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?
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?