Or Aella, whose blog is exciting and interesting. But who posts comments on twitter like “I’m shocked that people are offended by [highly decoupled statement] / [extremely norm-breaking behavior]” when it is completely obvious that most highly-coupling / norm-following people would be triggered by that.
Of course it’s obvious, and of course she knows it. It’s engagement bait. You get money for having followers on Twitter. And it’s a way to promote your other stuff, too; to create “hype”, etc. All of that requires having more followers, and you get more followers by posting toxoplasma-style bait.
Actually, I confidently believe she (and other autistic rationalists) who ask these questions often are earnestly confused, and do not easily empathize with the other minds on these topics. I think there’s still selection effects on why such people’s comments are selected for, but it is not conscious “engagement-bait”.
That hypothesis is wildly consistent with the facts. Aella is a professional self-promoter. She has built her entire career on using various forms of social media to “build her brand”. Self-promotion is what she does. From Wikipedia:
Aella moved out at age 17 after a fallout with her parents, and in 2012, after quitting a job as an assembly line worker in a factory, began working as a camgirl, initially on MyFreeCams.[2][5] She eventually became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, making over $100,000 in some months.[5] By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6] After camgirling, she began work as an escort.[3] As of 2024 her main source of income was her writing on Substack.[7] She has also been involved in several startups.[2][6]
The idea that this is a person who does not know exactly what is and is not engagement bait simply cannot be credited. It just has no plausibility whatsoever.
(This is not an attack on Aella. It’s just—well, if you said of, say, a seasoned corporate lawyer for a major PR firm, that his public statements about some person or organization was simply him earnestly reporting his personal opinion with no thought whatsoever to how his comments would be perceived… that would be outrageously naïve. No, someone like that doesn’t just earnestly say things without any conscious thought about how they’re going to be received. Their professional specialization is in not doing precisely that.)
(No comment about any other “autistic rationalists”, since I wasn’t talking about anyone else.)
I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets, in that she is often confident and wrong, or very surprised. So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.
I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
Statements of the form “I don’t understand X” (where X is a thing such that literally not understanding it is very weird) are a well-known genre of engagement bait (with several well-defined subgenres, such as “I don’t understand what [specific type of bad person, such as ‘racists’] even believe”, “I don’t understand why people [do common thing that basically everyone does]”, “I don’t understand why people don’t just [do some absurd thing or apply some absurd solution to some problem]”, etc.)
With such things, the greatest engagement will only come if you can appear to be totally innocent and sincere in your incomprehension. (If it looks like a “work”—a performance piece, posted for engagement—then people will mostly be reluctant to engage.) Now, as you no doubt well know, the best and most surest way to convince other people that you believe something is to actually believe it yourself.
One answer is that people who genuinely have a hard time understanding other ppl are selected for heavily.
To be clear I regularly have a hard time understanding other people, including on the internet, I don’t think it’s that unusual a state of affairs to be explaining.
Additional point: The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says “I don’t understand how someone can say/think/do X” where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior. I think I first read it pointed out by Julia Galef that it is not virtue to fail to understand someone, it does not make you superior to it. But I think honestly admitting you don’t understand someone’s behavior is a virtue and I believe is a very common experience.
Yep. From my perspective it’s pretty common to not understand or be able to easily empathize with minds that you interact with regularly (e.g. see Different Worlds by Scott). Especially in certain levels of depth, there are many people whose psychology confuses me, or people for whom I’ve puzzled over for a long time before understanding their basic attitude/mood in most interactions. I’d happily generate some examples if you find this surprising?
I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets
It’s true of Aella? This Aella right here:
By 2021, she was described as having set herself apart partly by conducting extensive market research, e.g. surveying almost 400 fellow female OnlyFans performers about their incomes and identifying factors that were correlated with higher earnings.[6]
I remain skeptical.
But note that you seem to be responding to what seems like a strawman:
So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.
If you post 10 things that are all written so as to have the properties of “things that often—at least 10% of the time—go viral”, and 1–2 of them go viral, then even if (as is likely the case) you could not have predicted in advance which of those 10 things would be the ones that went viral, it is nonetheless absurd to say of you that you “have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not”, or that you are not consciously posting engagement bait.
I expressed myself somewhat poorly. I of course should not imply that a twitter account with 200,000+ followers that has built a following on twitter does not have unusually good models about how to get engagement from twitter users, and doesn’t employ heuristics developed in order to maintain and increase the engagement.
But I stand by this: the reason Aella posts genuine-seeming confusion by people’s reactions to her writing, is not that she has goodharted on engagement at the cost of truth/honesty, but because she has found a part of her genuine+honest self that creates a lot of engagement. In the same way that people were not lying about whether a certain dress appeared to them as black & blue or orange & gold, Aella is not lying about whether she understands others’ behavior or interpretations of text, even though she may be writing about these specific subjects on twitter due to them being the sort of thing that gets a lot of engagement (as the dress did).
If you merely mean to say that Aella is aware that posting this sort of text will get a lot of engagement, then we have no disagreement. If otherwise, I’d be happy to discuss and defend specific examples, though I can no longer search them myself because her account is private.
The thread under this comment been yourself and Said seems to conflate two different questions, resulting in you talking past each other: 1. Can Aella predict that people will be offended by things. 2. Can Aella empathize with the offended people / understand why they are offended.
My guess would be that Aella can generally predict people’s reactions, but she cannot empathize with their point of view.
The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says “I don’t understand how someone can say/think/do X” where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior.
