Thread by @deontologistics

I think the discussions about the uses and abuses of the language of 'clever/smart/intelligent/etc.' that @bayesianboy has sparked are an absolute joy, especially as they bleed out of one context and into another. Allow me to add some thoughts of my own.

https://twitter.com/bayesianboy/status/1364762526949466112

There is one phrase that is burned so deeply into my brain it generates echoes of ancient shames even as I type it: "You think you're so smart." I can't even recall a specific memory in which this was said to me, it's nothing but a neural palimpsest of iterated childhood misery.

I have, for as long as I can remember, been interested in almost everything. My curiosity is so powerful it's often quite hard to control. This has created problems in socialising with my peers for my entire life. I'm mostly fine now, but there's some atypical trauma hereabouts.

Kids are necessarily naive by default. My naive enthusiasm about topics, and the ways I would talk about them obsessively, before the socialised filters kicked in, was a constant source of alienation for me as a child. It bred failures of mutual recognition.

It's important to stress the mutual/cyclical pattern here. There are concrete incompatibilities between the ways we behave that, though no one's fault, all too easily create friction and pain. In educational contexts, I'd alienate my peers, and they'd alienate me right back.

I experienced such interactions in the following way:

A: 'Here's something so precious I want everyone to have it. Please take this gift.'
B: 'You're saying I'm not worth anything without this? YOU THINK YOU'RE SO SMART.'
A: 'I'm sorry, please have this instead!'

Iterate loop.

I still get stuck in these loops from time to time. If hell is other people, this is what my personal hell looks like: a hole dug with discursive interaction that I cannot dig myself out of, even though my every inclination drives me to dig deeper in the frantic hope I can.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am that we're past peak 'mansplaining' discourse. I understand the importance of those concerns, and I find them both important and fascinating, but you cannot explain your way out of a mansplaining charge. It's a Kafkaesque nightmare.

"Allow me to tell you what your *real* motivations are using my personal grab bag of suspicious hermeneutics, while you have to sit and listen like a good boy or you'll confirm you're a bad man."

I'm not saying I didn't learn anything from this, or that those lessons weren't important. I talk too much. I suck the oxygen out of a conversation if I'm not careful. I get passes for such bad behaviour related to my positionality in various discursive contexts. It still hurts.

I've learned a lot of lessons from this sort of pain. The most deeply ingrained being that I should never, ever, use the words 'intelligent', 'smart', 'clever', or any even remotely related speech acts to describe myself. Going anywhere near these makes me flinch, often visibly.

I learned that I could only *show* not *tell* on any question of competence. I learned to be maximally self-critical in any context that involves talking or demonstrating competence. I learned to anticipate potential objections, challenges, passive aggressive insults, the works.

I'm not saying I'm even necessarily very good at this in any given context. I'm just trying to paint a picture of the way in which educational contexts have shaped my anxieties over the course of my life. I overthink *everything* in catastrophically counter-productive ways.

I've talked a lot about my personal frustrations with academia on Twitter. My struggles. My failures. My attempts to analyse and otherwise make them meaningful. They all trace back here: I just want to do the thing I love, but love isn't enough, no matter how vast or deep.

It turns out there are certain things you can't *show* in the relevant contexts, because whatever metrics and mechanisms of assessment have been built to gate access to resources are entirely blind to such things. If you're unwilling to *tell* in such contexts, you're invisible.

Or worse, you're a joke. It's important to be able to look back and see how funny a joke you were. Here's the first job application cover letter I sent out. I sent out many of these.

I understand that there are some contexts in which my competence is not only not-invisible but hyper-visible. I get to borrow the mystique of 'cis/white/male/etc. philosophical genius' in ways that people who aren't pattern matched in the way I am will never get access to.

That's privilege for you. I endeavour to check it myself (examination) so I don't have to deal with other people checking it for me (sanctioning). I get to enjoy the resonance of these words when they're used to describe me, even if they taste like ashes on my tongue.

But there's more than one hidden covenant of intellectual humility/hubris that thrives on shibboleths oft unspoken. There are many contexts in which competence is demonstrated/validated, and even more ways to not fit into them, no matter how you try.

Allow me a small humblebrag. Just one. Let me say this without grinding my teeth in anticipation of every possible response. My biggest champion inside academia is Ray Brassier, who is both a big influence and a good friend. He introduced me to a colleague now mutual friend.

The first time I met this colleague in a pub, he told me in hushed tones that Ray had described me as 'the best philosopher in the world'. How do you think I reacted to that? What was my immediate affective response? Pure, intense, completely irrational terror.

I don't think I let this show. The beer helped, and I managed to kick into the standard self-effacement routine I usually use to channel such impulses. But the impulse was so sudden and strong, in response to something so sincere and nice, that it shook me pretty badly.

