 votes, of any kind! Hover your mouse pointer over the karma total, and you will see that it has 63 votes (we do not know how many are up vs. down).
This probably does not change your point, but it’s important to keep this in mind when, e.g., comparing one post to another—especially across the history of LW.