99/100 of these tribes are the one-eyed leading the blind. Uncalibrated people very impressed with themselves attracting other Uncalibrated people looking for cultural leadership. Result: a Cambrian explosion of local consensus realities, all free from calibration.
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But what makes this extra frustrating is that the 1 time in 100 when genuinely intellectually pathbreaking tribes form, they struggle. Struggle for resources, institutional support, big patrons, prominent memetic wins, viral vigor...
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The median online tribe is much worse than the median institutional tribe. Less rigorous, more bullshitty, less skeptical of itself, more self-certain, less capable of systematic self-doubt... But the 1 in 100 will be far superior to the median institutional tribe.
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This mediocristan/extremistan difference means that *every* self-important online tribe thinks it is in the 1% of “special” tribes, and it’s everybody else who comprises the unwashed masses pwned by sloppy conspiracy cults. And all think they’re superior to institutional tribes.
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I’ve often argued with
@nils_gilman,@Aelkus and@Brett_Fujioka about this, and I’m usually the one defending the wisdom of Internet crowds over the complacency of institutional experts, but the picture is just more complex.1 reply 0 retweets 21 likesShow this thread -
I’m not entirely sure where this will go. Institutional authority is crumbling rapidly. I’m probably from last generation to have benefitted from a lot of time in both worlds, when they were both healthy and in a good yin-yang balance of power.
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In the future there may be nowhere to go to get your brain calibrated, as universities get sold for parts and social proof of status in subreddits and Facebook groups substitutes for calibration. This is one reason I’m suddenly interested in maker/diy type stuff.
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Calibration is *expensive* there’s a reason engineering departments have suffered less than humanities. They all have facilities with millions of dollars worth of equipment that won’t flatter your social-proof conceits, and epistemology and pedagogy are both arranged around them.
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Find *any* non-human, non-textual source of calibration for your brain and stay connected to it. People and textual culture can only generate social proof, not reality calibration.
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Replying to @vgr
What activities/sources of calibration do you have in mind here? Any specific examples?
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For humans in academia, peer review, with all its flaws, is a major one
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