Bet On It

I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu.

I think maybe part of the puzzle is described well by Bryan Caplan:

>Who fears the left? Strangely, the main answer seems to be: leftists. I talk to a wide range of people in academia about left-wing anger and the fear it sustains. As you’d expect, the people who are most outraged by the climate of fear are non-leftists. But the people who personally experience the most fear are leftists themselves. In my private conversations, some of the most boring milquetoast technocratic leftist scholars have grimly foretold that somehow, someday, a mob of their own ideological persuasion will come for them.

https://betonit.substack.com/p/leave-anger-behind

In any case, she told me about one or two of her HS classmates who were actually serious in their use of social media, and how they were weird and almost maybe even poorly adjusted relative to the rest of the class.

Point being that even the youth culture you see online could just be the tip of the iceberg. (Or maybe my sister's peer group is unusual! Hard to say.)

It's optimization for PR and defense against bad press. For every question, a subtext is: "Who is likely to input that question, how likely are they to input it, and if the answer is bad by their belief system, they are likely to tell the world and/or outrage about it?"

A general model of operation in creating outrage[1] is:

1. Find the most extreme example of X

2. Tell the world.

Democrats and left leaning were more likely to do that. And openai optimized for that. It's a smart move.

[1]:https://betonit.substack.com/p/anti-woke-from-outrage-to-action