#vibe shift

"Hey guys, it's us, the cool all-male ensembles from your childhood. Sorry about that bit where they replaced us entirely with women just to be assholes. But we're back now, so let's just forget about that, pick up where we left off, and have some fun."

I'll admit to it right now, I haven't been reading it! Since it's come up, I decided to have a peek.

I had a good laugh at a few parts of this recent post.

We can use this more serious post for calibration. There are a few things going on here.

1: Scott is writing for a more general audience, about a more common mistake, rather than a highly-selected audience of high-IQ nerds with a similar cultural background.

2: There is a pattern where someone is intelligent and relatively self-reflective and encounters some problem within society. Then they undergo rising awareness as they pour immense intellectual effort into figuring out what the fuck is going on. During this phase, they will tend to attack problems where there is high potential information gain.

3: Combining 1 & 2, we can see that Scott is taking on an officer role for a broader share of the blues than before, attempting to guide them away from a purely tribalistic pursuit-of-power approach. (We see something similar in the blog of another famous substacker - Matt Yglesias, despite (or perhaps because of) his partisanship attempting to reduce the epistemic debt load of the Democratic coalition.)

4: Scott is posting something almost daily (with new written posts every 2-3 days); this is less time to develop a topic.

5: Slate Star Codex apparently launched in 2013. The readers of the original blog are now ten years older, which means they've had ten more years to undergo ideological development.

Some time in the past couple of years, I reread Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel. It's well-written and a fun read, with a nice twist.

credit:

Which crosses very productively with the thing where I can game out contemporary trends to tell where they'll eventually end up

Which is maybe part of how it works out that I am now more amazingly well-positioned than I could ever imagine.

Moderns only have the *words* to this song. They have no context for how it was ever performed. Moderns engage Normie Mainstream English in a much more picky and literal way (this may be an effect of the internet forcing people to tailor their language across the broadest range of comprehension, rather than allowing for changed contextual meanings and subcultural usages) and nobody asks what anyone meant by anything. Nobody is interested in context or in creative word use or in supporting data of the times.

There's been very very good critiques of that argument in the past 30 years, but unfortunately, the popularization of said critiques has led only to the metastasization of what Thomas called 'victimology' in the 90's (mb earlier!).

That being said, too often said argument is used as a bludgeon, to force so-called 'necessary' pain on unwilling subjects that for various reasons, cannot escape or otherwise object in ways that lead to prompt ceasing of the unnecessary (and hopefully too, the necessary, for it is hard to explain oneself when suffering), reconciliation, and comfortable agreement to alternatives between the two parties, recognizing each other as equals. Too often is the argument used to justify those who wish to play Pharaoh on the powerless under their command and control. These things do not develop the skill either.