There’s a persistent community of taste emerging around sensemaking of noisy social media around developing events. It’s like fandom, with connoisseurs of the play by play getting snotty. Things like the Minneapolis strife end up being processed like concerts.

The interesting thing is that competing interpretive dance aesthetics evolve around the *same* event, with projected grammars, tropes ,and apophenia patterns. And people who just want make sense of the event run afoul of those building interpretation institutions.

Like if the same concert were being watched by Beatles fans, Bach fans, and Grimes fans, each sorting signal and noise differently to extract unique “truth” performances. Asking a question offends them all.

There are no innocent questions when tastemakers corner sensemaking. Questions mark you as either dumb or bad faith guy on the Other Team. The presumption is that there are no spectators, only participants. And participants don’t ask questions publicly, only to trusted team mates

The only public discourse allowed around doubt is:

“Is X true?”

“How dare you entertain doubt around X?”

Publicly expressed doubt is weakness in a participant so if all are presumed participants, nobody can express or explore doubts publicly.

Fwiw, I downgrade the credibility of anyone who acts like the news is a concert and that asking questions is philistinism/gaucherie.

One of the perks of being willing to look foolish and tasteless publicly is that you get a better sense of where actual foolishness lies. It can generally be found lurking under aesthetic confidence in one’s own interpretive stance. A kind of aesthetic Dunning-Kruger effect.

I genuinely don’t give a crap about whether unfolding events validate priors of this or that interpretive stance better. If your dance troupe got it right this time it might get it wrong next time and vice versa. Get over yourself. What matters is establishing what happened.

Twitter sensemaking isn’t a science. No matter how strongly you believe in the superior validity of your ideological inference engine, it’s as limited by noisy facts trickling in as the others. It will not consistently outperform others or be always right.

I may have been developing a beef/grudge against all news sensemaking aesthetic subcultures for a while. I’m tired of being patronized by six conflicting dance troupes, each convinced of its artistic and moral superiority, every time events like this unfold.

Curiously the sensemaking-aesthetic tribes aren’t the same as the ideological tribes in the culture war. More like mercenaries proud of their sensemaking lenses and more interested in using those lenses in a show of prowess than in what they reveal.

Broke thread in correcting typo. Continues here https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1266264689614307336?s=21