Leaving cults: I've heard some accounts. One particular dynamic is that leaving a cult you're born into is profoundly different from leaving a cult you joined. In the former case, you made a committment to it, and were converted. In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepencies.
The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong.
The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned. There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
Of course, another option is to replace one mythical system with another....
The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care. On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic.... On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.
Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.
People's interests are frequently rivalrous. Government helps balance those interests.
Mind all that, getting some sense of what is or isn't in the ultimate common interest is a really good thing to have, and I don't think we've got that. A tremendous number of my questions come down to "what's good, what's bad", which then requires some basis for determining what is good or bad. In AI there's concern over numerous aspects, one of which is the Paperclip Maximiser scenario: even an otherwise benign AI whose only directive is to maximise creation of paperclips is ultimately an existential threat. Our social goal measures -- GDP, profit, etc., seem problematic. There are other measures of net function, White's Law (total energy throughput) comes to mind. Balancing present and future flows is another.
Complexity of legislation and legal matters is yet another element, though of course, that complexity feeds on itself as it keeps the lawyers in pay.
Assessing narratives: It's not enough to have internal consistency, you also need to have accurate anchors to reality. What drives me most nuts is conspiracy theory crud that's got some foundational basis. There's an example, "It's all a Rich Man's Game", a ~3h 40m YouTube video which connects the 2007/8 financial crisis, 9/11, the Bushes, JFK, WWII, Hitler, etc., etc., into one continuous narrative. There are parts that are actually quite unambiguously true (corporate America's involvement and collaboration with Nazi Germany: IBM, GM, Ford, AT&T, Coca-Cola, and more) for example. But there are also parts that are utterly fabricated (or at least for which I could find no documentation) and others for which either false connections were drawn or very selective quotation was used (JFK's "Secret Society" speech -- about the USSR, not some dark Skull and Bones society plot). I didn't find any known-to-me contradictions until about 20 minutes in, but then they started popping up all over, and there may well be earlier ones. I'll look up vargas's posts....
There's also a reason I feel reputation has to be part of any widespread assessment system. If you've got a source who's known to propogate bullshit, then you do not trust them by default. If someone you do trust says "actually, this looks like it has merits", you might change your mind. The question of who you do trust is an interesting one, as trust can be (and will be) betrayed. But in general it's food for a while. Admissions of error are another crucial element (a chief reason I refuse to engage at length with those who cannot do so).
There's also the question of story relevance. To pluck from current headlines, I turned away from the BBC a day or so back when they insisted on spending 10+ minutes discussing the "clown scare". I don't find that to be worth however many millions of global ears the BBC might claim, and there are other stories worth covering.
On Matrix & cross-validation: I actually think diving in to minutiae is the wrong approach. It's attractive, and sometimes yields benefits, but also seems to be a common trait of the crackpot. Instead, get multiple accounts from multiple witnesses and compare them. To take a Biblical instance, there's the story of Susanna from the Book of Daniel: a bathing wife is accused by lecherous voyeurs of adultry after refusing sex with them. She is about to be put to death when Daniel insists on questioning the accusers, separately. They proceed to identify different (and very-different sized) trees under which she met her supposed lover. Susanna is set free and the accusers executed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_(Book_of_Daniel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_(Book_of_Daniel)
I've had my own similar experiences in examining stories from others, sometimes multiple people, sometimes the same.
Podesta emails: Another interesting situation. Here you've got the subtle conspiracist's dream: a vast trove of documents from which either slight alteration or selective quotation can prove highly destructive. It's a primary reason why I'm leary of having an extensive online trove of billions of people's mundane activities. The size of the trove itself makes ready assessment difficult (the Panama Papers and other similar leaks have much the same problem), unless you can find a specific narrative thread OR a specific critical moment or element within the documents to make your case.
Some years ago I found myself part to a legal proceeding in which the opposing party was accusing my side of specific actions, though with little other than testimonial evidence. What the other side didn't realise was that my team had access (and evidentiary claim) to a large document archive which established motive and lack of credibility. From a set of many thousands of documents, defending counsel presented three documents. Witness for the plaintif first established that the documents were theirs (credibility). The next two presented the crucial evidence necessary to utterly demolish the case. The key I took from this was that if you can get to the very heart of the matter, that's often all you need.
In the Podesta case, I've seen one instance where a published opinion piece (not written by Podesta) was claimed by Wikileaks and Trump supporters to have been Podesta's own words. They quite manifestly weren't (fully independent verification trivially possible), which impugns the credibility of Trump's team (hardly necessary) and Wikileaks (a massive blunder and mis-step on their part) tremendously.
A particular risk of mass document dumps is the Gish Gallop. In my courtroom case, courtroom discipline itself imposed harsh limits on testimony: you've only a few brief hours in many instances, and going beyond this with exhaustive documentation frequently isn't possible. There are exceptions to this rule, but those are very well-funded trials (and quite expensive). The ability of a disinterested third party to impose that discipline is crucial.
