🏴‍☠️ Post-rational nihilism (Kegan stage 4.5): the only academic study I know of.

Strongly recommended for postrats, and for rationalists who wonder what that’s all about.
∮ Rationalists’ stubbornness in the face of evidence that rationalism doesn’t work is based in a well-founded fear that letting go of it could cause catastrophic personal disintegration.

That is short-term wise, but retards more sophisticated integration by parts longer-term…
I have speculated about whether the stage 4 (systematic) to 5 (meta-systematic) transition has awful, what makes it more or less awful for different people, and what we could do to help: metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-…
😇 Swan & Benack’s see trouble deriving from using rationalism as a narcissistic self-definition, which makes one “special.” That can compensate for lack of a more realistic basis for self-worth, and as long as stage 4 remains stable, one can function well enough…
∮ If rationality is a tool you use, and your competence with it is only one of several sources of self-esteem, recognizing its limits is disappointing but tolerable.

If rationalism—or any systematic ideology—is your identity, the realization is crushing. meaningness.com/eternalist-sys…
“Narcissism in the Epistemological Pit” follows the progress of a brilliant college student for whom stage 4 begins fraying in his junior year. He realizes the search for the One True System will fail…

link.springer.com/article/10.102…
A common next step is to try to build a grand meta-system that is itself systematic. This is impossible; and a misunderstanding—probably necessary at first—of what meta-systematicity consists of. You can get sucked deep into pomo at this point…
When meta-system building fails, you can fall into the pit of nihilism. All the symptoms here: rage, depression, anxiety, twisted intellectualization, grandiosity with self-loathing, contempt for the “herds of idiots” who can’t understand or face the truth meaningness.com/emotional-dyna…
Unfortunately “Sean’s” story ends in a suicide attempt and psychiatric hospitalization. All too common in 4.5 nihilism.
There is light at the end of the tunnel! At minimum, once the collapse of ideological certainty you feared and defended against actually happens, there’s the sense of relief that you don’t have hold it off any longer.

You can relax. Epistemology can’t get any more horrifying!
How can one help? Swan & Benack suggest taking the epistemological crisis seriously *as such* and not pathologizing it as mere “intellectualization” (despite postrational nihilistic justifications being typically twisted and nonsensical).

This is a necessary step toward stage 5!
“Is cognitive growth itself a valid therapeutic goal in working with this group?”

If Kegan was right re linkages between transitions in different domains, promoting development of meta-rational epistemology may support parallel development in relationships, selfness, & emotions.

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More from @Meaningness

7 Aug
Earliest use of “nihilism” was in attacks on Kant’s Idealism: his denial that knowledge of external reality is possible. I didn’t know this! pdcnet.org/gfpj/content/g… Image
Subjectivism does always collapse toward nihilism. Current cognitivist stories about how we only have access to representations of reality, not reality itself. And Buddhist and Hindu stories about how everything apparent is illusory.

It’s a seemingly bizarre and paranoid error…
“We can’t really know anything because we are trapped in our heads and permanently separated from the world” makes sense if you had believed the eternalist fantasy of perfect certainty, understanding, and control; realized it was wrong; and inverted it.

meaningness.com/eternalism-app…
Read 4 tweets
5 Aug
0️⃣ A century ago, relativity was experienced as a catastrophic blow to rationalism. A few decades of work by the best philosophers of the era managed to retcon it as a triumph of rationalism instead.

But this entailed two drastic revisions in the plot…

1️⃣ Science used to discover eternal, absolute, certain truths, like Newtonian mechanics… which turned out not to be—oops!—not true.

To preserve rationalism, science got retconned as discovering increasingly accurate approximations to truth we have no access to & may never know.
2️⃣ Rationality used to prove that everything in the world makes sense and we can figure everything out rationally, because God likes us.

Relativity made no sense, so science got retconned as giving glimpses into the transcendent Science Realm that surpasseth all understanding.
Read 5 tweets
31 Jul
Catatonia is the accomplishment of nihilism. It’s so dramatic that I assumed it was extremely rare, but (TIL) it’s quite common in severe depression. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
I’ve only encountered one person (a girlfriend, actually) with serious catatonia (“waxy flexibility”). It’s deeply uncanny the first time you see it.
But reading the diagnostic criteria, I realized that at times when I was quite depressed, I exhibited milder versions of many of these symptoms. In fact, I exhibit some of them, to some extent, even when feeling good & normal. (Some are autistic symptoms too… they’re comorbid.)
Read 4 tweets
29 Jul
Historians will see the administrative bullshitization of every aspect of life as the defining feature of our era. (“How could they have slid into accepting that almost all of almost everyone’s time was wasted on pointless, unpleasant tasks?”)
Another manifestation of “administrative externalities” as a catastrophic loss of human life:
More on the harm of “administrative externalities,” from me: metarationality.com/post-apocalypt…
Read 8 tweets
25 Jul
@St_Rev Just about to launch a long rant about this! :)
@St_Rev I was going to do a second whole rant about how the natural numbers are bad actually, contrary to “God made,” because you can multiply them, and you get division that way, and if you have division you get primes, and if you get primes you get number theory, and that is AWFUL,
@St_Rev whereas the reals are wonderful, people are scared because they encapsulate actual Lovecraftian infinities with tentacles, but you get continuity with them, so you can do calculus, and calculus is great, calculus is actually the foundation of THE WHOLE MODERN WORLD,
Read 5 tweets
25 Jul
∑ Fascinating indeed! This is how MOST research works, but I didn’t appreciate quite how true it is in math (or at least current number theory). Lots of tasty morsels in this thread; h/t @DRMacIver

🧪 Science also USED to be like this and isn’t any more: “Mathematicians’ intuition about what's true is mysteriously really good, so publishing false results is quite rare.”

🧪 A few decades ago, most published science was more-or-less true, even though there were often glaring gaps or outright mistakes in experiment. [My informal observation; I don’t have numbers on this.]

Now most published science is more-or-less false, even when done “right.”
Read 14 tweets

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