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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Test: if you have to retreat into a subculture of people marked as “enlightened” to preserve sanity, retreating from all those pesky exceptions, corner cases, and “extreme” cases out there, your red-pill is a fragile false consciousness that can’t survive the cognitive wilderness

      1 reply 1 retweet 20 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Specialized words for some sort of domain-specific or ideology-specific enlightenment are usually a marker: woke, red pill (in MRA sense), Straussian, “IDW”, monetarist, “classical”. A reliable confirmation test is extreme ritual purity in praxis, offered as the one true way.

      1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      A robust red pill will offer a pluralistic live-and-let-live *style* of doing things and trust it to be competitive. A fragile cult red pill that sucks you into absolutism will seek to stamp out alternative styles with extreme prejudice to make itself a monoculture.

      2 replies 0 retweets 10 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Cultural examples are fraught, so think of time as a less fraught base example. The near-hegemony of universal, absolute time, which peaked around 1980 before starting to unravel (GPS atomic clocks have relativistic correction factors, did you know?) took a LOT of political work.

      2 replies 0 retweets 8 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      If you think you’ve been robustly red-pilled along a particular vector of human experience, try testing that sense by hoping deeper into the “wilderness” along that vector and away from the built environment of satisfying, comforting constructs.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      I used to refer to “robustly red-pilled” as grey-pilled, but I’m adopting this new terminology for a reason. You can’t tell a priori which direction is the “true” red pill. People along every direction will insist their way is the true red pill. Nobody claims blue or grey pills.

      1 reply 1 retweet 7 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      It’s like looking for true north at the magnetic North Pole. The compass spins uselessly. One good test is social. If you suddenly find yourself being welcomed by a bunch of people who flatter you, feed your conceit, and validate your “arrival” into the true way, it’s a cult.

      1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Equally, if you find yourself being expertly debated and made to doubt yourself with practiced arguments everybody seems to know, gaslit and criticized with confidence at every turn, that’s also a cult.

      1 reply 1 retweet 13 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      Basically, *any* collectively coherent response to your presence, in the form of either concerted inclusion/exclusion pressure, is a cult. As in absolutist, universalist theory bubble seeking monopoly. As in a Borg counterprogramming resistance and disconfirmatory variety.

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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      There is a test for cultiness, but no test for not-a-cult. The best you can hope for is signs that are validating without being determinative. A promising sign: you make one new friend at a time, and they tend to neither validate or challenge your understandings, but expand it.

      2 replies 2 retweets 13 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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      You are very unlikely to be so original in your explorations and growing understanding that you’ll be truly alone, meeting nobody. That’s typically psychosis. A cult-of-one past a personal, fragile event-horizon, via a singular red pill that others can’t take.

      8:48 AM - 12 Sep 2019
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      • stupid twitt account Aaron Jacob _ mutual Manuel Gómez кунев visa is working on his ebook
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          The more reliable sign is what I’ve come to think of as “meeting mutual prime numbers along the way”. You meet people who can’t be factored in terms of people/types you’ve met already, and these encounters get rarer as you age. And they ALSO seem to have trouble typecasting *you*

          2 replies 1 retweet 11 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          But unlike the psychotic cult-of-one types, you ARE able to meaningfully connect with, and for a while, grow along with, this kind of mutually prime person. For a while you’ll benefit from triangulating shared encounters with new experiences.

          1 reply 1 retweet 6 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          And each such encounter will take you further away from universal-absolutist cognitive monopolies. You’ll just be on a path of diverging, increasingly infrequent mind-expanding 1:1 encounters with Other Ways of Theorizing life, the universe, and everything. That’s lived pluralism

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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Pro-tip: The trick to safe dealings with cults is to treat them as aggregates. Talk to the anthill, not to the ants. If you’re talking to ants, you’re lost inside. Even the queen is just one ant. Or be a normcore neutrino: zip through without either disturbing or being captured.

          2 replies 0 retweets 6 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 12 Sep 2019
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          Cult theories can be usefully mutually prime to you, but only if you deal with them as a whole. On the inside, they likely run on a different “artificial number theory”, where prime numbers are omitted. They are constructed as irreducible-difference intolerance fields.

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        7. End of conversation

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