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This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).

 This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.
And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.
We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.
This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
When you suspend the assumption that anyone who has been selected by the system *must* understand what they're talking about and/or have something to say, taking the maxim 'fake it till you make it' as a methodological frame, it all looks like competition over formal prowess.
Yet here 'formal' no longer means 'logical', but something closer to 'rhetorical' and 'bureaucratic'. Once you see this, you see that it's exactly the same effect that debating societies and MBAs have had on political and industrial management in the neoliberal era.
Once mighty cognitive institutions (e.g., universities, political parties, and industrial corporations) have gradually devolved ways that are essentially synergetic, as the stupidity in one provides leverage on the growth of stupidity in another. This is the cunning of stupidity.
And so we return to the (social) epistemology of ignorance, but with a couple new points of reference: the anthropologically inspired theories of James C. Scott (cf. https://t.co/kOJPRNzDLj) and @davidgraeber (cf. https://t.co/CMQoBVd44o).
What we find in their work is an account of the socio-epistemic dynamics through which power breeds stupidity and stupidity breeds power, the genesis of stubborn knots around which active ignorance crystallises, generating complex defences that impede the flow of knowledge.
Here's what I mean by synergy between the devolution of cognitive institutions from various domains: the establishment of active ignorance in one place provides points around which alliances form, and through which leverage is exerted to establish it in other places.
The cunning of stupidity climbs the cognitive cliff face by finding purchase wherever it can within a given set of institutions and without. Bureaucratisation and managerialism are secular trends that have spread through the ratcheting the petty personal powers of the ignorant.
The real story of the dissolution and dissipation of the counter-culture of the 60s in the US and Europe is the story of its failure to generate new administrative norms to accompany the ethical, political, and aesthetic ones it had such success with: no persistent counter-power.
Instead we got the slow integration of the acceptable remnants of those norms into a different administrative culture, not simply that which had preceded the 60s (e.g., the party form), but which was born in the 60s, in the form of general purpose management and business schools.
The result was not simply the constitution of a new class of *managers* distinct from industrial workers, whose culture is projected downward through org charts in a way that aligns the interests of *bureaucrats*, but the universalisation of HR as the blueprint for its power.
I think most people on the left appreciate the point that media consolidation created an unprecedentedly homogeneous epistemic landscape in which the formation of political counter-consensus was effectively suppressed. I don't think they see the analogy in the dominance of HR.
I should show them the online forms I've had to fill in to complete academic job applications, whose mind-boggling irrelevance is nothing so much as a trap to discourage those who cannot play the relevant formal game. They build the filters, the obstacles, and the ignorance.
When you arbitrarily empower people who have no idea what it is they're exerting power over, the best intentions in the world will not stop the systemic proliferation of these knots of power/incompetence. The old banality of evil has a new face (https://t.co/XAZxtOFHLP).
I'm neither an anarchist nor a Quaker, but their critiques of these institutional forms, rooted in the autocatalytic growth of power (both centralised/distributed and personal/impersonal), and the serious alternatives they have tried to build are incredibly instructive here.
To return to my story about administrative culture, I think this lets us understand the split between the socially liberal left and the economically progressive left that became formalised in the 90s, and which haunts every attempt to push us out of this autocatalytic nightmare.
Every liberal concession to the counter-culture of the 60s and the liberation movements that have persisted since then has been channeled through the administrative culture of which HR is the nexus. This produces some positive results, but they're always systematically skewed.
For instance, it's great that hiring processes have been evolving in a direction that actively tries to compensate for demographic bias, but when this is merely one aspect of broken filter that otherwise removes the most useful signals, it's a depressingly pyrrhic victory.
Similarly, it's great that the technical language of liberation movements and the deep thinkers who to bring their struggles to self-consciousness disperses into the wider world, but when its principal use is to play out petty micropolitical feuds in formal games, it's maddening.
Managerial overreach, bureaucratic metrics, and quasi-academic jargon are different facets of the same secular process of self-reinforcing power/ignorance. My hope is that academics' perennial hatred of management might form the basis of a teachable moment regarding our own sins.
That's the end of my thoughts on this topic for now, but as usual I will refer you to some more of my extant work on these themes:
1. My recent thread on communicative interaction, dynamic fallacies, and the (synthetic a priori) maxim 'fake it till you make it': https://t.co/2k2QHRYaC7
2. A couple recent threads responding to @cstross, discussing the broken education system and the relation between the plague of terrible metrics and general purpose management: https://t.co/SW2keOnZcv
3. Another recent thread on the Foucault Wars, which lays out the basics of my theory of jargon as pathological technical vocabulary: https://t.co/ZEu1i39QaC
4. A discussion with @Chican3ry about the difficulties of reading philosophy and how to navigate the canon, which includes thoughts on Sellars idea that 'the history of philosophy is the language of philosophy' and a brief critique of 'Sokal Overfitting': https://t.co/NLvAfU0aQT
5. A very old, but theoretically fresh post on 'The Systemic Problems of Contemporary Academia' with an eye to philosophy in particular. This contains my first attempt to think through these issues in information-theoretic terms: https://t.co/sUvKjlf85M
6. Some more recent threads that begin to think through some solutions, by narrowing the problem down to the role of public philosophy:

