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Replying to
Prognosis: -- win rate drops -- takes more and work to be less and less right -- theories get more convoluted, with more epicycles, less of that sweet occam-razor sharp elegance
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Here a funny thing happens, involving others in their RDF. Haters and critics are as irrelevant to the epistemology as ever, because they've already been proven wrong long ago during the apogee of the CE's success. But true believers... hmm there's trouble with them.
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The thing is, the ability of true believers to do various validating things relative to the charismatic epistemology is dependent on the theories arising from that epistemology being elegant, simple, powerful, and effective.
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As the CE starts to get overextended and develop epicyclic clutter, it becomes hard for true believers to even pretend in the Winning and Rightness theater, because it's too complicated now.
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A dark cartoon version of this played out, for eg. in QAnon circles leading up to, and beyond, election night. Something very like this happens around every late stage charismatic epistemology that is wandering abroad far from where the world is flat.
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The central charismatic figure at this point can react in many ways. Some react by progressively cutting off people who are starting to stumble. The circle of "good people" starts to shrink and tighten. More and more people get cut out. It's a LIFO effect.
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The healthiest reaction is to recognize what's going on, and *realize that there is no easy way out.* The only way out is to take a looong break where you stop running the success script entirely, and wait for the RDF to wane and dissipate and ultimately collapse.
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This will happen because if you just stop using the charismatic epistemology, it will stop feeding large groups of people and developing in strength. My guess is a field that takes 10 years to build up takes about 1-2 years to dissipate.
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The only way to accelerate the field decay is to make a radical leap into a new endeavor where your CE is not just slightly fraying at the edges, but wildly wrong in ways that make you a fumbling beginner from day 1.
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Many even-headed big successes seem to do this naturally. They reboot in ways that make them a beginner again. A good heuristic for doing this is to find another, equally successful person whose CE is dramatically different from yours.
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There's a lot more to say... including about dark descents into hell, phenomena that arise in response like "hater" patterns, Big Man Straussian theorizing cottage industries... it's a whole extended universe.
Replying to
But I don't want to write a whole grand unified thesis here. So I'll close with a personal angle. One reason I've developed these theories is that I've spent a lot of time around people with charismatic epistemologies, and built something of a career out of pen-testing them.
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The reason I have this career is that many in the early stages of success and a modest RDF dimly recognize the risks and want it challenged enough to prevent cancerous over-extension, but not so much that it gets undermined even where/when it works.
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Haters and actually hostile critics are like actual hackers in this picture. They’ll actually cause damage if you let them into the RDF out of naive belief in “critical skepticism.” Their anger and resentment will seek to replace the RDF with a self-destructive alternative.
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You want someone who is not hostile but also has relative natural immunity to the RDF by virtue of lacking the ability to profit from it. If you were not a talented engineer/designer you’d have been less susceptible to Jobs’ RDF: you can’t work for it, it can’t work for you.
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But there are 2 other reasons I ended up accidentally being a connoisseur and wrangler of charismatic epistemologies: mediocrity and social media.
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First, I spent ~20y, age 15-35 having my sheer ordinariness and mediocrity drilled into me. I wasn’t right a lot, I wasn’t winning a lot. I wasn’t wrong a lot, I wasn’t losing a lot. I had an average amount of good and bad luck.
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For about 5 minutes after making it into IIT (which all of India believes is a Special Thing), I believed I was special. That self-congratulation party ended rapidly when I found myself strictly in the middle of the s distribution and with legit special geniuses all around.
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Second, age 35, I became “internet famous” via a viral blog post. And the sheer mind-boggling vacuity and inconsequentiality of that “arrival” served as a vaccine against ever developing a charismatic epistemology myself.
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People think I’m humble-bragging or being self-deprecating when I insist on my own mediocrity. It’s not. Do you know what it means to have 45k followers or a blog with a 14y history of multiple viral hits, and many famous friends? It’s about the same as being a middle manager 🤣
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But because people believe internet reputational currency is worth a lot more than it is, you get what I think of as a “fake reality distortion field” or fRDF that can’t actually generate the winning and rightness of the real thing.
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I often get mentioned in the same breath with people with comparable social media reputations but a lot more behind it. One sign: startup rubes sometimes assume I’m rich and approach me for funding. Not intros, actual funding. Also various requests for magic I can’t perform.
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This is like a vaccine. Having an fRDF with middle-manager mediocrity behind it means you get inoculated against developing a charismatic epistemology yourself. It’s not always effective. Curiously it’s in the online minor leagues that people develop the most CE from fRDFs.
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But to bring it back to macro… the world is now awash in Big Man charismatic epistemologies and colliding reality distortions. It is a world of weird epistemic feudalism. There is no banal public epistemology that mundanely pursues rightness without charismatic epiphenomena.
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The larger emergent charismatic epistemology that was emanating from Mount Davos has collapsed after Gollum Trump jumped into it with the One Ring — the White House charismatic epistemology. And with it, 40 years of neoliberal harmony has collapsed into a 1000 warring satrapies.
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Haha you thought “science” was the uncharismatic truth-seeking epistemology, but that got TEDified and sucked into its own charisma vortex. There’s nothing left. No commons-based public domain epistemology to navigate by. Just a Straussian War of Titans bumping RDFs.
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I’ll stop here. Tldr: this is happening and shaping the world. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is, like homelessness and nimbyism and religion and droughts and floods and wildfires. Part of the phenomenology of wild earth. Hope you enjoyed the faux-Attenborough documentary.
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