Originally published October 10, 2014
Prerequisites: Weak Men Are Superweapons, Detachment
Related to: When Truth Isn't Enough, The Worst Argument in the World, Arguments As Soldiers
The
best people I know are all high-level syncretists. They also don't say
much in public, opting to keep their ideas to themselves and their
trusted epistemic peers. They don't adopt any labels and they don't affiliate with any groups. These facts are related.
Ideas
are not independent but are atoms and molecules of
partially-overlapping partially-mutually-exclusive large structures we
call edifices or memeplexes. Edifices are very take-it-or-leave it. You can't pick and choose which parts to support.
Not publicly anyway. In public you can't say a claim without also
claiming everything else the audience associates with that claim.
There's probably some communication theorem that sufficiently
incomprehensible nuanced meditations on a subject are indistinguishable
from demagoguery.
The clustering of ideas is not wholly
unjustified. Some clusters take the form of conceptual frameworks,
systems of thought, cognitive attractors, paradigms, or another set of styles of thinking
resulting from, or bringing forth, a very large set of premises,
inferences, and general baggage all of which must be taken as a gestalt
because none of it makes any sense without its greater context. The
baggage is the problem. Memeplexes vary widely in quality, but even the
very best ones seem to be more noise than signal, vitiating the wheat by
the chaff of wrong ideas, wrong rules of inference, inefficient
heuristics, mandatory costly signaling, public relations, all the
terrible things that happen to ideas when they are exposed to human
brains, and even worse, optimized for virality rather than correctness.
There is even negative baggage when ideas that should be in a memeplex
are absent because they are unpalatable.
The clustering of ideas
is mostly unjustified. Two tribes that dislike each other will
instinctively decide that they differ along various unprincipled axes
that coagulate into opposing memeplexes, each of which may have some
good ideas in it forever invisible to the other, because no memeplex
will tolerate any of its hosts admitting to any sympathy with its enemy.
Arguments are soldiers; it is psychologically infeasible to do anything that feels like abetting the enemy.
Instinctual
is what it is! Memeplexes must be a human universal; they're part of
culture. It feels so natural to behold an enormous terrifying awesome
bundle of ideas you can't possibly ever fully understand and jump in,
immerse yourself, affiliate with it, make it part of your identity...
So "siding" with a bundle of ideas is instinctual, and doing anything else is infeasible for most people most of the time even when the instinct is noticed and then resisted. No wonder journalists round the truth down to the nearest cliche
while the best people lack all conviction and hide away in secret
treehouses, never to reveal their nuance lest it be misinterpreted and
destroyed.
All this to say: it's not as easy as urticator says, to detach a meme from its bundle.
No comments:
Post a Comment