a) Video Essays as a Philosophical Medium: https://t.co/a6epfzXYLS

b) Enlightenment and Opportunism: https://t.co/V8DJcgf9jm
7. 'The Going Price of Power' (https://t.co/aa2rcbOc40): An outline of the broader economic narrative I'm trying to construct, which ends with a discussion of managerialism and the secular trends I'm complaining about.
Finally, I'm going to reference a couple recent pieces by @OlufemiOTaiwo and @lastpositivist that have been jostling around in my brain as I'm articulating these thoughts:
1. https://t.co/K9z8XUxSIu
2. https://t.co/e76UYs5Zkq
3. https://t.co/ThvjoWStHQ
4. https://t.co/5izUq7ufea
And that's the morning thread! Additional thanks to @deonteleologist for occasioning some of these thoughts.

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pete wolfendale
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So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.


I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.

Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.

I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.

We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
@paulkreinerhere @schulzb589 I accept that I haven't given a proof of this impossibility, but I believe the concerns I've laid out could probably be formalised in a way that would lead to one, though it'd involve something like a combinatoric diagonalisation similar to Russell's paradox.

@schulzb589 To state my issue in a more philosophical way, I think the desire to combinatorially totalise mathematical syntax is an effect of something like a transcendental illusion, what I sometimes call the Mythos of Logos.

@schulzb589 It's the Leibnizian desire to obviate creative dialogical interaction (dialectical reason) by providing a deductive system (monological reason) that would allow us to simply 'shut up and calculate'; the desire to obviate the pragmatic autonomy of discovery by automating it.

@schulzb589 It doesn't matter how many times this desire is betrayed by its own formal tools: Russell, Godel, Turing, Chaitin, etc.; it doesn't matter that these betrayals are what drive the externalisation of thought by producing new tools to automate computation. It always comes back.

@schulzb589 The desire to brute force reality, be it mathematical or empirical, is always lying in wait, whispering seemingly 'reasonable' lies about what is and isn't rationally possible. This is as close as I come to endorsing Heidegger and Adorno's worries about technoscience.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
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pete wolfendale
pete wolfendale
@deontologistics
I think one way of looking at the economic pathologies of our society, without using words like 'capitalism' and 'rentiership', is to talk about inequities in the distribution of risk. Some have more taste for risk than others, sure, but risk is not distributed on this basis.

In the UK, so much of our political troubles come from the growth in the landlord class, who if nothing else, wield disproportionate power relative to their social worth: at one and the same time claim to be martyrs to the risk of investment, and demand these risks be minimised.

Of course, it's possible to make claims like this: e.g., nurses have every right to claim that they shoulder not merely more risk than most, but far more risk than is strictly necessary. The pandemic has made this brutally obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

However one chooses to tally up compensation for this social role, be it financial, social, or some other privilege, it's pretty obvious that every last 'essential worker' is shouldering more societal risk than most non-essential workers compensated far better than they.

The way this trade off gets (implicitly) articulated as 'pay vs. purpose' is one of the enduring insights of @davidgraeber's Bullshit Jobs. Yet there are many essential workers who don't even get the illusion of purpose in compensation for personal risk (e.g., warehouse staff).
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@deontologistics
My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

The characteristic Pete thought is: wait a minute, this whole area is dominated by an assumption that no one seems to be questioning, and I've got two options to express that: i) outline the logic of the issue in a quick and compressed way, ii) write a small book with references.

The discipline seems to want something in between these poles every single time, and this makes me extremely anxious because I feel (with good reason) like any partially referential engagement with the issue will get instantly torpedoed by anyone outside its referential remit.

To repeat something I've said before: I'm actually quite good at being *concise*, I just find it very hard to be *brief*, because most of the thoughts I have don't permit brevity. Consider what your (referential) reactions are to this brief piece:

One of the main genres of publication I've actually excelled in over the years is dictionary articles, which I take a lot of joy in writing, and include some of the pieces of which I'm most proud. Consider this one on the crux of Meillassoux's project:
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On December 25 Mr Pool retweeted August 16 message about the Phoenix and that the worst was still on the horizon to come. 1/*


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Brad started it on December 22 (1/3 posts (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 3/*


And immediately the SEC followed dropping the bomb (1.3 billions (Don't say? Sure) = 13 = Plan B). 4/*


FUD materializes, Bitstamp is one of the first that haltes XRP trading and so on. 5/*
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"The engineers on my team just want to code. They don't want to have anything to do with product. They just want specs. What do I do?"

1/n Are you asking them do to X *and* do their "day job" as defined by their managers (and frankly your roadmap) ?

If so, start there...

2/n Do they have a reason to believe that doing X will in any way improve the quality of the product and make their lives easier? Have they ever seen X "work" ?

Show don't tell.

3/n Is there average day/week a quagmire of unnecessary meetings, wading through tech debt, struggling to get *anything* to work ... and jumping through process hoops to prove their worth?

If so...no they will not have bandwidth.

4/n How do incentives work on the engineering team? Maybe they want to help, but their "grade" is determined by something altogether different.

