Questions From Readers
This living post answers the strongest objections to the Notoriety Arbitrage framework and demonstrates its falsifiability through ongoing public intellectual engagement.
A framework that cannot be questioned is not a framework. It is a belief system. Since this blog launched, the questions have arrived by email, by comment, and by academic correspondence. The strongest ones belong here, in public, with full answers.
"If the information environment is the driver, why do most isolated people never act?"
Significance Arbitrage is a trade, not a deterministic output. The framework predicts that the trade becomes available to individuals under specific conditions: low local significance, high digital exposure, and script accessibility. The vast majority of isolated individuals exit the risk window through natural tether restoration, community contact, or the absence of script saturation. The framework describes population-level vulnerability conditions, not individual predestination. A thermometer describes fever risk. It does not predict which patient will get sick.
"Doesn't naming the framework give it visibility that helps perpetrators?"
The Notoriety Arbitrage framework names a structural mechanism, not a valorized script. The difference is architectural. A physics paper that describes terminal velocity does not enable gravity. Publishing the causal chain in academic and public form accelerates the institutional response. The No Notoriety protocol governs what this blog never publishes: perpetrator names, manifesto excerpts, or operational detail.
"Why hasn't this been implemented if it's so obvious?"
The mechanism was not nameable before the 1999 informational phase transition produced a dataset large enough to analyze. The academic literature on contagion, on significance seeking, and on platform amplification developed in parallel silos. This framework is the integration. Integration takes time. Implementation follows legibility.
The framework invites disproof. Every question above sharpens it. Send your strongest objection to the contact address on this site.
Read the full economic framework: Notoriety Arbitrage (DiBella, 2026).
Glossary
Notoriety Arbitrage: The complete framework describing the informational incentive structure that drives significance-seeking mass violence and the structural interventions that collapse it.
Falsifiability: The scientific standard that a valid theory must make predictions that could in principle be proven wrong by evidence.
Reference Citations
DiBella, C. J. (2026). Notoriety Arbitrage: Informational Incentives in Violent Acts. SSRN.
Lankford, A., & Madfis, E. (2018). Don't name them, don't show them, but report everything else. American Behavioral Scientist, 62(2), 260-281.
Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson & Co.
Notoriety Arbitrage Series | Post 12 of 15 | Start here: Why Does Mass Violence Keep Happening?