Directionally Correct
The attention economy is not growing, which means we have to grab the attention that someone else has today.
-Brent Leary
If you’re building a trigger device for a bomb, you need to be correct. But softer things like ideas and abstract concepts can be directionally correct. It’s why companies have values and principles. There’s value even if they’re only directionally correct.
Heuristics like the 30 rules of chess are not absolute, but they’re directionally correct. It’s why games like chess can teach valuable life lessons.
Disagreement
Whether something is directionally correct or not is the only way to read online debates. There’s no way to caveat every statement.
Critics will find something specifically wrong with any statement. Even with added nuance, they can always find issues to pick apart and assume negative intentions. Sam Harris is the epitome of this problem. He can give every caveat imaginable for the most basic argument, but there are massive diminishing returns.
What matters more is the broad swaths, i.e., what is directionally correct.
Politics
When having political conversations (not around specific policy), what matters is being directionally correct.
Rhetoric speaks to emotions and riles up the base. It’s why memes are so powerful. They’re not 100% true, but almost nothing is true 100% of the time. Even the laws of physics break down at the quantum level. So when we speak, we’re speaking directionally and have to assume some intelligence and goodwill from the people listening to understand what we mean by our words.
By the Power of Rhetoric
Rhetoric is needed for attention.
It’s a trend for women to post a thirst trap (an attractive photo of themselves) and write something thoughtful or witty. The thirst trap gets attention for the thing they’re trying to say.
Men lack thirst traps, so they are likelier to utilize extreme rhetoric for attention. Someone can write thousands of tweets and get little attention, then write one tweet rhetorically and get the world’s attention.
JD Vance was attacked for saying childless cat ladies vote against him, but looking at the data; he’s directionally correct in that married men and married women are more likely to vote for him than unmarried women.
Whether he should have called single women childless cat ladies is another topic. However, fighting for attention is a zero-sum game. There’s only so much attention to go around, and attention is powerful, so rhetoric is powerful.
Ideas Matter
With the rise of social media hive minds, human evolution is more likely to lead to idiocracy than superhuman intelligence. It’s why the battle of ideas is so important to win to help civilization stay stable enough to get us to cure diseases like aging.
What’s natural is decay. This is why the fight for the West is so important. It’s unnatural to have prosperity. There are systems of government proven to lead us into complacency and decay. Incentives drive sapiens, and we need systems that create incentives that lead to healthier, happier lives.
Get a Few Things Right
If society gets things directionally wrong, we’re fucked. If society gets things directionally correct, we’ll be good. It’s similar to concentrating on macro vs micro. They’re both important, but more important is directionally what society optimizes for.
What principles, morals, and values do we care about? How should we treat each other? How should we poke fun at each other? Directionally, what world do we want to live in? Does the rhetoric we use and laugh at reflect that society?