Title : I'm reading Megan McCardle's Twitter feed, and I'll tell you why. But first...
link : I'm reading Megan McCardle's Twitter feed, and I'll tell you why. But first...
I'm reading Megan McCardle's Twitter feed, and I'll tell you why. But first...
... there's this...If this escalates further America should offer Taiwanese the same visa deal Britain offered Hong Kong: those who love freedom can come here and let China have the land. https://t.co/T4kFhsAaIX
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 23, 2021
A new character is born into the political world. It's a costume, easily patched together, humorous and scary. We'll see how widespread that becomes. I remember some Wisconsin characters — in the 2011 Wisconsin protests — who tried something similar. Here's a photograph I took back then:It begins pic.twitter.com/J0ssP4VKig
— ☄ marquis de posade 🥂 LOOT CREW 🏖 (@acczibit) January 23, 2021
Twitter’s very format encourages the sort of thing that is likely to get one canceled: short and context-free, composed in an instant, posted without reflection. Moreover, that very speed and effortlessness make it easy to form — or join — a mob going after someone else’s tweets. The result resembles the proverbial standoff where everyone has a loaded gun pointed at the head of someone else.
Ideally, everyone would simultaneously disarm, but no one trusts anyone else to do so. So instead, people try to make themselves safer through preemptive revenge. Or take refuge in communities of extremists who will at least protect them from anyone on the other side, no matter what they say, as long as it is sufficiently far left or right. In exchange, of course, they demand that you smile tolerantly at the worst your own side can dish out. ...
Within each ideological space, there’s tightening conformity to radical views; between them, growing interpersonal viciousness and a total lack of understanding. This dynamic is obviously bad for the people who inadvertently blow themselves up in a few seconds of casual typing. But it’s worse for the institutions they work for, which become hostage to the stupidest or most extreme thing any employees have said in their most thoughtless moments....
I wouldn’t trust anyone who talked about me and my friends with the arrogant contempt that I routinely see emanating from journalists and academics on Twitter; we shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives don’t, either. Especially as they watch institutions be forced by Twitter mobs to hew to an ever-narrower ideological line. These costs of tweeting aren’t balanced by the benefits....
[Most Twitter users] hate what Twitter does to their organizations and friends, they hate the pervasive fear, they even hate how much time they waste that could have been spent on better work. But they’re addicted to the attention, or fear ceding mindshare to people who are willing to stay in the fray....
"Mindshare" is a term from the sphere of marketing. The OED has this quote from Wired in 1998: "When a salesman says, ‘I'm building mindshare,’ what he means is he hasn't sold a thing."
Back to McArdle:
[T]his is really a collective action problem: People feel they have to stay on because others do, and others are on for the same reason. Collective action problems can generally be solved only institutionally, which is why I think the big media outlets and the major think tanks should tell their employees to read Twitter all they like, but not to post anything more controversial than baby pictures or recipes for cornbread. Those who are lucky enough to have reputations big enough to lose — or to work for organizations that do — will be better off if they take their voices back inside the institutions that were designed to amplify their best work, rather than their worst moments. But only if they make that journey together.
If the people with the biggest reputations shut up, it leaves more room for those with less to lose. It's hard to believe big media will shut down its Twitter voices, and I think it's pathetic that these illustrious folk can't produce appropriate tweets.
I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly? How does that happen? Why did he think there were people on the left who corresponded to the "hang Mike Pence" set on the right? Why didn't he hesitate to use that most inflammatory word, "lynch"? Why does Niskanen need censorship to protect Will Wilkerson from himself?
I suspect that the people of the left — like Niskanen — need to suppress their association with violence. Right now — with Trump's trial looming — there's an exceedingly strong interest in plumping up the belief that the right and not the left is given to dangerous violence. And lynching is not just deadly violence, it is an abusive, perfunctory execution — a mockery of the due process of law. There's a special problem showing enthusiasm for lynching as the Senate gears up to summarily inflict permanent political death on Donald Trump.
