Conversation

Economics/finance thought leaders always sound far more confident and reassuring than social/cultural ones. The former seem to shoot for an explainer tone, while the latter seem to go for either a tentative or provocative tone. I understand the former better, but trust them less.
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Former are like, “when interest rates deleverage the SPACs, the yield curve commoditizes the complement via aggregation of stock buybacks, and of course the SEC will frown on that sort of covfefe.” It will take you 3 minutes of headache to follow the heist-movie logic.
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Replying to
Latter are like, “Well, from a post-Deleuzean metamodern anti-anti-structuralist perspective, high incarceration rates are clearly performed as a narrative of redemptive recongealment. It’s a case of Butler’s axe meets Buridan’s Ass! Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”
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When you parse the gobbledygook, you realize instead of fragile, over-complex heist movie logic, you have intricate epicycles created by layers of indirection whose sole purpose is to situate a banal thought in a favored discourse rather than add useful detail. Compiler cruft.
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But you have a better sense of the underlying uncertainty and doubt getting through in the latter case. The former ec0nomist-speak projects vast oceans of false confidence.
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I’m not doing a good job of parodying either style. I try to avoid both, but sometimes slip into one or the other. I like my obscure bullshitting to be of its own unique variety.
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I think the big distinction between economist-explainer talk and social-cultural talk is appeal to reified certainties vs dead ambiguities.
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SPACs are like 5 minutes old but already have a satisfying hard edge to them. Some ambiguism with a philosopher name attached may be 200 years old but can muddy issues you want muddied as effectively in 2021 as in 1821. False clarity vs needless confusion.
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Rhetorical intents: “I get it, let me explain it to you” vs “You think you get it, but you actually don’t” Grooming vs gaslighting.
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Two kinds of Gordian knots. One used to lull you into a false sense of security (“don’t worry, I correctly predicted 11 of the last 5 crashes!”) The other used to drag you into analysis paralysis.
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The trick to cutting both is the same: invent your own language to talk about what you do/see. Either you own the meaning of your experiences or someone else does. To own your language is to own your meanings. Don’t fit the territory of your experiences to maps of others’ words.
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Bullshit can only be canceled by the opposed kind of bullshit 🤔
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Replying to @vgr
The first addresses an “known unknown” while the second aims at “unknown knowns.” The latter are hard to communicate about for good reason, and both provide tools to obscure rather than illuminate. Bullshitting the former produces illusions of knowledge the latter has to unwind.
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In general, if you don’t care who understands what you’re going on about, only that some people do, you can generally just use whatever ordinary language you have available to you to say it. You’ll just end up talking to randomly different assortments of people each time.
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Unless there’s math involved, specialized language in public discourse is usually either about bidding for ingroup status, or declaring it. Not clarity of thought or communication. The only kind of linguistic complication I like is jokes.
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