1/ The charitable interpretation here is that pg — someone respected in the startup community for, among other things, writing essays — communicated inarticulately because he has failed to update his audience mental model. The less charitable interpretation is that he hasn’t.https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1161894981503614977 …
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2/ But, I don’t want to talk about his (either bad or sloppy) take. Instead, I want to explore the idea of an audience mental model for people with high follow counts.
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3/ Imagine you exist in a social position that crosses a lot of boundaries and compels attention from lots of different people. Also, imagine that you care deeply about communication so you have good receptive models for all the people listening to you.
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4/ What messages could you express that would also be *accurately* received by the disparate sub-groups (assuming sincerity)? Very few. Clichés at best?
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5/ Tweets offer very little explicit context. BUT a lot of implicit context. The trouble is the latter varies by the receiving group’s prior interactions, desires, beliefs, and expectations.
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6/ Inevitability, the implict context dominates as the number of receivers goes up. And, the intersection that offers the possibility of shared meaning tends to zero. This architecture distorts perception and preferential attachment.
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7/ I don’t see you you fix such a problem on this medium. The absolute best case — one that I don’t believe we are even in — is that people with the best intentions who enjoy massive attention via high follower counts will always be mostly misread.
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8/ IDK if that’s a damning indictment. The medium also facilitates an ease of access to people in positions of power that otherwise may not exist. That’s pretty great! ...or, at least it can be.
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9/ But, the idea of an impossibly narrow intersection of meaning in places that are rendered algorithmically salient is one I’m thinking about a lot lately because in those collision spaces, we frantically learn social associations that generalize poorly and dangerously.
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P.S. My use of PG’s take to open this thread makes the effect more obvious. Like, you probably read and evaluated it in a way colored by that explicit initial context. But it wasn’t necessary for the argument and risked distorting it on predictable lines.
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This wasn’t actually intentional. It was just sloppy (and habit because I try to quote things that provoked ideas on here.) However, it accidentally clarifies. The only difference is that most of the time you don’t see the reference that affects your perception.
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