The longer I spend online, the more true this feels. A big consequence of social atomization is that increasing numbers of people lack a sense of how their thinking stacks up against others. They are either very impressed with themselves OR ridiculously underestimate themselves. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1266118677537026050

This isn’t good or bad. Viewed as an instrument, the brain requires calibration like any other. It produces “insights” that require calibration re: importance, originality, correctness. This is one of the banal functions academia provides. Not “education” but calibration.

Calibrated people have internalized a sense of when their assessments of their own thoughts are likely to match those of others. The cost is, the calibration makes your thinking more middling and mediocre unless you make an effort to protect it, Uncalibrated people

... are either extraordinarily delightful or extraordinarily tedious.

The former produce works of out-of-left-field genius that are a sheer delight to discover. Online life is enriched by their existence.

The latter produce tons of mediocre drivel that they *think* is genius.

I’m all for mediocrity that is self-aware of its own mediocrity. That can make it actually fun, and paradoxically elevate it above mediocrity, both for producer and consumer. Irony is the leveler-upper of well-calibrated average brains.

But mediocrity convinced of its own genius (engineers producing crackpot physics theories and pestering physicists with them is a good genre) is the bane of the Internet. But it wasn’t too bad in first couple of decades when they were mostly isolated. Now they can build tribes.

99/100 of these tribes are the one-eyed leading the blind. Uncalibrated people very impressed with themselves attracting other Uncalibrated people looking for cultural leadership. Result: a Cambrian explosion of local consensus realities, all free from calibration.

But what makes this extra frustrating is that the 1 time in 100 when genuinely intellectually pathbreaking tribes form, they struggle. Struggle for resources, institutional support, big patrons, prominent memetic wins, viral vigor...

The median online tribe is much worse than the median institutional tribe. Less rigorous, more bullshitty, less skeptical of itself, more self-certain, less capable of systematic self-doubt...

But the 1 in 100 will be far superior to the median institutional tribe.

This mediocristan/extremistan difference means that *every* self-important online tribe thinks it is in the 1% of “special” tribes, and it’s everybody else who comprises the unwashed masses pwned by sloppy conspiracy cults. And all think they’re superior to institutional tribes.

I’ve often argued with @nils_gilman, @Aelkus and @Brett_Fujioka about this, and I’m usually the one defending the wisdom of Internet crowds over the complacency of institutional experts, but the picture is just more complex.

I’m not entirely sure where this will go. Institutional authority is crumbling rapidly. I’m probably from last generation to have benefitted from a lot of time in both worlds, when they were both healthy and in a good yin-yang balance of power.

In the future there may be nowhere to go to get your brain calibrated, as universities get sold for parts and social proof of status in subreddits and Facebook groups substitutes for calibration.

This is one reason I’m suddenly interested in maker/diy type stuff.

Calibration is *expensive* there’s a reason engineering departments have suffered less than humanities. They all have facilities with millions of dollars worth of equipment that won’t flatter your social-proof conceits, and epistemology and pedagogy are both arranged around them.

Find *any* non-human, non-textual source of calibration for your brain and stay connected to it. People and textual culture can only generate social proof, not reality calibration.

It is of course ironic for me to be tweeting this. Producer of a firehose of mostly mediocre text for a “social media” economy that runs on likes. But in my defense, I’ve resisted tribal dynamics all the way, and have never relied on online world for brain (re)calibration.

A red-flag for me that signals poorly calibrated thinking is over-obsession with credit for ideas in any form. While academia can be extraordinarily petty about this, it’s due to lust for rewards not from lack of calibration. People accuse specific others of stealing credit.

Online, it’s more a diffuse and unironic concern with the provenance of ideas and thoughts as though there’s some absolute, unicausal, determinate history to every idea. Because every Uncalibrated Subcultural Bubble has only One True History and it is Uniquely Ours Alone.

You see this in corporations too btw. People without a broader exposure to the history of an idea will assume that a management idea used in a company was invented there.

“Oh, other companies use matrix management too? I thought Ac,e Corp invented it”

Entire countries do it. The Soviet Union practiced what was called Popovism: (term came from insistence that insisting that Alexander Popov invented radio). Oddly enough there is no Wikipedia page for this term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Stepanovich_Popov

Some helpful aphoristic wisdom (none of it mine)

“The part that is good is not new, and the part that is new is not good” — Martin Sherlock, 1781 (likely) https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/17/good-original/

“A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.” — not original to Harry Truman

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless/

Stigler’s Law of Eponymy (attributed by Stigler to Robert K. Merton) “no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

Quote Investigator btw is a great site for getting calibrated on just how often a) many people independently come up with a version of an idea b) how little it matters c) why it’s actually fine if Einstein and Gandhi between them get credit for saying basically everything first.

The dynamic that creates uncalibrated realities around self-impressed autodidacts on the wild internet is the same one that creates Straussian subcultures in academia and Big Man cultures in business. The desire for leaders which imprints on nearest simpatico self-certain person.

The difference is that Straussian great men and corporate Big Men have to work to shut down calibration in the naturally calibration-focused institutional environment. Or more frequently, have some first-generation acolyte do it for them. Online there’s no calibration from day 1.

The key sign that you’re being owned by a unfalsifiable, uncalibrated textual tradition is that you’re encouraged to consider some core texts the truth ground. An “up is down” maneuver. Bible, Constitution, online ur texts, incoherent flows of mother-lode memes, Ancient Forums

The devious aspect of the more sociopathic online cults is how they pretend to encourage you to “do your own research, see for yourself”, but all the while nudge/funnel you towards their ur sources by yes-and-ing you where you happen to lean that way, and ignoring where you don’t

Depressingly exploitative and predatory. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1297767323441348608

This is active vandalism of the fragile calibration instincts of vulnerable people. They don’t know they are onstage in a magic act with a conjurer. At least with cult gurus or faith healers there is a stage and an audience that might tip you off that you’re being played.

It’s like a Vegas magic act, except there’s no tickets and no audience doors. Only way into the audience is via the stage, and you only get a seat if you get fully taken in while on the stage. If not you’re out.

If you could find some way to deliver diy brain calibration at scale online, you’d solve mental health, culture war, and fake news, all in one shot. I don’t think it can be done. Calibration is expensive and painful and people have to be paid or otherwise rewarded to endure it.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail — John Salvatier (increasingly climbing the rankings in my best-things-ever-written-online)

But... textual ity has a surprising amount of detail too. So it’s easy to get disoriented. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail

The difference is that the detail in textuality is stretched out very thin over a lot of reality. And almost none of it is capable of providing calibration.

Any random object you pick up around your home likely involves more detail than any Big History stretched over centuries.

It’s like increasing magnification without increasing resolving power. You end up with blurry or pixelated results. How do you complete the magic trick with such poor optics?

The CSI Miami trick: “enhance!”

This is the function of aesthetics and why I distrust aesthetics.

Through interpolation and smoothing, aestheticization stretches a spoonful of reality detail over vastly more reality. The aesthetic filler creates the appearance of additional detail but it’s dead detail. Not capable of supplying brain calibration.

So maybe textuality has a pseudosurprising amount of detail. Like pseudorandom. Which is perhaps why GPT-3 can fake it so well in textual worlds.