An age-old pattern: wannabe kings allying with peasants to take down the feudal gentry in the middle. It’s an example of what Jaron Lanier labeled Digital Maoism (in Edge, ironically). Hack the Noble Lies to install the People’s Truths forged in the fires of righteous rage.
Conversation
Whether the People’s Truth finds expression in a new Rule of Woke Law or the Cleansing Commandments of Divine God-Emperor Zorgon the Heretic makes no difference.
It’s a Book of Rube Revelations in either case. Fundamentally a stupid person’s idea of political wisdom.
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This isn’t bothsidesing. It is signalsiding. Bothsidesing is acting like both sides of a false symmetry have equal validity, either because you’re dumb or because you’re disingenuous.
“the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth”). You really think we’re great-truthing?
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If both sides are 90% noise, do the math. About 81% of the time both sides are being stupid, 9% of the time one side is right by accident and the other side is bothsidesing out of stupidity or malice.
About, 1% of the time it’s a great truth in contention. By accident probably.
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Signal-siding is basically ignoring the stupid people, and continuing to actually think, even at the risk of perhaps missing the 1% great-truth debates.
Centrism is stupid or disingenuous because it acts like bothsidesing is meaningful 99% of the time instead of 1%.
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Noise vs noise does not net to signal via mutual cancelation (heh!), it is noise squared.
Signal is neither consensus or heresy by cosmic preference. Nor is it common sense or esoterically technical by preference, Signal is indifferent to self-important epistemic posturing.
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The truth, such as it is, does not lie on the Rube Revelation spectrum at all. And smart elites who should know better but act like it does, raising mook armies and winking at the snowballing crackpottery and Maoist trials of their rivals among the elites are just seeking power.
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If vast armies of enraged rubes rally around you, celebrating how you, the Rare Good Elite are absolutely tearing apart those awful Typical Bad Elites, you’re probably not catalyzing a Great Consciousness Raising among the masses. You’re cynically making a play for more power.
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Basically, in this environment, anyone who attempts to shape opinions on a large mass-media scale, pwning millions of minds to coerce hundreds of millions of minds into ideological submission, is basically a bad person. It’s as clear a tell as pouring gasoline into a fire.
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When you avoid the temptation to traffic in the Epistemic Status: Rube Revelation idea economy, you will find your audience hitting a low ceiling. Signal-siding in a noisy environment is like trying to have a conversation in a loud party with blaring music and drunken brawls.
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Only the 5 people next to you and straining to understand you above the noise are signalsiding whatever you are saying.
If the whole room hears you above the noise, music, and brawling, almost certainly you yelled something loud, stupid, and dangerous. Like “Fire!”
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Sometimes the noise is more fun than the signal. Also, maybe the room chose you because they enjoy the noise you help generate.

