Oct 21, 2026
Notes on political tweeting:
- social media accounts get pulled into one of two black holes. They’re either totally consumed by political punditry or never touch politics at all. For whatever reason it's a feature of the medium and is very difficult to escape
- rhetorical skirmishes have boundless, often algorithmically filled supply. If it were a business it would be a low-margin/commoditized race to the bottom. There is little marginal value in contributing to these
- best political tweets read like a conversation between a small group of knowledgeable, discerning people who have strong opposing views, a sense of humor, who enjoy a good debate but are also inquiring and charitable. Think Scalia/RBG duo. These are vanishingly rare and so have enormous marginal value
- you can make the most balanced, logical, eloquent arguments and you'll still be swarmed by people (or bots?) hellbent on misreading you and applying the least charitable interpretation possible
- people respond to this phenomenon by adding more qualifiers, being more explicit, accounting for every counterargument. This is a complete waste of time. It will make no difference to whoever is determined to misread you and will make your writing worse, don't do this
- there is a background worry that voicing a strong view will alienate half the audience. The small but vocal minority of the least charitable readers amplifies it. In the short term this pushes you toward equivocation (and thus worse writing), in the limit you get audience captured and unwittingly become an automaton in a digital mob
- tap-dancing around all these lasers will make you go crazy so you can't worry about any of this stuff. Fix your mind's eye on a person or a group with the right features (knowledgeable, charitable, inquiring, good-humored), then make the best argument you can as clearly as possible
- it's unpleasant to find yourself a Don Quixote charging at every windmill, so you need a limiting principle. A good test is whether your target person/group would think your argument is valuable in some way. (No one is good at this 100% of the time, hence the punditry black hole; but you should at least try)
- maintain good humor even in serious situations, there are enough grouches out there already. Stick to good-natured friendly jibes you’d appreciate yourself. Attempting to persuade ppl will disappoint you; shoot to get the argument right, persuasion will sometimes take care of itself
- technology is inherently political because it rebalances power (think of the effect of the printing press on the Catholic Church). The more AI reshuffles our economy, culture, and social institutions, the more relevant all this becomes
- politics is everywhere. For example, you'd naively expect views on AI safety or yc utility to be some probability distribution, but no AI researcher or yc founder defects. Remember that Cicero was not very careful in expressing his political leanings and had his hands nailed to the forum podium