The insight industry has been running in zombie mode on pure momentum for the last few years. Insights without a grand narrative context are like throwing random spices into a mystery pot without knowing what’s cooking in it.
Insights constitute a second-order layer of thinking about a complex system. The first order is global doctrinal commitments the insights can be about. Eg: “democracy and free markets are good.” When the first-order layer is shaky or missing the second order is not even wrong.
Like take a popular insight from 2012-13: “Big data is when it’s cheaper to store data than to decide what to do with it”
There were obvious ways to cash it out in ideas about business performance or public records. You didn’t have to agonize, you could run with it.
Doctrine is rules for turning context-free insights into “morally good optionality” for a particular context easily.
You have clear doctrine when there is a prevailing straightforward good/evil story. For eg, “what’s good for GM is good for America” in 1950s.
Sub “SV” for 2010s
ML today is descended from Big Data a decade ago, but is evolving in a context with no clear grand narratives or doctrines. There are no obvious Schelling point ideas for turning ML capabilities into “good.” So the 100 fears about how it can be evil dominate discourse.
Never noticed this before, but things bandied about as “insights” tend not to be neutral interesting facts about the world like math theorems or new physics discoveries. They tend to be contingent on notions of goodness.
Like “sociopaths use clueless to manage losers” means very different things in milieus that broadly approve of neoliberal corporate darwinism vs ones that are hotbeds of culture wars.
The insight economy only has stable valuations in regimes of broad moral consensus
Not sure what I’m groping at here, but this is why I’m no longer motivated to write merely by stumbling across good insights. I still find insights as good as the ones that fueled my writing 10y ago, but there’s no obvious ways to spin generally interesting essays out of them now
Now I have a reaction of “meh, to whom does this matter and why?”
To use the popular “pill” metaphor from the last era, it’s no longer clear what you’re pilling from/to. “Pills” are bridges between competing grand narratives. When there are none, “pilling” is meaningless.
“Vibes” culture is a sign. Vibes are pre-conscious, pre-moral, and pre-pre-narrative. They don’t stand for anything, let alone catalyze a grand journey based on it. You can’t be “pilled” from one vibe to another. There are no moral valences to flip, shockingly or otherwise.
I get a surreal feeling watching the minority still excitedly sharing “insights” about various things like it is 2013 and they’re trying to audition their way from Twitter to TED. Nobody cares because there’s no coherent default caring context.
The “insights” that succeed do so not on the strength of their surprisal, but the intensity of vibe shifts. Ukraine war insight threads still land strong because the war is a vibe of such horrifyingly pointless pain. It can shock you out of more anesthetized vibes.
But such vibe shifts (vibe shocks?) are not narrative bridges in a “pill” sense. They are primitive emotional key shifts. Meaningless without narrative structure. So you’re shocked about what Russia is doing. What next? Fold it into “software eats world” theory? Not even wrong.
“Software eats world” is a good example since it was a powerful grand narrative for 2000-15. In part because it accommodated the emotional and moral valence ranges of world events. But it feels mismatched to post 2016. It’s now just a subplot with limited explanatory power.
Plausible for a certain messed-up personality type, but I think humans who’ve once had their consciousness expanded by a global perspective can never be truly “local” ever again. Tbf I think there’s something wrong with frogs who climb back into wells after learning about ocean.
This is an unresolved problem with “city state” futures. Historically, city-state eras (Italy, hanseatic league) still had coherent global sensibilities. They weren’t frogs in wells trying to run culture larps in bubbkes.
This is a good example for this thread. It is a good insight. 10 years ago, you could have spun a 4000 word feature out of this that would have gone viral, because it would have made meaning out of the ML moment. Now it just sits there.
The next iteration of "bicycle for the mind", decoupling artistic skill from artistic expression and unlocking the creative potential of folks who haven't spent a lifetime honing their skills. You won't have to be a highly skilled (painter/musician/dancer/etc.) to make great art.
