A Writer's Best Articles Are The Least Clever

Clever arguments are not fit for public consumption.

Guys Blog Readers Literally Only Want One Thing And It's Fucking Disgusting

—Shevyrolet

You people are the cream of the crop. Your average SAT score is 1481 (and that’s significantly brought down by a few with particularly low scores), you’ve mostly studied philosophy at University, and many of you are either people with autism or Jews—perfectly fit for Talmudic debates about nerdy topics. And even you people don’t like my most interesting stuff!

I’ll write an article providing a completely new, original argument for the self-indication assumption—and the response will be crickets. I’ll come up with more, you people don’t care. Yet when I write an angry polemic about why it’s bad that billions of animals are tortured in factory farms or why cancel culture is bad—a famously original topic!—you people go crazy.

I don’t mean to oversell things. I’m not some philosophical supergenius. But I do have some pretty clever and original arguments, and when I write about them, you all don’t care much.

This is not unique to me. Huemer has a bunch of articles making clever points about things, and yet his most popular article is about why diversity statements are bad. Richard’s blog is much more popular than his old philosophyetc blog, even though his old one had cleverer arguments, because he’s now writing for a popular audience (his new one is still quite clever, though!). Richard formulated a brand new paradox that utterly devastates deontology and yet that’s much less popular than his article bashing some confused critics of effective altruism. There’s a paradox lurking here.