Shallow Feedback Hollows You Out
the actually scary thing about social media
Thinking about Nassim Nicholas Taleb always makes me sad. My brother handed me a copy of The Black Swan twelve years ago and it was a revelation, it blew my intellectual world open - Taleb seemed the perfect embodiment of the gentleman-scholar I’d always hoped to become. He saw through the pseudo-intellectual bullshit drowning the world and was working on the most fundamental questions, working at whatever hours he felt like, flaneuring around cities, reading classics and proving math theorems.
Now I can’t even look at his Twitter because of how sad it makes me. He seems to have become a cartoon version of himself, engaging in petty fights and finding the 500th way to express his hatred of bitcoiners or his love of squid ink pasta. There is no way he could write a masterpiece like Antifragile today, even though at age 64 he should be at the height of his powers as a writer. (If Taleb somehow finds this and reads this, I’m sorry, I know it’s a cruel thing to write, but I’ve heard people say it privately enough times I’d rather it be out in the open where it can be refuted).
Since then I’ve seen the same thing happen, to varying degrees, to other writers who for a time seemed to be The Writer In the World Most In Touch With The Truth - Noam Chomsky, Sam Harris, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Curtis Yarvin, and Jordan Peterson. They go from saying beautifully original things with every breath to becoming a shell of themselves, repeating the same talking points endlessly, totally unable to engage with or integrate feedback or criticism.
The same story has played out so many times it can’t be an accident - something is up. Clearly something about being in the spotlight quickly kills your ability to be an original thinker. But how exactly does this work?
Thinkers coevolve with their audiences
Consider Henrik Karlsson’s theory of how original thinkers are made, from his beautifully haunting essay Relationships are coevolutionary loops:
When I meet a person who is truly, profoundly themselves, I sometimes think of a letter Charles Darwin sent to Joseph Hooker in January 1862 after receiving a package of orchids.
“Good heavens,” Darwin wrote about the Angraecum sesquipedale, an orchid from Madagascar with a nectary as long as his forearm, ”what insect can suck it?”
There must exist a pollinator moth with a tongue longer than any that has ever been observed, he conjectured later. The moth and the orchid must have evolved in dialogue.
This is what I infer when I see someone who is comfortable in their unique strangeness, too. There probably exists someone who enabled that evolution of personality. A parent, a friend group, a spouse. It is rare for people to come into themselves if no one is excited and curious about their core, their potential. We need someone who gives us space to unfold.
We are social creatures, and our most important source of reward is the approval of others. Patterns of thought and speech that elicit approval from those we care about are reinforced; patterns that elicit disapproval are ruthlessly culled to avoid the exclusion we fear more than death itself.
Now consider how this changes with the size of your audience.
If you’re writing to just one person, and that person deeply cares about you and the topic you’re obsessed with, you’re strongly incentivized to generate new ideas (because your audience of one has heard your old ideas already), to explore them in great depth and detail (because there is no inferential distance between you), and to think of things that are personally meaningful to you and follow from your own deep-seated intuitions (because the person cares about you, not just the generic quality of your ideas).
If you’re writing to a small handful of people who know you well, you can do better in some ways. You’re more motivated to impress, your ideas get exposed to more diverse feedback and sharpen accordingly, and you’re more likely to be rigorous in your factual claims because it’s embarassing to be wrong in front of a whole group. But in other ways, your writing will get worse. Your fear of being called out will make you likely to hedge your true beliefs; conversely, your desire to get the group’s attention encourages you to exaggerate or embellish a bit. Most devastating is that you will have thoughts that are more obvious and require less context and reader investment to understand. If you don’t create a very unusual social context, you will subconsciously optimize your thoughts for the least-informed member of your group - we might call this the tyranny of the marginal reader.
Now it should be obvious what happens when you obtain a large following. Taleb’s marginal reader doesn’t care about the Russian school of statistics or Seneca’s views on death, they just want to hear Taleb dunk on Harvard professors. And so the exact subconscious process that motivated him to write compelling, original prose now reshapes his thoughts to endlessly repeat the most meme-able parts of his worldview for the entertainment of his marginal reader.
I make this process sound terrible but it might even be socially beneficial! Zoom out and think of Taleb’s brain merely as a small fraction of the collective brain that our society is running on. We collectively decided Taleb’s existing body of ideas is incredibly important. So important, in fact, that we’re going to reallocate his brain to the task of repeating those ideas over and over again in various ways to continually remind us all about how important they are. Sure, he won’t be generating any new ideas, but we have plenty of fresh brains to do that. Division of labor, baby!
Does this sound dumb? It made a lot more sense in the oral, low-innovation cultures we evolved in. Having a wise man around who would just repeat variations on the same five time-tested ideas over and over again to all the young people was incredibly valuable. Now we can just write those ideas down in a book that everyone reads, and the world moves much faster. In theory…
Even today, ask anyone in a management role how often they have to repeat the same goddamn thing over and over again, and how simple that thing has to be in order to actually be understood and guide collective action. Maybe it’s actually very good that we have some high-status stochastic parrots running around constantly generating variations on “clean your room” and “don’t trust formal models just because a smart Harvard professor invented them” and “superintelligent machines might kill us all soon”. The alternative, that we just forget these crucial truths, may be much worse.
