Hmm. This just seems really optimistic to me about how reasonable people are, and how easy it is to avoid these classes of issues.
The main threat here is costs to your time, attention and emotional well being, which are some of your most valuable resources.
Use basic PR filters to avoid pattern matching as an enemy; this is mostly about connotation rather than denotation)
Sure. But, this is a skill you now need to learn, that you didn’t have to learn if you were just sidestepping the issue, and which you might not be very talented at.
Ignore death threats
Probably correct, but, again, a major emotional skill people don’t have. Most people find death threats incredibly stressful.
Respond to criticism that influences your supporters
Assumes you have time to do so. Every instance of criticism you need to address is time that you didn’t have to spend before but now you do. This adds up quickly the bigger your stage.
If your supporters have decent judgement”
This is sidestepping several issues:
decent judgment is in fact not that common in the first place
critics who are not going out of their way to be truth-aligned can be optimizing for all kinds of things that are harder to defend against than attack. Two instances of this are the “if you have to spend time convincing people you’re not a child molester you’ve already lost” phenomenon, and the “if the argument for your position requires more inferential steps than your supporters have the attention to listen to, then you can’t actually address it.”
the relevant class isn’t “supporters”, it’s “potential supporters”, and there are many instances you don’t have the luxury of everyone in the “potential supporters” category being especially reasonable
It’s unfortunate that people don’t talk about the benefits of negative publicity more in this context. Attention can be metabolized into money or other resources. Negative attention too, because it will galvanize at least some positive attention, and because it gives you free publicity and sometimes people will straight-up pay for things they think are terrible. Look at what Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump have made out of being hated by so many.
You can’t do this if you’re depending on the average of public opinion for validation, though.
You can’t do this if you’re depending on the average of public opinion for validation, though.
I’m curious why you write this line after speaking about Donald Trump who did have to win something like an average of the population to vote for him.
Nassim Taleb writes about the benefit of negative publicity. His notion of anti-fragility is useful for thinking about when negative publicity is beneficial. Conceptually, I think that notion is more useful than asking yourself whether you depend on an average of public opinion.
When you want more of a how-to guide there’s Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying.
It seems to me like the main interesting thing Trump did was win the primary, and his tactics seemed designed to galvanize strong supporters, not win over the median Republican voter. I think the general election very closely followed party affiliation, which suggests that most voters just aren’t that sensitive to the details of who’s their party’s candidate and vote the party line.
But even under the median voter theorem you only need slightly more than 50% of voters to like you just a little more than the alternatives, and the intensity of opposition doesn’t matter much.
Even so, I agree Trump was not a straightforward example. Oops!
There were at the time plenty of people who predicted that even if Trump would win the primary he surely wouldn’t win the general selection. The fact that he did seems to be more obvious in hindsight.
The situations I was most imagining (from Sarah’s original post, not necessarily from Jessicata’s comment) were actually more Dunbar-ish-number-sized – a workplace or local community, that is large enough to have multiple interest groups.
In that context… well, there’s still a benefit of negative publicity (I have sometimes written things with intent to be medium-controversial, so as to get more attention to an idea). But it comes embedded with more personal costs than when you’re engaging the wider world and “no such thing as bad press” is a bit more fraught a guideline.
I don’t think we have a major disagreement about how big the threat is. Mostly I get annoyed when people allude to a vague threat from being transparent instead of being specific about what the threat is, how big it is, and how to plan around it; you are being specific here, which is helpful. I think planning around it is usually worth it, because the benefits from sharing information (strategic and otherwise) outside your clique are very large, unless your clique is itself already a functional secret society, which, let’s be real, is generally not what is going on. Advances (scientific, strategic, etc) are generally made by networks of communicating people, not lone individuals, and generally not secret cliques either (see: The Inner Ring).
Hmm. This just seems really optimistic to me about how reasonable people are, and how easy it is to avoid these classes of issues.
The main threat here is costs to your time, attention and emotional well being, which are some of your most valuable resources.
Sure. But, this is a skill you now need to learn, that you didn’t have to learn if you were just sidestepping the issue, and which you might not be very talented at.
Probably correct, but, again, a major emotional skill people don’t have. Most people find death threats incredibly stressful.
Assumes you have time to do so. Every instance of criticism you need to address is time that you didn’t have to spend before but now you do. This adds up quickly the bigger your stage.
This is sidestepping several issues:
decent judgment is in fact not that common in the first place
critics who are not going out of their way to be truth-aligned can be optimizing for all kinds of things that are harder to defend against than attack. Two instances of this are the “if you have to spend time convincing people you’re not a child molester you’ve already lost” phenomenon, and the “if the argument for your position requires more inferential steps than your supporters have the attention to listen to, then you can’t actually address it.”
the relevant class isn’t “supporters”, it’s “potential supporters”, and there are many instances you don’t have the luxury of everyone in the “potential supporters” category being especially reasonable
It’s unfortunate that people don’t talk about the benefits of negative publicity more in this context. Attention can be metabolized into money or other resources. Negative attention too, because it will galvanize at least some positive attention, and because it gives you free publicity and sometimes people will straight-up pay for things they think are terrible. Look at what Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump have made out of being hated by so many.
You can’t do this if you’re depending on the average of public opinion for validation, though.
I’m curious why you write this line after speaking about Donald Trump who did have to win something like an average of the population to vote for him.
Nassim Taleb writes about the benefit of negative publicity. His notion of anti-fragility is useful for thinking about when negative publicity is beneficial. Conceptually, I think that notion is more useful than asking yourself whether you depend on an average of public opinion.
When you want more of a how-to guide there’s Ryan Holiday’s Trust Me I’m Lying.
It seems to me like the main interesting thing Trump did was win the primary, and his tactics seemed designed to galvanize strong supporters, not win over the median Republican voter. I think the general election very closely followed party affiliation, which suggests that most voters just aren’t that sensitive to the details of who’s their party’s candidate and vote the party line.
But even under the median voter theorem you only need slightly more than 50% of voters to like you just a little more than the alternatives, and the intensity of opposition doesn’t matter much.
Even so, I agree Trump was not a straightforward example. Oops!
There were at the time plenty of people who predicted that even if Trump would win the primary he surely wouldn’t win the general selection. The fact that he did seems to be more obvious in hindsight.
The situations I was most imagining (from Sarah’s original post, not necessarily from Jessicata’s comment) were actually more Dunbar-ish-number-sized – a workplace or local community, that is large enough to have multiple interest groups.
In that context… well, there’s still a benefit of negative publicity (I have sometimes written things with intent to be medium-controversial, so as to get more attention to an idea). But it comes embedded with more personal costs than when you’re engaging the wider world and “no such thing as bad press” is a bit more fraught a guideline.
I don’t think we have a major disagreement about how big the threat is. Mostly I get annoyed when people allude to a vague threat from being transparent instead of being specific about what the threat is, how big it is, and how to plan around it; you are being specific here, which is helpful. I think planning around it is usually worth it, because the benefits from sharing information (strategic and otherwise) outside your clique are very large, unless your clique is itself already a functional secret society, which, let’s be real, is generally not what is going on. Advances (scientific, strategic, etc) are generally made by networks of communicating people, not lone individuals, and generally not secret cliques either (see: The Inner Ring).