I think the reason I find these tweets of Aella’s highly engaging and rage-baity is that they generally read as criticisms to me. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I expect this is also how most others read them.
Of course it’s obvious, and of course she knows it. It’s engagement bait. You get money for having followers on Twitter. And it’s a way to promote your other stuff, too; to create “hype”, etc. All of that requires having more followers, and you get more followers by posting toxoplasma-style bait.
Actually, I confidently believe she (and other autistic rationalists) who ask these questions often are earnestly confused, and do not easily empathize with the other minds on these topics. I think there’s still selection effects on why such people’s comments are selected for, but it is not conscious “engagement-bait”.
That hypothesis is wildly consistent with the facts. Aella is a professional self-promoter. She has built her entire career on using various forms of social media to “build her brand”. Self-promotion is what she does. From Wikipedia:
The idea that this is a person who does not know exactly what is and is not engagement bait simply cannot be credited. It just has no plausibility whatsoever.
(This is not an attack on Aella. It’s just—well, if you said of, say, a seasoned corporate lawyer for a major PR firm, that his public statements about some person or organization was simply him earnestly reporting his personal opinion with no thought whatsoever to how his comments would be perceived… that would be outrageously naïve. No, someone like that doesn’t just earnestly say things without any conscious thought about how they’re going to be received. Their professional specialization is in not doing precisely that.)
(No comment about any other “autistic rationalists”, since I wasn’t talking about anyone else.)
A couple of notes:
I think the position I most want to defend is that you can post something you know will get a lot of engagement, and it can also be true. I think when someone writes something like “I literally don’t understand why people choose to lie regularly in their daily lives” they might be aware that it could be a toxoplasma-kind of scissor-statement, and also they still don’t understand why people do it so much.
I think it’s a very common experience of writers that they have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not. I think this is true of Aella and her tweets, in that she is often confident and wrong, or very surprised. So I don’t expect that all of her popular twits are expected to be.
As for this:
Statements of the form “I don’t understand X” (where X is a thing such that literally not understanding it is very weird) are a well-known genre of engagement bait (with several well-defined subgenres, such as “I don’t understand what [specific type of bad person, such as ‘racists’] even believe”, “I don’t understand why people [do common thing that basically everyone does]”, “I don’t understand why people don’t just [do some absurd thing or apply some absurd solution to some problem]”, etc.)
With such things, the greatest engagement will only come if you can appear to be totally innocent and sincere in your incomprehension. (If it looks like a “work”—a performance piece, posted for engagement—then people will mostly be reluctant to engage.) Now, as you no doubt well know, the best and most surest way to convince other people that you believe something is to actually believe it yourself.
And the outcome of these incentives is…
One answer is that people who genuinely have a hard time understanding other ppl are selected for heavily.
To be clear I regularly have a hard time understanding other people, including on the internet, I don’t think it’s that unusual a state of affairs to be explaining.
Additional point: The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says “I don’t understand how someone can say/think/do X” where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior. I think I first read it pointed out by Julia Galef that it is not virtue to fail to understand someone, it does not make you superior to it. But I think honestly admitting you don’t understand someone’s behavior is a virtue and I believe is a very common experience.
Really?
Yep. From my perspective it’s pretty common to not understand or be able to easily empathize with minds that you interact with regularly (e.g. see Different Worlds by Scott). Especially in certain levels of depth, there are many people whose psychology confuses me, or people for whom I’ve puzzled over for a long time before understanding their basic attitude/mood in most interactions. I’d happily generate some examples if you find this surprising?
It’s true of Aella? This Aella right here:
I remain skeptical.
But note that you seem to be responding to what seems like a strawman:
If you post 10 things that are all written so as to have the properties of “things that often—at least 10% of the time—go viral”, and 1–2 of them go viral, then even if (as is likely the case) you could not have predicted in advance which of those 10 things would be the ones that went viral, it is nonetheless absurd to say of you that you “have a very poor ability to predict what gets a lot of attention and what does not”, or that you are not consciously posting engagement bait.
I expressed myself somewhat poorly. I of course should not imply that a twitter account with 200,000+ followers that has built a following on twitter does not have unusually good models about how to get engagement from twitter users, and doesn’t employ heuristics developed in order to maintain and increase the engagement.
But I stand by this: the reason Aella posts genuine-seeming confusion by people’s reactions to her writing, is not that she has goodharted on engagement at the cost of truth/honesty, but because she has found a part of her genuine+honest self that creates a lot of engagement. In the same way that people were not lying about whether a certain dress appeared to them as black & blue or orange & gold, Aella is not lying about whether she understands others’ behavior or interpretations of text, even though she may be writing about these specific subjects on twitter due to them being the sort of thing that gets a lot of engagement (as the dress did).
If you merely mean to say that Aella is aware that posting this sort of text will get a lot of engagement, then we have no disagreement. If otherwise, I’d be happy to discuss and defend specific examples, though I can no longer search them myself because her account is private.
The thread under this comment been yourself and Said seems to conflate two different questions, resulting in you talking past each other:
1. Can Aella predict that people will be offended by things.
2. Can Aella empathize with the offended people / understand why they are offended.
My guess would be that Aella can generally predict people’s reactions, but she cannot empathize with their point of view.
I think the reason I find these tweets of Aella’s highly engaging and rage-baity is that they generally read as criticisms to me. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I expect this is also how most others read them.
I’d be interested in discussing examples, I expect I will disagree.