How to protect your mind
Regardless of its social value, suppose you don’t want to lose your ability to think new thoughts and see new things. What are your options?
The best remedy is to write to the single smartest person you know who cares a lot about your topic of interest. Early science famously ran this way, in a Republic of Letters. Letters! A one-to-one communication medium. Even up till the 1930s, ‘scientific papers’ were basically short letters to the editor of a journal1, who would publish the ones they found interesting. To this day I believe most scientific breakthroughs result from deep one-on-one engagement, like the famous long walks that won Kahneman and Tversky their Riksbank Memorial Prize.2
The exact opposite of a republic of letters is 4chan - a republic of graffiti. Nobody knows who wrote what, there are no identities or relationships, the only feedback you ever get is from an ever-churning anonymous crowd. This makes it a perfect place to study and evolve virulent memes (and indeed, 4chan memes regularly escape containment and go viral in the broader internet). But it is a terrible place to learn to think.
Twitter/BlueSky are somewhere in the middle - if you curate your followers well, and only enable notifications from people you follow, you can have a republic-of-letters-like experience, but it’s quite fragile and you’re always surfing the edge of 4chan-like memetic warfare. Are there any public intellectuals at all who have managed to survive becoming the Current Thing on Twitter?
How to protect your scene
Academics are often extremely petty and condescending to popularizers - ask any historian how they feel about Jared Diamond. I used to think this was jealousy or arrogance, but now I understand it as a crucial defense mechanism. Humans are status-seeking creatures, whether we like it or not. In order to do good work, scientists must retain a separate status hierarchy where prestige flows to the most innovative ideas, not the most popular ones. In order to defend this separate status hierarchy, someone needs to actively denigrate (lower the status of) people who command too much attention relative to their recognized within-field contributions. If it looks petty and mean to us outsiders, it’s working as intended - as a credible signal that the scientists don’t care about our judgment. Let them be petty! And start your own petty, mean, judgy intellectual subculture. Let a million other, parallel status hierarchies bloom: with human minds as they are, this is the only path to real diversity of thought.
consider the letter, published in Nature, announcing the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939: a mere half page, written informally, more like a modern blog post or an email than a bloated academic publication
I follow Taleb in refusing to call it the Nobel Prize in Economics. Alfred Nobel created no such prize. I love economics but am not ok with this kind of prestige laundering.
Love this essay. Reminded me of Tanner Greer's "Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives—But Why?" https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/ His take:
> I have noticed that historians who transition from the role of academic scribbler to famed public voice follow a sort of pattern. Their first published work might be a monograph, perhaps a PhD thesis turned book. It will be on some narrow topic no sane person cares about, the product of months spent in one archives in one location. U.S.-British trade relations in the 1890s, perhaps, or state-led cultural imperialism in Japanese Manchuria. They may repeat this feat again, but at some point they transition to something broader—now they are writing a global history of trade regimes under the gold standard, or of empire building in the whole Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere. This work will be a brilliant, field-defining piece of scholarship, lauded (or resented) by other luminaries of their sub-discipline, read by scholars and interested laymen alike. That book will be published by an academic press; the next will be aimed at popular audiences. Our historian has now graduated fully to the role of public thinker: her next book will be on the dangers posed by trade wars writ large, or on the nature of modern imperialism. This title will be reviewed in all the famous magazines; people who have never read it will argue about it on twitter. And then everything starts to fall apart.
> The trouble is that just as our historian reaches her full stature as a public name, her well of insight begins to run dry. A true fan of her works might trace elements of their name-making title back to the very first monograph she published as a baby academic. She was able to take all of the ideas and observations from her early years of concentrated study and spin them out over a decade of high-profile book writing. But what happens when the fruits of that study have been spent? What does she have to write about when they have already applied their unique form of insight to the problems of the day?
> Nothing at all, really. Historians like this have nothing left to fall back on except the conventional opinions common to their class. So they go about repackaging those, echoing the same hollow shibboleths you could find in the work of any mediocrity. ...
> You see this pattern recur again and again in the op-eds of our nation. A once-bold foreign correspondent whose former days of daring-do have already been milked for more than they are worth, a Nobel laureate two decades removed from the economic papers that gave him acclaim, a nationally known historian who has not stepped into an archive since graduate school—the details change but the general pattern is the same. In each case the intellectual in question is years removed from not just the insights that delivered fame, but *the activities that delivered insight*.
> The tricky thing is that it is hard to go back to the rap and scrabble of real research when you have climbed so high above it. Penguin will pay you a hefty advance for your next two hundred pages of banal boilerplate; they will not pay you for two or three years of archival research on some narrow topic no one cares about. No matter that the process of writing on that narrow topic refills the well, imbuing you with the ideas needed to fill out another two decades of productive writing. The world is impatient. They do not have time to wait for you to reinvent yourself.
Beautifully written! I wonder if this is a bad equilibrium situation or something more sinister. If there was a social network that encouraged high quality of thought, could it compete with platforms that encourage optimization for the marginal reader?