Engagement maxing optimizes for first order effects.
Engagement maxing optimizes for first order effects. Those first order effects might have second order effects that destroy the underlying emergent core of the system.
Topic: engagement maxing
11 chunks · 8 episodes
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- engagement maxing appears in 11 chunks across 8 episodes, from 2025-05-05 to 2025-09-02.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 5/19/25 (2025-05-19), with 3 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with social media, OpenAI, and live aligned, while by chunk count it sits between coding agent and hill climbing.
Over time
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Observations
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If social media was the intellectual crack, AI could be intellectual fentanyl.
... could be intellectual fentanyl. Such a powerful substance, if it's put towards engagement maxing will be one of the worst intellectual epidemics society has ever seen. But if it's put towards helping us live aligned with our aspirations, to grow ...
What you want to want and what you want must be disjoint to some degree, they can't be perfectly aligned.
...ment is where the Goodhart's law delta emerges, leading to the inevitability of engagement maxing. If a company doesn't do it, their competitor will, so they do it too.
Ranking systems almost never expose the "knobs" to users.
... most importantly, consumer systems have an emergent gravitational pull towards engagement maxing. A ranking system would never ship a toggle to "make me more bored." This is probably the logic behind OpenAI refusing to make the memory feature use...
In the past I've enumerated three humanity-denying movements in the past around AI:
...f the three humanity-denying movements, no one says they want to do the cynical engagement maxing. In fact, many people doing it probably wouldn't even admit to themselves that that's what they're doing. That last one is so easy to get sucked into...
Social media engagement maxing is a light form of paperclip maxing.
Social media engagement maxing is a light form of paperclip maxing. The AI in this case is just capitalism. Both are swarm intelligences. Powerful but impossible to fully align. Mo...
AI must have a subscription to be user-aligned.
...t condition for user-alignment. Is it just the zero marginal cost that leads to engagement maxing? Attention is all you need… a neverending force of gravity not just for training LLMs but for business models too.
Is engagement maxing an apex predator of consumer software?
Is engagement maxing an apex predator of consumer software? I believe there can be another way. There must be, in an era of AI. Otherwise it could create a dangerous situ...
AI is a massive multiplier.
AI is a massive multiplier. The engagement maxing playbook was a toxic disaster for society, and now we want to supercharge it with AI?
The main chatbots are taking the engagement-maxing playbook of Facebook and jamming it into the most intimate personal interactions in our lives.
...oday are led by people who have been Facebook execs. OpenAI is speedrunning the engagement maxing playbook. Experts in the playbook have pointed this out. The engagement maxing playbook was a net negative for society on its own, and now we're supe...
Engagement maxing is a gravity well almost every scaled consumer business tends to fall into.
Engagement maxing is a gravity well almost every scaled consumer business tends to fall into. It's an auto-intensifying trap. Things that users "want" but don't "want ...