Conversation

Replying to
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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Replying to
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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