What To Share?

I’m interested in the problem of trying to influence public opinion. I’d like to marshal the best arguments using the most credible data sources and convince a listener that Policy A is better than Policy B. Where to start?

A fundamental constraint here is that human attention is limited. Nobody is going to read your 7,000 page piece on, say, optimal healthcare policy unless they are already sympathetic to the conclusion. The argument that’s actually long enough to convince someone and address all of their objections is so long that it will never be read. But try to be any shorter and you risk leaving someone with the impression that they have an unanswered objection. Maybe you did have an answer, but you made an editorial decision to exclude it, along with several dozen other answers, because they made the length of your piece too long and the prose too clunky. Someone has to have the patience to read your original piece and also engage you with their objections. Few people have such a dedication to free inquiry. And even if they did, why would they read your piece over the thousands of others they come across in their news-feed?

Suppose you adopt a policy of sharing persuasive links on social media. What is the optimal sharing behavior? Share too much, and you come across as an impulsive loud-mouth who can’t keep is finger off the “Share” button. Share too little, and you miss the opportunity to spread good ideas to reasonable people. There are a lot of people potentially reading your social media feeds. Some are unreachable. They’ll block or unfollow you if you share arguments they don’t approve of, no matter how thoughtfully you do it. Or they’ll comment with the same bilge every time without apparently learning from these exchanges. (I’ve seen both behaviors.) It doesn’t matter that you have a good argument, all that matters is that you’re “one of those wrong-thinking people”.

So what about the more reasonable ones, the ones who are capable of changing their minds? Sharing too promiscuously ruins your credibility. I’ve had this reaction to people who share too often. After the dozenth political post in a single day, it just starts looking like your brain-stem is connected to your itchy “Share-button” finger without any mediation from the thinking parts of your brain.  But how often is too often? Once a day? Once a week? Is it more credible if you add some of your own commentary when you link to something, showing that you’ve thought about it and thought through the obvious objections? Should you hold back, knowing that even thoughtful readers will only have time to read, say, one long-ish article or blog post every day? Is even that asking too much? There's a "Don't shoot until you see the whites of their eyes" aspect to this question. There is an optimization problem here, but I don't even know where to start. 

I’m not quite ready to give up on social media as a platform for reasonable political discussion. Some blogs have managed to curate an excellent community of commenters. Steven Landsburg’s blog The Big Questions, Scott Alexander’s blog Slate Star Codex, and Less Wrong are the best examples of this. I think this is possible on other more personalized kinds of social media (Twitter, Facebook), but it’s difficult. After all, you’re dealing with what is possibly the scarcest resource of all: human attention. That’s definitely something you don’t want to waste.