If you’re a prominent intellectual, then a lot of people want your time, and most of them will predictably waste it. You need a filtering/prioritization strategy. This article says that your filtering/prioritization strategy should be public and legible. There are three fairly fundamental problems with this.
The first problem is that most good filtering strategies involve inputs that can’t be made legible. If your strategy is to read the first paragraph and predict whether the rest will be worth it, then “predict whether the rest will be worth it” is a complicated black box with internals that are difficult to discuss.
The second problem is that, if you create a legible set of rules which says you’ll talk to anyone who’s worthy, then any time someone who isn’t worth your time tries to talk to you, you’re forced to insult them. That will end up, in aggregate, wasting more time than you have.
The third problem is that if you’re transparent about how your filters work, then people can optimize for getting through your filters. There’s a Goodhart’s Law issue where people who optimize for looking like good discussion partners will end up outcompeting people who optimize for being good discussion partners.
As far as your own signaling is concerned: you’ve made yourself look like someone who’s very costly to try and engage with. Specifically, people will anticipate that, if they try to reply to you in a time-efficient manner, you’ll be unsatisfied with a short response, demand a longer one, and leverage the lack of a longer response into a social attack. This makes it unsafe to write you even a short response. You’ve set that up by demanding responses from specific people to your long essays, and then using public channels to try to shame them into giving you an answer.
If you’re a prominent intellectual, then a lot of people want your time, and most of them will predictably waste it. You need a filtering/prioritization strategy. This article says that your filtering/prioritization strategy should be public and legible. There are three fairly fundamental problems with this.
The first problem is that most good filtering strategies involve inputs that can’t be made legible. If your strategy is to read the first paragraph and predict whether the rest will be worth it, then “predict whether the rest will be worth it” is a complicated black box with internals that are difficult to discuss.
The second problem is that, if you create a legible set of rules which says you’ll talk to anyone who’s worthy, then any time someone who isn’t worth your time tries to talk to you, you’re forced to insult them. That will end up, in aggregate, wasting more time than you have.
The third problem is that if you’re transparent about how your filters work, then people can optimize for getting through your filters. There’s a Goodhart’s Law issue where people who optimize for looking like good discussion partners will end up outcompeting people who optimize for being good discussion partners.
As far as your own signaling is concerned: you’ve made yourself look like someone who’s very costly to try and engage with. Specifically, people will anticipate that, if they try to reply to you in a time-efficient manner, you’ll be unsatisfied with a short response, demand a longer one, and leverage the lack of a longer response into a social attack. This makes it unsafe to write you even a short response. You’ve set that up by demanding responses from specific people to your long essays, and then using public channels to try to shame them into giving you an answer.