What do you call belief states underlying this kind of kayfabe larping? It’s clearly not literal, or ordinary irony. But it’s also overstating the case to call it delusional. A sort of serious unjoke. Performative chindogu? Cc: @literalbananahttps://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/style/storm-area-51-alienstock-blizzcon.html …
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There’s a sort of conscious bullshitting going on there. When tv shows do gimmicky episodes on ufo-hunter themes they tend to portray the characters as unironic literalist farce versions of Mulder on X-Files. I suspect the real ones are basically like comic book nerds.
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In general, I think the people who do the hand-wringing “reality is broken” agonizing are actually part of the kayfabe. Overstating the case so strongly underlines how weak the belief actually is. Compared to traditional religion for example, it’s like 1% as serious.
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None of these crisis commentators ever shows up at a church breathlessly reporting on the far more unbelievable belief systems being performed with much more literal belief inside. Possibly the difference is that crackpot theories are clearly in the zone of falsifiability.
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2x2: strength of believability vs cost of falsification Note that many crackpot theories, while not unfalsifiable, are certainly costly to falsify for yourself personally. They enjoy a disbelief moat.
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Like flat earth. You can even kayfabe good faith by larping falsification attempts like launching yourself in a rocket and breaking a leg. I don’t know what injuries this dude suffered, but clearly costly signaling.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/03/25/an-amateur-rocket-maker-finally-launched-himself-off-earth-now-to-prove-its-flat/ …
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Reports of the death of reality have been highly exaggerated. People enjoy pretending to believe in it more than they actually do, so they can get all dramatic about it and shock people by declaring “post truth” or whatever. Post institutional consensus is not post truth.
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Contrarian take: we are getting more real, not less, more truthful, not less. Reality just happens to be vastly more noisy and confusing than we’ve been prepared to admit, and believing in untruths a lot less dangerous than we’ve been led to believe.
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PKD reality (that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it) is not generally dangerous to ignore/tune out. Most ignored reality never bites you or chase you as you retreat to escape. Believing the moon is made of blue cheese is not dangerous.
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In fact DIY alt realities can often be more real than off-the-shelf large-consensus reallties from Walmart. They just don’t come with a lot of social proof. So post-truth alarmism is really post-social-proof alarmism. The alarmists care about lost social authority, not truth.
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