Also, if John Doe is interested in calculus, but never finds your post, then it will also be a silly post to write. In general, the ability of writing to produce value is bottlenecked by our ability to get the right piece of writing to the right person at the right time.
It’s also relevant to worry about externalities and information asymmetries.
Persistent frustrations with social media originate from posts that are at the Pareto frontier, having traded a lot of nuance and accuracy off in exchange for fun and signaling. Such posts do this because the writer gets more clicks and shares by writing posts like this. This is “good” for the individual readers and sharers in the moment, if we believe their behavior reflects their preferences, but it may be bad for society as a whole if we’d prefer our friends to focus more on accuracy and nuance.
Readers may use signals of credibility when they pursue nuance and accuracy in order to judge the accuracy of a text. They optimize, therefore, for credibility, because they can’t directly optimize for accuracy. Perhaps they also want accessibility. If you then write a post optimized for credibility and accessibility, but the post isn’t accurate, then you can be at the Pareto frontier while also doing the reader a disservice.
That being said, the basic concept here seems right to me. Being at the Pareto frontier is correlated with creating value for the reader, and a search for such correlates of value is helpful.
Also, if John Doe is interested in calculus, but never finds your post, then it will also be a silly post to write. In general, the ability of writing to produce value is bottlenecked by our ability to get the right piece of writing to the right person at the right time.
It’s also relevant to worry about externalities and information asymmetries.
Persistent frustrations with social media originate from posts that are at the Pareto frontier, having traded a lot of nuance and accuracy off in exchange for fun and signaling. Such posts do this because the writer gets more clicks and shares by writing posts like this. This is “good” for the individual readers and sharers in the moment, if we believe their behavior reflects their preferences, but it may be bad for society as a whole if we’d prefer our friends to focus more on accuracy and nuance.
Readers may use signals of credibility when they pursue nuance and accuracy in order to judge the accuracy of a text. They optimize, therefore, for credibility, because they can’t directly optimize for accuracy. Perhaps they also want accessibility. If you then write a post optimized for credibility and accessibility, but the post isn’t accurate, then you can be at the Pareto frontier while also doing the reader a disservice.
That being said, the basic concept here seems right to me. Being at the Pareto frontier is correlated with creating value for the reader, and a search for such correlates of value is helpful.