Thread by @BaldingsWorld

So a short thread on the US China Zoom call and that other reason you come to Twitter epistemology (a big word that means how do we know what we think we know). So here goes. I rightly deride all the arm chair (yes looking right at journos and other Galaxy Brains) sophistry 1/n

Discussing the summits and yes I said the same under Trump. There are two basic reasons for this. First, most meetings of this kind produce very little new information. Read the output from the China side and the US side and it was like watching reruns you've seen before 2/n

Second, the information received is generally very poor quality so even if there is some shred of new information it is very poor quality signal. How many times do politicians promise things they never intend to deliver even in the best of circumstances? Armchair analysts 3/n

Are then left deconstructing the importance of what tie color Biden was wearing or why Xi parted his hair on the other side or which form of the verb they used in the read out. Do we really have any NEW and high quality information after the Zoom call? No, not at all 4/n

Are Galaxy Brains going invent a variety of things to explain their preferred scenario? Hells yea Daddy got to meet his oped writing quota. I like the Taleb explanation for this phenomenon: when we see facts that have no real explanation we create narratives to explain them 5/n

Does almost anyone really know the importance of anything that happened yesterday? No. Will lots of people tell you? Oh yea. Why did the stock market go down/up the other day 0.3%? Who knows. Will lots of people tell you? Hells yea. They will invent narratives regardless 6/n

to explain events much like what early civilizations created narratives around why the sun rose. They had no knowledge of physics but had reasons why the sun rose. My own bias/framework, and I admit and declare this to me by bias, I expect this to have no meaningful impact 7/n

With US-China relations remaining on trend with China continuing to become more belligerent while Biden administration basically stands still neither engaging in large scale roll back of Trump policies but neither moving forward to challenge China. That is the clear trend 8/n

For both sides so until I see sustained material evidence to change that position, that will be y default interpreting evidence in a low and low quality information environment. Done