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 once you make it to D-list, the sharp disconnect between the optics and the reality inoculates you.
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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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some of the dynamics remind me of Ken Kesey's journey as described by Scott Alexander slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/23/boo
this is probably because this is also the life cycle of any cult
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Isn’t this always how the world has been shaped or are you saying that pervasive media has extended the reach and influence of people with larger CEs? To the point that it’s more salient for the general public than banal public epistemological like science?
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i understand the inevitability given current conditions but really - homelessness is neither good or bad?
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It's a good thing to be aware of as one's success increases. Interesting model of RDF-flattening. I *do* think some people just have better models of reality in their head - it would be nearly impossible to pick it apart from RDF effect post-hoc.
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this thread would be great narration with all kinds of wild animals being shown in documentary form. do the appropriate long shots, and some well-timed fast cuts. wild animals naturally doing life, in the wild. coincidentally exhibiting the CE dance
✌️🥵🔥
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Scary to think this would happen in all fields - including academia. Consequences are scary, esp for the people falling in the RDF. How to "make" the bigshot PI's hypothesis work? 🤷🏻♂️
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