I've been untangling a lot of affective knots very tied tightly in my childhood recently. This is very explicit in my more confessional Twitter threads. Here's another very relevant one on intellect, education, and class ('The Hogwarts Experience'):

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1359838567321722881?s=20

The lesson that pulling on this particular thread has taught me is that, however you want to cut it up, the world has taught me to fear my own intellectual capacities in extremely unhealthy ways, and this fear has been used against me over and over again throughout my life.

Writing these confessional threads is about exorcising this fear. If anyone else recognises some of themselves in these words or it sparks a more fruitful discussion, that's wonderful. But I need to desensitise myself to both sincere compliments and explicit self-assessments.

I need to be able to stand up and say: I'm good at what I do. I'm trying to be what I want to see in the world. My curiosity is weird but virtuous. My intellect is strange but worthy. I'm an oddity. An exception to the rules that govern the aristocratic monopoly of the 'clever'.

More than this (psychic misery aside), I'm a better thinker for having been excluded from this monopoly; for never feeling comfortable enough to rest on my laurels and give into the temptation to stop learning; for not being able to hammer my curiosity into a recognisable shape.

I'd like to close by turning to another story from my childhood, at the intersection of this thread and 'The Hogwarts Experience'. This is the story of the transition from primary to secondary school, and the basis of the deep repressive break between those times of my life.

To reiterate something from the other thread: going to private school was a source of deep shame for me. It put me in a position where I felt that I no longer belonged to the working class side of my family, nor to the scions of the petit bourgeoisie with whom I was grouped.

There were good elements of the experience, but the only person I still know from that school was failed by it as badly if not worse than I. But the bad began even before I arrived. It began with the competition to earn a place or a scholarship by way of standardised testing.

It began even before the competition for places. I cannot tell you exactly how old I was, but it would have been around 9 or 10. My parents gave me a take home MENSA test to do. There was no pressure, they may have even fudged the time a bit, and the result came back IQ ~155.

This meant that I had to go and take the real exam in person. This was my first real exposure to concrete mechanisms of academic pressure. I didn't know to fear the SATs at primary school, but the ominous hall of anonymous examiners communicated the message loud and clear.

I can't convey to you how much I hate exams: intellectually, professionally, and personally. Every side of my being aligns in exactly the same direction. They are the antithesis of everything I love. The bureaucratic murder of every curious passion. The banality of academic evil.

This hate begins with shame. The shame that, exposed to an unfamiliar context not suited to my oddly undisciplined interest, asked to match my peculiar cognitive rhythms to an alien mechanical tempo, I couldn't reproduce whatever I'd done on the take home test. I got 136.

All this love, time, and effort that had been poured into me personally had been wasted. I didn't make the grade. It didn't matter that my parents didn't care about it. For them it was just one more opportunity to have a crack at. For me it was the origin of imposter syndrome.

I had to try harder, make it worthwhile, make myself worthy. But you can't study or prepare for tests meant to categorise you under controlled conditions. There's literally nothing you can do. The exams I sat to qualify for scholarships were an exercise in learned helplessness.

I didn't get a scholarship to any school, but my parents paid to send me to one anyway. There's more unintended pressure for you, more anxiogenic education. They learned from this mistake with my brother, but he ended up in his own wholly different educational hell.

It's fun to joke about Foucault's comparison between schools and prisons, but if the very idea seems alien to you, your educational experience (Erlebnis & Erfahrung) was very different from mine and those closest to me.

https://twitter.com/Audenary/status/876808863529545728?s=20

I've never really left the education system, despite never really fully assimilating to it. I'm stuck on the edge, teaching myself things and trying to make sure what little influence I have is used to benefit those students who find themselves in my orbit. Autodidactic synergy.

When I took my last ever exam at, university finals, I felt as if the weight of untold ages had been lifted off my shoulders; as if I'd finally passed the last hurdle, and from hereon in I could just *do* the thing everyone seems to want, rather than dancing for my supper.

I didn't realise that there were whole new genres of anxiety still to learn, and whole new styles of failure that my atypical neurology was preparing to force upon me. But I've already told that part of the story (deontologistics.co/2017/12/22/tra…). What's left to say about this one?

Right. Recalibrate your vibe sensors for an inevitable change of emotional tone.

Allow me to tell you about the worst teacher I ever had.

From age ~5, I wanted to be a scientist, and from age ~8, I wanted to be a particle physicist. I didn't entirely know what that meant exactly, but I'd somehow (in some encyclopedia) stumbled onto the idea that you could detect and categorise the basic building blocks of reality.

To paint a picture of my younger self, my room had plastic models of three versions of the Starship Enterprise hanging from the ceiling, a poster comparing ever rocket ever sent into space (including the Black Arrow), and a poster of the periodic table of elements with pictures.

I had a large room to myself, and I slept on the bottom bunk of a pair of bunkbeds, with my own bookshelf filled with stories and factoids. I used to precariously balance a desk light on a foam char so I could read into the night, until it fell and I nearly burned the house down.

At some point my parents took me to a science fair at Newcastle University where I got to see and hear talks about physics, and I came back with a floppy disk containing a program that explained the standard model of particles I could obsessively rewatch.

