This seems like a similar drive to why a lot of people love gossip?
You might not be able to come up with the grand unifying theory of psychology, but at least you're the first to recognize that the neighbor didn't say hello this morning, so there might be something going on at the Jones family?
I think there are a lot of minor leagues in hobbies-- there's always something new to figure out about wood-working or bird-watching.
If you just want to discover something which will make life a little better in your social group, there are plenty of niches.
Mine seems to be finding the odd fact over here which fits into the discussion over there, plus knowing a fair amount about golden age science fiction.
Maybe the crucial thing is to not insist on being world-shaking.
Or maybe there should be an Effective World-Shaking Insight project to see whether people can be more efficient at it.
I'll have you know that much of what we know about human ribosome biogenesis originally comes from experiments in the fungus S. cerevisiae. And then I'll shut up because this isn't really the point of the post.
Okay so I was gonna riff on how this all basically describes LessWrong, when I realized that actually no, it's *literally every forum.* This is what drives Reddit, and Wikipedia, and StackOverflow; it's what makes the internet what it is. Little Leagues Research.
A guess as to why there is no such thing as the "intellectual minor leagues" - well there sort of is: school, up through college basically. It’s just inflicted on everyone, not just just the portion of the population interested in whatever sport. People who are really into academics, like people into actual little league, just never leave and end up as academics akin to professional sports players. Other people splinter off at some point or another.
Then society also has better ways to absorb the curiosity or intellectual drive for people who don’t end up doing that kind of thing full time as academics. People who are of academic temperament can channel that energy into learned professions (law, medicine, engineering, software, etc) and do something socially useful instead of needing to engage in intellectual minor leagues. Maybe you can’t discover a new fundamental force, but you can design a new system for whatever application or discover an interesting new way to apply some old legal precedent by some clever trick for example.
[A side point, I think the discovery drive is also just less widespread than the physical drive. There just aren’t as many people interested in doing intellectual labor for its own sake than physical labor for its own sake, I think]
For one example of the intellectual minor leagues, consider research in the SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism. When I started recreating medieval cooking about fifty years ago, there was close to nobody doing it, so I was almost certainly the first person in the past several centuries to try to make some of the recipes I did from medieval cookbooks. By now there are quite a lot of people doing it, but I only know of one person who has made a serious effort on medieval Indian cuisine, although there might be some more in India. Anyone willing to teach himself (or already knowing) Turkish or Persian could probably produce a substantial increase in what we know about their cooking as of five or six hundred years ago, and there are probably other languages that haven't occurred to me for which that is more true. I could pretty easily think of half a dozen SCA research projects that, so far as I know, nobody has done, and if I looked more carefully it might well turn out that for half of them I was right.
I expect the same situation exists for a variety of hobbies. It exists even more if you are satisfied with being the innovator in your geographical area. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still parts of the SCA where nobody is cooking from period recipes — certainly there would be if the internet hadn't sharply reduced regional diversity in such things.
> If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical.
Graham implies that the person who comes up with new ideas is likely to be:
I have met a lot of 'crazies' in my life, both online and off, but I have only ever once met someone who I would call a "QAnon follower". She's the wife of my friend and the kind of person who falls for silly things all the time.
So when I hear articles like "This is what really drives them", from someone who must be in the same socioeconomic position as me (==> not exposed to these people much if at all), and the article is anything other than a bunch of on-the-ground interviews repeated verbatim... I'm not sure I buy it.
In my extensive internet experience, the QAnon phenomenon has attracted the following groups of people:
* NEETs having a larp and laughing at how dumb everything is (==> motivated primarily by humour, not insight)
* Demoralized conservatives commiserating with each other over some dumb internet thing
* A bunch of people with grievances against the current government of varying degrees of legitimacy, who have recognized the QAnon phenomenon as a useful army to piss off the people in charge (==> motivated by a very poor understanding of how political power works)
* A handful of 'true conspiracy' people who deep dive into things like mkultra, who are making a bad judgement call on this particular one (==> motivated not by an ambiguous drive for insight, but for a concrete tangible drive of "they've lied so many times before, how are they lying to me now?")
* Left-aligned activists who are going undercover and participating in the discussions just to spy on and mess with the right-aligned people there (==> motivated by fun and spite)
* Some guy's wife in the rural midwest (she might actually follow the trope laid out by OP).
I don't know how you'd operationalize it but I would take a bet on the order of $5000 that, say, >80% of everyone identified as a 'qanon follower' does not conform to the popular mainstream image of what a qanon follower is
I'm pretty sure the intellectual minor leagues is Twitter, and a lot of people derive satisfaction not from necessarily discovering something fundamentally new themselves, but from *propagating* knowledge which is new *to their audience*.
This amateur discovery drive is probably also a factor in crypto traders who may have a little bit of knowledge of CS such that they can grasp a GitHub repot. Nobody can tell them they're wrong about the future of a specific blockchain because the price movements keep proving them right.
Regarding intellectual minor leagues, I can see how it might be conceivably more futile than minor league baseball. Intellectualism is supposed to find some absolute truth about the world, whereas minor league baseball is only trying to find relatively excellent baseball players. However, the intellectual minor leagues (i.e., blogging, or op-ed writing, or writing for the New Yorker, or the Atlantic, or WIRED) does many things that big-league intellectualism (i.e., academia) can't: educating the world about insights that come from academia, since the best academics aren't necessarily the best pop writers; multidisciplinary intellectualism, so that you or Tyler Cowen can synthesize for multiple domains in ways that academics can't; continuing in that vein, writers can pursue topics that for whatever reason don't fit classical academic disciplines–maybe some insight about the nature of TV shows, or comic books, or AI safety, or effective altruism. Topics that are either too new, or don't have a deep academic weight, or just for whatever reason, don't fit into the standard big league intellectual categories are prime targets for amateur intellectuals.
Scalable, amateur intellectual writing, though, is probably a tiny field. Many of the successful writers are people like Sam Harris, Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Harari, etc. They typically have podcasts or popular books, and they frequently give talks. TED Talks are probably the sine qua non of the intellectual minor leagues. It's arguable whether or not the whole lot of them are beneficial or not, but the masses need some way of accessing deep insights, for better or worse.
On the conclusion of the post: Strongly agree that we need more minor leagues. In everything. So much of social media is globalized and homogenized and this is bad because it creates superstar economies where (eg) five people each get twelve trillion retweets and the rest of us get three. Smaller scale social networks would be a good solution to this
I used to know a guy who was doing a startup about this. The elevator pitch was "facebook but for Dunbar's number". Basically imagine facebook, except the app restricts you to only interact with <150 people, using geofencing. I think he's onto something, but I don't think his specific idea is good
Hell, this was in some ways the point I was trying to make with my very first blog post years ago, where I wrote about how national news is overweighted and local news is underweighted in peoples' minds, and how everyone should shrink the scope of their social lives to a manageable size
And while we're at it, some words of (hopefully) support for Scott:
> I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk?
Part of the magic of being human, bro, is that you don't have to justify your existence. You exist, you're allowed to do whatever you want, purely because you want it and without appealing to any higher justification
And, for that matter, if we did have to appeal to higher justifications, dude, you've banked up a ton of karmic credit and you are the last person who should be worrying about justifying your life. You have brought more value (measured in handwavey utility) to your readers than people like me will bring to the entire universe across their lifetimes. You have more than justified your usefulness to the world
The epistemic minor leagues are where most of human social behavior occurs. The top-down perspective is the abnormal one as well as the one that doesn't capture as much information.
Intellectual discovery at the "major leagues" (at least compared to Qanon theorists) is not actually very satisfying at all. I'd imagine it to be far less satisfying than in the minor leagues of online anonymous speculation in almost every respect. It's a lot of fun to come up with a new scientific hypothesis. But then you spend the next couple years defending it from detractors. It's a lot of fun to identify the pitted core of an essay, but on the fifth editorial round you feel totally nauseated at the sight of it. It's a lot of fun to write a book, in some parts, but getting it published is enervating. Even the "intellectual rush" at a very high level is short and surrounded by drudgery. So getting it pure and in your veins via puzzles (either in games or in life) is pretty motivating in comparison.
You're ignoring that the focus on QAnon has potential material rewards outside of pure intellectual curiosity - 'Hey look everyone I found a new way to pathologize (i.e. dunk on) our enemies, you should give me tenure etc.! '
There are always people in society whose calling it is to make up things for other people to believe in. They're called priests/prophets etc. The regime loves focusing on QANON because it is dissident and crazy-sounding. There are also non-crazy sounding dissident priests around (like you sort of). These are harder to pathologize without admitting they might be on to various things.
>You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out
> I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk?
Maybe other bloggers / pundits / etc. should worry about this, but in your case it seems like genuinely unwarranted modesty; you really are a "Babe Ruth-level intellectual superstar" for many of the subjects you write about. There's only a handful of people I can think of who I would trust as much or more to write e.g. your long covid article.
> But read some politics, think a bit, and announce you've figured out how all existing institutions are corrupt and only you know how to run them fairly - and you can end up anywhere from interesting-at-parties, to newspaper columnist, to US President.
Being a good enough pundit to get a big substack following or even become president doesn't mean your insights are actually at the top of the ladder for epistemic rigor, correctness, usefulness, etc. It's just a field where there are lots of other axes people optimize for.
This is Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ - can he just get to R?! He’s made it to Q and that’s quite a lot, but what if he can never make it to R? What do you do then? Yadda yadda, join QAnon?
There's a category of applying knowledge here. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, car mechanics (many others), work as experts in a particular domain, and the vast majority of them aren't Babe Ruth/Einstein level. But reality is complex enough that these people get faced with idiosyncratic problems that don't fit nicely with the domain knowledge that you get from reading textbooks or going to school in these fields. They have to figure out how to apply the knowledge to the messy reality. Any solution they come up with for a problem may be innovative and novel, but specific enough that it's only good for that one situation, and the next day or file or patient they turn to will have another individual situation/problem to be solved. Doing this type of thing can be great intellectual exercise, and can really help people.
"But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?"
I was going to say "dilettantes" but yeah, that's become a term of disdain. "Amateur" still retains some shred of its original meaning, but is also shifting towards "bumbling, incompetent, inept".
I was looking for a Chesterton quote but got distracted reading the essays, so here, have a joke from him instead:
"Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps of volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all said simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence."
I feel like we have a shortage of people trying to write interesting/useful articles, not the other way around. There's so many areas of life where good knowledge is primarily passed around via internal documents or word of mouth that anyone can contribute something with a bit of effort.
Youtube example: random guy from the Midwest starts a tool review channel, using cheap test devices and a bit of ingenuity and produces content FAR better than any other source I've seen. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng. Did he discover a new alloy that allows you to make pliers that are 3x stronger while having the same weight? Nope. But his work still improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people looking for the best tool for the buck. His work also helps promote manufacturers who produce quality tools so in the long run it will also contribute to helping the best players on the market succeed.
Think about it - there are probably millions of girls/guys in America alone with a tool shed and the finances to afford a camera/microphone. Dozens of professional media companies were publishing tool reviews for decades The odds were absolutely stacked against Project Farm - but he did it anyway and massively succeeded. Literally anyone could copy his model of running data-based comparisons of various hardware (rather than talking about "opinions") but even today there's very few channels attempting to do this. Try figuring out which light bulbs are the best, which vacuum is the best, which couch is the strongest, which heater has the best features, which AC is the best bang for the buck... its really hard, precisely because there's no one trying to do objective comparisons for them like Project Farm does. There's still an immense amount of quality writing/investigation that's just waiting to happen.
Personal example: I lived in a European country for many years and eventually became eligible for citizenship. The official documents were a bit confusing and all I could find elsewhere were bits and pieces of info on various immigrant forums. So I went through the process while paying close attention to every step - and then wrote an article with an unofficial guide for that country's citizenship. Literally the first person to do so out of the tens of thousands of people applying every year. And boom - it has 10k views over a year, which I consider pretty good for a pretty obscure topic. Many people reached out to me and thanked me for simplifying the process for them.
Did I create an important piece of research? Probably not, no one will remember it in a couple of decades. But that's okay - many people are still happy that I did this and their lives were simplified just a tiny bit thanks to my article. And there's still a lot of space for future writers - if you google "citizenship X guide" where X is most countries in the world, you'll usually get nothing but scary looking government pages, fee-seeking immigration firms or immigrant forums with hundreds of scattered posts. We need more people to decide they want to share their bit of knowledge with the world and going out to write an article of make a Youtube video.
The issue is that people flock to the well known and attractive topics and then make broad pronouncements. If you want a unified theory of everything then you better come extremely correct. You need ten thousand footnotes and comments on a dozen school's opinions and all that. If you want to investigate, say, an extremely narrow question about a local neighborhood then you're entering less of a free for all and one where even relatively basic research can add to human knowledge. Likewise, there's plenty of space for people to do (eg) survival construction or 19th century cooking shows or youtube channels about how cities are planned without much competition.
The issue is that people want to occupy the fertile ground. If it's a subject everyone already knows then capturing it is worthwhile. For example, everyone knows about Caesar so capturing a narrative around Caesar occupies mental space that entirely new topics don't. Bold new discoveries about herd subsistence in Central Asia are interesting to me but the average person probably doesn't even know if they'd find it interesting or not. They'd have to think about it first. Meanwhile, mentioning some obscure new ACTUALLY fact about Caesar has a pre-existing slot in people's heads. This is why you get dubious interpretations or grand theories of everything memetically racing across the internet: it redefines something the end user already knows.
Another issue is that lack of rigor won't stop you from getting famous or propagating your ideas. Turchin is a modern example but Marx is arguably the most successful 19th century philosopher. At least measured by "founded the most politically successful 19th century ideology." He too has an extremely deterministic view of history that falls apart when you poke at it. Yet Marxism was fairly successful at propagating itself. And for people who think the goal is praxis that's all that matters.
Like, the QAnon people are not interested in doing deep dive investigations and FOIA requests to reveal the depths of corruption in Washington or to talk about how what technically isn't corruption still stinks like a fish. They want to propagate their ideology, to gain fame and fortune, etc. And in this they are joined by even many mainstream thinkers with different ideologies. There's a real lack of rigor among public intellectuals.
This is part of why I keep on delaying launching a blog. I'm entering the minor leagues. The question then is what league to enter both so I can be useful to my readers and make a good showing of things. There are pressures both of popularity and rigor which are sometimes in direct conflict.
The HBO documentary "Q: Into The Storm," is super-fascinating. I would have expected it to be a NYT-style propaganda piece about "threats to democracy," "insurrection," blah, blah. But instead it's a detailed breakdown of the history of the whole Q phenomenon told through the actual people that created and ran the 8-chan board. The drama of the interpersonal feuds between these characters is worth the price of admission alone.
The filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, was also on Joe Rogan a few weeks back.
