Older generations circle wagons around their ingroup epistemes. Younger ones adopt new mitigating behaviors that are a mix of more conservatism (default skeptics, checking up on snopes) and operating off a smaller knowledge base (Talebian strategies).
Conversation
I don’t even think there is a real epistemic crisis yet. We’re learning that we need consensus reality only in a few critical cases like vaccination where there are material consequences (loss of herd immunity) to epistemic pluralism.
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Most of the time, you don’t need a belief monopoly to act. Just enough relevant agency, and a sort of Straussian contempt for the outgroup.
“I don’t have to persuade you I’m right, I just have to make sure you can’t stop me from acting or roll back my consequences”
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I’m fascinated by the possibilities of fait accompli + irreversibility action orientation over deliberation and mutual persuasion before action. I think *this* will be biggest long-term effect. The role of mutual persuasion among adversaries in collective action will diminish.
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We’ve already seen a big example. Trump doesn’t need to persuade opponents of anything, with or without deepfakes. Just roll back Obama programs and ensure his own are harder to undo. Future politicians will run this playbook better.
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Tldr of my position: Persuading opponents is now for poor people.
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I don’t disagree but merely point out that naked coercion follows as the inevitable defining feature of a post-persuasion, post-consensual order.
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My point is, it’s always been that way. Peter Thiel’s 1950s utopia for example seems like Organization Man idyll of consensus/harmony because main group inclined to systematically disagree that everything was fine, blacks, were systematically shut out of “debate” with coercion.
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I’m not persuaded that pro-discursive liberalism was merely the velvet glove over the the mailed fist of inevitable authoritarianism
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You’re overstating my case. The glove unlike the pen is a metaphor for cosmetic roles.
Just because a discourse is protected by guns/exclusion doesn’t mean it’s not generating useful knowledge and helping compound the power that sustains it. It just means it has blindspots.
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The biggest blindspot being blindness to the ways the knowledge being discovered and deployed is contingent and context-situated. Which of course is the main criticism.
To the extent it is NOT contingent, guns can’t preserve exclusivity of discourse. If an experiment replicates and news leaks, your guns can’t stop me from talking differently about it and booting up an independent discourse protected by my own guns. Hence nuclear proliferation.
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A good way to fingerprint an episteme is to ask what the guns are doing at the boundary? Are they mainly keeping non-contingent secrets (“facts”) from leaking out, or adversarial participants from entering? Facts spreading to competing contexts or local context expanding?
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