I spent 10 years working as an actuary and the most valuable concepts I walked away with were: "goodness of fit" and "degrees of freedom." These feel like more technical expressions of patternicity and nebulosity. It's actually not that hard to develop a fairly intuitive grasp of how this works just by playing around with fitting lines to data plots in Excel. Is the "true" underlying distribution normal or lognormal or exponential? Is that point an outlier, or is it highly significant? Is ordinary least-squares the "right" way to determine minimize "errors?" Neither eternalism, nor nihilism will survive long in the acid bath of spreadsheet modeling, yet your clients still have deadlines, and your colleagues still want a vocabulary to sync up perspectives, and somehow you will deliver an estimate and decisions will get made and actions taken. It's silly and it's serious and it's satisfying and saddening all at the same time. Eventually, you start to see it everywhere, even outside the office--in your home, in the gym, at church--and you realize that the Ideal Form of Man is actually "Actuary," and then, of course, a bird poops on your jacket and you swear and laugh because, "what are the odds?"
I would love to see a dialogue between you and Michael Levin. He’s reinvigorated platonism for me in a way I find utterly fascinating, not least because it’s anchored in experimental results. On a bit of a different axis from meaning (I think?) but would be so curious to see where you guys would go
"I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. "
Read different ancient Greeks! Sextus Empiricus would tell you that philosophy is bad and that the ancient Greek philosophers were enormously confused and wrong about almost everything!
I continue to think that you're unfairly blaming the Greeks for getting us stuck with philosophy. To use your terms, stances trump systems; for whatever reason, eternalism is more intuitively attractive to us than the complete stance, and metaphysics straightforwardly emerges once you approach ontological questions with an eternalist stance, which is why various metaphysical systems were independently invented around the world. So, metaphysics is the natural order of things, and anti-metaphysical crusades are necessarily difficult, unintuitive, against the grain (I like the term anti-meme). Greeks may be to blame for the particular shape of western metaphysics, but, like God, if it didn't exist, we'd invent something like it.
> Greeks may be to blame for the particular shape of western metaphysics, but, like God, if it didn't exist, we'd invent something like it.
That's true, but nevertheless the specific thing we got came via them. Plus via Christianity. And both of those have earlier sources.
But, Vervaeke has particular reverence for Socrates (I believe?) and I don't, and that's a point of contrast. And Andrew was specifically looking for points of contrast, and that's one.
If you have the time at some point, there's a couple of things you mention in this video that I'd love to hear more about.
At about 18:20, you mention that you think John Vervaeke's account of how relevance realisation works, from a cognitive science perspective, is probably wrong. His account of relevance realisation was one of the things that was most impactful for me in his work, so very interested to hear your thoughts on it.
Also, at around 11:40ish, you talk about how you (and presumably he) are following the standard story of intellectual history. Would you know any particular sources that are worth looking at for this standard story? I've been able to cobble together bits of it from your work, and John's, and various other bits and pieces, but have never been able to find something I can actually just sit down and read about it. That intellectual history is another part of yours and John's work that has influenced me a lot (I had several lightbulb moments while reading "The Collapse of Rational Certainty" way too late at night lol), and I'd really like to delve into it in more detail.
So, I think the point that relevance realization is central to human being is correct and important. And some of the other points he makes, such as that there can be no general method for that, due to the infinite regress that would create, is also critically important. Where we differ is in his speculations about mechanisms. It would take a book-length text to explain that... but Part Two of the metarat book points in the direction, particularly https://metarationality.com/perception and https://metarationality.com/reasonable-reference .
> Would you know any particular sources that are worth looking at for this standard story?
I don't know of any good overview discussion. What we each wrote is absolutely standard stuff that you'd get in any graduate course, but it's scattered across a lot of specialized academic texts.
Lyotard's _The Postmodern Condition_ is one key text, and it's quite short and relatively understandable. It only covers one corner of the story, but maybe it's the best starting point? https://meaningness.com/further-reading#Lyotard
Amazing, thanks. I'll go take another look at all of those.
Also, with the standard story of intellectual history, this seems similar to what you at one point mentioned you found when looking into nihilism - everyone kind of knows about it, talks about it, can gesture to a general body of literature, but there doesn't actually seem to be an agreed authoritative source. Sounds like something that it would be worth someone doing at some point.
In terms of cultural evolution, Axial philosophy (purity myths) didn't need to be perfect, just better than paganism.
As agrarian city-states emerged (slave and peasant economies replaced nomadic tribes) there was a need for more complex social hierarchy, roles, rules), beyond tribalism. Greater social trust was required than in tribal systems.
Aurobindians, Jean Gebserians and Wilberian integral theorists find Karl Jaspers’ idea of the Axial age useful because it frames Kegan’s stages as an evolved response to the disruption created by the chaos and violence of the Bronze Age Collapse.
One of the best summaries , like it or not, of that stuff is Ronfeldt's TIMN model.
(Note that Ken Wilber massively flubs evolutionary theory.)
Also, Vervaeke has a YouTube discussing “the religion of no religion “ with Jordan Hall , futurist, from years ago that is a pretty good intro. Their conversational weirdnesses are entertaining (IMO).
And, our situation is very different from that of 2600 years ago, so the ideas they came up with to transition from pastoralism to early urbanism no longer function well. Of course, we've augmented those with vastly more. (Hence: we haven't *lost* anything, we've gained much more sophisticated ideas about meaning).
Some of the legacy stuff is actively harmful. Much of it has, in fact, been discarded as centuries have gone by. But some mistaken foundational ideas (e.g. essentialism) remain as large distorting forces, and need to be rooted out.
