Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making
There has been a breakdown in the Semi-reliable Communal Sense-making. Traditionally we used institutions to guide our collective sense-making, but this is no longer the case in the media landscape – so sense-making is no longer close to fully communal. Walter Cronkite was not always telling the truth, but what he said was a close approximation of the national consciousness and shared belief structure as a complex for the country to function upon, but this does not exist in the current media landscape – so it is no longer semi-reliable.
...there was enough complex for us to function as a country and I think that has gone away. So I think that this (our loss of Semi-Reliable Communal Sense-making) is the parent of the crisis which I increasingly think of as, what I call it is: The No-Name Revolution or The N-squared revolution. We are in some sort of new regime which doesn't look like any revolution we have seen before. It's much less physically violent, so far. It is digitally extremely violent. And it has to do with the fact that we can't make sense of things communally at some semi-reliable level.
- Eric Weinstein January 5, 2018, on Sam Harris #112
On YouTube
On X
An attempt to synthesize the totality of known failures of the "sense-making architecture" of the MSM emphasizing the scope of the problems. https://t.co/nEEH0rr19M
In my opinion, we're now every day living through a single meta-emergency: the total collapse of even semi-reliable communal sense-making.
Live on @RubinReport in 15 minutes.
Discussing the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN) and its latest theory of The “Alternative Influence Network” (AIN), the move(s) against Alex Jones, and the steps being taken to take “alternative sense making” off the air.
Join us.
I'd like to pay a debt or two. I have not always had the easiest relationship with @jgreenhall over the last 10 years and I don't always feel comfortable with his takes on things. But he is one of my "minds of last resort." Early on @wikileaks & @Bitcoin. Maddening on everything.
My emphasis on "Sense-making" came from him directly as did the phrase. I don't know that I can or would recommend him to most sane people. Just know that he's out there and that when everyone has gone crazy, he is one of 5 or so people I call to make sure I'm not losing my mind.
Thought those of you who put up with me should know; I've been thinking about this for a long time and it's time to boost @jgreenhall's signal: high variance, high insight, and high agency. Just know, he's not your indoor cat.
End.
@barryeisler @mtracey @ggreenwald @jayrosen_nyu @SamHarrisOrg @joerogan @ZaidJilani Thanks for being super respectful.
I don’t know you either, but nothing about your tweets puts me off. I intensely dislike the way I was approached. I also am known for saying that activism and the loss of trustworthy sense-making by journalists is going to plunge us into war.
@barryeisler @mtracey @ggreenwald @jayrosen_nyu @SamHarrisOrg @joerogan @ZaidJilani Let me be clear: I *detest* the loss of journalism to activism and I will not stand for the “Bro: you just don’t get twitter.” deflection. Journalists don’t do what @mtracey did in my book. It’s not that I don’t see the changes. I am actively rejecting them with every fiber.
If you have ever traveled the world, please read the following News Headline from a trusted News Source.
I don’t think journalists realize the danger of liquidating their credibility on activism. We‘re not structured to survive w/o credible sense-making:
“Rules out..”
“No Evidence of..”
“Rules out for now..”
“Multiple Church Fires..”
“Rules out” does not mean “No evidence of” and there’s simply no such thing as “Rules out for now”. Similarly reporting on multiple fires isn’t helping. #GetItRight https://t.co/RezLcXasyQ
I don’t know how to say this politely. This is Norte Dame. Journalists need to tell us what happened & not jump the gun. Take your time and pass us information, but only the information.
We have time. Just don’t incite our passions or lie to us to cover anything up. Just facts.
- Notre.
Even if O’Keefe’s methods make you uncomfortable (as they do me), I have an inkling of the payload that may be coming. If so, it’s unrelated to the channels through which it may arrive.
In a better world, the payloads would arrive in different vehicles. We just don’t live there.
There are many disgruntled tech workers who have been sharing uncomfortable practices for years now that involve the algorithmic corruption of sense-making for social engineering objectives.
These folks had nothing to do w/ O’Keefe so far as I know.
Let’s ALL watch this space.
I long for a day when our politics is finally more interesting than the mind control, ‘gotcha’ tactics & mental traps maintained by our professional sense-making layers.
I just wasn’t at all focused on Tulsi..until the NYT & Hillary told me how important to them she is. Am now.
Spoke to accused Marxist @benshapiro yesterday about Trump but before the alleged Maoist @Peggynoonannyc had written her Anti-trump column. Ben & I couldn’t find a dime’s worth of difference on the portion of the hearings we discussed. Q: Does this mean I should join ANTIFA?