If this escalates further America should offer Taiwanese the same visa deal Britain offered Hong Kong: those who love freedom can come here and let China have the land. https://t.co/T4kFhsAaIX
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 23, 2021
A new character is born into the political world. It's a costume, easily patched together, humorous and scary. We'll see how widespread that becomes. I remember some Wisconsin characters — in the 2011 Wisconsin protests — who tried something similar. Here's a photograph I took back then:It begins pic.twitter.com/J0ssP4VKig
— ☄ marquis de posade 🥂 LOOT CREW 🏖 (@acczibit) January 23, 2021
Twitter’s very format encourages the sort of thing that is likely to get one canceled: short and context-free, composed in an instant, posted without reflection. Moreover, that very speed and effortlessness make it easy to form — or join — a mob going after someone else’s tweets. The result resembles the proverbial standoff where everyone has a loaded gun pointed at the head of someone else.
Ideally, everyone would simultaneously disarm, but no one trusts anyone else to do so. So instead, people try to make themselves safer through preemptive revenge. Or take refuge in communities of extremists who will at least protect them from anyone on the other side, no matter what they say, as long as it is sufficiently far left or right. In exchange, of course, they demand that you smile tolerantly at the worst your own side can dish out. ...
Within each ideological space, there’s tightening conformity to radical views; between them, growing interpersonal viciousness and a total lack of understanding. This dynamic is obviously bad for the people who inadvertently blow themselves up in a few seconds of casual typing. But it’s worse for the institutions they work for, which become hostage to the stupidest or most extreme thing any employees have said in their most thoughtless moments....
I wouldn’t trust anyone who talked about me and my friends with the arrogant contempt that I routinely see emanating from journalists and academics on Twitter; we shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives don’t, either. Especially as they watch institutions be forced by Twitter mobs to hew to an ever-narrower ideological line. These costs of tweeting aren’t balanced by the benefits....
[Most Twitter users] hate what Twitter does to their organizations and friends, they hate the pervasive fear, they even hate how much time they waste that could have been spent on better work. But they’re addicted to the attention, or fear ceding mindshare to people who are willing to stay in the fray....
"Mindshare" is a term from the sphere of marketing. The OED has this quote from Wired in 1998: "When a salesman says, ‘I'm building mindshare,’ what he means is he hasn't sold a thing."
Back to McArdle:
[T]his is really a collective action problem: People feel they have to stay on because others do, and others are on for the same reason. Collective action problems can generally be solved only institutionally, which is why I think the big media outlets and the major think tanks should tell their employees to read Twitter all they like, but not to post anything more controversial than baby pictures or recipes for cornbread. Those who are lucky enough to have reputations big enough to lose — or to work for organizations that do — will be better off if they take their voices back inside the institutions that were designed to amplify their best work, rather than their worst moments. But only if they make that journey together.
If the people with the biggest reputations shut up, it leaves more room for those with less to lose. It's hard to believe big media will shut down its Twitter voices, and I think it's pathetic that these illustrious folk can't produce appropriate tweets.
I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly? How does that happen? Why did he think there were people on the left who corresponded to the "hang Mike Pence" set on the right? Why didn't he hesitate to use that most inflammatory word, "lynch"? Why does Niskanen need censorship to protect Will Wilkerson from himself?
I suspect that the people of the left — like Niskanen — need to suppress their association with violence. Right now — with Trump's trial looming — there's an exceedingly strong interest in plumping up the belief that the right and not the left is given to dangerous violence. And lynching is not just deadly violence, it is an abusive, perfunctory execution — a mockery of the due process of law. There's a special problem showing enthusiasm for lynching as the Senate gears up to summarily inflict permanent political death on Donald Trump.
Thus articles I'm reading Megan McCardle's Twitter feed, and I'll tell you why. But first...
You now read the article I'm reading Megan McCardle's Twitter feed, and I'll tell you why. But first... with the link address https://welcometoamerican.blogspot.com/2021/01/im-reading-megan-mccardles-twitter-feed.html
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