Glen -
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 appreciate this perspective, but I don't need to assume good or bad
faith to continue to read and try to parse. It makes it *easier* if I
do... a heavy pruning of the parse/possibility tree.
When I first started reading the first (earliest) article I was mildly
taken in by the goals/ideas they were presenting. I *wanted* it to be
as "good faith" as it was articulate and aligned with my own hopes and
fears. Reporting only on my instincts/intuition after reading it all,
I have a strong feeling there is a deep vein of "bad faith" in there
somewhere... your continued analysis about the role as a possible
victim of yet-more-capable perpetrators and about the risk of
sycophantic ego-stroking, etc. leading to somewhat innocent
perpetration of a long-con provides me with a useful balance to keep
that intuition from becoming a flat assumption.
I myself have repeatedly been (and continue to be) a victim of
structurally embedded bad faith. Free Market Capitalism, Mutual
Assured Destruction, CowboysvIndians, IsraelisvArabs, MegaScience,
HyperRationality, Reaganism, Clintonism, Technophilia, Technocracy,
RuggedIndividualism, etc. have all captured me in their own ways at
different times, only to prove to be flawed in obvious enough ways that
when I see through it I realize that I myself have been complicit in
their spread and *should have known better*. Gawdess only knows which
one of satan's horses I'm riding these days?
Meanwhile, I'm glad the Consilience folks opened the questions so
(relatively) clearly, and look forward to hearing other *answers* and
more importantly *discussion* that might spin off from there. I have
some thoughts growing on the topic but won't just dump them out here to
pollute the forum further.
- Steve
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.
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