When attention is very scarce, and you have some discretionary ability to boost signals, any act of public curiosity becomes a political act. Whatever the content of your opinion on X, simply being publicly curious about X (minimum=liking a tweet) sends a message.
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I suspect one reason
@robinhanson drew fire for broaching sex redistribution is simply because as a signal booster he diverted scarce public attention to that topic. The actual opinion matters less than the act of putting that topic in the public short-term magic 7±2 meme buffer3 replies 2 retweets 34 likesShow this thread -
Boosting the topic says “the needs/motives/desires of this group X are worth more attention than those of every other group I’m not signal-boosting.” I suspect it would be useful for public figures to preface displays of public curiosity with justification of importance.
2 replies 1 retweet 14 likesShow this thread -
Unlike private curiosity, public curiosity of thought leaders deploys more than their own attention. It’s a public attention allocation decision. When you tweet or RT something, you’re deploying num_followers*clickbaitness*avg_time attention, Like national park hygiene norms.
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In an attention scarcity (or information overload) environment people are desperate for meta-signals on what to pay attention to. Hell, there’s even a
@pmarcaslikes account that RTs things@pmarca likes. That’s how starved the information economy is for quality meta-signals.2 replies 4 retweets 29 likesShow this thread
Agree! Best Twitter users have signal and meta-signal.
Meta-signal attracts signal: if user (like @pmarca before he went dark) regularly RTs quality, people try to put signal in front of them in hope for a boost. Can be a virtuous cycle for enhancing booster's meta-signal.
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