@slatestarcodex .@glenweyl’s “Why I Am Not A Technocrat” is also very good and worth reading if you haven’t already.
I think there is much less disagreement here than it may seem. Both essays are quite complicated, so sorting this out point-by-point would be difficult, but…
@slatestarcodex@glenweyl Both essays take what I would call a meta-systematic, meta-rational position (which is why I admire both of them). They seem to agree on a core understanding (one that is, I think, very important and NOT widely recognized):
The science reform movement ~3 years ago was "it's definitely not about fraud, that hardly ever happens, it's about inadvertent errors, or at worst sloppiness."
Increasingly it's "it's about fraud."
Rubbish science is one manifestation of the pervasive characteristic of current society, bullshit in the sense of Harry Frankfurt: communication whose function is purely social performance, so that no one cares whether it is true or functional.
Everything you learned in school about how to write, and most of what you learned in most jobs, is WORSE THAN WRONG.
Here's why your writing sucks, and how you can fix that:
You learned that the function of language is to state facts. [*Cough* rationalism...] FALSE!
Language is the way we do relationships. Writing puts you in relationship with readers.
Relationships are shared caring. Do you care about your readers? Do they care about your text?
DO I CARE? is what the reader asks when reading your title. When reading your first sentence. When reading your first paragraph. Unless the answer is HELL YES, they'll close the tab.
There's another hundred open. And there's the stuff in Pocket, and a subreddit to check, and
Does “enlightenment” mean a permanent no-self state, someone asked in email? It depends who you ask… also, is that something worth pursuing? vividness.live/2012/09/13/epi…
Here @OortCloudAtlas answers to “what does ‘deconstructing yourself’ mean.”
A more sophisticated story than the Buddhist “no self” theory, which is ultimately about avoiding rebirth by not existing…
Starting from Thales, 2600 years ago, rationalists have maintained religious certainty that all existence is bound by mathematical laws, despite for the first 2200 worth there being zero evidence for that, and overwhelming evidence against it.
The extraordinary triumph of the Copernican Revolution, culminating in Newton: rationalists FINALLY discovered *something*, one thing, that fit their religious preconception. Glory Be!
And if one thing, surely also every thing. And thus: modernity! NEWTONIZE ALL THE THINGS!
Discovering that Newton’s absolute truth was not, after all, true was a cosmic shock now underestimated. The collapse of modernity had many causes; for the intellectual elite this discrediting of the foundation of rationalism was central I think.
🇺🇸 In the run-up to the last election, I wrote several pieces about politics from a meta-rational point of view. I’m going to tweet links to some of them as a thread over the next few days.
🇺🇸 Our current political divide is rooted in the culture war that began with the New Left & hippie counterculture in the 1960s-70s, versus the Evangelical counter-counterculture of the 70s-80s.
🇺🇸 The two countercultures, though apparently opposed, were strikingly similar attempts at solving the same fundamental problems of meaning—which are still unresolved.
My history of that attempt and its failure is long, so I will tweet only selections…