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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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My rule of thumb is that no one can resist getting paid for their thoughts.

I think there is a serious survivorship/availability bias involved in this assumption as 100% of the people you know of who get paid for their thoughts are definitionally the the one's who could not resist.

Hence why it's a jokey heuristic rather than a real theory of human behavior, similar to the theory that you should assume all professional athletes do steroids because so many who have gotten popped for steroids were previously on record as "clean" and lauded in the press as too honorable or too concerned with their health to take them.^1

When content as homegrown as Jomboy and RiverAveBlues Yankees analysis can get brought onto CBS and YES, when writings as honest as SlateStarCodex analysis and as off-kilter as KulakRevolt Reddit rants are providing livings to their authors, when podcasts as niche as the #1 Bachelor recap podcast hosted by a male interracial best friend duo and the MoneyBall of The Bachelor hosted by a former shockjock bro-lit author are all selling merch I think we've passed the point where anyone gets into the game without knowing that it can happen to them. And even if it doesn't ever happen to most of them, it impacts how they think and write and act. These are all example I've followed in real time, from hobby to vocation. It could happen to you! I've even had my own joke-y conspiracy theories get picked up by the media and become brief micro-trends in a particular subculture. And to be honest, I see the appeal, so maybe in another life I'd start churning out more and more unhinged tinfoil hat theories in the hope of bringing in more attention.

I don't subscribe to it as a complete model, but The Beef-Only Internet Model of Rao is kind of a relevant reference. The knights and bishops and rooks and queens of the great internet battles duke it out, and their loyal pawns join the fighting, but every pawn secretly thinks that he's just one clever comment in support of his knight or reply-guy-ing the other knight from getting a battlefield promotion. Which really happens! You really can go from nobody on Twitter to having a career, getting interviewed on legacy media, getting invited to the good parties. And as we have no effective way of determining morality in advance, we have to assume that everyone is out there trying to get attention.

^1 Rick Reilly on what to do when Barry Bonds passes Hank Aaron

• Send rabbits' feet, four-leaf clovers and two-headed pennies to Alex Rodriguez and Ken Griffey Jr., letting them know that you're pulling for them to pass Bonds like he's a hitchhiker in an orange jumpsuit

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