My n size for this theory is probably several dozens. I've been around people who are far more talented and successful than me for like 30 years now, and sort of figured out how to free ride in their slipstreams. Sometimes parasitically, sometimes symbiotically.
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For a while, I was confused about this phenomenon because I was thinking of it as a minor special case of the fundamental attribution error, with minor additions. No, it's a distinct and richer/larger phenomenon.
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The FAE is the tendency to explain outcomes based on dispositional factors rather than situational, with a personal bias. As in "you just got lucky, I won by genius... you asked for your misfortunes, I got unlucky."
But the FAE applies to all of us, not just outsize successes.
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Charismatic epistemology is what you get when the fundamental attribution error meets an outlier success with a non-trivial evidentiary basis for their own uniqueness/outlier-ness.
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A familiar but peripheral example is simple, lazy self-mythologizing, as in a poorly written self-congratulatory autobiography. This is peripheral because it is something of a conscious construction, and the person knows they're doing it at least dimly/unconsciously.
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Charismatic epistemology isn't about the story you tell about your *own* success story. It's how you explain the *rest* of the world by extrapolating from your own experiences. This is an egoist bias rather than an egoTist bias. differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/
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EgoTists are boring. Trump is an example. EgoTists not actually interested in the rest of the world. Only in themselves. The charismatic manifestation of EgoTism in a successful outlier person is narcissism. I'm not talking about narcissism in this thread.
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Charismatic epistemology is something you get even with self-effacing, non-egoTistic egoists. And here I mean egoists in a broader sense than usual. People who believe they're special in some way, not necessarily "superior," but may or may not want to perform it egoTistically.
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The sources of charismatic epistemology may or may not even be fodder for egoTism. Any innate trait or life experiences will serve -- being much taller or shorter than others, race, gender, early childhood trauma or privilege, extreme poverty or wealth, living through wars...
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2 special cases of interest:
One is people who've had extreme objective validation of their sense of specialness (scoring genius IQs when young, winning olympic gold at 16, becoming a big movie star at 21)
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The other is people who've had experiences of specialness that are extremely NOT objectively validatable but they know from the inside were huge. Enlightenment type altered mind states, periods of deep suicidal behavior, life-altering but not very visible illnesses.
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So that's the eligible set. Note that this specialness is not of "everybody has some special shit if you look hard enough." This is actual outlier attributes relative to closer-to-the-mean humans. This is necessary but not sufficient for charismatic epistemology to emerge.
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Necessary+sufficient conditions are:
1. Subjectively compelling (even dispositive) evidentiary support for your specialness
2. Outlier success where your specialness is a non-trivial, salient explanatory factor.
3. Tested predictive power of "I am special"
4. Broad curiosity
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If ALL 4 factors hold, you might develop a case of "charismatic epistemology."
What are the features of this epistemology?
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The biggest feature is: believing the universe works in a way where your account of your own success is Exhibit A. Ie the same laws that you think determined your successes, determine how the world itself works.
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For example, if a core belief of your explanation for your own success is "optimism and daring shapes events, and I won because I was optimistic and daring" you'll tend to explain everything else in terms of the effect of optimistic-daring.
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Several secondary features:
1. You "do your own research" a lot
2. You are acutely aware/sensitive to the flaws in how other people think
3. When people disagree with you, you look for hidden agendas/backstories first, examine the merits of their arguments second
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If this sounds similar to crackpot reasoning patterns, it is not an accident. It IS the same pattern, except that it is accompanied by high success and comes from your own life. For most crackpots, it is sort of "borrowed" from charismatic leaders they become true believers of.
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Ie, charismatic epistemologies that are born of successful and "different" people attempting to explain their own lives to themselves "seed" the crackpot epistemologies of... much less impressive people. But let's set that aside. This is not about the crackpot echoes.
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One interesting sign of this. The Peter Thiel "contrarian/heretic" question of a "secret" is designed to DETECT a charismatic epistemology at work. But it can't actually tell crackpots apart from the future outsize success types.