Every organism is basically a model of… something. All that DNA encodes a strategy for survival and reproduction. The beliefs and values layered on top seem to form a similar role.
One last piece here: the combinatorial argument for armatures. Most computational complexity theorists belief that P!=NP. If this is true, it means that there are many truths out there which are very difficult to find, but easy to recognize. Large numbers of people putting the pieces together in different ways, and sharing the good ones, might actually be the most energy efficient way of searching a massive space of worldviews.
Oh, and that something that all organisms are modeling? I think it’s Goodness. Every organism is an imperfect model of The Good, and the physics universe is this massive ensemble of flawed models. As far as I can tell, nobody else is saying this. And that’s my contribution to the space of plausible solutions :)
It's sort of a crowdsourced wiki-conspiracy project. It's really hard to tell, however, how many people are are playing the game for entertainment, are doing it ironically, or are true believers (to the extent the vague and cryptic "drops" are something specific enough to believe.)
This summer I and a couple of other philosophy undergrads got together to read 'The Conscious Mind' by David Chalmers. No professors or grad students, no one with a huge lead in expertise, and not much background knowledge in philosophy of mind between us. I doubt any of us had any earth-shattering thoughts about consciousness, but it was a fun way to get together to practice sharing insights, having friendly arguments, and rigorously articulating our thoughts. (Book clubs in general do this, I guess, but I think it helped that we were trying to Do Philosophy a little bit rather than just chatting about our thoughts.)
Let me suggest art (in the broad sense) as a kind of intellectual minor league. It lacks the particular thrill of the pursuit of objective truth, but replaces it with the deeper satisfaction of the pursuit of meaning (or beauty or Truth or mystic insight; whatever you want to call it). It isn't useful for helping you be more economically productive or politically powerful or socially high-ranked, the way objective truth promises. (And if you're getting those things from it, you're probably missing out on the deeper meaning.) But it promises to be useful for life itself, which, really, isn't life itself the point of the economy, politics and society anyway?
I guess this might sound glib or navel-gazey, in the "they should learn to play guitar instead of trying to stop child sex trafficking" way. But... you know, if participating in local amateur musicmaking conferred more status than it currently does, maybe there would be less QAnon than there currently is.
This is a beautiful post, except that even academic science is *full* of the equivalent of minor leagues! What else are the more serious high-school science fairs? Where else would we find research projects to give to undergrads? In physics, for example, there’s an *enormous* space between the crackpots and the Einsteins (or the discoverers of new fundamental forces); it includes everything from undergraduate research forums to Physics StackExchange.
It may be more useful to think of intellectualism like we do many mental disorders, as existing on a spectrum, rather than major and minor league. That way many more people can be wise in an incremental way, and avoid being dismissed as out of their league when seeking attention.
For those interested, there is an almost unlimited (might actually be unlimited) number of useful intellectual discoveries to be made that follow the basic formula of "difficult problem x is actually very similar to seemingly unrelated problem y, and we can apply the known solution y to problem x by putting a funny hat on it"
The formula is both very useful (there are lots of problems that need solving) and, at least occasionally, relatively easy. Go learn multiple unrelated fields. You'll find applications.
So here’s my question about Q. How come they haven’t found the guy, or guys who are doing this. There’s really no hiding yourself on the internet. There’s very little demand to find him/them either.
Also, and I admit I haven’t read anything by Q, why does the writer manage to convince so many people. Where does this persuasiveness come from? Has anybody examined the text for expertise in manipulation.
I don't know if the "minor leagues" problem is inherent to all of humanity; I think it's because of socially desirable intellectualism currently is. As the old joke goes; new, true, and interesting, pick any two. If knowing new things gets you points at parties, people will always prioritize interesting - and if necessary new - over true, which gets them no points.
In a context where novelty doesn't get you as many point, you might instead get points for a great knowledge of authorities, such as religious scholarship.
But apparently "minor leagues" are a problem in Q&A sites. Ideally you get a bunch of experts answering intro questions; but there's always new newbs, and mostly the same experts, so they get tired of playing in the minor leagues and screw off to only answer questions about obscure things that really pique their interest. So in the long run one of your biggest problems is actually preventing a (slightly more) major, or at least niche, league from forming. I want to say this tech talk was by one of the founders of Stack Overflow looking back on its design?
It seems like one epistemic minor league (or, perhaps, epistemic pick-up game) is simply playing games with friends. Word games, trivia games, even tabletop roleplaying games provide space for cleverness and competition among people without any abnormal levels of expertise. One more plausible mechanism for regular contact with friends to improve one's life, I suppose—giving one an outlet for rewarding intellectual exercise outside of conspiracy theory world.
This is one of those areas where the Internet has put all the fish in one tank, to force a metaphor. I would imagine that for most of human existence , sure, you might not be the best basket maker or tuber digger on the planet, but being the best anyone around you knew, that was within reach. I think for many of us, having something we're known to be good at is key to our self-worth. If you have to compete now on Instagram with a million other people who might well have been the best in their little tribe, the competition gets a lot tougher.
You don't have to be a genius or in the elite circle to change lives or influence events. Greta Thunberg is as thick as two short planks (no offence, and she may not be so in private, but that's her self-chosen public persona) and she's influencing world policy. She's wrong in every respect, but she has shown others that ordinary people with no experience or expertise can make a big difference IF you can figure out the right leverage and pivot points.
"This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even being included in existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great."
I have no data to back this up, but I would guess that there's some availability bias in the background here. QAnon conspiracy theorists, like potential restaurant owners and aspiring actors, only see the wildly successful cases and don't really know about the army of non-successful competitors out there, and that their chances to "make it big" are actually pretty slim. Hell, even most aspiring PhDs are not really aware of their actual prospects of becoming a "big name."
I wouldn't discount too much the story Hon's story that people think they may become influential in the conspiracy world, even though they will simply be nut jobs.
I think calling it a discovery drive is a misnomer. I don't think it's about discovery per se, I think it's the same spirit of social credit-seeking that drives people to try to make witty banter at dinner parties, the drive to be seen as clever, on top of things, a leader, someone in whose entourage interesting things happen. The fact that QAnon works just about as well as Modern Monetary Theory or a novel and persuasive insight into the motivations of Augustus is prima facie evidence that the cleverness of the fitting together of the pieces -- the compelling curlicuity of the narrative -- is way more important than the content of actual measureable truth.
I've known one or two people who genuinely have a discovery drive, and they're quite different. As a rule, they are shockingly uninterested in communicating what they have discovered to others, they can hardly be bothered even when it's critical to their careers. They don't bother publishing, and when they do it's badly written, and gems of stunning insight have to be pried out of turgid ungrammatical sentences that would embarrass a 5th grader. They don't talk at conferences, they're too busy listening, and it's only when they ask a weird question that -- when you finish untangling it an hour or two later -- you realize they not only understood what was said in about the first 4 minutes, they were already jumping ahead to implications that will only occur to others years later if at all. They're strange people, and very different from people who love to talk about their latest clever idea.
I was very active on right wing twitter for years, yet basically never heard of Qanon until the mainstream media started covering it. Same thing with Alex Jones. Same thing with Richard Spencer. All three seemed to experience their growth in popularity *after* the negative media coverage. Perhaps even because of it. The media might be inadvertently steering the right into dumber directions by covering the dumbest elements of it and unintentionally making them more popular. Not any sort of conspiracy, but just a bunch of independent people following an incentive gradient. Partisan hacks (including lots of journalists) want to hunt for weak-men, because it helps them load up the "right" or "left" with negative karma ala Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments.
When only 1% of the population has heard of X, and then a bunch of major news outlets that two thirds of the population already distrust come out with stories about how X sucks, I bet belief in X actually goes up.
I think the traditional way for ordinary people to fulfill the discovery drive would be specialized local knowledge. "Where's the best fishing hole within an hour's walk of [NAME OF TOWN]?" is knowledge that's valuable, has some status, and where Average Joe from NAME OF TOWN has a crushing comparative advantage over the best scholars worldwide.
But even the metaphor of "minor leagues" gestures in the direction of the collapse of localized knowledge bases. Because minor leagues (if I understand correctly), AREN'T local; they're a feeder system tied into the lower tiers of the same old national major league. So this may be a case where the collapse of value in local knowledge spawns a wide range of substitutionary behaviors—Qanoners pacing the internet like polar bears pacing a zoo enclosure.
(Another thing that fits into this concept space of discovery-drive-behaviors-without-actual discovery? Dads reading books about World War II.)
>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.
I think the burden of proof should be on those who might say, "only experts can talk about a subject" rather than on those who might say, "I have something to add". That doesn't mean the learned and the lay have equally valid opinions; it just means telling someone to clam up should have a higher threshold than ignoring what they say.
First of all we do have freedom of speech and it's not just a legal privilege. Freedom of speech is how democracy exercises its muscles. Second of all a world where only experts can speak freely would be stultifying; free speech is a social leaven.
There's going to be wacky ideas in the mix because there's always a price to pay. But it's a small price compared to the alternative.
There is a "wipe ass while sitting or standing up" phenomenon going on.
The majority of people who come up with earth shattering ideas don't talk about them or implement them because of the perceived dangers involved with them.
Those driven with incentive processes essentially don't even acknowledge that population existing and shoehorn everything into yet "more incentive". Corrupting the capacity to think about this topic.
The small subsection of people who are willing to put an idea out there and let the consequences do their thing if one personally benefits, tend to be in self-selected hierarchies.
The even smaller subsection of people whose ideas actually do materialize into replicability are almost always driven by some sort of economicus positive feedback loop that seeks to expand itself.
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> I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some.
Maybe this is true but no one knows this.
What you put out into the world is so sanitized on account of the various political environments you're appealing to, that you've become little more than an anti-cognitive bias peddler begging for scraps.
Your intellectual curiosity is enslaved to making a science out of denying caricatures and caricatured thinking.
One thing to add is that expert thought at any given time tends to proceed along specific pathways, and there may be large areas in between that no-one is looking at and which could be stumbled upon by anyone. My metaphor for this is Venice. If you're on one of the main drags, Venice is crammed with tourists, hotels, & souvenir shops. But if you randomly turn onto a side street and walk two minutes in a straight line away from the crowds, you will find yourself on a piazza where there are literally no tourists AT ALL (except for you, ruining it); no shops; no hotels. Just echoing alleys, laundry hanging out of windows, beautiful churches that are completely deserted.
Ok, so fleshing out the baseball analogy, seems like school is the minor leagues (grad school is AAA), academia is the majors. Most of us are playing in the local after-work softball league or just tossing the ball around with the kid in the backyard or drinking a beer on the couch with the game on. So QAnon is what, fantasy league?
While this sounds like a novel insight, it's actually:
1) Not actually new - it's actually a fairly old idea, that part of what makes conspiracy theories so appealing is that you are Special and Important and possess Secret Knowledge and are making New Discoveries, and thus are secretly important. As you noted, this is actually really common - digging up some forgotten piece of knowledge from the Giant Pile of All Human Knowledge and actually applying it makes you seem super smart. And to be fair, drawing these sorts of connections is more difficult than it seems - most people simply haven't dug that deep into that pile, or don't think of something as being relevant because they've mostly forgotten it and it takes a certain set of neurological pathways to be activated to remember.
2) QAnon is actually very literally an ARG - there's a lot of people who are literally making up QAnon conspiracy theories *because they think it is funny*. QAnon people are so gullible, there is a whole community of people who are out there making up insane nonsense to see what it is that these people actually believe. So it's an ARG where people are playing and other people aren't even aware that they're NPCs in an ARG - basically some sort of way of scoring points, seeing if you can get enough people to believe in Jewish Space Lasers that someone will actually talk about it on CNN. Not all of the conspiracy theories in QAnon are part of this ARG, but there's a group of people who are out there on these boards literally making up random things to see what people are gullible enough to believe. Heck, some people suspect that some people involved with QAnon are literally in it for the money.
I mean, someone is selling all those QAnon folks QAnon stuff.
3) As for the greater idea - yeah, this is very true. Honestly, a lot of coming up with better things is about figuring out connections between various old ideas and realizing that a bunch of things might be related and there's some sort of hidden cause between them. Heck, that's how germ theory was discovered. The entire area of genetics is potentially rife with such things - for instance, there's a connection between height, attractiveness, IQ, and a huge number of other traits, and recognizing this is important and can help you to find what genes and environmental factors are responsible for these things. Given how many genes there are, really, you don't need to be an enormous genius to make a discovery - you just have to stumble on the right link.
I think this is true of a huge number of things. Heck, I think this is one reasons why psychologists can get so excited about various theories - because they get to play this same game as well, because psychology isn't well understood.
Conversely, with physics, we understand things well enough that you need a huge telescope or particle accelerator to come up with new stuff.
I think you missed a very important form of knowledge: conveying information to new groups of people. YouTube and other "public intellectuals" are a solid example of this. None of what they're saying is "new", but it is repackaged in a way that is leagues more digestible and accessible to a new and wider audience (and oftentimes more impactful as a result).
Kurzgesagt and Minute Physics and Jodran Peterson are not paving new intellectual territory in the sense of any new discoveries, but they are paving new territory in conveying them very well, to far more people. Which is very important in its own sense.
I think the heirarchy you've presented here of Major vs. Little Leagues isn't necessarily descriptive of how all information works; there's always new ways to share it, convey it, repackage it, reshape it to fit ever-fluid and evolving cultures and languages and contexts.
I opened the link thinking I had read it before, and was surprised to find it unfamiliar. Turns out the Washington Post published an op-ed this year with the exact same thesis. Also worth a read: https://archive.md/bZ0N2
I, in fact, did get my PhD in Biology earlier this year studying fungal ribosomes. Although it's only been six years, not ten, I can confirm that there are plenty of people who still know more than me. Also, I feel personally attacked. :-)
I will offer my own example of some "intellectual minor leagues": one for history and one for physics, both related to video games.
History: Summoning Salt on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/SummoningSalt/videos), produces videos on the history of world record attempts to speedrun various video games. The videos are better researched than many actual professionally produced historical documentaries I've seen. He often interviews the record holders and possess a command of the intricacies of speedrunning, which often involve abusing arcane programming exploits. Nevertheless, he weaves everything into a satisfying understandable narrative. You really feel the human striving of these speedrunners. It's a minor league version of history because 1) video game speedruns are very niche so there's not a lot of other people who do historical scholarship on them, 2) the people involved are almost all alive, 4) speedrun records are already fairly well organized, and 3) the video games themselves can be emulated to provide living historical context.
Physics:
pannenkoek2012, also on YouTube, explains Super Mario 64 physics in a very in-depth, almost college lecture format. Again, this is in intellectual minor league because it makes physics easier in a few ways: 1) Super Mario 64 physics is niche, not a lot of physicists are working on it. 2) the video games can be easily run to make experimentation easier. 3) the physics is simpler and fully defined as well as deterministic. There really is a source code you can read to definitively explain observed pneumonia. And yet.... The videos are better than many physics lectures I've attended, and the physics of Super Mario 64 is unexpectedly rich enough to enable some truly exotic physics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A is pannenkoek2012 explaining SM64's version of quantum tunneling!
