I think this class of exercises is (i) a major strand of what a lot of rats and adjacents are up to, and (ii) sadly, suddenly very socially important
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looping back to the motivating conversation: it seems to me that we are very much in a sort of epistemological interregnum traditional Knowledge Authorities--universities, media, religion--have lost the mandate of heaven
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i can imagine at least two causes one I talk about here with @collinofzion--this is an old story, but its simply a printing press-to-Reformation analogue universities and media authority relied on distributional barriers, and the Internet broke thosehttps://youtu.be/Gey0RPfR0kQ
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this has been building for a while, and is arguably even older than the internet--look at the proliferation of alternate right media in the 80s, or underground left media in the 60s and 70s the internet and social media in particular blew everything wide open, tho
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covid has been a second and acute disaster for traditional information authority experts fucked it up their mandate was to predict, prevent, and mitigate this sort of unusual event and they failed they failed embarrassingly badly and others did not fail
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things like the replication crisis and rampant politicization have been eating away at institutional academic authority for a while, but that was mostly inside baseball and a slow boil compared to fucking up covid you_had_one_job.jpg
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in summary this is what I am thinking is a major social role of our corner of twitter our epistemological system is broken; the mandate of heaven is up for grabs
@wesyang talks about a successor ideology, but i am more interested in the successor epistemologyShow this thread -
its not just a matter of algorithms or methods; its the design of institutions and platforms that teach and propagate such methods, their staffing, and their propagation humans and robots are the substrates for and originators of memes this is in short a cultural question
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so: yes rationalists and adjacents have weird knowledge generating systems this is absolutely the time for that kind of metaexploration let us fuck around and find us
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End of conversation
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) essay: how do we design a system that enables people to develop to think in this metasystematic manner?
this will be important in part (ii)
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