Why do I care about artistic skill or unlocking creative potential of masses with next bicycle of mind. They’ll probably just do tedious culture war shit with it. It’s not obvious in 2022 that empowering more artistic output is “good” and “Progress.”
Insights used to be a highly fungible currency within large, liquid markets. They’re now more like 1/1 NFTs from nowhere, headed nowhere. Resale value 1% if you can find liquidity at all. Notable that NFT projects that succeed do so by creating entire worlds for them to inhabit.
This is the problem. Insights by nature are short, lightweight memes that hope to travel vitally. But now the minimum viable meme must come packaged with an entire damn extended universe, complete with lore, vibes, and internal epic arcs. Way too much work.
Exactly. Now if you say this excitedly in a TED talk voice of profound revelation, you just sound like an idiot. You need more. A lot more. Mere “empowerment and tools” narratives just sound like a dreary prospects for more snowballing shittiness.
This is on my mind because I’m doing my first post-Covid public talk soon (eth devcon in bogota), and for the first time in 10+ y of giving talks, I’m trying to construct it around something other than “insights”
I don’t think vaguely TED-like substances work as talks anymore.
I don’t want to do yet another “pill” talk of the sort we all used to do. There are no unqualified “ideas worth spreading” in a “technology, education, design” commons anymore.
With hindsight of 2022, the very idea of an unqualified “idea worth spreading” seems chaotic neutral at best, clueless evil at worst. That was a global-network-effects world. We’re in cozyweb world now. If an idea is worth spreading, you must specify: in which cozyweb and why?
It sort of is… the broad topic I’ve picked is “hypercomplexity” and in line with systems theory talks I’ve done in the past. Except this time I want to focus on “why,” not “how.” Why build ambitious, hypercomplex things like ethereum with all the headaches in a dissolving world? https://twitter.com/alexqgb/status/1574852304452218881…
Subplot. There are 2 kinds of insights:
Appreciative insights are about the world, how it works, what’s happening, etc. It’s my main genre.
Instrumental insights map to self-interest: how can I succeed, how to find a partner, where to live? I’ve rarely played in this genre.
Much of the zombie-ness is in latter category, in part because practical life-stage concerns don’t go away simply because the world got weird. 20-30 year-olds still need ideas about how to succeed, date, etc. I’m sympathetic.
Right now instrumental insights are running on fumes.
But when the more basic kind of appreciative insight starts to fail, the instrumental insight questions increasingly run aground. If people are questioning career hustle and “quiet quitting” in droves, the best advice on how to get ahead at work/startups is sorta moot.
Where we’re just coming off years of toxic culture wars around chads and incels, antinatalism vs make-moar-babies, trad vs woke etc, “how to date and partner up” is no longer about simple instrumental insights. It turns into existential angst crisis.
I mean can you imagine “4-hour work-week” (2007) or the og PUA manual “The Game” being simple hits today?
The world they were uncritically written for has unraveled pretty thoroughly
One of the clear signs that we’re in a post-insight era is that conspiratorial declarations that something or the other is a big fraud simply don’t land anymore. A major sub-pharmacopeia of “pills” has always been “exposing the fraudulent nature of X”
Feels like someone pointing to a movie playing and declaring (Alan from Hangover voice): “Guys, that’s a movie! Radioactive spiders aren’t real!” Yes Alan, good insight.
People still capable of being excited by a sense of uncovered fraud are innocents from another era.
It’s similar to the paradigm / fact duality.
Only when the paradigm is firm can we have „facts“. When the paradigm shifts, „facts“ are revealed to have been temporarily useful approximations.
In the longer timeframes, we cycle between fact building and paradigm building eras.
I think for bucking of the conventional wisdom (ie an insight) to be salient, society need to be impressed/bought into the conventional wisdom in a way people are not currently
It would be an interesting exercise to review the insight porn market of 2000-2015 (TED talks, viral posts, Gladwell-esque books) and classify them by grand narrative to make a pie chart.
Eg:
Hustleporn: 24%
Software eats world: 18%
Freakonomics/biasporn: 32%
Empathyporn: 17%