Yes, that's exactly how I feel, like it might be a long con. But it's not fair to
assume bad faith. Every single person involved may have good intentions. I suppose
I'm focused on Daniel Shmachtenberger because he seems to have appeared out of
nowhere in ~2017. If it's a con, he could be victim or perpetrator, perhaps an
inscrutable hybrid as with Ben Shapiro
<https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/12/how-hollywood-invented-ben-shapiro>.
If it's not a con, it could be the typical result of incessant ego-stroking of a
plastic intelligence. I feel a bit sorry for seriously bright but naive people who
land in a pool of fawning sycophants. Can you imagine being surrounded by people
oohing and awing over your every carefully constructed sentence? Nobody could resist
that stroking.
A friend of mine recently contacted me after a long ghosting. He laid into me
... like really flat out ... about how much of a jerk I am and how I'd
intellectually bullied him over our entire relationship, etc. I was quite
surprised he'd been stewing in these juices for so long because I'm quite clear
about my adversarial stance and post-truth tendencies. So, after he was done
venting, I reminded him of these things that I *thought* I'd made clear from
the beginning. I then apologized for my assholery because clearly I had not
done a good enough job explaining, not only *that* I'm fundamentally critical,
but also *why* I'm fundamentally critical. (Turns out he later admitted I was a
convenient scapegoat for a whole series of difficult shit he'd been through
over the past few years. But the lesson remains.) He is, I'd argue, as
brilliant as Schmachtenberger or anyone I've ever met. But my friend has
cultivated a core of true, truly skeptical, truly honest, friends who are
willing to dig into the ideas he bounces. And when kneading out a difficult to
realize innovation like the company he's been building, that constant critical
evaluation takes a psychological and emotional toll. That he's pushed through,
however, means his success will be robust and have deep, intentional, impact.
I can't imagine what it must be like for someone who doesn't have that core
group of curmudgeons keeping you honest with their constant
[abusive|bullying|whatever] criticism or, worse yet, if they were fawning
sycophants. What hell that must be.
Anyway, I'm not saying any of this has anything to do with Consilience Project.
But it's a tangent that, by typing it out and submitting it for criticism here,
may help me fine-grain my worry into a concrete criticism of them.
On 2/16/22 19:10, Steve Smith wrote:
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.
--
glen
When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.
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