Attention, not agreement
Why it's here
The definitive piece to understand why the internet feels miserable, and why people fight and argue, and why the most controversial things always get the most attention. B.
From the piece
Under Moloch, activists are irresistibly incentivized to dig their own graves.
Which means that it’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship case for fighting police brutality and racism is the flagship case that we in fact got. It’s not a coincidence that the worst possible flagship cases for believing rape victims are the ones that end up going viral. It’s not a coincidence that the only time we ever hear about factory farming is when somebody’s doing something that makes us almost sympathetic to it. It’s not coincidence, it’s not even happenstance, it’s enemy action. Under Moloch, activists are irresistibly incentivized to dig their own graves. And the media is irresistibly incentivized to help them.
The big ideas
The machine: Alexander argues that a cause faces a tradeoff between agreement and attention. Restrained campaigns win assent but are ignored, while outrageous ones get noticed and create their own opposition.
Vegan Outreach can get everyone to agree in principle that factory-farming is bad, but no one will pay any attention to it. And PETA can get everyone to pay attention to factory farming, but a lot of people who would otherwise oppose it will switch to supporting it just because they’re so mad at the way it’s being publicized.
The machine: Alexander argues that no one is in charge of what the media covers. Topics rise by an uncoordinated process driven by incentives, so even sympathetic journalists cannot simply choose a clear-cut flagship case.
Steven in his wisdom reminds us that there is no National Conversation Topic Czar. The rise of some topics to national prominence and the relegation of others to tiny print on the eighth page of the newspapers occurs by an emergent uncoordinated process.
The original
slatestarcodex.comRead Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex (opens in a new tab)18 December 2014 · 27 minutesSee also
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