Spider shopping
Seeking out what's worst
I can’t remember where I heard this metaphor; apologies to whoever the original author is.
A shopper walks into a pet store and asks, “Do you have any spiders?” The pet store owner says, “Yes, we have some.” The shopper runs into the street screaming “AUGHHH they have SPIDERS in there!!”
Some writers are spider-shopping.
Someone I know goes spider-shopping for evidence of wokeness ruining academia. He finds the worst examples of unreasonable things that happened at some department somewhere, and posts them regularly. From reading his writing, you’d conclude academia is a vile place where only unreasonable things happen.
Some writers go spider-shopping in EA for evidence about bad and dangerous ideas lurking in EA.
This stuff is fascinating to read! It’s much more interesting to read about spiders than all the normal, non-alarming stuff that’s happening in these spaces.
These writers give the impression that the spiders they’ve found are representative of those spaces. Someone unfamiliar with the space will remember it as “the place with all the spiders.” I think this is often very misrepresentative.
Related: “nutpicking,” which Nate Silver defines as “cherry-picking the worst or nuttiest comments to disparage a larger group (“liberals”, “conservatives”, “feminists”) by falsely implying the views are widely-held within the group.”
To be clear, I'm not trying to subtweet anything in particular beyond the examples here. I tried to find a time when nothing special was happening because I didn't want the post to subtweet whatever happened recently.