So I think that the whole "knowledge is vast and there's something for you" thing is largely true and allows for a vast number of "intellectual minor leagues".
Sverker Johansson in "The Dawn of Language" points out that - if language were a tool primarily for sharing information - the valuable content in each exchange would be moving from the speaker to the listener. The listener would therefore be benefitting most, and we'd all by vying to listen more and take in the best insights. Which is... not what happens.
The fact that we all spend so much time vying instead to be the person sharing the insights strongly suggests that using language for homo sapiens is a status game from the ground up.
Whether it's in a classroom, on a blog, round a coffee table, at dinner with friends - we all try to contribute in a way that builds our status. Sometimes you can 'win' by having the juiciest bit of gossip, sometimes by telling the best joke, sometimes with the most exciting twist on the conspiracy theory.
The mechanisms of academia channel this drive for status-through-sharing into developing human knowledge by (at least attempting) subjecting it to rigorous challenge in a professional context, and those that perform well get a bit of extra kudos on top to keep the system going. But what academia is enforcing and rewarding isn't the coming-up-with-insights it's the absorbing-all-relevant-existing-knowledge-first, supporting-with-evidence and subjecting-yourself-to-peer-review - the hard graft part that isn't rewarded in normal human social interaction.
There's absolutely nothing wrong in all the rest of us doing our best to grab a bit of elusive kudos by flaunting our insights in the spheres that come to hand. Peacocks gotta spread those tails, we enjoy it, and it has a sneaky side benefit for the species as a whole.
(Johansson also suggests that humanity would not be able to be so cooperative and mutually helpful - traits that have served us well - without the drive to gossip about the cheaters to penalise any freeloading.)
"You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out."
I think this view of scientific communities is wrong. It assumes that the researchers in a field are *comparable* with each other. But "knowledge" and "research" are so multidimensional that you just can't. The guy in China will have discovered some things that you didn't know. But also, you will have discovered something that the other guy didn't know.
In my research community (a math one), the objective of a PhD is to find a tiny sub-topic in which you become the world-leading expert. That is "easy" to do if you invest 4 years of your life, and it would still be easy if there were 1000-fold more PhD students. All of the colleagues in my field are "better" than me on some axes and topics, and I am "better" than all of them on some other axes.
The same applies to non-scientific communities, too. In your personal peer group, I bet that every single member has some skill or expertise that no one else in the peer group can rival. Often something that is important in their own eyes. So they have their own quirky scale on which they are best in their own personal circle. And that's a good thing.
I think QAnoners “abandoning reality” in any conscious sense is stretching this beyond parsimony, and they may actually be a bad example of this. They’re mostly drawn from a biblical literalist milieu, in which the atheist/satanist distinction is blurry, the antichrist might show up at any time and it’s taken for granted that whole scientific fields are simply wrong. If those are your foundations, QAnon’s not far from the null hypothesis; you’re also really in your own separate league structure, where the epistemological hierarchy is going to operate very differently.
> You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.
This is obviously false though. There are plenty of knowledge domains where the space of people in the know is like, a dozen guys. As an obvious example, take speedrunning. There is a community of people who are dedicated to figuring out how specific games work and discovering exploits in them that lead to faster completion times. This community is pretty damn tiny though, especially for smaller games. It is very possible to make a novel contribution there.
I think it's pretty feasible to find a similarly small niche of knowledge where you may just be the single domain expert in the world.
Substitute "white supremacy" or "cisheteronormativity" for "lizard papacy", and the following is a perfect explanation of the Woke postmodernist turn in academia:
"The thrill of QAnon isn't just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. 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.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. 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."
> But what is the non-relativity knowledge I trust Hon or myself to discover? Different "perspectives"? Putting existing knowledge into different and easier-to-understand words? "X is kind of like Y if you think about it, isn't that interesting?"
I think you're really underselling this sort of thing! IMO as an ex-physicist, most of physics is under-digested and people with e.g. an undergrad education could contribute a lot by reframing and elucidating the stuff that's already supposedly well-known. The experts often don't bother to repave a road if they're used to navigating around the bumps, but that doesn't mean there isn't a cost.
On the original ARG-fun / QAnon thing, a person who's been thinking about this for a few decades is game designer Brian Moriarty. People who have played the game The Witness might know that name from this lecture that's included in it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0OY1RDe8Yg and here's a more light-hearted lecture of his on a similar theme http://ludix.com/moriarty/paul.html
His thesis is that mystery and the feeling of joining dots is one of the most powerful emotions a person can experience, and game designers can pursue this. It's also a big part of the reason Shakespeare and Bach are big deals.
For what it's worth, "Swiss patent clerk" was not where anyone saw not one but TWO total revolutions in physics coming from, in the same year no less. Einstein was called up to the majors pretty quickly but he did his time in AA ball. But there's also a key distinction: Einstein's ideas weren't just beautiful or insightful, they were incredibly USEFUL, and their value could be readily demonstrated in their practical application by "actual" experts.
"You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first. The closest you can come is to pull a QAnon - secede from reality, and then you'll only be competing with other secedees."
I don't think this is true. Or at least I think it over eggs the pudding - plenty of everyday people (who I wouldn't call dull) join things like bookclubs and they discover both on their own and among similar minded people huge amounts. It's not seceding from reality!
- Have super niche interests/hobbies where there are still things left to be discovered.
- Have expertise in different areas that aren't usually connected, and make associations, apply ideas from one area to another.
- Mine already discovered information, find gems, make them popular/discoverable.
- Take complicated subjects and explain them in an engaging and easy to understand way.
- Be on a cutting edge of a rapidly changing field (like software) where there's new ideas/frameworks/tools every month, which you can research, find better ways to use, teach.
Did I miss anything? Are there others?
Also you could think of building a startup or a product as a very productive way to do this kind of thing. You're gaining expertise about your customers and their needs (also your company and the tech you're using), and you use it to create something actually valuable. This is an extremely niche field only you and your co-workers (and maybe a few competitors) know about, there's new knowledge to be gained, new insights are meaningful, and rewarded with money.
Also - answering questions on stackoverflow and reddit. You can use your expertise to find an answer to someone's extremely specific problem. And everyone who has struggled with a difficult programming challenge (or even an easy one they aren't familiar with) knows how valuable it is to receive some help on reddit or find a stackoverflow answer that solves your exact problem.
Hmm... I guess there are infinite discoveries and insights to be made if your goal is to contribute to the collective knowledge. Just solve extremely niche, concrete, specific problems and help people out using your expertise. It satisfies the same drive for discovery in a useful way, I think.
This is mainly a verdict on the incompetency of social scientists. And the nature of social science. It is the only field where people (somewhat justifiably) feel their opinion is worth about as much as the average social scientist.
This is partially because other fields of science are not reflexive. You make a prediction, it comes through, and the system doesn't change. And prediction ability of the field slowly improves. And credibility increases. But in social science the system you are making predictions on is constantly changing and adjusting.
And complexity is much greater and is constantly increasing. You cannot easily isolate a core unchanging unit (like the atom) and use that to make consistent predictions. This has probably made it harder to find some deeper principles that can be used to make powerful predictions that keeps social scientists ahead of the curve and tame this complexity.
They are mostly stumbling around after something has happened to explain why it has happened. Or trying to find causations through statistics. Almost every major trend in the past decades has not been predicted by social scientists. Political, cultural or economic. They even use (abuse?) theories like EMT to explain away their own incompetence.
And impressive prediction is really the only way social scientists can build up credibility, since unlike other sciences they don't really build anything (by the nature of social science). Physicists can proudly point at various technical feats, medical scientists can proudly point at life saving treatments they have created etc.
All social scientists have is prediction, and they have mostly failed in that department so far.
"Real expertise" is often so narrow that it isn't hard for an amateur with some time on his hands to get at least as up to speed as many people who pass for experts on that thing while having done most of their work in some other (nearby) area. "Nearby experts" make valuable contributions that narrow subject matter experts don't, just because being all the way zoomed in on some issue means you miss certain aspects. And I think if laypeople are interested and get themselves up to the "nearby expert" level they can helpfully contribute (at least in the humanities and social sciences!).
Maybe a bigger barrier between laypeople and "experts" is learning how to layer on tons of shibboleths and not say stuff that will get you laughed at (some of my classes make me suspicious that this is the entire point of grad school). Probably we can all think of people in our own specializations who output tons of inane nonsense but get recognition for it cause they have PhD (or MD or JD or...) after their name and they don't use words that members of the guild have been conditioned to get upset by. But you can either learn the jargon (which is possible) or accept that some annoying people will be annoyed at you.
As a rationalist who enjoys spreading conspiracy theories and had a lot of involvement in kickstarting Q-anon, I think I have some useful insights to contribute.
First of all, I agree with everything that both Scott and Adrian have to say about this subject. I thought that both analyses were very insightful and Adrian in particular had a lot of great insights into the psychological mechanisms that drive Q-anon adherents.
However, I think that one thing that both analyses are missing is the fact that a lot of modern science IS legitimately garbage. Fields like economics or sociology are almost entirely unable to replicate or predict. The only way to gain acclaim in those fields is through the consensus of the existing experts, who act as gatekeepers. That's exactly how the field of astrology (which was once considered a legitimate science) worked in the days of ancient China. And much like astrology, one's ability to rise and gain status in the fields of sociology and economics is based purely on how much the elite gatekeepers like you. Now I may not have a degree in those fields, but it seems to me that expertise in a SCIENCE ought to be conferred by something more than a popularity contest among the wealthy elite. (And let's face it, anybody who can afford a PhD in economics or sociology is almost certainly one of the wealthy elite.)
So that was the first hole in the armor of the modern "expert consensus" paradigm - the fact that two entire fields of science - sociology and economics - are frauds used to push heavily politicized causes, like CRT. And this isn't a mystery to the public: most people know this already on some level. That's why many Republicans want to burn those fields down, along with the high-status "experts" who occupy them. If you think that the talking heads who masquerade as "scientific experts" have some sort of inherent "right" to exist despite the fact that they peddle useless garbage to the public, then Q-anon must seem frightening and terrifying. But if you believe - as I do - that peddling scientific bullshit is a crime against humanity that ought to be punishable by death, then Q-anon is simply the logical reaction to the understanding that a lot of "experts" are totally unqualified for the prestige and status that they have. After all, if a high-status economist or sociologist can be successful simply by manipulating the data to support a conclusion that they are being paid to propagandize, then why can't you do the exact same thing? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The best way to show the liberal elites the hypocrisy of the paradigm that they are pushing is to confront them with a mirror image of their own behavior. If THEY make stuff up, WE can make stuff up. If THEY call us liars, we can call THEM liars. If THEIR "sociology science" doesn't need to meet the criteria of replication and prediction, then OUR "conspiracy science" doesn't need to either.
The second vulnerability that the expert consensus had to the Q-anon paradigm is that modern academia is just a gatekeeping institution designed to deny access to power to anybody who can't afford a degree. This means that a lot of talent and intelligence is going to waste under our existing system. Say you're an uneducated genius born into the lower class who is prevented from gaining social status or prestige due to less intelligent academics who hold you back because you don't have all their fancy degrees, or maybe you're an aspie who isn't too good at playing the cutthroat conversational games that academics and elites use as class signifiers. Well, either you can resign yourself to a lifetime of obscurity, or you can use your genius to start a revolution and burn the existing system down. After all, climbing the ladder of prestige in these fields - where expert consensus is more important than the ability for your experiments to predict or replicate - requires you to kiss a lot of asses of people less intelligent than you who are higher up on the prestige ladder. A much faster way to climb the social status hierarchy is to simply stand at the bottom of the prestige ladder and shake it violently until anybody above you falls off the ladder and dies. Then not only can you climb the prestige ladder more easily - without jealous elites trying to snipe at you and sabotage your success - but you can also loot the bodies of everybody who got annihilated by your little scientific coup. I call it "the Genghis Khan approach to science."
"But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?"
Isn't this one of the attractions of various niche and nerdy Internet forums and Facebook groups? When your interests are niche enough, there very likely won't be an Einstein posting about them.
Uhm... I already said this. But let me add that the payoff for discovery is something we have explicitly monetized, and part of the incentive for people to use the interwebz in the 21c is that these minor league playoffs are profitable. It goes beyond the joy of discovery and into the power of disinformation. That is why politics are useful, because we expect to be part of the change and words of mouth matter in a democracy. What's most unfortunate is that these little leagues are all aggregated to national contests where memes like 'Bigly' and 'Small Hands' are echoed by 'democratic' institutions that editorialize. Ours is a situation where Babe Ruth smiles for the camera and pitches at the little league game for a photo op, and the self-determination of our amateur political discovery is co-opted in the Big Game. Is that patriotic or self-destructive?
I think a lot about William James's remark that "When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!"
To generalize past the physical sciences to the entire cathedral of knowledge, nearly all of us are at best bricklayers and masons. Very, very few are the architects and designers. The conspiracy theorists are James's little sentimentalists, building their castles in the air. They don't have the chops to be architects as they crave, but refuse to settle as hod carriers, a position while humble is honorable and necessary.
"But it would have been even better if he'd gone meta and noticed that he himself is being motivated by the discovery drive. He claims to have found a secret resonance - one between QAnon and alternate reality games (for best effect, imagine him having a conspiracy corkboard and pinning red string between pins marked QANON and ARGS). ...
This isn't meant in any way as a criticism of Hon."
Hon is not just playing in the minor leagues (and he might be offended that you treat him that way!). He surely wants to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, he tries to explain conspiracy theories by invoking a conspiracy, which is silly and self-defeating.
I always liked the image evoked by dendritic democracy, even though I realize it's a popsci abuse to distort that into a bunch of parts of the brain voting on a fully formed ontology.
Democratic ontology is still a fun image.
Maybe it has more explanatory power at the other scale. Thinking of each of us as a neuron in a giant societal brain.
The society brain is engaged in a brute force search for useful truths. It needs to have someone spend cycles mapping out crazy ontologies just to see if they take off. It needs to have others assessing those efforts and tugging on the weights.
Just like an ant colony needs to send scouts all directions. And have other waves vet if there's really food there, then drop pheromones for signal boosting.
The anti foraging impulse is the herding or swarming instinct. Or the natural built in resistance, to avoid chasing every scout down empty paths. If we know the right path, we can do more if we all push the same way. If we're under threat, we should all stick together. But these annoying stragglers keep wandering off other directions!
We're all foragers on some issues and herders on others though, so we want to keep good foraging, limit the bad kind.
But to do that we have to first agree on what is the bad kind of foraging, and that's the game we're all already playing, so in practice changing the underlying rules to improve outcomes in an agnostic way is difficult.