It had to be booted from DOS on an ancient Compaq laptop my Dad had brought home from work and bequeathed to me. I got a lot of retro computing hardware this way over the years, but that's another story entirely.

In year 8 I got a physics teacher who slowly destroyed my naive enthusiasm to the point that I gave up on my dream, this little image of my older self I'd cultivated for years, living in Switzerland and working at CERN, wearing turtlenecks and driving a sleek Chrysler Voyager.

He was a great teacher by everyone else's standards. One of those who has an instinctive read for the room, who is cooler and wittier than his students and can use those dynamics to make a classroom learn. He did this by making fun of how invested I was in learning about physics.

The bullying outside of the classroom merged with the dynamics inside the classroom in a way that turned camaraderie into education for others, and all it cost was completely destroying my childhood sense of self.

By 14 I'd abandoned any idea I'd be a scientist, and turned towards politics, computers, and games. Different types of nerdy enthusiasm in which I might find some sort of social solidarity outside of the classroom. The less said about my experience of IT teachers the better here.

This is as condensed a symbol of the compromises of classroom education as it currently exists that I can give you, and this was an experience my parents were *paying for* with money that might be needed elsewhere. Imagine what my brother went through in the comprehensive system.

I know of stories so much worse than this. Stories in which potential was systematically beaten out of people by those whose responsibility was to cultivate it. Stories that make me shake with anger I find difficult to control. But they aren't my stories to tell.

The education system as it exists is an all out war on human cognitive potential, and most teachers are fighting for both sides in one way or another, tangled in webs of bureaucratic complicity and cycles of intellectual abuse. I have family and friends in every corner of it.

I could tell you much lovelier stories about the great teachers I have had in my life. People whose influence is so subtly positive you don't even notice it until years later. Here's a shout out to Greg Hunt, who made me the Lakatosian I am today.

But the real controversies concern not simply the disposition of this potential, but its inherent nature. What cognitive materials are given by nature for the artificers of the mind to hammer into useful shapes? What genetic commodities are fed into the industrial pipeline?

What can we learn about the nature of human cognition, its possibilities and limitations, by looking at the results of these processes? Can we sift through the educational effluent expelled by these processes in ways that tell us what it's looking for? Some people think so.

Let me provide some additional context before I let the hate flow. When I try to describe my own oddness - my peculiar cognitive style and the myriad epistemic strategies I've assembled around it - I often think of the way Hunter S. Thompson describes Dr. Gonzo:

This fits me in various ways, not least for the way it resonates with the Gonzo philosophical voice I've been trying to cultivate in these sprawlingly self-referential and confessionally incisive Twitter essays I've been writing over the last few months. It feels right.

But there's also the looming spector of the X-Men, another of those coded literary metaphors for outsider status and oppression that run through the YA genre and its offshoots, set in a school for gifted youngsters no less!

There are many difficulties involved in articulating the concept of neurodiversity without collapsing it back into more familiar sites of struggle, including but not limited to queerness, class, and race. Worse, these categories intersect in ways that are tricky to disentangle.

But I'll restrict myself to the most pressing point: the coalescing communities of neuro-atypical edge cases agitating for recognition and accommodation often want precisely what the racialised reject: "Look at my blood, my brain, my heritage, and you'll see I'm *different*!"

I'm quite open about my bipolarity. I'm also a researcher who's happy reading papers in computational neuroscience, so it was inevitable I'd look into my own genetics eventually. Here are my confirmed bipolar-linked SNP variants: deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/bipola…

I've got more spreadsheets and papers, but this should give you a taste of just how willing I am to dig into the genetic details of the purportedly natural potentials that are supposedly nurtured by the education system. I'm not fluent, but I'm comfortable with GWAS studies.

In 2019 I had my first run in with HBD Twitter, when Landian racist-alts flooded into my my mentions while I was trying to articulate Fisherite thoughts about the health system in the UK. This is the first time I decided to do some practical discursive anthropology.

None of this was kept secret. It’s all been there for a while, and I’ve occasionally linked to it when it’s become relevant. I’ve also reflected on my methodology and my conclusions on here at length in recent months, though the whole picture isn’t visible.

But in the spirit of sincerity it’s worth making these intricate intellectual grudges and their genesis explicit. To this end, I give you the first new Deontologistics post in over a year, Lost in the Labyrinth: deontologistics.co/2021/02/25/los…

I hope you all enjoy it. It’s been sitting nearly finished in my drafts folder for far too long. There will be some more constructive thoughts on neurodiversity and it’s politics to follow in Phase 3.

In the meantime, shitposting will continue apace:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1364727076180406273

I’m going to close by quoting a complement I received yesterday, from @NegarestaniReza: “My idea of you is as simple as this:

You are the one who knocks'”

It’s not quite the life I’d imagined for myself, but I suppose it’ll do. Solidarity in diversity, my friends. 🖖