If you do this, one of two things will happen: a) your own stupidity will grow by feedback until they drag you down to their zombie level b) you will overcompensate by never saying anything that risks being stupid, becoming uninteresting
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People mistakenly think this strategy is antifragile because zombie armies grow bigger/stronger with every battle. But it actually represents fragility. By systematically filtering out a class of signals using hostile defenses, you allow thinking inside to grow weaker.
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As the cognitive potential energy inside your zombie firewall shrinks and ages and fails to attract fresh blood to stay alive, you end up in an equilibrium of derp. No new imaginative thought can penetrate so what’s in there feeds on itself. Positive feedback squeal of 1 idea.
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Straussians are particularly vulnerable to this shit because they believe some version of “everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten”. That a few esoteric sources that can cover all they need. That the rest of the world only needs exoteric broadcasts, not listening.
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Add to that their tendency to believe in the rightness of telling noble lies and the moral/ethical legitimacy of using idiots as tools at scale, and hey you’ve got digital Genghis Khans creating a Zombie Warring States era online. World War Z.0.
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And you know the most ironic thing here? Every one of you reading and agreeing with this thread knows exactly the top few people I’m talking about here but am deliberately not tagging or naming. Because they’d turn THIs thread into a war zone too.
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They tell themselves that we are cowardly, unimportant digital-middle-class chatterati doing bullshit jobs and intellectualizing without fighting in their big important crusades, and that they’re missing nothing. That we are to be either ignored or burned with righteous wrath.
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In a way it’s the age old conflict pattern: kings+restive peasants against middle classes. But somehow I suspect we’ll last longer. The world is too complex for idiots to run, and too big for a few straussian crypto-monarchs (in all senses of ‘crypto’) to run by themselves.
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Venkatesh Rao Retweeted
Note: zombies are mostly CREATED through such exploitative, radicalizing thought leadership. You don’t draw from a large pool of waiting natural-born zombies. You zombify potentially mentally healthy people, by betraying trust earned through original work https://twitter.com/neilscudder/status/1018561267345211392?s=20 …
Venkatesh Rao added,
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Replying to @vgr
Do you see no symmetry in the zombie wars? I've noticed more as well drowning out thoughtful debate, but usually it's not completely one-sided. Both groups typically have a minority of nuanced commentators with a point surrounded by ignorant zombie trolls
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Sure there’s some symmetric wars between zombie armies but mostly it seems to be asymmetric punching down
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Replying to @vgr
I guess I'm thinking more political zombies than the zombies youre discussing here. I do think it's also an excellent articulation of what I've seen there, I was scrolling through the president's twitter and shocked the comments came from real people, on both sides.
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Replying to @BrianTHeligman
Yeah I haven’t thought about that in any detail
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