7 ms·

Epistemic Minor Leagues

110 points by zby 5y ago

2mol 5y ago
It amuses me to no end to read all these nuanced (dis)agreements, but then miss the obvious connection: HN is exactly one of those proposed intellectual leagues! A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).
pmdulaney 5y ago
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  I am not sure if the article is presenting it as an unalloyed good, but I certainly agree with you. We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important). You can look at some philosophers of science who have thinking very much along these lines, ie. https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html
wolverine876 5y ago
> politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well. Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).
- strulovich 5y ago
  Who are some of those experts in your opinion? Sounds like an interesting read perhaps.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    The Monkey Cage column at the Washington Post is written by political scientists (generally, afaik), and will reference others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/ The Duck of Minerva is a good blog, with contributors who are at the level of full professors at leading universities https://www.duckofminerva.com/ https://www.duckofminerva.com/ Political Science Quarterly can be fantastic, though being a quarterly, won't be tackling news from the last 24 hours (but I think we have enough of that). For a different perspective, the Lowy Interpreter blog at Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, has excellent, expert analysis from a often strikingly different geopolitical point of view: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter Other non-partisan think tanks can be a great source. U of Pennsylvania has a ranking of them which, while I wouldn't take verbatim, can provide a good starting point.
    - mpalczewski 5y ago
      What makes these people experts? It looks like some of this is that they are professors, or they cite each other, which is rather circular. Are there testable predictions, or some utility to those who aren't political scientists?
      - mistermann 5y ago
        I would think it would be a relative scale, whoever are the top x% (by some measure) would by The Experts, by definition. As a terrible analogy, the top 10% of a fruit crop (or whatever) for a given season are "the best", by definition. It would be lovely if we had a kind of absolute scale to measure by (as is often done in sports and other less complex domains), but that is not possible. However, what is possible (or should be, to some degree) is that (more) people could think from an absolute perspective, which I believe can substantially change how some things appear. How you would go about doing this though is not obvious, to me.
bobthechef 5y ago
Expertise is not such a cut-and-dry matter. Pretense is more rampant than one would like to admit. And what good does it do you that someone else knows something? It only becomes YOUR knowledge when YOU know it. In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way. Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo? So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.
- sdhfjg 5y ago
  >Compared to infinity, all dicks are small... Wisdom for the ages.
jrm4 5y ago
This rather long article saying nothing (weird, because I love his other stuff) reinforces my continually growing belief that "general knowledge" is not a particularly clear or useful construct, especially beyond a certain threshhold. (This is also why A.I. is wildly and absurdly overblown.) There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  > (weird, because I love his other stuff) Mind an example? I'm curious, because I so far have not been blown away by the writing of the rationalist-adjacent subcommunity.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    Addendum. Now that I go back and read it, it was that I remember loving it back when I read it, and offhand for me I'm realizing it was before I discovered Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who does most of what this guy does, but way better; e.g. the basic prinicple of "skin-in-the-game" very easily does the plodding work of "Beware The Man..."
  - mistermann 5y ago
    A few of my favorites: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... "Top 10": https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
  - jrm4 5y ago
    This was the one for me. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
  - 5y ago
dash2 5y ago
Thomas Hobbes got there first, he called curiosity “a lust of the mind“.
jkingsbery 5y ago
I often here the analogy to sports when it comes to expertise. And if it often applies, but not always. Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1] We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly. Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't. > My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term. I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority 3. https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-19-coronavirus-8a839c179c330c56fa46a763b7286a7f https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-1... 4. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-science-coronavirus-pandemic-c0c594f9060f676c0ea48c2d1c69daec https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-scien...
anonu 5y ago
> It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it. QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...
- mistermann 5y ago
  Interestingly, from the perspective of the individual, the real world is also an augmented reality version of of the real world.
TeeMassive 5y ago
> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.
TruthsIsBad 5y ago
Perhaps the alternative is that if you know anything abrasive will be ignored or derailed by others then you’ll automatically not share knowledge and then you don’t learn. If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol. It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.
efitz 5y ago
“There's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.” Cracked me up. Visions of minor league math competitions, etc.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Most math competitions are effectively minor league math competitions
distortedsignal 5y ago
> ... what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  It pays just about as well as the minor leagues, too.
efitz 5y ago
I disagree with several of the premises of the article. There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way. Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things. For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips. If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies. Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy. My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then. The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.
- Lochleg 5y ago
  QAnon exists for the same reason Alex Jones exists. Sensation sells. You can still be an (entirely rational) "prepper" if you want to be. Yet, it's routinely associated with right-wing extremism and delegitimized as a movement. By the same token, you can probably try to be an independent, investigative journalist even if you are bound to not survive scrutiny, especially if you let foundational research practices and sourcing slip.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Kosirich 5y ago
Respectfully disagree with the article. There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been. A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL. I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing: Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?" Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?" Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?" Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over" Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share" Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT

