Your work deserves more comments and re-stacks. And probably also some folks willing to figure out how to take action toward implementing ideas. It can be hard to market around here though huh? I'm already kind of over substaxk marketing. =)
Thanks! I really appreciate it. *I* certainly think they deserve more, but I might be a little biased ;-)
This is a problem I have been working on. It's an uphill battle, here's the list of forces I have identified working against the work TSB is doing:
1. Human cognitive default — System 1 is the path of least resistance. System 2 requires effort, feels like work, doesn't deliver the immediate emotional reward. Steve Krug's _Don't Make Me Think_: Cognitive ease is the default. TSB asks for the opposite.
2. Active vs. passive preference — People want to be fixed, not fix themselves. We want to want to delegate the fix to someone else (i.e. send someone to Washington to fix it). But as I wrote in Same Gravity the way the current legislative system functions, their efforts will be absorbed.
3. Comforting lies beat uncomfortable truths — Armitage's soft secession feels better. Villain narratives feel better. The structural answer requires accepting that the fix is long and hard.
4. Platform optimization for outrage — Fox, YouTube, Meta, Google, even Substack all profit from System 1 activation. The algorithm is an outrage accelerant.
5. Rational disengagement — The people most capable of System 2 thinking have already checked out to focus on what they can control.
6. The credentialed class — Allen, Kosar-adjacent institutions, political scientists — invested in the existing paradigm, not because they're villains but because it's their identity and livelihood.
7. Lack of credential proxy — Allen et al are credentialed through institutions. People use that as a proxy for evaluating ideas (tying back to System 1/2 above). If you are talking to someone with a PhD from Harvard you are going to scrutinize what they say far less than a nobody former software engineer with a blog. Because I have no credential proxy it is on readers to do the System 2 analysis to evaluate my ideas on their merits.
8. Conspiratorial thinking — Shares a surface feature with structural thinking but is unfalsifiable and requires villains. MAGA has weaponized it deliberately.
9. You can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.
10. No distribution mechanism — Essays reward existing traction. I'm building a movement from scratch, no money, no notoriety, no external champion consistently pointing people in. I have to rely on others to judge the merits of these ideas and deem them worthy of sharing.
There's other factors as well, but this should give you a sense of what we're up against.
Your work deserves more comments and re-stacks. And probably also some folks willing to figure out how to take action toward implementing ideas. It can be hard to market around here though huh? I'm already kind of over substaxk marketing. =)
Thanks! I really appreciate it. *I* certainly think they deserve more, but I might be a little biased ;-)
This is a problem I have been working on. It's an uphill battle, here's the list of forces I have identified working against the work TSB is doing:
1. Human cognitive default — System 1 is the path of least resistance. System 2 requires effort, feels like work, doesn't deliver the immediate emotional reward. Steve Krug's _Don't Make Me Think_: Cognitive ease is the default. TSB asks for the opposite.
2. Active vs. passive preference — People want to be fixed, not fix themselves. We want to want to delegate the fix to someone else (i.e. send someone to Washington to fix it). But as I wrote in Same Gravity the way the current legislative system functions, their efforts will be absorbed.
3. Comforting lies beat uncomfortable truths — Armitage's soft secession feels better. Villain narratives feel better. The structural answer requires accepting that the fix is long and hard.
4. Platform optimization for outrage — Fox, YouTube, Meta, Google, even Substack all profit from System 1 activation. The algorithm is an outrage accelerant.
5. Rational disengagement — The people most capable of System 2 thinking have already checked out to focus on what they can control.
6. The credentialed class — Allen, Kosar-adjacent institutions, political scientists — invested in the existing paradigm, not because they're villains but because it's their identity and livelihood.
7. Lack of credential proxy — Allen et al are credentialed through institutions. People use that as a proxy for evaluating ideas (tying back to System 1/2 above). If you are talking to someone with a PhD from Harvard you are going to scrutinize what they say far less than a nobody former software engineer with a blog. Because I have no credential proxy it is on readers to do the System 2 analysis to evaluate my ideas on their merits.
8. Conspiratorial thinking — Shares a surface feature with structural thinking but is unfalsifiable and requires villains. MAGA has weaponized it deliberately.
9. You can't logic someone out of a position they didn't logic themselves into.
10. No distribution mechanism — Essays reward existing traction. I'm building a movement from scratch, no money, no notoriety, no external champion consistently pointing people in. I have to rely on others to judge the merits of these ideas and deem them worthy of sharing.
There's other factors as well, but this should give you a sense of what we're up against.