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So everybody who uses the "secret" question for diagnostic purposes tends to pair it with OTHER evidence to determine whether you're a genuine potential future success or a crackpot. Some people call it "earned secret" rather than just a "secret"
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Cf necessary and sufficient... it's bidirectional. If you satisfy conditions 1, 3, and 4, there's a stronger-than-random chance you'll develop condition 2 (outsize success)... and if you have charismatic epistemology, chances are you got there via satisfying the 4 conditions
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The mechanics of this are mostly obvious, so I won't belabor them, but one mechanic is worth calling out. The "tested predictive power." People who develop charismatic epistemologies don't just make up just-so self-congratulatory theories about their past. They TEST them.
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If you believe, for eg. that having a green-dyed beard is a big part of your success, you'll actually try to prove this, by (for eg) giving important speeches with and without green-dyed beards. And these experiments will prove you right! Green beards lead to success!
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Now this is where charismatic epistemologies start to turn cancerous, and any genuine explanatory power starts turning into your personal pseudoscience. Now why might your "green beard" theory prove out?
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The thing is, success is non-ergodic! Once you start succeeding, you lose the ability to systematically experiment with your own success factors because it has *already* altered your decision environment!
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If you
a) have a reputation for success, however strong
b) have been telling a story about it with confidence and self-assurance
c) people have believed in, adapted to, and responded to it...
Well... it's a self-validating theory.
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This is the "reality distortion field." It takes a while for it to grow to Steve Jobs size and power, but it is visible fairly early on a success trajectory of any sort. I've met enough people "before" and "after" that I've now seen it multiple times.
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The more you succeed, the more people around you will adopt complementary patterns of effective behavior to ride your coat-tails, and the more they'll reinforce the theory of success. This will make the next time you tell your story even MORE confident and self-assured.
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It's a bit like a stock market effect, where a stock goes up and up and up because more money pours in, and up to a point, actually makes future success more likely.
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Notice the positive feedback effect here: you are confidently espousing a theory of success, backed by a track record... the confidence and success attract ever-more talented people hoping to leverage your "formula" to succeed themselves. Proven winners attract likely winners.
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The problem here is that your chances of being *right* about the world don't actually increase at the same rate as your chances of *succeeding* in the world. You're going viral like a meme, not converging on an ever-truer theory of the world.
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l'il break here for dinner (stuffed arepas 🥳) to be continued...
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Ok, to continue. Here's where the crackpot connection comes in. A charismatic epistemology is something like a flat earth theory that's not just approximately locally true, it is increasingly exactly true over time.
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This is because success has a "flattening" effect in the immediate neighborhood. The world around you adapts to you through the progressive effect of a strengthening reality-distortion field. It grows to include a core group, a larger group, a company, a market...
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Before we examine the implications of this, a couple more pieces of evidence/illustration.
First, the Amazon Leadership principle #4: "Good leaders are right, a lot."
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This is, in my experience... basically true. Good leaders are weirdly, presciently, right. In a series of uncertain, ambiguous decisions, where rational analysis might expect say a 30% hit rate, they're hitting 80-90, even 100% for brief periods.
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This is more than Taleb's "fooled by randomness" effect because it's not like betting on the market. This is "being right a lot" due to the world having arranged itself in your local neighborhood to consistently prove your theory right.
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Second piece of... not evidence, but... illuminating narrative false-color from a perceptive observer, Douglas Adams In Hitchhiker's Guide.
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Zaphod Beeblebrox goes into the Total Perspective Vortex and, much to the amazement of the others, does NOT come out stark raving mad from having gazed into the void and realized his own utter insignificance (which is what the machine is supposed to do)
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Instead he comes out feeling validated: the TPV validates what he already believes: he is the most important guy in the universe.
The reason, in the book, is simple: they are in a universe that was created for Zaphod so he's obviously the most important person in it.
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