I happened to come across this 2015 post that recounted the anecdote of the famed economist Robert Solow telling us back in 1986 that if it was up to him he’d cut funding for Amtrak to zero. I think his point was that, yeah, he’s a liberal but he’s no doctrinaire, but when he said it I just thought he was displaying narrow economist tribal bias (cars are good because they’re free enterprise, trains are bad because government) and not recognizing all the tax money that goes into maintaining the road system.
But that’s not the topic for today. Scrolling down at the above-linked post you’ll come to an exchange in the comments section that proceeds roughly as follows:
1. Someone pulls a sentence of mine from an earlier post out of context and uses it to criticize me in a stuffy way.
2. I get annoyed and reply, “That’s just humorless and rude of you,” and explain in great detail why the commenter didn’t get the joke.
3. The commenter responds that it was me who missed the point, and he’d just been kidding.
4. I thank him for the clarification and remark that intonation is notoriously difficult to convey in typed speech.
5. He acknowledges my acknowledgment and agrees with the point about intonation and typed speech.
6. All’s good.
Now just imagine how this would’ve played out in twitter:
1. Same step 1 as above.
1a. Before I get around to responding, 12 people read this guy’s comment and don’t realize it’s a joke or follow the links. They explode in righteous anger against me.
2. Same step 2 as above. But, because of 1a, I’m not just moderately annoyed at him, I’m very annoyed at him.
2a. Before the original commenter gets around to responding, 12 people read my reaction and don’t realize I didn’t get the joke. They explode in righteous anger against him.
3. Same step 3 as above. But, because of 2a, he’s not just amused, he’s annoyed at me.
4. Same step 4 as above.
5. Same step 5 as above.
6. All’s good with original commenter and me, but now there are 100 people who only saw part of the thread and leave with the impression that I’m an idiot, and another 100 people who only saw part of the thread and think he’s a humorless ass. This carries through to later twitter appearances. (“Isn’t he the guy who . . .”)
P.S. Blogs > Twitter from 2014
P.P.S. Blogs > Twitter again from 2022
Lots of recursion in this blog so it is difficult to follow–I do not do Twitter–who, if any, are the villains, and who, if any, are the heroes. However, before I “throw in the sponge,” below is a typo as proof that I am paying attention:
“2a. Before the original commenter gets around to responding, 12 people read my reaction and don’t realize I didn’t get the joke, they they explode in righteous anger against him.”
Paul:
There is no villain in the story, that’s the point, it’s just a misunderstanding that was easily defused in blog comments but could’ve blown up on twitter.
Also, thanks for pointing out the typo.
There’s a sort of insidious scoreboarding element to Twitter debates. If your opponent(s) can get more likes than you, that’s called getting “ratioed” and it’s seen as a massive loss for your stance, regardless of the actual substance of the arguments. It encourages this kind of dogpiling you refer to here, and it’s totally stupid.
Okay, I accept your observation, but isn’t that rather the difference between psychological pair dynamics and psyc. group dynamics?
“Quantity has a quality all its own” and all that.
Unless you were joking, in that case it was me who missed the point, and I’d just been kidding
and we can skip the first 3 points and directly move to point 4. ;-)
Crazy:
Agreed that an N=2 discussion can work out much better when there aren’t thousands of spectators egging people on and turning a confusion into a war.
One of the problems with social media, Is there is no clear borders between a dialog, within-group discussion, court room and mass media. Something that is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another, so basically everything you write could be taken out of context and considered inappropriate.
I like blogs, but what isn’t better than Twitter?
(I will caveat that Twitter can be useful for acquiring information. It’s terrible for discussing information. I tbink it’s interesting as to why).
Andrew, it’s socialism that’s never really been tried, not passenger rail. But I think there’s a progressive think tank working on ways to get people home from the light rail station without using roads. They’re testing neighborhood canals. All natural water! Solar powered locks!
Chipmunk:
Subsidized passenger rail has indeed been tried. It exists, as do subsidized road and rail travel. I don’t think it makes sense to zero out the funding for any of these, and I don’t think Solow was thinking hard when he made that offhand remark. My guess is that he was just reacting to some talking point he’d heard on TV or some comment that someone had made in the faculty lounge or whatever.
I agree!
In a science communication workshop I was part of (poster I threw together here: https://imgur.com/a/jl4ajJA ) , I noted that it’s very hard to find any numbers about blog readership — there’s almost nothing out there, and what little there is is long out of date. This 2017 study is a nice look at a handful of ecology blogs: M. E. Saunders, et al. “Bringing ecology blogging into the scientific fold: measuring reach and impact of science community blogs.” Royal Society Open Science . 4 , 170957 (2017).