Welcome To The Epistemic Playground
the great game of writing online + the players + why it is good
I.
I've heard a number of arguments for why more people should start a blog.
And this week, Scott Alexander published an essay on The Philosophical and Psychological Basis for Internet Poasting. Except he didn't call it that.
Which is a shame. Because the "Epistemic Minor Leagues" is a misleading (and kinda insulting) moniker for the services provided by all the lovely folk behind our favourite newsletters and blogs. Implying that they are somehow a lesser form of the "Big Leagues" of academia or Science™. A description I think is plain wrong.
Because this a completely different game. With new rules and different players. With larger audiences and no referees. You don’t have to compete as hard to stay alive, nobody’s going to drop you from the team. It’s more like a playground, than a competitive league.
The barrier to entry is near-zero. But the moats of discovery and engagement are significant. Oft due to the pesky twosome of network effects and power laws.
Some players are fighting against megacorps and brainworms for people's attention. Some seek fame and glory. Some write for a handful of acquaintances. Others are doing it for kicks.
The rules are domain-specific. Which is to say, there are none. You're allowed to do everything that the readers will forgive. Your audience is global (to the extent that the English language is global) and the lurkers are everywhere.
If you’re a QAnon theorist, outlandish hypotheses and far-out conclusions are what your readers come for. If you’re a rationalist blogger with a massive audience of intelligent- well, you can do that too, actually. No longer confined to the etiquette of peer review or replicability, the incentives for writing online are geared towards sensationalism and novelty.
And this is good.
The more heterogenous the contributions to the GSCITC (Global Social Computer In The Cloud) get, the more fun it is for everyone involved.
There’s also a variety of roles one can fill. Akin to the different positions on a soccer team. For example, the hedgehogs stick to their own corner of the playground, the foxes are rather indiscriminate when it comes to picking their mode of amusement.
Some players are more like maintainance workers, walking around pointing out flaws in the equipment. But this is important work too, even if it brings no glory. There’s also a class of people who take on the responsibility of teaching others the ropes. And acting as both introducer and inspiration.
Fiction vs. Non-fiction. Personal vs. Professional. Explorer vs. Consolidator. Thesis-antithesis. You can draw classification axes aplenty in this space.
II.
Make no mistake, this is the Glass Bead Game in one of it's purest forms.
Nevertheless, there's a lot of overlap between "impressive in the real world" and "impressive in the blogosphere". Verbal intelligence, conscientousness and creativity are all heavily selected for by the act of churning out relatively novel (and entertaining) insights in blog form.
And I can personally attest to the fact that most of the great shitpoasters I know have proven to be very cool people.
Yeah, the epistemic playground is a bunch of nerds. With a bunch of weird interests that may or may not have an audience. But though they may not be aiming for publication or lofty goals of scientific progress, their impact on the real world is still significant.
Because ideas are ridiculously powerful things. I’ve seen perspectives that reduced people to tears. Fact-checking that turned accepted wisdom on it’s head. Opinions that launched a thousand quotetweets.
Someone can just go and tell you something one day. Anyone can do this. It is an awesome power available to every person. And if their message is compelling and it hits you at a moment of suggestibility, they can instantly alter your trajectory. - Sasha Chapin
The internet poasters stand in the gaps where academia cannot afford to go. The smartest people aren’t the ones providing us with these ideas, they’re too busy chasing down dark matter and inventing new forms of math. So it’s left to regular folk to populate the public playgrounds of content-land.
If I wanted to be dramatic, I would describe epistemic playfulness as a form of revolt. A revolt against the expert class and the jornalist bluechecks. And being a public intellectual demands a form of self-confidence and contrarianism that is rather in-your-face.
III.
And so it selects for a particular brand of people.
I love making generalizations. They’re such useful little things, regardless of what anyone tells you. So here’s a list of traits I’ve observed among the players I follow most closely 1:
A slight (or not so slight) anti-authoritarian streak.
Playfulness
High openness
Neurodivergent
Boldness
Earnestness
The sort of person you would call a “good sport”. Or insane. Why is this?
Well, some of it is definitely selection effects. Assholes are less likely to be popular because, well, nobody really likes them. And you didn’t have the loose playfulness that shitpoasters have in abundance, you’d take yourself too seriously to bother being entertaining.
But if you believe, like I do, that ideas are alive and inhabit the most suitable minds, it makes sense that many people in the epistemic playground would have the above traits.
Even on YouTube, many of the geniuses in the visual medium display the same characterics. As do most good musicians and poets. A sterotype perhaps, but one that fits.
But what is is that makes them all choose to play?
IV.
Let's run the utility calculations, shall we?
As always, there's an oppurtunity cost. These people could be doing other things with their time. Especially since most of them are already fairly succesful folk with no shortage of interesting options. With the price of creating and sharing your work plummeting, time is by far the biggest sacrifice.
There’s also the cost of being publically wrong. But as I’ve argued before, it’s a negligible one.
As for the rewards, a small percentage of players can make a living off of this. If you get a big enough audience, there’s dozens of ways to convert them into cash. Ranging from advertising to subscriptions to getting yourself hired through poasting.
For a people with an evagelical bent, the internet provides a fertile recruiting field. If your arguments are convincing enough, and poasting schedule relentless enough, people will be drawn in by the sheer inertia. Cults of personality are very rewarding for the founders, I would assume.
For reasons mentioned in the beginning, players in this game self-select for certain desirable traits. Which makes the mere act of writing online a perfect form of signalling. This is usually done in good faith (e.g. trying to attract like-minded folks, creating discussion), but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people trying to game this system too.
So there's definitely a prize for winning. But like all good games, there's also rewards for playing. And for the majority of players, this is what keeps them coming back.
Scott mentions the discovery drive (a desire for novelty) and status-seeking in his essay, but that’s only a small part of what motivates these players.
You see, most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people. The point being, many of these people would do it for nothing.
Sure, somebody like Gwern will build up a carefully-tended intellectual garden. But others will fire off blog posts into empty internet space in the vague hope of snagging a wandering lurker. The internet makes it easy to leave a mark, so why not make a bunch of them?
But as I’ve said before, this has taken exactly zero willpower. It’s more that I can’t stop even if I want to . Part of that is probably that when I write, I feel really good about having expressed exactly what it was I meant to say. Lots of people read it, they comment, they praise me, I feel good, I’m encouraged to keep writing. - Scott Alexander
I like that he touches upon the social aspect of it here. Because it’s a pretty big deal. You can compare writing online to making music, which is often more fun when you're doing it with friends 2. The blogosphere may not be a perfect substitute for a coffee shop, but it comes pretty close.
A bunch of other reasons people participate:
Practicing the craft: People writing because they want to be better Writers™
Worldview clarifiers: Folks trying to put their beliefs into writing.
Someone told them to: There are very good arguments for it.
Naive youngins with something to say: I love them. I am them.
You might object that these motivations seem very…amateurish. But that’s my point! Like any playground, winning isn’t what everyone’s playing for.
There’s room for all types here.
Great post! I do think Scott calling it 'epistemic minor leagues' is an example of his aggressive modesty. After all, what am I partaking in then... The infant league?!