I do think society brain has its own cognitive biases, distinct from those of individuals. Will unpack some of those sometime.
But for now... There, there's a sofa theory about sofa theorists. Sometimes they're really important! I think you're a pretty good one, and maybe I just need to work on my signal boosting.
1. Contrary to popular belief, cognitive dissonance is more common among the educated and intelligent than it is among the thick and slow. This is because dummies lack the symbol manipulation ability to rationalize a belief sufficiently well as to convince themselves.
It isn't help that much "knowledge work" today consists of symbol manipulation. Also, like any other cult, it takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to accept Qanon.
2. What I find fascinating about Qanon is that "Q" hasn't produced a "Q drop" in quite some time. I think it's been over a year, and he doesn't even have to. The Qanons have been doing his work for him, busily making predictions and prophecies, taking any event or non-event and trying to make it fit the Q narrative.
It helps that Q's utterances became increasingly cryptic. That means that, with enough imagination, just about anything that happens can be made to fit into the Q narrative so that Q can be given the credit for an accurate prediction, when it's the mark that is really doing all the work here. The process is like watching someone do cold reading on themselves.
As a Christian, I see members of my own tribe do something very similar. To give but one example, there haven't been any new biblical revelations for centuries, but all the same we've been predicting the imminent End of Days for about 2,000 years now.
You don’t have to have dual PHDs to contribute something of use in fact it’s shocking when looking at the history of STEM how many big contributors were “amateurs.” Also, philosophy and political science are bullshit and psychology is a mess.
First example of a minor-league of knowledge that comes to mind is speedrunning. Not only is this a relatively niche area where you can be competitive by putting in a lot of time with no credentials, but it's deeply appreciated by a bunch of people who participate and watch in the community. Plus, speedrunning is niche but within speedrunning there are hundreds of micro-niches, there are guys who only run one game and guys who spend tons of time figuring out glitches for only one game and you can put yourself at the top of one of those knowledge hierarchies in a way that's verifiable and relatively unique.
> 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.
The thing is you can do this in academia, if you're persuasive enough to argue that existing science is Biased Because Men Did It, and come up with a completely new "science" of Gender Studies which is Completely Unbiased Because Women Do It. This lets you study things like why men abuse/rape women but never the other way around (hint: defining rape as "the rapist penetrates the victim with his male genitalia" ensures your data will never be contaminated by female rapists, and similarly the Duluth model excludes female abusers by axiom).
The main difference between QAnon and the Duluth model is that the mainstream liberal media seems to have no problem with the Duluth model.
Really great stuff. I started a reply, but it ballooned into a full-on article of its own. Rather than take up space in your comments section, I'll just say this: Political opinions are almost always personal.
A lot of us can't imagine what it's like to be a QAnon theorist any more than we can imagine what it's like to be black tar heroin addicts. But there was a time when all this QAnon stuff was just another story among stories on Reddit and 4Chan, back when there were some weird coincidences, a few cryptic emails, and strange signs that seemed to point to... something. That was the gateway drug and like all gateway drugs, most of us move on because it doesn't do much for us. But for others, maybe people with issues in their upbringing, or holes in their lives that need filling, or just that sense that Morpheus describes in the Matrix that things aren't quite right, it's enough to keep going... Cut to 4-5 years of more and more of this and the beliefs are as grotesque as disfigured as the mugshots of hardcore meth addicts.
I remember how exciting it was when the internet broke the story on "Rather-gate."
For those who don't recall, in the run up to one of George W Bush's elections, 60 Minutes got a document from a confidential informant that purported to be a copy of a US Military memo directing that W not see combat because of his political influence. Some internet sleuth posted within a few minutes that the memo looked like it had features that are available in MS Word but not generally available in the Vietnam era to someone typing up a memo, such as accurately centered text and character kerning.
Over the next few weeks, both sides of the debate raged on the internet, and each nugget anyone found contributed to the debate in real time. 80% of the info on both sides was trash, but sometimes someone would come up with information about the centering copies of army typewriters, or a point by point comparison of characters that helped nail down the font. It was fun and exciting.
(Ultimately, CBS did an internal investigation, and it turned out the document came from a guy who hated George Bush and believes Bush tried personally to kill him, that CBS's experts didn't think it was real, etc., but that took a long time, and I'm not sure if they would have done the investigation or released the results without those internet sleuths.)
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, because the branch-hackers have a more inviting, lower-stakes community.
I think you're generally recognized to be a guy with good reasoning skills that can apply it to a lot of things. You are careful and charitable. The result is that you can make insights without being a professional. You have a large audience. If you were a crank, I think that you would have more professionals calling you a crank. Instead you're recognized to be a smart dude by a wide audience. Continue to be charitable and I think it is okay to have a wide array of interests and make important contributions.
The only area where you have a major failure is your knowledge of Marx. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and have been repeatedly told by an expert that .....just kidding
I find it impossible to take *anyone* who claims to be an expert seriously.
I have spent a few decades working in a technical field and the most important lesson that I have learned is that the amount of stuff that you realise that you don't know increases faster than the amount that you definitely do know.
I would never claim to be an expert due to the awareness that the knowledge in my head is just a firefly in a vast dark void of ignorance.
I think there's a lot to be said for re-deriving or popularizing already-known knowledge. It can be genuinely useful if, say, not a lot of people know about the Lizard Pope yet and you want to raise awareness, but you can also do it just for fun or to build your "intellectual muscles" by testing your knowledge skills.
Computer programmers will sometimes work on problems that have already been solved - often low-level things things like "build an adder out of logic gates" that nobody would ever implement themselves in a real project - just because it's a fun challenge and you get to learn about something you normally never think about. Or think about science youtubers like NileRed - he's not discovering anything new, he's just saying "here's a paper on a neat chemical reaction, how about I do it in my lab and see how it works?" (And videotaping the process so the rest of us can be like "wow, that really is a cool reaction!") You're taking something that was previously just words on a page, and turning it into something you really *understand.*
I think part of why people get so carried away with conspiracy theory’s is because some many of them have proved to be true. There really was an Area 51 that the Government denied existed. The CIA really was organizing coups and doing mind control experiments. And working with Nazis. When you read about what Jeffery Epstein was up to with all the powerful people he was in contact with the Qanon stuff can seems extremely plausible. I recently read “And the Band Played On” about the aids crisis and I was shocked at what the gay community was up to in the late 70s and 80s and the book doesn’t even mention the amount of sex crimes and human trafficking that must have been going on in the Bay Area at the time. I have successfully avoided the Qanon stuff because what little I’ve heard really creeps me out. But I can understand why people get caught up in it.
In my salad days, I've reinvented quite a huge chunk of philosophy. It was a very satisfying experience - figuring out some problem, than finding a couple of possible solutions to it yourself, and than validating it by learning that both problem and solutions are well known and recognised in philosophical community.
I really wish education was more focused on giving pupils similar insights of actually finding solutions themselves. I believe such approach would be much more engaging than memorising seemingly arbitrary rules and then applying them couple of hundred times in order to practice.
Essentially every company meets this definition of intellectual minor leagues, no? You have 1) information unique to the company (often proprietary, or at least confidential), and 2) a set of problems that are only of interest to your company (and maybe your competitors, but if they've figured it out, they're not sharing).
This is assisted by most workers not being interested in solving wider problems, so even in a large company you can often stand out for even trying.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up in other comments I've seen - perhaps corporate shills are in the minority here? Do we have any readership surveys on employment?
> I don't think there's a minor league equivalent to discovering the Theory of Relativity
I would say there is: Every physics forum or study group where the Theory of Relativity is rederived from whatever the curriculum has been so far. It doesn't have to be a different or better version.
Also, the size of the major leagues is relatively small. Normally baseball teams have 25 players; times 30 teams that's 750 players, with injured lists and whatnot the total under contract is closer to 1000 players. Of these, probably no more than 200 are "important" players - an American League team would have 9 starting hitters, 4 starting pitchers, and a bunch of relievers. A few of each category will be younger players in the process of breaking in, not all of whom will make it. One way to think about it is that a typical fantasy baseball league would likely have 200 rostered players, so player #200 is somebody that only a hardcore baseball fan would know about apart from that team's specific following.
There are 120 minor league teams, assuming a roster size of 28 players (the lowest league max), that gives 3360 minor leaguers; some of those are double counted with the 1000 above (if you're in the 1000 number above but not in the 750 [i.e you are on the 40 man roster but not the 25 man roster] and not hurt you are likely playing on a AAA or AA team), however even factoring this in there are > 3000 minor leaguers and so 3x as many minor leaguers as major leaguers.
So you've got ~38,500 baseball players, 200 of whom are "important".
Now in academia you do have some similar dynamics: we award ~55k PhDs/yr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#United_States) and over 300k tenured professors. We'd have to look at the career dynamics (obviously professors work for longer than baseball players), but even if we see 20% of baseball players drop off every year and only 2% of tenured professors, we have something like:
55k new PhDs/yr competing for 6k open tenure slots = 11%
8.5k graduating college baseball players competing for 200 MLB (not MiLB!) slots = 2.4%
This is obviously extremely hand-wave-y, but should be pretty clear that the baseball players have more downside here.
"But when I'm in a bad mood, I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some."
This is your bad mood speaking? I think it is the most valuable statement in the whole article. We humans are hard wired to ask and answer, search and discover. It is as much part of our DNA as eating, sleeping and sex. It is this imperative that has driven our evolution. Evolution by accidental natural selection? No. Evolution by myriads of creative acts that have arisen from our innate need to discover. We learn something new. We are driven to share it. This is how humanity progresses.
> But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?
Mensa. The Rationalist Community. The philosophy subreddit. Amateur mathematicians work on puzzles, amateur astronomers find and track asteroids. All kinds of things.
Sometimes amateurs in these communities find interesting results, which maybe qualifies as the minor league version of the Theory of Relativity:
What a humane and benevolent observation. I've made an effort to resist labeling other people as insane and to try to understand what's driving them. I'd like to think that I'm more rational, but the truth is that I'm just trying to contribute knowledge on a minor-league scale, too.
I'm not sure the epistemology and knowledge production are what is important to followers of Q and other conspiracy theorists (although they are important to Scott and many of his readers). Hon seems to be saying that these folks are engaged in a form of collaborative fan fic. It's kind of like calling Herzog a bad documentarist. But that's not he's doing. He's in a gray zone and so is the Q crowd. They remind me a lot more of some hackers, and some toddlers, who simply like to put things together and then show those constructions to people. I think the right metaphor is more "construct" than "discover". It's like interactive infotainment, where the consumers are all also producing these collages in new mashups of fact and fear and fiction... fact fiction?
> You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.
This sounds like a prod at Eliezer's "Bayesian Conspiracy" concept (specifically https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xAXrEpF5FYjwqKMfZ/class-project) — but more from the rhetorical perspective of being a nod to some other previous repudiation of the concept that Scott is assuming the audience to have read. If there is such a repudiation, I haven't seen it.
Can anyone help: what exactly _is_ wrong with the pitch of "raise children to be unaware of certain scientific insights, but aware of all the right requisite knowledge required to make those breakthroughs; and then gamify their rediscovery of those insights, to allow them to get practice in the types of thinking that lead reliably to scientific insights"?
Like so much of Scott's work, this is remarkably sweet-spirited and lovely. But surely a problem is that "Democrats are a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping pedophiles" isn't just a piece of intellectual play or attempted "I'm smart too!" insight. It's the sort of thing that leads to killing.
Forecasting is great... there is often room to contribute to epistemic minor league here. Damage of bad forecasts/comments is fairly limited. Most importantly, contributors gets feedback (as long as they forecast some questions operating on short/moderate time frames.
I am South American, and as far as I know, most American Evangelicals believed in creationism, anti-Catholic conspiracy theories (Chick Tracts, anyone?) and so many other similar QAnon conspiracy theories (Jesuits control the Soviet Union) since basically forever.
The original QAnon scandal was that Facebook greatly helped to propagate QAnon material, not QAnon per se, which is standard American right-wing conspiracy theories.
Theology and being a pastor or priest is just another of those parallel epistemic worlds, also Marxism, and French post-Marxist nonsense too.
I think you've previously very effectively justified your existence (or rather unwritten the low end) by stating that you rewrite things in a way that can be most effectively digested by your particular audience. Of course - I'm sure you put it more elegantly - that's the point!
I feel like you also add a lot of interesting original perspectives and points - but just helping me understand what's already been said is more than enough to keep me coming back.
This seems like a similar drive to why a lot of people love gossip?
You might not be able to come up with the grand unifying theory of psychology, but at least you're the first to recognize that the neighbor didn't say hello this morning, so there might be something going on at the Jones family?
I think there are a lot of minor leagues in hobbies-- there's always something new to figure out about wood-working or bird-watching.
If you just want to discover something which will make life a little better in your social group, there are plenty of niches.
Mine seems to be finding the odd fact over here which fits into the discussion over there, plus knowing a fair amount about golden age science fiction.
Maybe the crucial thing is to not insist on being world-shaking.
Or maybe there should be an Effective World-Shaking Insight project to see whether people can be more efficient at it.
I'll have you know that much of what we know about human ribosome biogenesis originally comes from experiments in the fungus S. cerevisiae. And then I'll shut up because this isn't really the point of the post.
Okay so I was gonna riff on how this all basically describes LessWrong, when I realized that actually no, it's *literally every forum.* This is what drives Reddit, and Wikipedia, and StackOverflow; it's what makes the internet what it is. Little Leagues Research.
Is it possible you're burying the lede and overcomplicating this?
People like doing things that are fun. Talking about things, getting exciting about things, and thinking about things, are all fun.
I claim that injecting competitiveness into this is unnecessary?
A guess as to why there is no such thing as the "intellectual minor leagues" - well there sort of is: school, up through college basically. It’s just inflicted on everyone, not just just the portion of the population interested in whatever sport. People who are really into academics, like people into actual little league, just never leave and end up as academics akin to professional sports players. Other people splinter off at some point or another.
Then society also has better ways to absorb the curiosity or intellectual drive for people who don’t end up doing that kind of thing full time as academics. People who are of academic temperament can channel that energy into learned professions (law, medicine, engineering, software, etc) and do something socially useful instead of needing to engage in intellectual minor leagues. Maybe you can’t discover a new fundamental force, but you can design a new system for whatever application or discover an interesting new way to apply some old legal precedent by some clever trick for example.
[A side point, I think the discovery drive is also just less widespread than the physical drive. There just aren’t as many people interested in doing intellectual labor for its own sake than physical labor for its own sake, I think]
For one example of the intellectual minor leagues, consider research in the SCA, the Society for Creative Anachronism. When I started recreating medieval cooking about fifty years ago, there was close to nobody doing it, so I was almost certainly the first person in the past several centuries to try to make some of the recipes I did from medieval cookbooks. By now there are quite a lot of people doing it, but I only know of one person who has made a serious effort on medieval Indian cuisine, although there might be some more in India. Anyone willing to teach himself (or already knowing) Turkish or Persian could probably produce a substantial increase in what we know about their cooking as of five or six hundred years ago, and there are probably other languages that haven't occurred to me for which that is more true. I could pretty easily think of half a dozen SCA research projects that, so far as I know, nobody has done, and if I looked more carefully it might well turn out that for half of them I was right.
