The book’s vocabulary

Engagement optimization

When measured attention is the objective, reconsidering loses.

From The World That Agrees With You1 section of the book2 related posts

Designing a system to maximize measured attention: clicks, time on the page, return visits. A feed learns which grievance brings you back; the question “how do we keep this audience?” becomes an engineering problem with your attention as the input.

When engagement is the objective, the content that keeps you watching is selected without asking whether any of it would make you reconsider. The pattern can scale to billions of people before anyone votes on it.

Definition from The World That Agrees With You: Understanding and Managing Sycophancy in the Age of AI, by Timothy O’Brien. © 2026 Timothy O’Brien. All rights reserved.

In the book

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