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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Internet pollutes the concept of "public". Here's a 2x2, privacy/audience:
- open channel/wide reach (news)
- open channel/selective reach (blog)
- closed channel/wide reach (open invite chat)
- closed channel/selective reach (private chat)
Only news is political by default.
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IMO the Hanson type issue occurs when you have a open blog with a selective base, and you accidentally tread upon a wider audience's sacredness norms.
Could argue "make your blog private" but that partly eliminates the (IMO essential) discovery aspect of the Internet.
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The ability to perform such a hypothetical is a learned skill. I assume the general public is not so much refusing but instead are incapable of thinking abstractly near their sacredness boundaries.
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I think the broader public unconsciously operates by the”harder to be kind than clever” heuristic and expects to see 2x kindness accompany every edgy clever thought