"I'd love to, but I am on the hook to deliver [some project] this quarter to make a good impression..."

Talk to eng management.

5/n Have they had any time to practice?

Or did they get thrown into the deep end the first time they were given a shot ... expected to brainstorm on demand, be as vocal as practiced PdMs and designers, and "participate" !

Make it safe to practice. Reasonable expectations.
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Nonlawyer Explainer Thread: On Keeping One's Mouth Shut

It occurs to me that certain private-jet-flying seditionists who continue to yammer on Twitter about their DC excursions provide us with the opportunity to do a little hypo to explore the benefits of silence.

So let's explore what a hypothetical law enforcement interview *might* look like in this situation. I'm not - I want to make clear - drawing from experience as a lawyer here.

I AM NOT A CRIMINAL LAW ATTORNEY.

Instead, I'm mostly drawing from discussions with my father-in-law.

My father in law is a now-retired homicide cop, and we've had a lot of discussions (especially since I started law school) about criminals and interviews over the years.

So with that in mind, let's look at this hypo.

ALSO - Simplifying for Twitter character counts.

*Knock*
*Door opens*
Agent: Ms [Name]? I'm Agent Smith, and this is Agent Jones. We're with Agency. We'd like to talk to you if you've got a minute.

Ms X: Oh? Is this about that thing at the Capitol?

[Yes, it seems insane but if you're worried about something specific and the cops show up, blurting out something like that is totally a thing that can happen.]
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@deontologistics
My morning thought. I think what's most incompatible about the way I think and the journal article format as a means of capturing and validating thought is that I have a completely different sense of the relation between tentativeness, rigor, and informatic compression.

The characteristic Pete thought is: wait a minute, this whole area is dominated by an assumption that no one seems to be questioning, and I've got two options to express that: i) outline the logic of the issue in a quick and compressed way, ii) write a small book with references.

The discipline seems to want something in between these poles every single time, and this makes me extremely anxious because I feel (with good reason) like any partially referential engagement with the issue will get instantly torpedoed by anyone outside its referential remit.

To repeat something I've said before: I'm actually quite good at being *concise*, I just find it very hard to be *brief*, because most of the thoughts I have don't permit brevity. Consider what your (referential) reactions are to this brief piece:

One of the main genres of publication I've actually excelled in over the years is dictionary articles, which I take a lot of joy in writing, and include some of the pieces of which I'm most proud. Consider this one on the crux of Meillassoux's project:
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Quantum causal loops

https://t.co/emX8OxKPl0

#loops #quantum

Large-scale commodity farming accelerating climate change in the Amazon

https://t.co/v3gA7OTP9E

#ClimateChange #forest #farm

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#glacier #lakes #ClimateChange

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Rani Jindan Kaur, wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh had illegitimate relations with Lal Singh (PM of Ranjit Singh). Along with Lal Singh, she attacked Jammu, burnt - https://t.co/EfjAq59AyI


Hindu villages of Jasrota, caused rebellion in Jammu, attacked Kishtwar.

Ancestors of Raja Ranjit Singh, The Sansi Tribe used to give daughters as concubines to Jahangir.


The Ludhiana Political Agency (Later NW Fronties Prov) was formed by less than 4000 British soldiers who advanced from Delhi and reached Ludhiana, receiving submissions of all sikh chiefs along the way. The submission of the troops of Raja of Lahore (Ranjit Singh) at Ambala.

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YarKhan. (ref was proudly shared by a sikh on twitter)
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And idiot Hindus place him along Maharana, Prithviraj and Shivaji as saviours of Dharma.
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Whatever political meeting or conference is held in this ground, we come here on the same night or morning hours to collect the Liquor bottles to sell in the scrap shop for 50 paisa to 1 rupee per bottle and we used to earn Rs 200 to Rs 400 on each such event.

Even in the last DMK meeting the very next day we collected around 1500 bottles. But for Modi's BJP meeting, we could not find even a single bottle in the whole ground. We are coming around and around and not a single bottle in any corner of the G Corner ground in Trichy,

we are much disappointed, sir!". Police seem were stunned and pleasantly surprised. This is what Modi magic does in this nation. Modi is the one who can lead our nation and make everyone prosper with hardwork in right direction and proper approach.

This funny but interesting anecdote was published by a statewide local daily Dinamalar. I have just translated and posting it here for rest of the nation;
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1/ Here’s a list of conversational frameworks I’ve picked up that have been helpful.

Please add your own.

2/ The Magic Question: "What would need to be true for you


3/ On evaluating where someone’s head is at regarding a topic they are being wishy-washy about or delaying.

“Gun to the head—what would you decide now?”

“Fast forward 6 months after your sabbatical--how would you decide: what criteria is most important to you?”

4/ Other Q’s re: decisions:

“Putting aside a list of pros/cons, what’s the *one* reason you’re doing this?” “Why is that the most important reason?”

“What’s end-game here?”

“What does success look like in a world where you pick that path?”

5/ When listening, after empathizing, and wanting to help them make their own decisions without imposing your world view:

“What would the best version of yourself do”?
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