Thread by @deontologistics

I have a lot of disagreements with @slatestarcodex, but this is genuinely one of the best essays I’ve ever read about death and personal autonomy: slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who…

The only thing that beats it are Seneca’s letters on suicide (emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2010/01/sen…): “It is criminal to “live by robbery”;[12] but, on the other hand, it is most noble to “die by robbery.” Farewell.”

@NegarestaniReza has done the deep reading on this topic though.

My main problem with @slatestarcodex is really a failure of mutual recognition. He has a tendency to deny that anyone who isn’t a grey tribe utilitarian technocrat could possibly thinking with the same sporadic, insightful synopticism that he displays, and this is patently false.

For example, this is one of the least charitable of a highly uncharitable genre of reviews of @n_srnck and @lemonbloodycola’s ‘Inventing the Future’: slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/18/boo…

I may be some sort of leftist Veblenite technocrat (S/O to my l/acc peeps), and perhaps even greytribe adjacent (S/O to my infosec peeps), but I’m vociferously anti-utilitarian from a logical rather than merely meta-ethical perspective. My neorationalism runs 180 degrees to LW.

Here’s the short version (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2018/02/11/on-…), shorter version (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/oft…), medium version (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/09/09/tfe…) and longer statement (deontologistics.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/tfe…).

However, I think the most representative post with regard to the problem I’m discussing is the review of Foucault’s history of madness: slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/04/boo…

I have a lot of time for Scott’s writings on medicine, psychology, and psychiatry, and have learned a huge amount from them. It’s a topic on which he is eminently qualified to present a balanced perspective on the nexus of problems and guide us through the ramifying literature.

But the interesting thing about the review is how *surprised* he is to find that Foucault, another renaissance man essayist with diverse interests and synoptic ambitions, might have something to say to him. That’s the pathology of mutual recognition rearing it’s ugly head.

I like to call this problem ‘Sokal Overfitting’ after the drastic overextension of the initial experiment in generative nonsense that is Sokal and Brigmont’s ‘Intellectual Impostures’: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionab…

To shift into the register of what @maradydd and I call ‘cognitive infosec’, Sokal performed a pretty significant penetration test of an information filter playing an infrastructural role in the epistemic ecology of academic humanities in the 90s.

I think that Sokal discovered a genuine exploit in the system, which definitely deserved to be patched, even though doing so would have required a significant restructuring of academia publishing that is by now several decades overdue. However, he misunderstood its implications.

Sokal confused his ability to generate syntactic nonsense that could pass the filter for an ability to recognise semantic content commensurate with the correct operation of such a filter. This produced a whole cottage industry of 'bullshit' experts who are *genuine* charlatans.

To be crystal clear, I don't mean Harry Frankfurt (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullsh…) or @davidgraeber (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_…). Bullshit is a real phenomenon that is worth understanding on its own terms, but there are plenty of grifters who make a living selling bullshit about bullshit.

I vividly remember being handed a book by @phil_watson84 with a title like 'How Bullshit Conquered the World', in which a line of Deleuze's Difference & Repetition was quote as an exemplar of incomprehensible nonsense. I'd been reading D&R so I checked the reference in the back.

The reference was not in fact to D&R, but to another essay on bullshit by Richard Dawkins. The sheer cheek required to call a sentence from a very technical academic work you've not only separated from its context, but haven't even glanced at a copy of is quite impressive.

There was so much of this meta-bullshit in the 'new atheist' movement, in which principled skeptics (e.g., @danieldennett and James Randi) got bundled together with philosophical amateurs with poor instincts like @neiltyson and outright intellectual grifters like Sam Harris.

I have similarly vivid memories of marking undergraduate essays in intro philosophy of science and philosophy of religion inspired by such shallow pop-philosophy that defines itself against an entire tradition it does not know how little it knows about (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E…).

The whole torrid discourse of 'classical liberalism' (jordanbpeterson.com), 'free speech' (freespeechunion.org), and 'post-truth' (amazon.co.uk/Post-Truth-New…) is the spiritual successor to this meta-bullshit grift-machine: from unfortunate ignorance to outright culture war.

But before anyone accuses me of defending bullshit in philosophy, the arts, and the humanities, allow me to remind you of my own views here:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1346143866148302849?s=20

Let me also point out that I've been explicitly discussing the problems of academia in terms of information filtering, perverse incentives, and poorly trained pattern recognition for quite a while now:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1349630844231675904?s=20

And I've been doing my best to call out bullshit when I see it (

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1342588210090807297

) and describe the social environments in which it thrives (

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1352173114222911492?s=20

) whenever I get the chance. If there's one thing to make crystal clear: I make no such accusations lightly.

Oh, and just to signal boost a particular accusation that I make in utter seriousness; a seriousness measured in apt vulgarity:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1343906445352431616?s=20

It might seem like I've gone off the rails here, and that I'm no longer talking about SSC and why I think you should read it despite how disappointing Scott's occasional misrecognition of intellectual fellow travellers (or meta-bullshit grifters) might be. But I really haven't.

If what we're seeing is anything like a renewal of whatever energy animated the Enlightenment mediated by new technological modes of communication and organisation, then Scott is obviously a philosophe, kin to Diderot and Voltaire, Pope and Paine. He's no (meta)bullshit artist.

Disagree with him, but read him, so that you may disagree thoroughly and productively. Even when he's wrong about solutions he puts his finger on problems that demand attention (slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/con…). Dismiss this as 'neoliberal ideology' and you'll walk away poorer for it.

At the very least, I ask you to cultivate better enemies, because shadowboxing with straw men never enlightened anyone, least of all those exercising their discursive fists.

Thoughts inspired by a worthy disagreement with @peligrietzer.

🖖

Turns out it was this book: amazon.co.uk/How-Mumbo-Jumb…