temporary faddish things don’t matter
plato had a lot of silly ideas, but the gist of focusing on universals or somewhat permanent ideas is the correct one. (advertisers, dumb as they tend to be, have made the term "evergreen" to refer to almost exactly the same thing.) when your thoughts are so obviously just constrained by your circumstances, they tend to be frivolous. we can extend the time frame to increasingly shorter circumstances until I find a time-bound relevance timeframe you agree is stupid to post about.
the discourse of what is called "extremely online" people is obsessed with having kids vs not and this is, in my opinion, obviously a result of people who grew up on the internet suddenly having to make a decision and up to this point they've given it very little thought. so much of what's called "the discourse" or "the current discourse" is just what a bunch of journalists and/or nerds on social media have procrastinated thinking about. (I can't wait for how awesome it's going to be when this population is old and debating about dentures or the afterlife or things every other old person does)
valuable stuff — I don't give a shit about your economic definition — is stuff that tends to endure and have some kind of inarticulable "good" quality to it and its relevance, and the opposite of this is faddish trendiness, which makes a sacrifice of endurance for novelty that's just enough to maintain people's attention now but which will cease to matter when it doesn't do that. this is why journalists are so overwhelmingly useless, and why "the discourse" — if by "the discourse" you mean what useless 20k-follower twitter accounts are talking about — can so overwhelmingly not matter.
we can talk about not just what you're paying attention to but what you *should* pay attention to, and the term "attentional capture" has been used by people who aren't just me to describe this. the basic idea of public education is that you're a moron when you are a child and you have no idea what you should be really spending your time on. and in case you're one of those dorks who thinks homeschooling is what everyone should do — and is probably going to raise their kid with a lot of kooky internet beliefs that will undoubtedly create maladaptation and possibly psychological disorders — then instead of public school, use the basic concept of parenting. you are tasked with figuring out, for eighteen years and possibly more if you have multiple children years apart, what those children should be paying attention to. (Rousseau wins the award of possibly the most wrong person to ever write about this.)
yet people think, as adults, this ceases to matter and endurance isn't an important quality of something mattering and it's totally fine if all of your attention is just tabbed scrolls through twitter dogshit.
this is easily refuted. if you're capable of being wrong about what is best for you to pay attention to as a child, why would it be as an adult? it's not as if, at age 18, you gain immunity from being wrong about what's good to think about or pay attention to; your brain didn't walk through some magical doorway where you are suddenly a great judge of what's good for you.
this is why, by the way, it is so incredibly insulting and epistemically heinous to describe someone like Zvi Mowshowitz as "optimizing for being right." no one who was a competitive magic the gathering player with a physique like mister potatohead is "optimizing for being right" just because, for a period of two or three years, he was unusually sharp about COVID.
(and this is a cheap shot, but when the ideal position on a pathogen is "stay indoors" it's not the most impressive thing when much of your life is spent indoors playing card games and you pick that position.)
I obsess about not saying false things; in fact I am obsessed with the procedures and details of certain subject matter to a degree that is at times nearly pathological, and I still am undoubtedly wrong about many, many things. to describe someone — anyone — as "optimizing for being right" is such a profoundly myopic and squirrelbrained thing to say when there are limitless ways we are failing to do the best things for ourselves basically all the time in some way or another.
but speaking of mister potatohead physiques and yes I went there twice, let's take another obvious scenario: nutrition. a majority of adults — let's lowball this at 75% — are wrong about what's best for them to eat with a frequency that may be described as "basically all the time", and nutrition CANNOT be separated from activity levels and exercise habits; what is ideal will depend on what you do.
the other 25% is still wrong, a lot, and maybe 1% (or less) of that 25% are evidence based nutrition weirdos like myself who have an "as best as what current evidence allows us to say" position on what is ideal to eat all the time — but whether we actually do that all the time is another matter, then of that 1% there's some other percent who actually execute this ideal 100% of the time, which statistically speaking is basically Menno Henselmans and Alan Aragon on a small island of exceptionally disciplined people and I can assure you that if you asked them if they thought they were doing the best thing all time or if most of their attention or abilities were allocated as best as they could be their answers would be something like "I don't know" or "I'm doing my best" or something else that indicates capacity for folly.
so if we are capable of being wrong about what we should be paying attention to as children, and we are likely of still being wrong about this as adults, and we are capable of being wrong about what we should do in so many other domains — such as how the vast majority of people are provably wrong about nutrition, some in colossally wrong ways — why can we think we are right about what kind of stuff we're reading and paying attention to is just fine? why do you think it is unreasonable to say it's probably a massive problem that many academics who have valuable things to say are spending so much time on a platform as terrible for this as twitter? why do you find it unobjectionable that people who vote are spending the majority of their day scrolling through memes?
I am being rhetorical. you can be wrong, and many people are spending their attention not just suboptimally but massively so, and it's usually better to spend this on enduring universal things than circumstantial faddish things. you can act like I'm not right here, and it's going to be one of those back-of-your-brain contentions you're going to have to repeatedly justify. what you pay attention to matters and it's usually better if what you pay attention to is not something circumstantial and faddish and temporary.