I expect the same situation exists for a variety of hobbies. It exists even more if you are satisfied with being the innovator in your geographical area. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still parts of the SCA where nobody is cooking from period recipes — certainly there would be if the internet hadn't sharply reduced regional diversity in such things.
Your post makes me think of a recent post by Paul Graham ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer) )
http://paulgraham.com/smart.html
> If you asked people what was special about Einstein, most would say that he was really smart. Even the ones who tried to give you a more sophisticated-sounding answer would probably think this first. Till a few years ago I would have given the same answer myself. But that wasn't what was special about Einstein. What was special about him was that he had important new ideas. Being very smart was a necessary precondition for having those ideas, but the two are not identical.
Graham implies that the person who comes up with new ideas is likely to be:
* Independent
* Obsessive
* Have projects
* Work hard
* Write
I have met a lot of 'crazies' in my life, both online and off, but I have only ever once met someone who I would call a "QAnon follower". She's the wife of my friend and the kind of person who falls for silly things all the time.
So when I hear articles like "This is what really drives them", from someone who must be in the same socioeconomic position as me (==> not exposed to these people much if at all), and the article is anything other than a bunch of on-the-ground interviews repeated verbatim... I'm not sure I buy it.
In my extensive internet experience, the QAnon phenomenon has attracted the following groups of people:
* NEETs having a larp and laughing at how dumb everything is (==> motivated primarily by humour, not insight)
* Demoralized conservatives commiserating with each other over some dumb internet thing
* A bunch of people with grievances against the current government of varying degrees of legitimacy, who have recognized the QAnon phenomenon as a useful army to piss off the people in charge (==> motivated by a very poor understanding of how political power works)
* A handful of 'true conspiracy' people who deep dive into things like mkultra, who are making a bad judgement call on this particular one (==> motivated not by an ambiguous drive for insight, but for a concrete tangible drive of "they've lied so many times before, how are they lying to me now?")
* Left-aligned activists who are going undercover and participating in the discussions just to spy on and mess with the right-aligned people there (==> motivated by fun and spite)
* Some guy's wife in the rural midwest (she might actually follow the trope laid out by OP).
I don't know how you'd operationalize it but I would take a bet on the order of $5000 that, say, >80% of everyone identified as a 'qanon follower' does not conform to the popular mainstream image of what a qanon follower is
I'm pretty sure the intellectual minor leagues is Twitter, and a lot of people derive satisfaction not from necessarily discovering something fundamentally new themselves, but from *propagating* knowledge which is new *to their audience*.
This amateur discovery drive is probably also a factor in crypto traders who may have a little bit of knowledge of CS such that they can grasp a GitHub repot. Nobody can tell them they're wrong about the future of a specific blockchain because the price movements keep proving them right.
Regarding intellectual minor leagues, I can see how it might be conceivably more futile than minor league baseball. Intellectualism is supposed to find some absolute truth about the world, whereas minor league baseball is only trying to find relatively excellent baseball players. However, the intellectual minor leagues (i.e., blogging, or op-ed writing, or writing for the New Yorker, or the Atlantic, or WIRED) does many things that big-league intellectualism (i.e., academia) can't: educating the world about insights that come from academia, since the best academics aren't necessarily the best pop writers; multidisciplinary intellectualism, so that you or Tyler Cowen can synthesize for multiple domains in ways that academics can't; continuing in that vein, writers can pursue topics that for whatever reason don't fit classical academic disciplines–maybe some insight about the nature of TV shows, or comic books, or AI safety, or effective altruism. Topics that are either too new, or don't have a deep academic weight, or just for whatever reason, don't fit into the standard big league intellectual categories are prime targets for amateur intellectuals.
Scalable, amateur intellectual writing, though, is probably a tiny field. Many of the successful writers are people like Sam Harris, Malcolm Gladwell, Yuval Harari, etc. They typically have podcasts or popular books, and they frequently give talks. TED Talks are probably the sine qua non of the intellectual minor leagues. It's arguable whether or not the whole lot of them are beneficial or not, but the masses need some way of accessing deep insights, for better or worse.
On the conclusion of the post: Strongly agree that we need more minor leagues. In everything. So much of social media is globalized and homogenized and this is bad because it creates superstar economies where (eg) five people each get twelve trillion retweets and the rest of us get three. Smaller scale social networks would be a good solution to this
I used to know a guy who was doing a startup about this. The elevator pitch was "facebook but for Dunbar's number". Basically imagine facebook, except the app restricts you to only interact with <150 people, using geofencing. I think he's onto something, but I don't think his specific idea is good
Hell, this was in some ways the point I was trying to make with my very first blog post years ago, where I wrote about how national news is overweighted and local news is underweighted in peoples' minds, and how everyone should shrink the scope of their social lives to a manageable size
And while we're at it, some words of (hopefully) support for Scott:
> I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk?
Part of the magic of being human, bro, is that you don't have to justify your existence. You exist, you're allowed to do whatever you want, purely because you want it and without appealing to any higher justification
And, for that matter, if we did have to appeal to higher justifications, dude, you've banked up a ton of karmic credit and you are the last person who should be worrying about justifying your life. You have brought more value (measured in handwavey utility) to your readers than people like me will bring to the entire universe across their lifetimes. You have more than justified your usefulness to the world
The epistemic minor leagues are where most of human social behavior occurs. The top-down perspective is the abnormal one as well as the one that doesn't capture as much information.
Intellectual discovery at the "major leagues" (at least compared to Qanon theorists) is not actually very satisfying at all. I'd imagine it to be far less satisfying than in the minor leagues of online anonymous speculation in almost every respect. It's a lot of fun to come up with a new scientific hypothesis. But then you spend the next couple years defending it from detractors. It's a lot of fun to identify the pitted core of an essay, but on the fifth editorial round you feel totally nauseated at the sight of it. It's a lot of fun to write a book, in some parts, but getting it published is enervating. Even the "intellectual rush" at a very high level is short and surrounded by drudgery. So getting it pure and in your veins via puzzles (either in games or in life) is pretty motivating in comparison.
You're ignoring that the focus on QAnon has potential material rewards outside of pure intellectual curiosity - 'Hey look everyone I found a new way to pathologize (i.e. dunk on) our enemies, you should give me tenure etc.! '
There are always people in society whose calling it is to make up things for other people to believe in. They're called priests/prophets etc. The regime loves focusing on QANON because it is dissident and crazy-sounding. There are also non-crazy sounding dissident priests around (like you sort of). These are harder to pathologize without admitting they might be on to various things.
>You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out
Oof.
> I often find myself trying to justify my existence; how can I write about science when I'm not a professional scientist, or philosophy when I'm not a professional philosopher, or politics when I'm not a professional policy wonk?
Maybe other bloggers / pundits / etc. should worry about this, but in your case it seems like genuinely unwarranted modesty; you really are a "Babe Ruth-level intellectual superstar" for many of the subjects you write about. There's only a handful of people I can think of who I would trust as much or more to write e.g. your long covid article.
> But read some politics, think a bit, and announce you've figured out how all existing institutions are corrupt and only you know how to run them fairly - and you can end up anywhere from interesting-at-parties, to newspaper columnist, to US President.
Being a good enough pundit to get a big substack following or even become president doesn't mean your insights are actually at the top of the ladder for epistemic rigor, correctness, usefulness, etc. It's just a field where there are lots of other axes people optimize for.
This is Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’ - can he just get to R?! He’s made it to Q and that’s quite a lot, but what if he can never make it to R? What do you do then? Yadda yadda, join QAnon?
There's a category of applying knowledge here. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, car mechanics (many others), work as experts in a particular domain, and the vast majority of them aren't Babe Ruth/Einstein level. But reality is complex enough that these people get faced with idiosyncratic problems that don't fit nicely with the domain knowledge that you get from reading textbooks or going to school in these fields. They have to figure out how to apply the knowledge to the messy reality. Any solution they come up with for a problem may be innovative and novel, but specific enough that it's only good for that one situation, and the next day or file or patient they turn to will have another individual situation/problem to be solved. Doing this type of thing can be great intellectual exercise, and can really help people.
"But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?"
I was going to say "dilettantes" but yeah, that's become a term of disdain. "Amateur" still retains some shred of its original meaning, but is also shifting towards "bumbling, incompetent, inept".
I was looking for a Chesterton quote but got distracted reading the essays, so here, have a joke from him instead:
"Every one knows the story of the solicitors' corps of volunteers who, when the Colonel on the battlefield cried "Charge!" all said simultaneously, "Six-and-eightpence."
I feel like we have a shortage of people trying to write interesting/useful articles, not the other way around. There's so many areas of life where good knowledge is primarily passed around via internal documents or word of mouth that anyone can contribute something with a bit of effort.
Youtube example: random guy from the Midwest starts a tool review channel, using cheap test devices and a bit of ingenuity and produces content FAR better than any other source I've seen. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2rzsm1Qi6N1X-wuOg_p0Ng. Did he discover a new alloy that allows you to make pliers that are 3x stronger while having the same weight? Nope. But his work still improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people looking for the best tool for the buck. His work also helps promote manufacturers who produce quality tools so in the long run it will also contribute to helping the best players on the market succeed.
Think about it - there are probably millions of girls/guys in America alone with a tool shed and the finances to afford a camera/microphone. Dozens of professional media companies were publishing tool reviews for decades The odds were absolutely stacked against Project Farm - but he did it anyway and massively succeeded. Literally anyone could copy his model of running data-based comparisons of various hardware (rather than talking about "opinions") but even today there's very few channels attempting to do this. Try figuring out which light bulbs are the best, which vacuum is the best, which couch is the strongest, which heater has the best features, which AC is the best bang for the buck... its really hard, precisely because there's no one trying to do objective comparisons for them like Project Farm does. There's still an immense amount of quality writing/investigation that's just waiting to happen.
Personal example: I lived in a European country for many years and eventually became eligible for citizenship. The official documents were a bit confusing and all I could find elsewhere were bits and pieces of info on various immigrant forums. So I went through the process while paying close attention to every step - and then wrote an article with an unofficial guide for that country's citizenship. Literally the first person to do so out of the tens of thousands of people applying every year. And boom - it has 10k views over a year, which I consider pretty good for a pretty obscure topic. Many people reached out to me and thanked me for simplifying the process for them.
Did I create an important piece of research? Probably not, no one will remember it in a couple of decades. But that's okay - many people are still happy that I did this and their lives were simplified just a tiny bit thanks to my article. And there's still a lot of space for future writers - if you google "citizenship X guide" where X is most countries in the world, you'll usually get nothing but scary looking government pages, fee-seeking immigration firms or immigrant forums with hundreds of scattered posts. We need more people to decide they want to share their bit of knowledge with the world and going out to write an article of make a Youtube video.
The issue is that people flock to the well known and attractive topics and then make broad pronouncements. If you want a unified theory of everything then you better come extremely correct. You need ten thousand footnotes and comments on a dozen school's opinions and all that. If you want to investigate, say, an extremely narrow question about a local neighborhood then you're entering less of a free for all and one where even relatively basic research can add to human knowledge. Likewise, there's plenty of space for people to do (eg) survival construction or 19th century cooking shows or youtube channels about how cities are planned without much competition.
The issue is that people want to occupy the fertile ground. If it's a subject everyone already knows then capturing it is worthwhile. For example, everyone knows about Caesar so capturing a narrative around Caesar occupies mental space that entirely new topics don't. Bold new discoveries about herd subsistence in Central Asia are interesting to me but the average person probably doesn't even know if they'd find it interesting or not. They'd have to think about it first. Meanwhile, mentioning some obscure new ACTUALLY fact about Caesar has a pre-existing slot in people's heads. This is why you get dubious interpretations or grand theories of everything memetically racing across the internet: it redefines something the end user already knows.
Another issue is that lack of rigor won't stop you from getting famous or propagating your ideas. Turchin is a modern example but Marx is arguably the most successful 19th century philosopher. At least measured by "founded the most politically successful 19th century ideology." He too has an extremely deterministic view of history that falls apart when you poke at it. Yet Marxism was fairly successful at propagating itself. And for people who think the goal is praxis that's all that matters.
Like, the QAnon people are not interested in doing deep dive investigations and FOIA requests to reveal the depths of corruption in Washington or to talk about how what technically isn't corruption still stinks like a fish. They want to propagate their ideology, to gain fame and fortune, etc. And in this they are joined by even many mainstream thinkers with different ideologies. There's a real lack of rigor among public intellectuals.
This is part of why I keep on delaying launching a blog. I'm entering the minor leagues. The question then is what league to enter both so I can be useful to my readers and make a good showing of things. There are pressures both of popularity and rigor which are sometimes in direct conflict.
The HBO documentary "Q: Into The Storm," is super-fascinating. I would have expected it to be a NYT-style propaganda piece about "threats to democracy," "insurrection," blah, blah. But instead it's a detailed breakdown of the history of the whole Q phenomenon told through the actual people that created and ran the 8-chan board. The drama of the interpersonal feuds between these characters is worth the price of admission alone.
The filmmaker, Cullen Hoback, was also on Joe Rogan a few weeks back.
Every organism is basically a model of… something. All that DNA encodes a strategy for survival and reproduction. The beliefs and values layered on top seem to form a similar role.
One last piece here: the combinatorial argument for armatures. Most computational complexity theorists belief that P!=NP. If this is true, it means that there are many truths out there which are very difficult to find, but easy to recognize. Large numbers of people putting the pieces together in different ways, and sharing the good ones, might actually be the most energy efficient way of searching a massive space of worldviews.
Oh, and that something that all organisms are modeling? I think it’s Goodness. Every organism is an imperfect model of The Good, and the physics universe is this massive ensemble of flawed models. As far as I can tell, nobody else is saying this. And that’s my contribution to the space of plausible solutions :)
It's sort of a crowdsourced wiki-conspiracy project. It's really hard to tell, however, how many people are are playing the game for entertainment, are doing it ironically, or are true believers (to the extent the vague and cryptic "drops" are something specific enough to believe.)
This summer I and a couple of other philosophy undergrads got together to read 'The Conscious Mind' by David Chalmers. No professors or grad students, no one with a huge lead in expertise, and not much background knowledge in philosophy of mind between us. I doubt any of us had any earth-shattering thoughts about consciousness, but it was a fun way to get together to practice sharing insights, having friendly arguments, and rigorously articulating our thoughts. (Book clubs in general do this, I guess, but I think it helped that we were trying to Do Philosophy a little bit rather than just chatting about our thoughts.)
