Man... I finally read through all of the 4 articles linked from the
digest issue you (glen) sent.
I can't begin to provide the kind of incisive analysis you usually do,
but there are a number of threads of subtly disturbing things woven
through those articles... a lot of "soft" false equivalences is my
best description I suppose.
I think they opened some very good questions and offered some good
perspectives but I felt at it's root, this body of work (the whole
Project?) is part of a long con, even if I can't quite figure out what
they are up to, I definitely feel like their "mark"... me and anyone
else reading them without exercising more than a little Pyrrhonian
skepticism. Maybe I'm just tired... but they sounded like a much
smarter/more-sophisticated PragerU to me by the time I got done.
If you find them to be more righteous than I'm intuiting, I look forward
to hearing more from you about their arguments.
On 2/16/22 5:55 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
I'm glad you brought up the Consilience Project again. I have not
hardly but scratched their "veneer" and have my own warning signals,
including how smooth some of their stuff goes down *my* gullet. Almost
as if it were crafted for the likes of me? And given the topic of
their discussion (all I've read so far is their "End of Propoganda"
and some meta-info about them), it feels a little too reflexive? I
am interested if not intrigued and very resistant to being "hooked" by
what seems like pretty sophisticated arguments. The MIU pedigree is
a little disturbing... I have a couple of links back into them, one
that when taken with the right amount of salt is somewhat supportive
while the other makes me want to run for the hills. "fevered gaze of
zealotry" fits the latter.
I haven't extracted enough of their examples of "human sovereignty" to
know if it is actually an anthropocentric arrogance or not, but I'm
looking for it. I think the one place I saw it, I would have
expected something more like "toxicly deluded individualism" as a
judgement, but I really haven't given this work a fraction of what you
apparently have.
Like many of the frayed threads that is FriAM, I wonder who else is
following this and not chiming in with some useful parallax?
I wanted to read your "my Pyrrhonian tendencies" as "Pyrrhic" but
nevertheless, thanks for a new word!
My jury is still out. But this is similar to my evaluation of the
Consilience Project, in particular this concept of "human sovereignty":
https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
https://consilienceproject.org/the-digest-issue-9/
https://highexistence.com/jordan-greenhall-humanity-global-collapse-survive/
And I can't put my finger on precisely what's unsettling about it. It
is similar to Rogan's dissonance, where with so much Rogan "content",
you can easily cherry pick both good and bad stuff. But at least with
Rogan, in spite of frequent bouts of arrogance, he's really just some
dude yapping with people. Stein, Hall, Shmachtenberger, et al [⥀]
have something akin to the fevered gaze of zealotry. I get this
feeling from all the Eastern mystic-friendly people (present company
excluded of course, Dave & Kim). What started my worry was
Shmachtenberger's (apparent) alma mater: https://www.miu.edu/.
But backing out of my Pyrrhonian tendencies, my real worry is their
idealism, seemingly fueled by eschatological thinking. Putting so
much emphasis on concepts like "human sovereignty" seems
anthropocentric and a bit arrogant to me. It's directly in the
transhumanist tradition, I guess, but more utopian and less Blade
Runner/Neuromancer. The stylistic difference coheres a little bit
when comparing their feverish narrative(s) with posts by Robin Hanson
or Eliezer Yudkowski.
I don't know. I'd appreciate any opinions offered here.
[⥀] Rutt is of a different category. His affinity for anti-Woke
rhetoric, constant F-bombs, and Weinstein-style alt-right ideas makes
me worry there's also an affinity with the right's obsession with the
anti-vaxx "bodily sovereignty" and maybe even the whackadoodle
"sovereign citizens" thing. Both Rutt and Weinstein are listed as
advisors: https://consilienceproject.org/team/ But I'm obviously OK
with cafeteria style idea farming. Even a broken clock's right twice
per day, right? [[⥁]]
[[⥁]] Of course NOT! Clocks are mechanisms, maybe even the canonical
mechanism. And, as a mechanism, a stopped clock cannot be a clock at
all. So "stopped clock" is self-contradictory ... from which,
classicaly, we can derive any theorem at all. So stopped clocks are
either always right or never right, which means they can't be right 2
times per day. Pffft.
On 2/16/22 10:32, Steve Smith wrote:
I kinda gave up on Rutt... he's not exactly Joe Rogan, but there
was something in his PlanB stuff that left me feeling like he was
snookering me (all of us), even if he himself didn't know it? Maybe
reading too much Rebecca Solnitt has made me hypersensitive to
(other's not my own) mansplaining.
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