110 points by zby 5y ago

2mol 5y ago

It amuses me to no end to read all these nuanced (dis)agreements, but then miss the obvious connection: HN is exactly one of those proposed intellectual leagues! A place in which curious people explore and debate their common interests, where you don't have to be an intellectual superstar to participate (although those occasionally show up).

pmdulaney 5y ago

> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. This is true, but I'm not sure that viewed from the larger perspective this is an unalloyed good. Sure we can do without crackpots. But do we really want the only voices that matter to be those belonging to persons with "PhD" attached to their names?

whimsicalism 5y ago
I am not sure if the article is presenting it as an unalloyed good, but I certainly agree with you. We need to be thoughtful about how we design "epistemic communities." The current approach centered around normal institutions/academia I think is flawed (although I do think professional scientists are very important). You can look at some philosophers of science who have thinking very much along these lines, ie. https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html https://www.liamkofibright.com/research.html

wolverine876 5y ago

> politics: that rare area where there are no real experts, and it's every man for himself There are experts, but things are so politicized that everyone dislikes them (the acts don't agree with anyone's partisan position) and reads what is appealing. I think that was the OP's point, but it's a dangerous notion to think we all know politics roughly equally well. Political science can be highly informative and predictive, as can research in adjacent fields such as international relations. It transforms my understanding of what others are saying (with partisans being reliably absurd).

strulovich 5y ago
Who are some of those experts in your opinion? Sounds like an interesting read perhaps.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  The Monkey Cage column at the Washington Post is written by political scientists (generally, afaik), and will reference others. https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/monkey-cage/ The Duck of Minerva is a good blog, with contributors who are at the level of full professors at leading universities https://www.duckofminerva.com/ https://www.duckofminerva.com/ Political Science Quarterly can be fantastic, though being a quarterly, won't be tackling news from the last 24 hours (but I think we have enough of that). For a different perspective, the Lowy Interpreter blog at Australian think tank The Lowy Institute, has excellent, expert analysis from a often strikingly different geopolitical point of view: https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter Other non-partisan think tanks can be a great source. U of Pennsylvania has a ranking of them which, while I wouldn't take verbatim, can provide a good starting point.
  - mpalczewski 5y ago
    What makes these people experts? It looks like some of this is that they are professors, or they cite each other, which is rather circular. Are there testable predictions, or some utility to those who aren't political scientists?
    - mistermann 5y ago
      I would think it would be a relative scale, whoever are the top x% (by some measure) would by The Experts, by definition. As a terrible analogy, the top 10% of a fruit crop (or whatever) for a given season are "the best", by definition. It would be lovely if we had a kind of absolute scale to measure by (as is often done in sports and other less complex domains), but that is not possible. However, what is possible (or should be, to some degree) is that (more) people could think from an absolute perspective, which I believe can substantially change how some things appear. How you would go about doing this though is not obvious, to me.

bobthechef 5y ago

Expertise is not such a cut-and-dry matter. Pretense is more rampant than one would like to admit. And what good does it do you that someone else knows something? It only becomes YOUR knowledge when YOU know it. In any case, seeking knowledge isn't a race. It's about YOU personally trying to grow in wisdom. You don't read Aristotle because you'll "beat" someone at philosophy. Millions of people have read him before you were even born. You read him so that YOU become a better human person. Our lives are a journey of coming to know the truth, or at least they ought to be, and that means a steady resolution of our initial confusion. This requires the cultivation of virtue because vice corrupts motives and moves them away from the steadfast pursuit of truth toward lesser things in an improper way. Life isn't about measuring dicks. It's about happiness which is about becoming more fully what you are as an individual human being. Is the life of a simple carpenter who does the best he can worthless because he isn't Michelangelo? So get rid of your pride and the need to be special and you will be set free from countless miseries. Compared to infinity, all dicks are small and only the prideful man would fall into despair over that realization. He wants fame or adulation from everyone. Focus on your own life and the world around you. Be the salt of the earth to those around you and profit from their good. Stop chasing illusions.