Let me suggest art (in the broad sense) as a kind of intellectual minor league. It lacks the particular thrill of the pursuit of objective truth, but replaces it with the deeper satisfaction of the pursuit of meaning (or beauty or Truth or mystic insight; whatever you want to call it). It isn't useful for helping you be more economically productive or politically powerful or socially high-ranked, the way objective truth promises. (And if you're getting those things from it, you're probably missing out on the deeper meaning.) But it promises to be useful for life itself, which, really, isn't life itself the point of the economy, politics and society anyway?
I guess this might sound glib or navel-gazey, in the "they should learn to play guitar instead of trying to stop child sex trafficking" way. But... you know, if participating in local amateur musicmaking conferred more status than it currently does, maybe there would be less QAnon than there currently is.
This is a beautiful post, except that even academic science is *full* of the equivalent of minor leagues! What else are the more serious high-school science fairs? Where else would we find research projects to give to undergrads? In physics, for example, there’s an *enormous* space between the crackpots and the Einsteins (or the discoverers of new fundamental forces); it includes everything from undergraduate research forums to Physics StackExchange.
It may be more useful to think of intellectualism like we do many mental disorders, as existing on a spectrum, rather than major and minor league. That way many more people can be wise in an incremental way, and avoid being dismissed as out of their league when seeking attention.
Reptilians are far older than mammals, so our Pope became a mere figurehead long ago.
For those interested, there is an almost unlimited (might actually be unlimited) number of useful intellectual discoveries to be made that follow the basic formula of "difficult problem x is actually very similar to seemingly unrelated problem y, and we can apply the known solution y to problem x by putting a funny hat on it"
The formula is both very useful (there are lots of problems that need solving) and, at least occasionally, relatively easy. Go learn multiple unrelated fields. You'll find applications.
So here’s my question about Q. How come they haven’t found the guy, or guys who are doing this. There’s really no hiding yourself on the internet. There’s very little demand to find him/them either.
Also, and I admit I haven’t read anything by Q, why does the writer manage to convince so many people. Where does this persuasiveness come from? Has anybody examined the text for expertise in manipulation.
I don't know if the "minor leagues" problem is inherent to all of humanity; I think it's because of socially desirable intellectualism currently is. As the old joke goes; new, true, and interesting, pick any two. If knowing new things gets you points at parties, people will always prioritize interesting - and if necessary new - over true, which gets them no points.
In a context where novelty doesn't get you as many point, you might instead get points for a great knowledge of authorities, such as religious scholarship.
But apparently "minor leagues" are a problem in Q&A sites. Ideally you get a bunch of experts answering intro questions; but there's always new newbs, and mostly the same experts, so they get tired of playing in the minor leagues and screw off to only answer questions about obscure things that really pique their interest. So in the long run one of your biggest problems is actually preventing a (slightly more) major, or at least niche, league from forming. I want to say this tech talk was by one of the founders of Stack Overflow looking back on its design?
My the forces above (if any) save you from ever becoming a Professional Philosopher, or a Professional Scientist, or a Professional Policy Wonk.
There's a joke about the oldest profession here, but it's probably too crass.
It seems like one epistemic minor league (or, perhaps, epistemic pick-up game) is simply playing games with friends. Word games, trivia games, even tabletop roleplaying games provide space for cleverness and competition among people without any abnormal levels of expertise. One more plausible mechanism for regular contact with friends to improve one's life, I suppose—giving one an outlet for rewarding intellectual exercise outside of conspiracy theory world.
This is one of those areas where the Internet has put all the fish in one tank, to force a metaphor. I would imagine that for most of human existence , sure, you might not be the best basket maker or tuber digger on the planet, but being the best anyone around you knew, that was within reach. I think for many of us, having something we're known to be good at is key to our self-worth. If you have to compete now on Instagram with a million other people who might well have been the best in their little tribe, the competition gets a lot tougher.
You don't have to be a genius or in the elite circle to change lives or influence events. Greta Thunberg is as thick as two short planks (no offence, and she may not be so in private, but that's her self-chosen public persona) and she's influencing world policy. She's wrong in every respect, but she has shown others that ordinary people with no experience or expertise can make a big difference IF you can figure out the right leverage and pivot points.
"This is sort of true. But it needs to acknowledge that even being included in existing systems of knowledge production isn't that great."
I have no data to back this up, but I would guess that there's some availability bias in the background here. QAnon conspiracy theorists, like potential restaurant owners and aspiring actors, only see the wildly successful cases and don't really know about the army of non-successful competitors out there, and that their chances to "make it big" are actually pretty slim. Hell, even most aspiring PhDs are not really aware of their actual prospects of becoming a "big name."
I wouldn't discount too much the story Hon's story that people think they may become influential in the conspiracy world, even though they will simply be nut jobs.
I think calling it a discovery drive is a misnomer. I don't think it's about discovery per se, I think it's the same spirit of social credit-seeking that drives people to try to make witty banter at dinner parties, the drive to be seen as clever, on top of things, a leader, someone in whose entourage interesting things happen. The fact that QAnon works just about as well as Modern Monetary Theory or a novel and persuasive insight into the motivations of Augustus is prima facie evidence that the cleverness of the fitting together of the pieces -- the compelling curlicuity of the narrative -- is way more important than the content of actual measureable truth.
I've known one or two people who genuinely have a discovery drive, and they're quite different. As a rule, they are shockingly uninterested in communicating what they have discovered to others, they can hardly be bothered even when it's critical to their careers. They don't bother publishing, and when they do it's badly written, and gems of stunning insight have to be pried out of turgid ungrammatical sentences that would embarrass a 5th grader. They don't talk at conferences, they're too busy listening, and it's only when they ask a weird question that -- when you finish untangling it an hour or two later -- you realize they not only understood what was said in about the first 4 minutes, they were already jumping ahead to implications that will only occur to others years later if at all. They're strange people, and very different from people who love to talk about their latest clever idea.
I was very active on right wing twitter for years, yet basically never heard of Qanon until the mainstream media started covering it. Same thing with Alex Jones. Same thing with Richard Spencer. All three seemed to experience their growth in popularity *after* the negative media coverage. Perhaps even because of it. The media might be inadvertently steering the right into dumber directions by covering the dumbest elements of it and unintentionally making them more popular. Not any sort of conspiracy, but just a bunch of independent people following an incentive gradient. Partisan hacks (including lots of journalists) want to hunt for weak-men, because it helps them load up the "right" or "left" with negative karma ala Ethnic Tension And Meaningless Arguments.
(https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/04/ethnic-tension-and-meaningless-arguments/). This may have the unintended side effect of increasing the popularity of the elements of the "right" or "left" that they find most objectionable.
When only 1% of the population has heard of X, and then a bunch of major news outlets that two thirds of the population already distrust come out with stories about how X sucks, I bet belief in X actually goes up.
I think the traditional way for ordinary people to fulfill the discovery drive would be specialized local knowledge. "Where's the best fishing hole within an hour's walk of [NAME OF TOWN]?" is knowledge that's valuable, has some status, and where Average Joe from NAME OF TOWN has a crushing comparative advantage over the best scholars worldwide.
But even the metaphor of "minor leagues" gestures in the direction of the collapse of localized knowledge bases. Because minor leagues (if I understand correctly), AREN'T local; they're a feeder system tied into the lower tiers of the same old national major league. So this may be a case where the collapse of value in local knowledge spawns a wide range of substitutionary behaviors—Qanoners pacing the internet like polar bears pacing a zoo enclosure.
(Another thing that fits into this concept space of discovery-drive-behaviors-without-actual discovery? Dads reading books about World War II.)
>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.
Exactly. That's what I'm doing.
Tinyurl.com/HaitiZSS
I want to feel like I have made a contribution.
I think the burden of proof should be on those who might say, "only experts can talk about a subject" rather than on those who might say, "I have something to add". That doesn't mean the learned and the lay have equally valid opinions; it just means telling someone to clam up should have a higher threshold than ignoring what they say.
First of all we do have freedom of speech and it's not just a legal privilege. Freedom of speech is how democracy exercises its muscles. Second of all a world where only experts can speak freely would be stultifying; free speech is a social leaven.
There's going to be wacky ideas in the mix because there's always a price to pay. But it's a small price compared to the alternative.
There is a "wipe ass while sitting or standing up" phenomenon going on.
The majority of people who come up with earth shattering ideas don't talk about them or implement them because of the perceived dangers involved with them.
Those driven with incentive processes essentially don't even acknowledge that population existing and shoehorn everything into yet "more incentive". Corrupting the capacity to think about this topic.
The small subsection of people who are willing to put an idea out there and let the consequences do their thing if one personally benefits, tend to be in self-selected hierarchies.
The even smaller subsection of people whose ideas actually do materialize into replicability are almost always driven by some sort of economicus positive feedback loop that seeks to expand itself.
--------
> I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some.
Maybe this is true but no one knows this.
What you put out into the world is so sanitized on account of the various political environments you're appealing to, that you've become little more than an anti-cognitive bias peddler begging for scraps.
Your intellectual curiosity is enslaved to making a science out of denying caricatures and caricatured thinking.
I love you and I thank you, but it's pathetic.
One thing to add is that expert thought at any given time tends to proceed along specific pathways, and there may be large areas in between that no-one is looking at and which could be stumbled upon by anyone. My metaphor for this is Venice. If you're on one of the main drags, Venice is crammed with tourists, hotels, & souvenir shops. But if you randomly turn onto a side street and walk two minutes in a straight line away from the crowds, you will find yourself on a piazza where there are literally no tourists AT ALL (except for you, ruining it); no shops; no hotels. Just echoing alleys, laundry hanging out of windows, beautiful churches that are completely deserted.
Ok, so fleshing out the baseball analogy, seems like school is the minor leagues (grad school is AAA), academia is the majors. Most of us are playing in the local after-work softball league or just tossing the ball around with the kid in the backyard or drinking a beer on the couch with the game on. So QAnon is what, fantasy league?
I am the Lizard Pope
From now on, Catholics may do dope
While this sounds like a novel insight, it's actually:
1) Not actually new - it's actually a fairly old idea, that part of what makes conspiracy theories so appealing is that you are Special and Important and possess Secret Knowledge and are making New Discoveries, and thus are secretly important. As you noted, this is actually really common - digging up some forgotten piece of knowledge from the Giant Pile of All Human Knowledge and actually applying it makes you seem super smart. And to be fair, drawing these sorts of connections is more difficult than it seems - most people simply haven't dug that deep into that pile, or don't think of something as being relevant because they've mostly forgotten it and it takes a certain set of neurological pathways to be activated to remember.
2) QAnon is actually very literally an ARG - there's a lot of people who are literally making up QAnon conspiracy theories *because they think it is funny*. QAnon people are so gullible, there is a whole community of people who are out there making up insane nonsense to see what it is that these people actually believe. So it's an ARG where people are playing and other people aren't even aware that they're NPCs in an ARG - basically some sort of way of scoring points, seeing if you can get enough people to believe in Jewish Space Lasers that someone will actually talk about it on CNN. Not all of the conspiracy theories in QAnon are part of this ARG, but there's a group of people who are out there on these boards literally making up random things to see what people are gullible enough to believe. Heck, some people suspect that some people involved with QAnon are literally in it for the money.
I mean, someone is selling all those QAnon folks QAnon stuff.
3) As for the greater idea - yeah, this is very true. Honestly, a lot of coming up with better things is about figuring out connections between various old ideas and realizing that a bunch of things might be related and there's some sort of hidden cause between them. Heck, that's how germ theory was discovered. The entire area of genetics is potentially rife with such things - for instance, there's a connection between height, attractiveness, IQ, and a huge number of other traits, and recognizing this is important and can help you to find what genes and environmental factors are responsible for these things. Given how many genes there are, really, you don't need to be an enormous genius to make a discovery - you just have to stumble on the right link.
I think this is true of a huge number of things. Heck, I think this is one reasons why psychologists can get so excited about various theories - because they get to play this same game as well, because psychology isn't well understood.
Conversely, with physics, we understand things well enough that you need a huge telescope or particle accelerator to come up with new stuff.
I think you missed a very important form of knowledge: conveying information to new groups of people. YouTube and other "public intellectuals" are a solid example of this. None of what they're saying is "new", but it is repackaged in a way that is leagues more digestible and accessible to a new and wider audience (and oftentimes more impactful as a result).
Kurzgesagt and Minute Physics and Jodran Peterson are not paving new intellectual territory in the sense of any new discoveries, but they are paving new territory in conveying them very well, to far more people. Which is very important in its own sense.
I think the heirarchy you've presented here of Major vs. Little Leagues isn't necessarily descriptive of how all information works; there's always new ways to share it, convey it, repackage it, reshape it to fit ever-fluid and evolving cultures and languages and contexts.
This was excellent.
I opened the link thinking I had read it before, and was surprised to find it unfamiliar. Turns out the Washington Post published an op-ed this year with the exact same thesis. Also worth a read: https://archive.md/bZ0N2
I, in fact, did get my PhD in Biology earlier this year studying fungal ribosomes. Although it's only been six years, not ten, I can confirm that there are plenty of people who still know more than me. Also, I feel personally attacked. :-)
The section about dimensionality reminded me of this Lesswrong article:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvN2QQpKTuEzgkZHY/being-the-pareto-best-in-the-world
It goes into some more detail about reaching the Pareto frontier of human capability by being at the intersection of different domains of expertise.
I will offer my own example of some "intellectual minor leagues": one for history and one for physics, both related to video games.
History: Summoning Salt on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/c/SummoningSalt/videos), produces videos on the history of world record attempts to speedrun various video games. The videos are better researched than many actual professionally produced historical documentaries I've seen. He often interviews the record holders and possess a command of the intricacies of speedrunning, which often involve abusing arcane programming exploits. Nevertheless, he weaves everything into a satisfying understandable narrative. You really feel the human striving of these speedrunners. It's a minor league version of history because 1) video game speedruns are very niche so there's not a lot of other people who do historical scholarship on them, 2) the people involved are almost all alive, 4) speedrun records are already fairly well organized, and 3) the video games themselves can be emulated to provide living historical context.
Physics:
pannenkoek2012, also on YouTube, explains Super Mario 64 physics in a very in-depth, almost college lecture format. Again, this is in intellectual minor league because it makes physics easier in a few ways: 1) Super Mario 64 physics is niche, not a lot of physicists are working on it. 2) the video games can be easily run to make experimentation easier. 3) the physics is simpler and fully defined as well as deterministic. There really is a source code you can read to definitively explain observed pneumonia. And yet.... The videos are better than many physics lectures I've attended, and the physics of Super Mario 64 is unexpectedly rich enough to enable some truly exotic physics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A is pannenkoek2012 explaining SM64's version of quantum tunneling!
So I think that the whole "knowledge is vast and there's something for you" thing is largely true and allows for a vast number of "intellectual minor leagues".
