Thank you for "attention bartering" with me Christian, this is how the game is played! Like most aspects of human psychology, I believe the False Consensus Effect serves a useful purpose while not always being ideally suited to our modern cultural context. If we were always painfully aware of how different our preferences are from those around us it would be difficult to build communities, form personal relationships, and establish productive patterns of cooperation and trade. We would also probably over-avoid risks of rejection and embarrassment. I may never have started this blog for example!
I'm sad, tho also not sure, about books becoming less important. They certainly are to some extent, except for escapism for reading nerds. Yet my computer game-playing sons are also reading books in PDF form. And much of what intellectuals talk about is based on books, along with their own authority to talk about it. "White Fragility", became fetched (?) because while it had been a phrase, it became an intellectual meme target from the book.
(But I came here, again, to praise you for you FITs note, which I'll now comment on...)
I have been thinking about this question for a few days and will probably address it in an upcoming post. In what ways are books more/less important than in the past? I think it is clear that in order to maximize reach with an idea you need to either condense writing into very short chunks (blogs/twitter) or enrich the content through audio and video (podcasts/tiktok/youtube). That said, books still serve an immensely useful function for a committed infovore, as they often provide a better signal to noise ratio than the newer mediums.
I'm liking this so you feel engaged with and understood, and so that you like my stuff later ;)
Thank you for "attention bartering" with me Christian, this is how the game is played! Like most aspects of human psychology, I believe the False Consensus Effect serves a useful purpose while not always being ideally suited to our modern cultural context. If we were always painfully aware of how different our preferences are from those around us it would be difficult to build communities, form personal relationships, and establish productive patterns of cooperation and trade. We would also probably over-avoid risks of rejection and embarrassment. I may never have started this blog for example!
I'm sad, tho also not sure, about books becoming less important. They certainly are to some extent, except for escapism for reading nerds. Yet my computer game-playing sons are also reading books in PDF form. And much of what intellectuals talk about is based on books, along with their own authority to talk about it. "White Fragility", became fetched (?) because while it had been a phrase, it became an intellectual meme target from the book.
(But I came here, again, to praise you for you FITs note, which I'll now comment on...)
I have been thinking about this question for a few days and will probably address it in an upcoming post. In what ways are books more/less important than in the past? I think it is clear that in order to maximize reach with an idea you need to either condense writing into very short chunks (blogs/twitter) or enrich the content through audio and video (podcasts/tiktok/youtube). That said, books still serve an immensely useful function for a committed infovore, as they often provide a better signal to noise ratio than the newer mediums.