sdhfjg 5y ago
>Compared to infinity, all dicks are small... Wisdom for the ages.

jrm4 5y ago

This rather long article saying nothing (weird, because I love his other stuff) reinforces my continually growing belief that "general knowledge" is not a particularly clear or useful construct, especially beyond a certain threshhold. (This is also why A.I. is wildly and absurdly overblown.) There are groups and pockets of people who believe sets of things; some are more robust than others probably because they get tested via skin-in-the-game means.

whimsicalism 5y ago
> (weird, because I love his other stuff) Mind an example? I'm curious, because I so far have not been blown away by the writing of the rationalist-adjacent subcommunity.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Addendum. Now that I go back and read it, it was that I remember loving it back when I read it, and offhand for me I'm realizing it was before I discovered Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who does most of what this guy does, but way better; e.g. the basic prinicple of "skin-in-the-game" very easily does the plodding work of "Beware The Man..."
- mistermann 5y ago
  A few of my favorites: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin... "Top 10": https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
- jrm4 5y ago
  This was the one for me. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
- 5y ago

dash2 5y ago

Thomas Hobbes got there first, he called curiosity “a lust of the mind“.

jkingsbery 5y ago

I often here the analogy to sports when it comes to expertise. And if it often applies, but not always. Epistemology is simply the study of "the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues." [1] We all do epistemology, all the time, whether we choose to think about it or not. In sports, we have minor leagues, where the stakes are lower. As the political climate (and the unfortunate affect of things like QAnon) demonstrates, the stakes aren't always lower just because epistemology is done poorly. Something similar can be said of rhetoric. I applaud this article for not falling a trap we have also seen too often recently, the Appeal to Authority [2]. The author judges someone else's argument solely on the merits, rather than that person's background. To steal the original authors metaphor: Babe Ruth still had to go up to the plate and take a swing. Babe Ruth was an expert baseball player because he hit a lot of home runs. It would bizarre if the opposite were true - that is, if Babe Ruth was given a lot of home runs because he was an expert. And yet, we have experts that try to dismiss plausible (perhaps likely, perhaps unlikely, but nevertheless plausible) scenarios without any explanation as to why they choose to do that. [3][4] And it is incumbent of all of us in a free society to be able to read something presented to us and realize, though we may not be experts, even if the conclusion is right, the argument along the way isn't. > My point is we're all engaged in this kind of desperate project of trying to feel like we're having new important insights, in a world full of people who are much smarter than we are... Partly this is all for the greater good... I would argue "intellectual exercise" is a better term. I've come to the conclusion that even if it's not read by many people, public professions are still valuable. As an American who is generally more "conservative" but also finds Trump abhorrent, I wish I had written more random internet posts in the summer of 2015 about how, even from a traditional conservative perspective, Trump is terrible, for the World, for the US, and for Conservatism. Perhaps it would have changed a few people's minds. Maybe it wouldn't have changed anyone's minds, but planted a seed of doubt in people's blind faith for that man. I'm a complete amateur when it comes to all the relevant subjects. Yet, it still seems like it would have been a good thing to do. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority 3. https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-19-coronavirus-8a839c179c330c56fa46a763b7286a7f https://apnews.com/article/who-report-animals-source-covid-1... 4. https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-science-coronavirus-pandemic-c0c594f9060f676c0ea48c2d1c69daec https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-world-news-health-scien...

anonu 5y ago

> It's the feeling that you have something to contribute to the great project of figuring out the secret structure of the world, and that other people in a shared community of knowledge-seeking will appreciate you for it. QAnon exists, in part, because of the metaverse. The metaverse can be viewed as some augmented reality version of of the real world. Conversations and ideas that foment and thrive in the metaverse eventually make their way back to reality. You can (mostly) thank Facebook for that...

mistermann 5y ago
Interestingly, from the perspective of the individual, the real world is also an augmented reality version of of the real world.