Another take is that I appear to be somewhat Right of Reagan’s speech writer Peggy Noonan at the moment.
We’ve lost the plot if no one can explain how we seem to be watching so many incompatible stories. This is my “Crisis of semi-reliable communal sense making.” from years ago.
1/ Too Many Different Stories.
Here’s my best guess as to what‘s happening. There was a post-WWII Int’l order. Both US parties agreed to service it. They became systemically corrupt when growth changed in the early/mid ‘70s. This accelerated wildly with the end of the Cold War.
2/ The parties & Trump represented systemic & idiosyncratic corruption respectively. Systemic had Rep & Dem flavors. The tattered Int’l order is serviced (barely) by the systemically corrupt but repudiated by the idiosyncratic. The new GOP is moving towards the Idiosyncratic.
3/ We are divided by the following. Some party players benefit from the systemic corruption but are loyal to the two party flavors. Remaining party players want to end the corruption. But they agree on the need to service the Int’l order because of dangers of restarting history.
4/ The Idiosyncratic players want to use Trump to end systemic corruption (drain the swamp). Some want it so badly that they’ll defend nearly all idiosyncratic corruption. Others admit to idiosyncratic failings but point to the fact that only Trump broke through our MSM defenses.
5/ The idiosyncratic players (The “Trump Train”) are further divided as to whether the Int’l order is too corrupt & expensive to service or too essential to abandon. The former are divided into isolationists vs those who wish to project new power. The latter subvert withdrawal.
6/ Why the crisis in communal sense making? We are now micro-divided by pro vs anti systemic rent-seekers with 2 flavors. Anti is further split by pro vs anti willingness to admit to the idiosyncratic corruption. We are divided by isolationists vs maintainers of the order. Etc...
7/ Where I am: I see 2 party flavors of systemic corruption. And the new idiosyncratic. I see corrupt expensive foreign entanglements but also no ability to retreat. I also believe great nations are based on communal *fictions* which are being destroyed by our extractive actors.
8/ This is where we are to my understanding. I *only* really look down on *pro*-corruption folks. I do fear the isolationists have no idea what they’re signing us up for on a thermonuclear planet, but I just see them as confused by BAD foreign adventures & betting the 🌍 on luck.
End/ So I have the group I look down on (Systemic corruption of the party regulars) different from the group to be feared (advocates of abandonment of the corrupt system to restart history).
The folks w whom I get along now have no home: those who get we have to fix ALL this. 🙏
@OathoutTony Not punking out of world wars.
A new episode of The Portal dropped. The great Gary Kasparov stopped by to talk about machine intelligence, Putin and his theories of the crack up of Western Sense-Making under post-modern Russian propaganda attack. Subscribe where you listen to podcasts:
It’s all simple. We built a world based on broad growth from science & technology which sputtered for unsustainability reasons around 1973, and all our institutions have been lying for about 50 years on anything needed to keep our illusion going.
It’s just the size of the claim.
Intimidating me isn’t going to make these graphs go away. I’m just pointing to them and their infinite consequences: https://t.co/iyZ93xKXaG
As the the period went on and on, the sense-making institutions of journalism, research, political representation, teaching, analysis could no longer afford honest experts and so such people were silenced, intimidated, shamed or purged.
This 50 year bubble is now going to end.
That’s not me. That’s just unsustainable demography. Shutting me up does nothing. It’s all going to end soon due to cohort analysis and aging. But I feel fine and promise not to kill myself. Thanks for caring!
Let me say one thing that I love about @nntaleb and why I‘ve been loyal to him despite my discomforts.
Nassim has been about my only friend & colleague who understands the scope of our problems and is sufficiently disagreeable to never get blown off course.
His “IYI” is a critique of almost our entire expert class. His “Skin In The Game” gambit, a critique of our entire system of sense-making. There’s a reason you are discovering yourselves using words like “anti-fragile” & “black swan”. These are but fragments of a giant critique.
In short, Nassim and I have a comparable scope of critique but radically different methods. I can’t take his ad hominem attacks on my colleagues and he no doubt sees me diminished by my half-measures by his standards.
It makes me very sad. But I think I understand it. And him.
But one day you will need your Nassims. You will want people willing to lose it all to try and warn you.
And you will have canceled them because they offended you. Because they said some stupid things on the way to the truth. Because of egos.
But I take Nassim very seriously.
In a crisis, he’s a voice you want constantly driving the system to explain itself.
I’m prepared to lose friends & followers over him. We went through the run up to 2008 & he was the guy who NEVER let up.