Sverker Johansson in "The Dawn of Language" points out that - if language were a tool primarily for sharing information - the valuable content in each exchange would be moving from the speaker to the listener. The listener would therefore be benefitting most, and we'd all by vying to listen more and take in the best insights. Which is... not what happens.
The fact that we all spend so much time vying instead to be the person sharing the insights strongly suggests that using language for homo sapiens is a status game from the ground up.
Whether it's in a classroom, on a blog, round a coffee table, at dinner with friends - we all try to contribute in a way that builds our status. Sometimes you can 'win' by having the juiciest bit of gossip, sometimes by telling the best joke, sometimes with the most exciting twist on the conspiracy theory.
The mechanisms of academia channel this drive for status-through-sharing into developing human knowledge by (at least attempting) subjecting it to rigorous challenge in a professional context, and those that perform well get a bit of extra kudos on top to keep the system going. But what academia is enforcing and rewarding isn't the coming-up-with-insights it's the absorbing-all-relevant-existing-knowledge-first, supporting-with-evidence and subjecting-yourself-to-peer-review - the hard graft part that isn't rewarded in normal human social interaction.
There's absolutely nothing wrong in all the rest of us doing our best to grab a bit of elusive kudos by flaunting our insights in the spheres that come to hand. Peacocks gotta spread those tails, we enjoy it, and it has a sneaky side benefit for the species as a whole.
(Johansson also suggests that humanity would not be able to be so cooperative and mutually helpful - traits that have served us well - without the drive to gossip about the cheaters to penalise any freeloading.)
"You become a Biology PhD student, you spend ten years learning about fungal ribosomes, and probably there's still some guy in China who knows more than you and beats you to the one interesting thing about fungal ribosomes left to figure out."
I think this view of scientific communities is wrong. It assumes that the researchers in a field are *comparable* with each other. But "knowledge" and "research" are so multidimensional that you just can't. The guy in China will have discovered some things that you didn't know. But also, you will have discovered something that the other guy didn't know.
In my research community (a math one), the objective of a PhD is to find a tiny sub-topic in which you become the world-leading expert. That is "easy" to do if you invest 4 years of your life, and it would still be easy if there were 1000-fold more PhD students. All of the colleagues in my field are "better" than me on some axes and topics, and I am "better" than all of them on some other axes.
The same applies to non-scientific communities, too. In your personal peer group, I bet that every single member has some skill or expertise that no one else in the peer group can rival. Often something that is important in their own eyes. So they have their own quirky scale on which they are best in their own personal circle. And that's a good thing.
I think QAnoners “abandoning reality” in any conscious sense is stretching this beyond parsimony, and they may actually be a bad example of this. They’re mostly drawn from a biblical literalist milieu, in which the atheist/satanist distinction is blurry, the antichrist might show up at any time and it’s taken for granted that whole scientific fields are simply wrong. If those are your foundations, QAnon’s not far from the null hypothesis; you’re also really in your own separate league structure, where the epistemological hierarchy is going to operate very differently.
> You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.
This is obviously false though. There are plenty of knowledge domains where the space of people in the know is like, a dozen guys. As an obvious example, take speedrunning. There is a community of people who are dedicated to figuring out how specific games work and discovering exploits in them that lead to faster completion times. This community is pretty damn tiny though, especially for smaller games. It is very possible to make a novel contribution there.
I think it's pretty feasible to find a similarly small niche of knowledge where you may just be the single domain expert in the world.
Substitute "white supremacy" or "cisheteronormativity" for "lizard papacy", and the following is a perfect explanation of the Woke postmodernist turn in academia:
"The thrill of QAnon isn't just learning that all your political opponents are secretly Satanists or Illuminati or whatever. 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.
One place you could go from here is to talk about how QAnoners are the sort of people who are excluded from existing systems of knowledge production. They are never going to be Professors of Biology, and they know it. 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."
> But what is the non-relativity knowledge I trust Hon or myself to discover? Different "perspectives"? Putting existing knowledge into different and easier-to-understand words? "X is kind of like Y if you think about it, isn't that interesting?"
I think you're really underselling this sort of thing! IMO as an ex-physicist, most of physics is under-digested and people with e.g. an undergrad education could contribute a lot by reframing and elucidating the stuff that's already supposedly well-known. The experts often don't bother to repave a road if they're used to navigating around the bumps, but that doesn't mean there isn't a cost.
On the original ARG-fun / QAnon thing, a person who's been thinking about this for a few decades is game designer Brian Moriarty. People who have played the game The Witness might know that name from this lecture that's included in it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0OY1RDe8Yg and here's a more light-hearted lecture of his on a similar theme http://ludix.com/moriarty/paul.html
His thesis is that mystery and the feeling of joining dots is one of the most powerful emotions a person can experience, and game designers can pursue this. It's also a big part of the reason Shakespeare and Bach are big deals.
For what it's worth, "Swiss patent clerk" was not where anyone saw not one but TWO total revolutions in physics coming from, in the same year no less. Einstein was called up to the majors pretty quickly but he did his time in AA ball. But there's also a key distinction: Einstein's ideas weren't just beautiful or insightful, they were incredibly USEFUL, and their value could be readily demonstrated in their practical application by "actual" experts.
"You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first. The closest you can come is to pull a QAnon - secede from reality, and then you'll only be competing with other secedees."
I don't think this is true. Or at least I think it over eggs the pudding - plenty of everyday people (who I wouldn't call dull) join things like bookclubs and they discover both on their own and among similar minded people huge amounts. It's not seceding from reality!
I'm not sure if it's possible to comment on this article without being ironic.
Ways to contribute to "Epistemic Minor Leagues":
- Have super niche interests/hobbies where there are still things left to be discovered.
- Have expertise in different areas that aren't usually connected, and make associations, apply ideas from one area to another.
- Mine already discovered information, find gems, make them popular/discoverable.
- Take complicated subjects and explain them in an engaging and easy to understand way.
- Be on a cutting edge of a rapidly changing field (like software) where there's new ideas/frameworks/tools every month, which you can research, find better ways to use, teach.
Did I miss anything? Are there others?
Also you could think of building a startup or a product as a very productive way to do this kind of thing. You're gaining expertise about your customers and their needs (also your company and the tech you're using), and you use it to create something actually valuable. This is an extremely niche field only you and your co-workers (and maybe a few competitors) know about, there's new knowledge to be gained, new insights are meaningful, and rewarded with money.
Also - answering questions on stackoverflow and reddit. You can use your expertise to find an answer to someone's extremely specific problem. And everyone who has struggled with a difficult programming challenge (or even an easy one they aren't familiar with) knows how valuable it is to receive some help on reddit or find a stackoverflow answer that solves your exact problem.
Hmm... I guess there are infinite discoveries and insights to be made if your goal is to contribute to the collective knowledge. Just solve extremely niche, concrete, specific problems and help people out using your expertise. It satisfies the same drive for discovery in a useful way, I think.
This is mainly a verdict on the incompetency of social scientists. And the nature of social science. It is the only field where people (somewhat justifiably) feel their opinion is worth about as much as the average social scientist.
This is partially because other fields of science are not reflexive. You make a prediction, it comes through, and the system doesn't change. And prediction ability of the field slowly improves. And credibility increases. But in social science the system you are making predictions on is constantly changing and adjusting.
And complexity is much greater and is constantly increasing. You cannot easily isolate a core unchanging unit (like the atom) and use that to make consistent predictions. This has probably made it harder to find some deeper principles that can be used to make powerful predictions that keeps social scientists ahead of the curve and tame this complexity.
They are mostly stumbling around after something has happened to explain why it has happened. Or trying to find causations through statistics. Almost every major trend in the past decades has not been predicted by social scientists. Political, cultural or economic. They even use (abuse?) theories like EMT to explain away their own incompetence.
And impressive prediction is really the only way social scientists can build up credibility, since unlike other sciences they don't really build anything (by the nature of social science). Physicists can proudly point at various technical feats, medical scientists can proudly point at life saving treatments they have created etc.
All social scientists have is prediction, and they have mostly failed in that department so far.
"Real expertise" is often so narrow that it isn't hard for an amateur with some time on his hands to get at least as up to speed as many people who pass for experts on that thing while having done most of their work in some other (nearby) area. "Nearby experts" make valuable contributions that narrow subject matter experts don't, just because being all the way zoomed in on some issue means you miss certain aspects. And I think if laypeople are interested and get themselves up to the "nearby expert" level they can helpfully contribute (at least in the humanities and social sciences!).
Maybe a bigger barrier between laypeople and "experts" is learning how to layer on tons of shibboleths and not say stuff that will get you laughed at (some of my classes make me suspicious that this is the entire point of grad school). Probably we can all think of people in our own specializations who output tons of inane nonsense but get recognition for it cause they have PhD (or MD or JD or...) after their name and they don't use words that members of the guild have been conditioned to get upset by. But you can either learn the jargon (which is possible) or accept that some annoying people will be annoyed at you.
Matt Might's Illustrated Guide to a PhD might be relevant here - of course from the point of view of inside the knowledge production establishment: https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
As a rationalist who enjoys spreading conspiracy theories and had a lot of involvement in kickstarting Q-anon, I think I have some useful insights to contribute.
First of all, I agree with everything that both Scott and Adrian have to say about this subject. I thought that both analyses were very insightful and Adrian in particular had a lot of great insights into the psychological mechanisms that drive Q-anon adherents.
However, I think that one thing that both analyses are missing is the fact that a lot of modern science IS legitimately garbage. Fields like economics or sociology are almost entirely unable to replicate or predict. The only way to gain acclaim in those fields is through the consensus of the existing experts, who act as gatekeepers. That's exactly how the field of astrology (which was once considered a legitimate science) worked in the days of ancient China. And much like astrology, one's ability to rise and gain status in the fields of sociology and economics is based purely on how much the elite gatekeepers like you. Now I may not have a degree in those fields, but it seems to me that expertise in a SCIENCE ought to be conferred by something more than a popularity contest among the wealthy elite. (And let's face it, anybody who can afford a PhD in economics or sociology is almost certainly one of the wealthy elite.)
So that was the first hole in the armor of the modern "expert consensus" paradigm - the fact that two entire fields of science - sociology and economics - are frauds used to push heavily politicized causes, like CRT. And this isn't a mystery to the public: most people know this already on some level. That's why many Republicans want to burn those fields down, along with the high-status "experts" who occupy them. If you think that the talking heads who masquerade as "scientific experts" have some sort of inherent "right" to exist despite the fact that they peddle useless garbage to the public, then Q-anon must seem frightening and terrifying. But if you believe - as I do - that peddling scientific bullshit is a crime against humanity that ought to be punishable by death, then Q-anon is simply the logical reaction to the understanding that a lot of "experts" are totally unqualified for the prestige and status that they have. After all, if a high-status economist or sociologist can be successful simply by manipulating the data to support a conclusion that they are being paid to propagandize, then why can't you do the exact same thing? What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The best way to show the liberal elites the hypocrisy of the paradigm that they are pushing is to confront them with a mirror image of their own behavior. If THEY make stuff up, WE can make stuff up. If THEY call us liars, we can call THEM liars. If THEIR "sociology science" doesn't need to meet the criteria of replication and prediction, then OUR "conspiracy science" doesn't need to either.
The second vulnerability that the expert consensus had to the Q-anon paradigm is that modern academia is just a gatekeeping institution designed to deny access to power to anybody who can't afford a degree. This means that a lot of talent and intelligence is going to waste under our existing system. Say you're an uneducated genius born into the lower class who is prevented from gaining social status or prestige due to less intelligent academics who hold you back because you don't have all their fancy degrees, or maybe you're an aspie who isn't too good at playing the cutthroat conversational games that academics and elites use as class signifiers. Well, either you can resign yourself to a lifetime of obscurity, or you can use your genius to start a revolution and burn the existing system down. After all, climbing the ladder of prestige in these fields - where expert consensus is more important than the ability for your experiments to predict or replicate - requires you to kiss a lot of asses of people less intelligent than you who are higher up on the prestige ladder. A much faster way to climb the social status hierarchy is to simply stand at the bottom of the prestige ladder and shake it violently until anybody above you falls off the ladder and dies. Then not only can you climb the prestige ladder more easily - without jealous elites trying to snipe at you and sabotage your success - but you can also loot the bodies of everybody who got annihilated by your little scientific coup. I call it "the Genghis Khan approach to science."
Maybe there is not enough multi-domain experts in science and smart enough people with a lot of free time on the internet are helpful in this role
"But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?"
Isn't this one of the attractions of various niche and nerdy Internet forums and Facebook groups? When your interests are niche enough, there very likely won't be an Einstein posting about them.
Most people would be happy to talk to people who they think are smarter than them.
Uhm... I already said this. But let me add that the payoff for discovery is something we have explicitly monetized, and part of the incentive for people to use the interwebz in the 21c is that these minor league playoffs are profitable. It goes beyond the joy of discovery and into the power of disinformation. That is why politics are useful, because we expect to be part of the change and words of mouth matter in a democracy. What's most unfortunate is that these little leagues are all aggregated to national contests where memes like 'Bigly' and 'Small Hands' are echoed by 'democratic' institutions that editorialize. Ours is a situation where Babe Ruth smiles for the camera and pitches at the little league game for a photo op, and the self-determination of our amateur political discovery is co-opted in the Big Game. Is that patriotic or self-destructive?
I think a lot about William James's remark that "When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!"
To generalize past the physical sciences to the entire cathedral of knowledge, nearly all of us are at best bricklayers and masons. Very, very few are the architects and designers. The conspiracy theorists are James's little sentimentalists, building their castles in the air. They don't have the chops to be architects as they crave, but refuse to settle as hod carriers, a position while humble is honorable and necessary.
"But it would have been even better if he'd gone meta and noticed that he himself is being motivated by the discovery drive. He claims to have found a secret resonance - one between QAnon and alternate reality games (for best effect, imagine him having a conspiracy corkboard and pinning red string between pins marked QANON and ARGS). ...
This isn't meant in any way as a criticism of Hon."
Oh, it *should* be a criticism, Scott! I critiqued his piece a while back on DSL: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1310.msg29109.html#msg29109
Hon is not just playing in the minor leagues (and he might be offended that you treat him that way!). He surely wants to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, he tries to explain conspiracy theories by invoking a conspiracy, which is silly and self-defeating.
I always liked the image evoked by dendritic democracy, even though I realize it's a popsci abuse to distort that into a bunch of parts of the brain voting on a fully formed ontology.
Democratic ontology is still a fun image.
Maybe it has more explanatory power at the other scale. Thinking of each of us as a neuron in a giant societal brain.
The society brain is engaged in a brute force search for useful truths. It needs to have someone spend cycles mapping out crazy ontologies just to see if they take off. It needs to have others assessing those efforts and tugging on the weights.
Just like an ant colony needs to send scouts all directions. And have other waves vet if there's really food there, then drop pheromones for signal boosting.