TeeMassive 5y ago

> Their only hopes of being taken seriously as an Expert - a position our culture treats as the height of dignity - is to create a complete alternate system of knowledge, ungrounded in any previous system, where they can end up as an expert on the Lizard Papacy. I couldn't help but notice the resemblance with how postmodernism and critical theory and their derivatives have infiltrated Academia.

TruthsIsBad 5y ago

Perhaps the alternative is that if you know anything abrasive will be ignored or derailed by others then you’ll automatically not share knowledge and then you don’t learn. If people who are intelligent can’t handle ideas that aren’t “palatable” to them, what’s the fucking purpose of your academy? lol. It’s like asking atheists to care about your church’s rules. You’re just stupid for not understanding that they aren’t participating with you any longer.

efitz 5y ago

“There's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.” Cracked me up. Visions of minor league math competitions, etc.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Most math competitions are effectively minor league math competitions

distortedsignal 5y ago

> ... what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? It's called bar trivia and it's awesome! I'm not a super smart dude, but I love going to a bar trivia and seeing what I get right (despite never having watched the show, I guessed that the motor home in The Walking Dead was a Winnebago) and what I frustratingly get wrong (despite being a huge fan of pop-punk music, I couldn't remember the title to Green Day's hit song Basket Case).

tomjakubowski 5y ago
It pays just about as well as the minor leagues, too.

efitz 5y ago

I disagree with several of the premises of the article. There are lots of interesting things to learn that are well within the intellectual horsepower of average people, esp if you give people a short primer or refresher on experiment design. For example, there is a guy “Project Farm” on YouTube that does practical experiments to see which hand tool is better. Are his experiments rigorous enough for a scientific journal? Probably not, but he’s transparent about the design and conduct of his experiments and develops useful information in an entertaining way. Put another way, just as there are precious few people to lead the NBA in scoring or discover the Higgs boson, doesn’t mean that there isn’t room for the rest of us to do our own corresponding modest things. For every person who patents a process for the economical industrial scale production of graphene there are scores of relatively normal people who invent practical stuff like wrenches and paper clips. If I have convinced you that this premise is wrong, then the argument against QAnon falls apart, as the argument posits that the only way for normies to get their intellectual itch scratched is to invent conspiracies. Personally I think the argument is wrong for other reasons: I’ve met some QAnon people and there are way more consumers than producers; it appears that QAnon is not only or even primarily about “solving” the conspiracy. My opinion is that QAnon is about as serious as anything else that emerged from 4Chan and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was an elaborate hoax with some giggly drunk people writing posts now and then. The people I know who subscribe to QAnon theories are people who feel powerless but desperately want there to exist a “5th column” who will take down the tyrannical forces of evil that they perceive but don’t know how to effectively fight. They really do believe that the generals are about to March in and arrest Biden for (insert latest crazy legal theory here) and re-install Trump. It’s a form of political fantasy.

Lochleg 5y ago
QAnon exists for the same reason Alex Jones exists. Sensation sells. You can still be an (entirely rational) "prepper" if you want to be. Yet, it's routinely associated with right-wing extremism and delegitimized as a movement. By the same token, you can probably try to be an independent, investigative journalist even if you are bound to not survive scrutiny, especially if you let foundational research practices and sourcing slip.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Kosirich 5y ago

Respectfully disagree with the article. There is a not a "minor league" version of competing for Nobel in Physics or Chemistry but it also doesn't have to exist as it is not what those people are after. From my POV and experience, what broke down are communities and role of discussion and gossip in those same communities. The popular "Have you heard X about Y" use to apply to a local teacher, major, bar owner ect. and more connection people would find between the X and prominent the figure would be in the community, the more engaged the conversation would have been. A conversation would go like this Today it's about pop stars, politicians, scientist aka people you (them) will never meet in RL. I imagine this would be a typical example of conversations that are missing: Person A: "Have you heard about our major, he is sleeping with the shop owners daughter?" Person B: "Oh no, really? Doesn't she have a child with the son of the barber?" Person A: "You mean the barber on the main square?" Person B: "Yes, that one he use to have more shops but they failed, because barber no.2 screwed him over" Person A: " That is not what I heard... the story I heard is that barber no1. didn't do his fair share" Person B: " Come on... that can't justify that..." ECT ECT ECT