In my experience, there is usually even more there than meets the eye.
Your mileage may vary. But with me, 1 on 1, he’s been solid on a lot of deep theory critique for almost 20 yrs...and w/ almost no support. Standing alone.
He may rip my head off for this, but he has been inspiring to me. I just wish his methods were much less brutal & frontal.
The outbreak of a pandemic and/or a bioweapon was *entirely* forseeable. As was the 2008 crisis. As was 9/11.
As I have said almost constantly for years: we have SYSTEMATICALLY selected for the wrong experts & leaders for between 30 to 50 years.
We need to replace our experts.
Trump, Bernie & Biden are *all* unworkable. Our Chinese staffed research labs are all unworkable. Our payment obligations under social security are unworkable. As is Just-In-Time supply lines across borders. Our Debt is likely not payable. Macroeconomists are not talented enough.
We're panicking because we're being lied to and misinformed. Panic is stupid: our efforts should be to get rid of our impotent institutional expert/leadership class. We have low agency get-a-long social creatures where we need disagreeable tough minded creative folks in the room.
We need more divergent thinkers and we need to get rid of everyone who ushered in our state of panic, ill-preparedness and indebtedness.
I'm sorry but it is this stark. We just have the wrong editors, the wrong politician, the wrong CEOs, and the wrong university presidents.
We need competence to match our threats. If not this one, then the next.
We should institute competency reviews for people over 70 who are sitting in important chairs. There's no way the final people running for president should have ALL been septuagenarian. It's simply insane.
It is time to re-evaluate all (and re-instate some) of the people our current fake experts called Xenophobes, Chicken Littles, The Disgruntled, Whiners, Catastrophists.
The globalizers were never people in love with other cultures. They were profiteers looting their nations.
I'm sorry to bore you with this frequently. But this evil impotent center has put our entire world at risk.
These are not our candidates. They aren't our journalists. They are not our researchers.
They propped up institutions that needed to go through crisis periodically.
It's time for a massive reversal of who is allowed to contribute to our institutional sense-making.
End.
- SlipTheDISC
So @amitkgupta84 heard me claiming that Academe, Journalism, Big Tech and Entertainment are the four areas that have become both the most bizarrely ideologically intolerant *and* constitute our traditional sense-making apparatus.
So he directed me to this graphic from @Crowdpac: https://t.co/4P0bHcYVf8
So, for example, academics write about X. Reporters interpret findings on X for readers. Celebrities read these reports of findings on X in newspapers and record a group PSA. Then platforms decide who should be able to see and talk about this X PSA on-line.
Where X is arbitrary.
For example, X could be:
China
Immigration
University Admissions
Vaccines
Wuhan Institute
Section 230
“Equity”
WTO
WHO
Climate
Biological Sex
Tax Policy
Where are the trusted central and neutral sense-making institutions that can counter ideological bias and activists? Nowhere.
I don’t find the Right providing the institutional answers here. I see the non institutional folks like podcasters as all we have. Which is pathetic and insane. Also dangerous, irresponsible and suicidal for an advanced nuclear superpower. 🙏
Since the Internet took over the heavy lifting of sense-making, almost everything ends in muddle.
Each new day is a splitting event in the human multiverse.
Every story a superposition of our activist narratives.
If WWII had the web, 10% of us might claim Japan was victorious.
If I express curiosity as to why half my timeline is talking about Pennsylvania, 47 missing USB memory devices, an appellate ruling, etc... and half are not even aware of this discussion, does that make me a bad person? A dumb person? Both?
I bet It’s both. Damn.
- ImpureThoughts
There is something very sick about having a nation’s leading Universities, News-desks and other sense making institutions be the de facto extensions of only one of the two unethical and deceptive major political parties distorting our world view.
There has to be sense-making.
I know of no 11 or now 12 figure billionaires endowing the independence of institutional sense-making.
In a highly unequal world widely agreed as having gone mad, securing Academic Freedom for Sense-making has now become of zero interest to anyone who has true financial freedom.
This has been clear for years. This is the conversion of the No Name Revolution towards a standard kinetic one. This clip comes from something like late 2017 early 2018. It’s been crystal clear since 2015 and clear since 2007-8.
Sense making is the issue: https://t.co/FIxDE9s4bF
Um. Wow?
So that’s how our sense making institutions are so sure of themselves. This is what happens when your idea suppression gets caught suppressing reality. If you’re an institution you just retcon away what you did as an sense-making Crank.
It’s bottomless Knarc behavior.