The anti foraging impulse is the herding or swarming instinct. Or the natural built in resistance, to avoid chasing every scout down empty paths. If we know the right path, we can do more if we all push the same way. If we're under threat, we should all stick together. But these annoying stragglers keep wandering off other directions!
We're all foragers on some issues and herders on others though, so we want to keep good foraging, limit the bad kind.
But to do that we have to first agree on what is the bad kind of foraging, and that's the game we're all already playing, so in practice changing the underlying rules to improve outcomes in an agnostic way is difficult.
I do think society brain has its own cognitive biases, distinct from those of individuals. Will unpack some of those sometime.
But for now... There, there's a sofa theory about sofa theorists. Sometimes they're really important! I think you're a pretty good one, and maybe I just need to work on my signal boosting.
1. Contrary to popular belief, cognitive dissonance is more common among the educated and intelligent than it is among the thick and slow. This is because dummies lack the symbol manipulation ability to rationalize a belief sufficiently well as to convince themselves.
It isn't help that much "knowledge work" today consists of symbol manipulation. Also, like any other cult, it takes a lot of cognitive dissonance to accept Qanon.
2. What I find fascinating about Qanon is that "Q" hasn't produced a "Q drop" in quite some time. I think it's been over a year, and he doesn't even have to. The Qanons have been doing his work for him, busily making predictions and prophecies, taking any event or non-event and trying to make it fit the Q narrative.
It helps that Q's utterances became increasingly cryptic. That means that, with enough imagination, just about anything that happens can be made to fit into the Q narrative so that Q can be given the credit for an accurate prediction, when it's the mark that is really doing all the work here. The process is like watching someone do cold reading on themselves.
As a Christian, I see members of my own tribe do something very similar. To give but one example, there haven't been any new biblical revelations for centuries, but all the same we've been predicting the imminent End of Days for about 2,000 years now.
You don’t have to have dual PHDs to contribute something of use in fact it’s shocking when looking at the history of STEM how many big contributors were “amateurs.” Also, philosophy and political science are bullshit and psychology is a mess.
First example of a minor-league of knowledge that comes to mind is speedrunning. Not only is this a relatively niche area where you can be competitive by putting in a lot of time with no credentials, but it's deeply appreciated by a bunch of people who participate and watch in the community. Plus, speedrunning is niche but within speedrunning there are hundreds of micro-niches, there are guys who only run one game and guys who spend tons of time figuring out glitches for only one game and you can put yourself at the top of one of those knowledge hierarchies in a way that's verifiable and relatively unique.
> 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.
The thing is you can do this in academia, if you're persuasive enough to argue that existing science is Biased Because Men Did It, and come up with a completely new "science" of Gender Studies which is Completely Unbiased Because Women Do It. This lets you study things like why men abuse/rape women but never the other way around (hint: defining rape as "the rapist penetrates the victim with his male genitalia" ensures your data will never be contaminated by female rapists, and similarly the Duluth model excludes female abusers by axiom).
The main difference between QAnon and the Duluth model is that the mainstream liberal media seems to have no problem with the Duluth model.
Really great stuff. I started a reply, but it ballooned into a full-on article of its own. Rather than take up space in your comments section, I'll just say this: Political opinions are almost always personal.
A lot of us can't imagine what it's like to be a QAnon theorist any more than we can imagine what it's like to be black tar heroin addicts. But there was a time when all this QAnon stuff was just another story among stories on Reddit and 4Chan, back when there were some weird coincidences, a few cryptic emails, and strange signs that seemed to point to... something. That was the gateway drug and like all gateway drugs, most of us move on because it doesn't do much for us. But for others, maybe people with issues in their upbringing, or holes in their lives that need filling, or just that sense that Morpheus describes in the Matrix that things aren't quite right, it's enough to keep going... Cut to 4-5 years of more and more of this and the beliefs are as grotesque as disfigured as the mugshots of hardcore meth addicts.
I remember how exciting it was when the internet broke the story on "Rather-gate."
For those who don't recall, in the run up to one of George W Bush's elections, 60 Minutes got a document from a confidential informant that purported to be a copy of a US Military memo directing that W not see combat because of his political influence. Some internet sleuth posted within a few minutes that the memo looked like it had features that are available in MS Word but not generally available in the Vietnam era to someone typing up a memo, such as accurately centered text and character kerning.
Over the next few weeks, both sides of the debate raged on the internet, and each nugget anyone found contributed to the debate in real time. 80% of the info on both sides was trash, but sometimes someone would come up with information about the centering copies of army typewriters, or a point by point comparison of characters that helped nail down the font. It was fun and exciting.
(Ultimately, CBS did an internal investigation, and it turned out the document came from a guy who hated George Bush and believes Bush tried personally to kill him, that CBS's experts didn't think it was real, etc., but that took a long time, and I'm not sure if they would have done the investigation or released the results without those internet sleuths.)
There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, because the branch-hackers have a more inviting, lower-stakes community.
I think you're generally recognized to be a guy with good reasoning skills that can apply it to a lot of things. You are careful and charitable. The result is that you can make insights without being a professional. You have a large audience. If you were a crank, I think that you would have more professionals calling you a crank. Instead you're recognized to be a smart dude by a wide audience. Continue to be charitable and I think it is okay to have a wide array of interests and make important contributions.
The only area where you have a major failure is your knowledge of Marx. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about and have been repeatedly told by an expert that .....just kidding
I find it impossible to take *anyone* who claims to be an expert seriously.
I have spent a few decades working in a technical field and the most important lesson that I have learned is that the amount of stuff that you realise that you don't know increases faster than the amount that you definitely do know.
I would never claim to be an expert due to the awareness that the knowledge in my head is just a firefly in a vast dark void of ignorance.
Recursive leagues
I think there's a lot to be said for re-deriving or popularizing already-known knowledge. It can be genuinely useful if, say, not a lot of people know about the Lizard Pope yet and you want to raise awareness, but you can also do it just for fun or to build your "intellectual muscles" by testing your knowledge skills.
Computer programmers will sometimes work on problems that have already been solved - often low-level things things like "build an adder out of logic gates" that nobody would ever implement themselves in a real project - just because it's a fun challenge and you get to learn about something you normally never think about. Or think about science youtubers like NileRed - he's not discovering anything new, he's just saying "here's a paper on a neat chemical reaction, how about I do it in my lab and see how it works?" (And videotaping the process so the rest of us can be like "wow, that really is a cool reaction!") You're taking something that was previously just words on a page, and turning it into something you really *understand.*
I think part of why people get so carried away with conspiracy theory’s is because some many of them have proved to be true. There really was an Area 51 that the Government denied existed. The CIA really was organizing coups and doing mind control experiments. And working with Nazis. When you read about what Jeffery Epstein was up to with all the powerful people he was in contact with the Qanon stuff can seems extremely plausible. I recently read “And the Band Played On” about the aids crisis and I was shocked at what the gay community was up to in the late 70s and 80s and the book doesn’t even mention the amount of sex crimes and human trafficking that must have been going on in the Bay Area at the time. I have successfully avoided the Qanon stuff because what little I’ve heard really creeps me out. But I can understand why people get caught up in it.
Re. Intellectual Minor Leagues:
I partake of Second Minorest of all; which is arguing about if one fictional spaceship could beat another fictional spaceship in a fight.
The First Minorest is the Goku v. Superman , and the Deep Minorest is bugs bunny v. batman.
In my salad days, I've reinvented quite a huge chunk of philosophy. It was a very satisfying experience - figuring out some problem, than finding a couple of possible solutions to it yourself, and than validating it by learning that both problem and solutions are well known and recognised in philosophical community.
I really wish education was more focused on giving pupils similar insights of actually finding solutions themselves. I believe such approach would be much more engaging than memorising seemingly arbitrary rules and then applying them couple of hundred times in order to practice.
Essentially every company meets this definition of intellectual minor leagues, no? You have 1) information unique to the company (often proprietary, or at least confidential), and 2) a set of problems that are only of interest to your company (and maybe your competitors, but if they've figured it out, they're not sharing).
This is assisted by most workers not being interested in solving wider problems, so even in a large company you can often stand out for even trying.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up in other comments I've seen - perhaps corporate shills are in the minority here? Do we have any readership surveys on employment?
"...and then you'll only be competing with other secedees."
Please edit this to use the correct term: "Secesh," which can be in singular or plural forms. Pronounced "suh-SESH."
> I don't think there's a minor league equivalent to discovering the Theory of Relativity
I would say there is: Every physics forum or study group where the Theory of Relativity is rederived from whatever the curriculum has been so far. It doesn't have to be a different or better version.
I don't want to apply too much meaning to the metaphor here, but as applied to sports vs intellectual pursuits this is exactly backwards.
Minor league athletes (and even most major league ones) get paid utter peanuts for the most part. See e.g. https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/even-after-overdue-salary-bump-baseballs-minor-leaguers-still-paid-far-below-nba-nhl-counterparts/1gpql94asy7a10uo5nvc3yp4k#:~:text=For%20Single%2DA%20players%2C%20that's,for%20five%20months%20of%20work . Not only is $10k for 5 months of work not great, but the nature of being an athlete precludes a lot of other jobs - you need to take a winter job that also gives you a lot of time to work out.
Also, the size of the major leagues is relatively small. Normally baseball teams have 25 players; times 30 teams that's 750 players, with injured lists and whatnot the total under contract is closer to 1000 players. Of these, probably no more than 200 are "important" players - an American League team would have 9 starting hitters, 4 starting pitchers, and a bunch of relievers. A few of each category will be younger players in the process of breaking in, not all of whom will make it. One way to think about it is that a typical fantasy baseball league would likely have 200 rostered players, so player #200 is somebody that only a hardcore baseball fan would know about apart from that team's specific following.
There are 120 minor league teams, assuming a roster size of 28 players (the lowest league max), that gives 3360 minor leaguers; some of those are double counted with the 1000 above (if you're in the 1000 number above but not in the 750 [i.e you are on the 40 man roster but not the 25 man roster] and not hurt you are likely playing on a AAA or AA team), however even factoring this in there are > 3000 minor leaguers and so 3x as many minor leaguers as major leaguers.
This doesn't even count 34,500 college baseball players, 5,400 of whom have scholarships (https://www.ncsasports.org/baseball/scholarships).
So you've got ~38,500 baseball players, 200 of whom are "important".
Now in academia you do have some similar dynamics: we award ~55k PhDs/yr (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#United_States) and over 300k tenured professors. We'd have to look at the career dynamics (obviously professors work for longer than baseball players), but even if we see 20% of baseball players drop off every year and only 2% of tenured professors, we have something like:
55k new PhDs/yr competing for 6k open tenure slots = 11%
8.5k graduating college baseball players competing for 200 MLB (not MiLB!) slots = 2.4%
This is obviously extremely hand-wave-y, but should be pretty clear that the baseball players have more downside here.
"But when I'm in a bad mood, I think the best apology I can give for myself is that the discovery drive is part of what it is to be human, and I'm handling it more gracefully than some."
This is your bad mood speaking? I think it is the most valuable statement in the whole article. We humans are hard wired to ask and answer, search and discover. It is as much part of our DNA as eating, sleeping and sex. It is this imperative that has driven our evolution. Evolution by accidental natural selection? No. Evolution by myriads of creative acts that have arisen from our innate need to discover. We learn something new. We are driven to share it. This is how humanity progresses.
I wrote a comment and then it disappeared. Certainly it was mild and not abusive. What happened? Do you shut off comments after awhile?
> But what's the intellectual equivalent of the minor leagues? The place where, even if you're not a superstar, you can have the experience of generating new insights which get appreciated by a community of like-minded knowledge-seekers?
Mensa. The Rationalist Community. The philosophy subreddit. Amateur mathematicians work on puzzles, amateur astronomers find and track asteroids. All kinds of things.
Sometimes amateurs in these communities find interesting results, which maybe qualifies as the minor league version of the Theory of Relativity:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/amateur-mathematician-finds-smallest-universal-cover-20181115/
What a humane and benevolent observation. I've made an effort to resist labeling other people as insane and to try to understand what's driving them. I'd like to think that I'm more rational, but the truth is that I'm just trying to contribute knowledge on a minor-league scale, too.
I'm not sure the epistemology and knowledge production are what is important to followers of Q and other conspiracy theorists (although they are important to Scott and many of his readers). Hon seems to be saying that these folks are engaged in a form of collaborative fan fic. It's kind of like calling Herzog a bad documentarist. But that's not he's doing. He's in a gray zone and so is the Q crowd. They remind me a lot more of some hackers, and some toddlers, who simply like to put things together and then show those constructions to people. I think the right metaphor is more "construct" than "discover". It's like interactive infotainment, where the consumers are all also producing these collages in new mashups of fact and fear and fiction... fact fiction?
This is very relatable. Thank you for sharing it.
> and ancient Lemuria
Scott knows the CCRU, or CCRU has ended up in QAnon? Or Land is behind QAnon?
> You can't do that with intellectual curiosity; there's no way to match dull people against each other to see who discovers gravity first.
This sounds like a prod at Eliezer's "Bayesian Conspiracy" concept (specifically https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xAXrEpF5FYjwqKMfZ/class-project) — but more from the rhetorical perspective of being a nod to some other previous repudiation of the concept that Scott is assuming the audience to have read. If there is such a repudiation, I haven't seen it.
Can anyone help: what exactly _is_ wrong with the pitch of "raise children to be unaware of certain scientific insights, but aware of all the right requisite knowledge required to make those breakthroughs; and then gamify their rediscovery of those insights, to allow them to get practice in the types of thinking that lead reliably to scientific insights"?
Like so much of Scott's work, this is remarkably sweet-spirited and lovely. But surely a problem is that "Democrats are a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping pedophiles" isn't just a piece of intellectual play or attempted "I'm smart too!" insight. It's the sort of thing that leads to killing.
Forecasting is great... there is often room to contribute to epistemic minor league here. Damage of bad forecasts/comments is fairly limited. Most importantly, contributors gets feedback (as long as they forecast some questions operating on short/moderate time frames.
I am South American, and as far as I know, most American Evangelicals believed in creationism, anti-Catholic conspiracy theories (Chick Tracts, anyone?) and so many other similar QAnon conspiracy theories (Jesuits control the Soviet Union) since basically forever.
The original QAnon scandal was that Facebook greatly helped to propagate QAnon material, not QAnon per se, which is standard American right-wing conspiracy theories.
Theology and being a pastor or priest is just another of those parallel epistemic worlds, also Marxism, and French post-Marxist nonsense too.
Where is the meta of the blog writer?
I think you've previously very effectively justified your existence (or rather unwritten the low end) by stating that you rewrite things in a way that can be most effectively digested by your particular audience. Of course - I'm sure you put it more elegantly - that's the point!
I feel like you also add a lot of interesting original perspectives and points - but just helping me understand what's already been said is more than enough to keep me coming back.