Good thoughts again.
Sorry about the delay in replying. I was distracted by work and the online civil war, and I didn't want to take a hurried scan over your post since you went to some effort.
> Leaving cults .... In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepancies.
That is true. One day I was struggling with something I read. It just didn't gel with my beliefs and I couldn't refute it. It just made too much sense to be false. It had too much power to explain the world. So that's the kind of discrepancy that can happen.
The reasons why most leave the faith are rather more prosaic and I feel they are held back because they didn't have an intellectual reason for leaving. This may be arrogant of me but I feel it's like leaving Enron because management was interfering with your sex life or you had an emotional spat with a coworker. There are better reasons to leave! I myself will never go back but I think the reason why some people feel lost after leaving is that they didn't refute what they had been taught, they are still part trapped and this is distressing to them. I never felt so happy in my life as when I left and it was like everything suddenly made sense. It might seem cheesy but that is a kind of 'enlightenment'.
> The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong
We see that with ISIS. The most volatile ones are the new ones. Something to do with group dynamics and hierarchy.
> The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned.
Have you read Rene Girard? His lens is Catholic theology but he has interesting secular ideas.
> There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."
You probably already know this but that is a core belief of the neoreactionary, who believes the truth to be sometimes painful or horrible but always all important e.g. the red pills. Not coincidentally they refer to their belief system as 'The dark enlightenment', and see it as a (partial) critique of the Enlightenment.
> another option is to replace one mythical system with another....
This is a slight tangent but there is this excellent audio drama called 'Our Fair City'. In a recent episode the molepeople begin to rebel against their human masters. In a few short phrases they encapsulated this. The young recruits urge the moleperson leader to take on the role of 'Queen' (very radical change!) but she rejects this out of hand as being little better than being under the thrall of the humans. Then grudgingly she seems to acknowledge it's at least some progress away from enslavement. I laughed, but I also thought to myself that wow, that's kind of how it really happens. We cannot visualize the spectrum of future possibles or the 'golden city' because we're all down here in the mud. It takes an act of some faith just to move to a slightly more elevated plane. I can't say why that is. Supposing our population shrunk to 500 million on earth, I still think we'd have the institutions we have now, I don't think we'd devolve back to a more primitive state unless our population and knowledge base was very seriously damaged. That might seem hopeful but I also do not see us making a grand leap into the future towards some golden city, I really don't know we have that kind of imagination today. The Communists were the last people to hope for such with their scientific socialism. Hopes of utopia appear quite dead in the present and I think that is a problem despite the problems it sometimes caused. Apathy reigns now.
> The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care.
If you're independently wealthy it doesn't matter, but if you must work to live then I have to say to you that you'll need to nudge your ideas into paying rent in some way. Books, podcasts, t-shirts, lectures, software, something. If your ideas aren't close to gestation then there's nothing wrong with working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, there are many jobs not particularly joyous but which give the opportunity to think. It is good to have something concrete since this gives a metric to work with and helps gain confidence. It might be difficult but you know there is nothing more exhilarating than something from your mind fleshed out into the physical world. I admire what you're doing because I know it is difficult and intellectuals are unfortunately plagued by self-doubt. This I consider rather unfortunate because while many intellectuals and their ideas stay anonymous, the fields are far less barren than most people think. There really are not that many intellectual explorers out there (and most of them are defenseless since they are dead).
> On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic....
I'd say to you that if you develop your ideas in the right form (a series of explanatory animated youtube videos) or you manage to hit the right chord then you'll automatically obtain a network of helpers.
Peter Thiel has worked his butt off giving countless presentations on the Stagnation Hypothesis. Look at this methods. He uses simple but irrefutable points built into logical chains of reasoning and repeats this to each audience until he has each line perfect and ready to roll off the tongue. If you go this route I recommend you read Cicero's Rhetorica Ad Herennium, it's the go to book for this method.
Curtis Yarvin has managed to spread his ideas by dint of being provocative, but also by using unusual joined up thinking that makes me go 'huh, I didn't see that before' or more likely 'I don't want to believe this but it kind of explains some things.
Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't start with LessWrong, but with an interesting Harry Potter fan fiction. Unlikely but it worked.
Julian Assange got his ideas out there by pissing off the powerful.
You get the idea, signal to your tribe and ye shall find them waiting.
> On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.
This is what I was saying above. Many of us have similar observations or insights and don't realize they are held in common. You have your tribe, it's out there. It remains to collect them together under a banner. To get there initially you would need a holistic set of statements that are consistent as a sort of axiomatic base.
> Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.
That's an interesting metaphor.
However I am troubled by it because it means the system could and likely does waste energies it could be objectively devote to more effective uses. If every time I lay a building block and tomorrow you remove it, we could play that game forever. I think this is behind the frustration many of us feel about politics. How do you distinguish between balance of interests and plain wastefulness?
I'll reply more tomorrow, it is well past time for sleeping!