Edit: Having made my finer distinction, I’ll replace the 0-1/1-0 terms up thread with NB-B and B-NB (nonbeing-being, being-nonbeing). 0 is the wrong signifier for non-being. We didn’t have zero twitters in 2005. We had twitter not-being.
Conversation
It’s not that explainerism doesn’t work at all on the new thing. It just has poor traction. You can still explainer (I’m verbing it to distinguish it from explain) it to the extent it impinges on existing categories but you’ll miss all the substance that inheres in the newness
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For example, if zombies appear tomorrow, you can explain statistics of zombie attacks, what the most efficient beheading tool is, etc. But you won’t get at the intension-with-an-s of zombieness. And as the category comes to dominate more of reality, your explainering will weaken
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Yes… the only question the old ontology can meaningfully pose about the new one is how to kill it, banish it back to non-being instead of either accommodating it or worse, being accommodated by it
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Replying to @vgr
The further the explainering strays from "how do I kill zombies," the more useless it is.
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Explainer podcast: “There’s basically 3 ways the market can react to zombies: increased demand for machetes, inverted bond yields, and increased federal incentives for new machete-tech. Investment in DARPA X-tech fell from 0.1 to 0.01% 1960 to 2022, so it’s down to the first 2”
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“Well last month, zombies actually appeared, growing at 100% week-over-week, and it looks like machete demand is up as predicted, but curiously, the demand for high-carbon steel was *down* during the same period. Turns out, there are weird incentives at Chicago Metal Exchange!”
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“Bond yields however,… hold on a sec, someone at the door…”
“What noooo!!”
“Braaaaaaaiiiiiiins”
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I hate to parody Matt Levine like this since he’s one of the Good Ones, but that’s the problem. Even the good ones are trapped by explainerist epistemology.
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The Great Weirding has been about 1/3 ontological primitives being swapped out for new ones. So explainerism has come to seem like 33% more surreal to me. I’ll read a thing and want to yell “DO YOU NOT SEE THE ACTUAL ZOMBIES BEHIND THE MACHETE FUTURES??”
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When ontologies shift, there’s a shift both in how you explain things and *what is worth explaining*
In some ways explainerism is an economist’s disease wherein money is always the only thing worth explaining and the only means for constructing explanations. Market theology.
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The opposite of explainerism is probably what could be termed inventoryism. Where all you do is characterize, categorize, memeify, and taxonomize the newly beinged. It gropes in the dark where explainerism is confidently looking where the ontological light shines.
Replying to
Inventoryism chooses confusion in the face of the totality of being over comfort in the declining explainability of a shrinking part
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Replying to
Read/writing the political-economy by the Interest rate (inventoryism) versus the Inflation rate (explainerism)



