When Expertise Loses to Virality

What i've Learned from Analyzing Attention for a Living

This story is one that i think is worth sharing, not just as someone who consumes content, but as someone who gets paid to understand how it works.

i run a boutique analytics agency. Massive companies hire us to analyze consumer attention, how people behave online, and how brands can use that information to sell more products, capture more attention, and serve more ads. What i'm about to tell you isn't just my opinion as a concerned observer, it's what i've learned from decades of professional expertise studying exactly how the attention economy operates and how it's systematically destroying our relationship with expertise.

This pattern first became clear to me years ago when i discovered Missy Cummings.

i first encountered her during a lecture at the Santa Fe Institute, and i was immediately struck by her brilliance. She wasn't some academic trapped in an ivory tower. She had flown F-18 Hornets in the Navy before transitioning to academia, where she now directs the autonomy and robotics center at George Mason University. She'd served with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Her expertise in automation and robotics was built on both rigorous study and real-world application.

When Cummings spoke about autonomous vehicles, she did so with the nuanced understanding that only comes from deep expertise. Yes, she supports advancing automation technology but she also understands the critical importance of proper safety protocols, regulatory oversight, and the dangers of rushing unproven technology to market.

Naturally, this put her at odds with many in the business world, most notably with Tesla.

When she raised concerns about Tesla bypassing regulatory systems or putting untested technology on public roads, she did so with the measured tone of someone who understood both the promise and the peril of the technology.

But measured tones don't often go viral.

When Cummings was appointed to the NHTSA, Elon Musk himself criticized the appointment. Worse, Tesla advocates, these faceless keyboard warriors of the internet, launched coordinated attacks on her character. Not her arguments, not her expertise, but her personally.

She even received death threats.

This is what we're doing now? A woman with unparalleled expertise in her field, trying to ensure public safety, was receiving death threats because she dared suggest that maybe, just maybe, we should be careful about how we deploy potentially dangerous technology?

Meanwhile, any Tesla enthusiast with a YouTube channel and basic video editing skills could amass millions of followers by parroting whatever Musk tweeted that week. Their voices, backed by nothing more than algorithmic favor and parasocial relationships with their audiences, carried more weight in public discourse than a former Navy pilot with decades of robotics expertise.

From my professional perspective, this made perfect sense. Outrage drives engagement. Controversy creates clicks. The platforms are designed to reward content that provokes strong emotional reactions, not content that promotes careful thinking. Missy Cummings was offering nuanced expertise, the Tesla bros were offering tribal identity and emotional validation.

The algorithm had made its choice.

But it was a recent discovery that finally pushed me to write about this pattern i'd been professionally analyzing for years.

A guilty pleasure of mine is binging YouTube videos about space and the universe. There's something mesmerizing about watching respected astrophysicists break down complex phenomena for laypeople like me. The types of YouTube videos i like aren’t the flashy productions, the ones trying to manufacture drama, they're the videos from scientists sharing genuine wonder about discoveries from the James Webb telescope and other new technologies. Their content is grounded in facts, rooted in reason, and approached with the careful methodology that real science demands.

Right now, there is a lot of buzz about the third interstellar object we've detected named 3I/ATLAS.

A comet behaving in ways that challenged our understanding of how these celestial visitors work. The legitimate scientists i follow are cautiously excited, methodically analyzing the data, and sharing their findings with the careful precision their field demands.

But that’s not the type of content the algorithm demands.

Suddenly, my feed was flooded with a name i'd barely heard before: Avi Loeb. This American theoretical physicist from Harvard was seemingly everywhere, not on the thoughtful science channels i actually followed, but dominating the podcast bro ecosystem with wild theories about alien technology, channels that the algorithm was determined to force feed me. Where legitimate scientists saw unexplained phenomena worthy of study, Loeb saw UFOs. Where others urged patience and rigorous analysis, he declared these objects could very well be alien ships monitoring Earth.

Here was a man with impressive credentials, Harvard-trained, academically respected, leveraging his authority to peddle sensational theories to audiences hungry for spectacle. The social media influencers with their millions of subscribers ate it up. Suddenly, everyone active on social media knew "Avi" as the Harvard guy who “proved” aliens were real.

Meanwhile, the actual experts doing careful, meaningful work remained mostly invisible.

Watching this unfold, i recognized every technique in the playbook. Loeb had been given the secret the code: manufacture controversy, abandon scientific rigor, and watch the clicks and attention and money roll in. He will sell more of his books than ever before. His speaking fees will skyrocket. And legitimate scientific discourse will continue to get buried under an avalanche of alien conspiracy theories.

This was the Missy Cummings pattern playing out all over again, but this time i was watching it happen in real-time, with the full understanding of someone who gets paid to analyze exactly these dynamics.

And i realized i was witnessing something far more dangerous than just misinformation or bad science communication. i was watching the systematic suppression of expertise itself. The platforms we'd built to democratize information had instead created a new aristocracy, not of knowledge or merit, but of virality and engagement.

The most upsetting part isn't just that experts like Cummings get drowned out. It's that experts like Avi Loeb, people with genuine credentials and years of legitimate work, feel pressured to abandon their principles in order to compete. When the system only rewards those who can game the algorithm, even accomplished professionals might feel they have no choice but to become social media influencers themselves.

This isn't sustainable. A civilization that systematically devalues expertise in favor of entertainment is a civilization in decline. When death threats carry more weight than Ph.D.s, when viral tweets matter more than peer review, when influence is measured in followers rather than knowledge. We're in trouble.

And you know what? i don't think most people even realize that they're actively participating in this system.

Every time you click on a sensational headline instead of seeking out expert analysis, you're casting a very meaningful vote. Every time you share content because it confirms your biases rather than challenges your thinking, you're participating in the suppression of expertise. Every time you let the algorithm decide what you should know about the world, you're allowing yourself to become a pawn in someone else's game.

The platforms know this. The influencers know this. Our elected officals knows this. They've built empires on our passive consumption, our willingness to let engagement metrics substitute for critical thinking.

Again, i tell you this as someone who is paid to analyze your attention online.

Our clients, some of the most well-known brands in the world, hire us precisely because we understand how to capture and manipulate human attention at scale. We know which psychological triggers drive engagement, which content formats generate the most shares, and how to design systems that keep people scrolling, clicking, and consuming.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

You have more power than you realize. Every click is a choice. Every share is a decision about what kind of world you want to live in. When you deliberately seek out real experts, even when their content is less flashy, less emotional, less immediately satisfying, less of that dopamine hit you're looking for, you're fighting back against a system designed to exploit your attention.

When you take the time to understand the difference between someone with actual expertise and someone who's just good at social media, you're reclaiming your agency. When you support thoughtful analysis over viral content, you're voting for a future where knowledge matters more than followers.

The algorithm wants you to be passive. It wants you to consume whatever it serves up, to react rather than reflect, to engage rather than think. But you don't have to play that game.

Be deliberate. Be intentional. Seek out the Missy Cummings of the world, even when, especially when, their voices are being drowned out. Question the credentials behind the confidence. Ask yourself, “is this person trying to teach me something, or just trying to get my attention?”

Because in the end, we still have a choice. We can continue letting the algorithm decide what we should know about the world, letting influencers and podcast bros and elected officials shape our understanding of everything from space exploration to public safety. We can keep allowing expertise to be buried under an avalanche of engagement-optimized content.

Or we can fight back.

The experts are still out there, still doing the work, still seeking truth over virality. They're just harder to find now, buried beneath layers of algorithmic noise and coordinated attacks.

But they're worth finding. Our future depends on it.

Much Love 💛

– jason