> Extremist

You say that like it's a bad thing. Once you've stretched the limits of acceptability beyond the capacity of short-term memory, anything of a 'compromise' is just a token dilution that keeps the same status quo intact in everything except a temporary face-saving apology.

A realistic solution must consider the actions of all parties involved, but it doesn't have to actually appease any of those parties with anything they may want.

It's currently an adtech bubble, foaming to the brim. People speculating in attention-based revenue and side-dealing surveillance armaments through malware distribution to ferment the process should feel the losses when the deal goes bad to set an example that hurting others isn't going to get you a bailout. I don't care about your moral plea for "equality" where we make sure no one suffers the consequences of damaging the commons such as the intrinsic value of information and content.

Because of the adtech bubble, we have a _huge_ problem of noise pollution. Valuable public research cannot be funded effectively because the public realizes the history of paid "results" to turn a profit for media proselytizing and reframing unpopular governmental policies.

Public institutions are no longer credible due to the obvious connections between surveillance, profit, and legislation that is effectively mediated through media companies.

There's a real solution here: puncture the bubble by drying up the money stream. It'll help the useful creators in the long term that are being suppressed by the influx of dumb content and blackholing clickbait algorithms designed to minimize utility to maximize profitability.

Now, for writing professionally being a useful skill. That paragraph was obviously in the context of becoming something like a journalist, blogger, or news pundit where your income is paid by this scam of exchanging between attention and currency though a network of super shady intermediaries.

If you're writing instruction manuals for a living, you're not getting paid for how long eyeballs are on your work so that someone can monetize a reader's susceptibility to suggestion. In fact if I hired you, you'd be paid by how _quickly_ a human can view your instructions and move on with their life in doing something productive.

And that's exactly my point: I know many communications major graduates and many engineering major graduates. The former usually went into the program as a last resort for underwhelming academic performance and trying to latch on to the hype before it bursts rather than being gifted in communication ability. The latter could definitely transition to professional writing, not because of language skills that are essentially expected anyways but because their deep understanding in a subject allows them to distill useful insights that are rather hard to crack otherwise.

For example, I love IKEA/Lego instruction manuals not because a random "professional writer" with no independent domain expertise was able to checkmark that off his daily tasklist, but because the manual was made by people with incredibly sophisticated knowledge of how to visualize and communicate the ideas of physical assembly and knew their audience appreciates that expertise. If you're able to document the assembly process, you're qualified to critique and help improve the usability, design, and even materials engineering that ultimately influences what you write in the manual.

This reinforces the idea that if you're just a writer, you're useless because you _should_ be funneling what insight you distilled back to the process your're documenting. And then you're not really a writer, but an engineer.

And just because there are jobs and people being paid money to do it doesn't mean it's useful at all. Biggest fallacy I've ever heard.