Admiring ASK
Arnold Kling is the person I would have to credit with the main ideas for this blog. Before he launched In My Tribe, his Substack newsletter, he posted to his personal blog daily, the ASK blog—comprised of his initials, Arnold S. Kling. This blog has found the twin aims of posting daily and keeping the posts short to be the most inspiring, although only six days a week in contrast to Kling’s seven.
I would like to think of Kling as a model internet citizen and blogger: living the example that could serve everyone, if only it were more appealing to human nature. He presents ideas he agrees with in a constructive fashion, while mainly avoiding the passionate online fights of the day. To illustrate the difference, he recently featured a blogger spat rife with the behavior that he has largely avoided. Says Kling:
When you crave an audience too much, you become a performative pundit. What you write is not exactly who you are. Maybe you don’t even know who you are.
It’s a tough thing to resist in the Internet world. I have to keep reminding myself that I want readers to take away something of long-term value from what I write. When I get a lot of positive reinforcement for a post that I think is probably giving people more of a dopamine hit than insight, I experience regret.
This was his summary statement about the trap two bloggers fell into arguing with each other. Both of them posted repulsive ideas on the web: one a long time ago, and the other recently in an effort to discredit and shame the anonymously posted embarrassing articles by the former.
The attention economy has brought us here: everything is media, and media are always on, almost everywhere in everyone’s pocket. And that media has to have someone’s attention at all times. There is an incentive to behave in a way that gets the most attention from others: and nothing draws and holds a crowd better than fights and fits of rage.
When people want to calm down, and realize they are being manipulated emotionally, they decide to go offline. Or so we should hope. But dopamine is a hard neurotransmitter to swear off.
Forget the literary dopamine and just buy a few rounds for the house is what I say. Sure, you'll get an angry drunk now and then, but more often than not most of 'em will likely be happy drunks, and we've got Phil here if anyone gets too far out of line.
I just got my first ad for Holland bulbs daffodils! I am stoked. I love planting daffodils. I told my wife I might want to buy an augur this year for planting. 𝙏𝙃𝙒𝙊𝘾𝙆! 🙄 The sound scared the deer in the backyard. Well, time to get on the road to Rockville, TTFN!