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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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”
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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.
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Nice frame. Definitely in paradigm building era. Or as I like to think if them, extended universe/lore era.
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Replying to @fdousek and @vgr
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.
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Yep. Insights can’t short what has already crashed.
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Replying to @vgr
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
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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%
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I date the end of the insights era to the rise of the “explainer”era ~2013 (though a few like Nate Silver were early to the game)
Explainers deprecated the point “Aha” in favor of explainerist schemes. The high of insight replaced by the more mellow glow of pseudo-comprehension
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But I’m short explainerism, and not just because I’m bad at it. I think explainers are epistemic band-aids/palliatives, and only work on nerds capable of forgetting about the why through OCD absorption in an intricate “how.” Or about 10-20% of people.
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Explainers also take way more work than insight discourses. They’re halfway to extended universes. For eg, if you read Matt Levine, you know he writes within an extended universe of financial world game mechanics. The appeal is less insight and more video game twitch stream.
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But that’s also the weakness. It never leaves the game-like escaped reality and helps you construct larger significance. If you read Matt Levine, you’ll learn in excruciating detail how the Musk-Twitter saga might play out, but absolutely nothing about why it matters or doesn’t.
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A larger issue might be that the big challenges of the day, like climate change, don’t yield to high-leverage global “insights”
To the extent insights are cheat codes you can’t cheat these problems. You can’t insight your way out of problems you externalized your way into.
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Maybe insights are just a bull-market commodity.
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