Discussion on anti-epistemology might benefit from the concept of semiotics, the study of signs: “an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.”
In anti-epistemology, people use signs to communicate meaning that diverges from a straightforward literal interpretation, often its opposite. I offer a tasty meal to see if you’ll be suspicious enough to reject it as possibly poisoned, which means you might be a trustworthy criminal associate. I tell jokes to see if you’ll laugh, which means you’re too comfortable, don’t know your place at the bottom of the hierarchy, and need a public reprimand. I say something absurd and offensive, to see if you’re also willing to say the kind of absurd and offensive things that are capable of warping social dynamics.
In general, I tell you things, see if you can reliably translate them into the opposite meaning by observing your behavior, and gradually increase your access to high risk/reward criminal, immoral, or stigmatized opportunities if I can tell you’re understanding this coded language correctly (and demonstrating that you’re contaminating yourself with culpability while being capable enough not getting caught). Perversion of such signs is necessary for the sustenance of the criminal or outsider society, and therefore are deontologically imperative, obligatory. It can’t be straightforward encryption, both because encryption can be unambiguously cracked and because that would limit the ability to onboard outsiders, who wouldn’t understand how to decrypt and for whom it would be too risky to teach them how to decrypt.
Rationalists get called “quokkas,” I think, not because they naively believe the signs they’re exposed to are all literally meant as true, but because they want to live in a world where all signs are literal, and their strategy to achieve that world is to treat all signs as literally true, as if that could make it so. When everybody can see the signs aren’t literally meant as true, it can make what rationalists intend as a form of activism appear as naivete, tilting at windmills, or dangerously confrontational with the underlying coded order, particularly when the perversion of the literal meaning of the sign is so widely understood that treating its literal meaning as primary is actually confusing to most people.
There’s been some writing on LessWrong recently about paranoia. What I’m saying here can sound paranoid, but paranoia implies having false, fearful beliefs about the world. Instead, I think people often have true, non-fearful beliefs about the world, just based on non-literal but commonplace meanings of signs. The boss says you don’t have to do X, you clearly understand he means you do have to do X, so you do X, and you keep your job. It might be scary or harmful to have to do X, but you’re correctly, clearly understanding that you’re being told that you do in fact have to do it to keep your job. You’re not paranoid. You are reading the sign backwards, as intended. Boss wouldn’t have mentioned not doing X if he hadn’t intended you to do it, or would have conveyed the doing of X as being attached to a threat of retribution. Everybody understands they’re surrounded by an enormous number of conspiracies all the time, and it’s not so much frightening as an extremely irritating slog to parse them and try and complete their goals.
Discussion on anti-epistemology might benefit from the concept of semiotics, the study of signs: “an object, quality, event, or entity whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.”
In anti-epistemology, people use signs to communicate meaning that diverges from a straightforward literal interpretation, often its opposite. I offer a tasty meal to see if you’ll be suspicious enough to reject it as possibly poisoned, which means you might be a trustworthy criminal associate. I tell jokes to see if you’ll laugh, which means you’re too comfortable, don’t know your place at the bottom of the hierarchy, and need a public reprimand. I say something absurd and offensive, to see if you’re also willing to say the kind of absurd and offensive things that are capable of warping social dynamics.
In general, I tell you things, see if you can reliably translate them into the opposite meaning by observing your behavior, and gradually increase your access to high risk/reward criminal, immoral, or stigmatized opportunities if I can tell you’re understanding this coded language correctly (and demonstrating that you’re contaminating yourself with culpability while being capable enough not getting caught). Perversion of such signs is necessary for the sustenance of the criminal or outsider society, and therefore are deontologically imperative, obligatory. It can’t be straightforward encryption, both because encryption can be unambiguously cracked and because that would limit the ability to onboard outsiders, who wouldn’t understand how to decrypt and for whom it would be too risky to teach them how to decrypt.
Rationalists get called “quokkas,” I think, not because they naively believe the signs they’re exposed to are all literally meant as true, but because they want to live in a world where all signs are literal, and their strategy to achieve that world is to treat all signs as literally true, as if that could make it so. When everybody can see the signs aren’t literally meant as true, it can make what rationalists intend as a form of activism appear as naivete, tilting at windmills, or dangerously confrontational with the underlying coded order, particularly when the perversion of the literal meaning of the sign is so widely understood that treating its literal meaning as primary is actually confusing to most people.
There’s been some writing on LessWrong recently about paranoia. What I’m saying here can sound paranoid, but paranoia implies having false, fearful beliefs about the world. Instead, I think people often have true, non-fearful beliefs about the world, just based on non-literal but commonplace meanings of signs. The boss says you don’t have to do X, you clearly understand he means you do have to do X, so you do X, and you keep your job. It might be scary or harmful to have to do X, but you’re correctly, clearly understanding that you’re being told that you do in fact have to do it to keep your job. You’re not paranoid. You are reading the sign backwards, as intended. Boss wouldn’t have mentioned not doing X if he hadn’t intended you to do it, or would have conveyed the doing of X as being attached to a threat of retribution. Everybody understands they’re surrounded by an enormous number of conspiracies all the time, and it’s not so much frightening as an extremely irritating slog to parse them and try and complete their goals.