From what I can tell, both good/better and bad/worse ideas can emerge in a disrupted system.
In Martin Van Creveld's description of failing modern nation states, legacy structures that regulate the expression of pathological personality traits (criminality, piracy, socially predatory and parasitic behavior) are disrupted, then they decline and social disintegration sets in. The disruption is usually described as being caused by neoliberalism, globalism, the displacement of economics of national/local productivity with global suburbanization and consumerism. Then bad ideas (wokeism, feminization) begin to flourish.
In that context, there is a sociological "loss" of regulation of the expression of pathological personality traits such as sadism, narcissism, sociopathy and Machievellianism ("dark triad/tetrad", "cluster B").
I can't see most of the apparatus of elite intellectuals having much anti-fragility to such disruption. On the contrary, facilitating the bad expression of pathological personality traits is rewarded and profitable via badly regulated internal finance and corrupt NGOs (recent examples being SPLC and the NoKings protests, which were funded to $100,000,000s by a communist billionaire tech bro out of China, Neville Roy Singham). (On the political "right" we see vast pathology gaining influence via Christian Zionism and it's defense of genocide and insane war mongering.)
To be clear: the emergence of things like heterodox thinking as an alternative to standard/mainstream, elite intellectual thinking or mainstream culture in general is good.
At this point I'm sceptical how benefit it provides to most people. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi and others have done deep dives into how bad ideas flourish among monied elites.
I spent 10 years working as an actuary and the most valuable concepts I walked away with were: "goodness of fit" and "degrees of freedom." These feel like more technical expressions of patternicity and nebulosity. It's actually not that hard to develop a fairly intuitive grasp of how this works just by playing around with fitting lines to data plots in Excel. Is the "true" underlying distribution normal or lognormal or exponential? Is that point an outlier, or is it highly significant? Is ordinary least-squares the "right" way to determine minimize "errors?" Neither eternalism, nor nihilism will survive long in the acid bath of spreadsheet modeling, yet your clients still have deadlines, and your colleagues still want a vocabulary to sync up perspectives, and somehow you will deliver an estimate and decisions will get made and actions taken. It's silly and it's serious and it's satisfying and saddening all at the same time. Eventually, you start to see it everywhere, even outside the office--in your home, in the gym, at church--and you realize that the Ideal Form of Man is actually "Actuary," and then, of course, a bird poops on your jacket and you swear and laugh because, "what are the odds?"
I would love to see a dialogue between you and Michael Levin. He’s reinvigorated platonism for me in a way I find utterly fascinating, not least because it’s anchored in experimental results. On a bit of a different axis from meaning (I think?) but would be so curious to see where you guys would go
https://mlevin77.substack.com/p/a-platonic-space-background-for-questions?r=1w7h86&utm_medium=ios
"I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. "
Read different ancient Greeks! Sextus Empiricus would tell you that philosophy is bad and that the ancient Greek philosophers were enormously confused and wrong about almost everything!
Yes, I have a copy of Sextus Empiricus on my “ought to read soon” shelf! I like what I have read about him, but haven’t read the book (yet).
I continue to think that you're unfairly blaming the Greeks for getting us stuck with philosophy. To use your terms, stances trump systems; for whatever reason, eternalism is more intuitively attractive to us than the complete stance, and metaphysics straightforwardly emerges once you approach ontological questions with an eternalist stance, which is why various metaphysical systems were independently invented around the world. So, metaphysics is the natural order of things, and anti-metaphysical crusades are necessarily difficult, unintuitive, against the grain (I like the term anti-meme). Greeks may be to blame for the particular shape of western metaphysics, but, like God, if it didn't exist, we'd invent something like it.
>but I think we haven’t lost something
Haven't we lost the notion of nobility, though?
> Haven't we lost the notion of nobility, though?
Oh, we've lost all sorts of things! I lost a pair of running shoes on a Buddhist retreat last week.
I meant, we haven't lost a general sense of meaningfulness, which (I take it?) is the premise of the Meaning Crisis thesis.
> Greeks may be to blame for the particular shape of western metaphysics, but, like God, if it didn't exist, we'd invent something like it.
That's true, but nevertheless the specific thing we got came via them. Plus via Christianity. And both of those have earlier sources.
But, Vervaeke has particular reverence for Socrates (I believe?) and I don't, and that's a point of contrast. And Andrew was specifically looking for points of contrast, and that's one.
If you have the time at some point, there's a couple of things you mention in this video that I'd love to hear more about.
At about 18:20, you mention that you think John Vervaeke's account of how relevance realisation works, from a cognitive science perspective, is probably wrong. His account of relevance realisation was one of the things that was most impactful for me in his work, so very interested to hear your thoughts on it.
Also, at around 11:40ish, you talk about how you (and presumably he) are following the standard story of intellectual history. Would you know any particular sources that are worth looking at for this standard story? I've been able to cobble together bits of it from your work, and John's, and various other bits and pieces, but have never been able to find something I can actually just sit down and read about it. That intellectual history is another part of yours and John's work that has influenced me a lot (I had several lightbulb moments while reading "The Collapse of Rational Certainty" way too late at night lol), and I'd really like to delve into it in more detail.
So, I think the point that relevance realization is central to human being is correct and important. And some of the other points he makes, such as that there can be no general method for that, due to the infinite regress that would create, is also critically important. Where we differ is in his speculations about mechanisms. It would take a book-length text to explain that... but Part Two of the metarat book points in the direction, particularly https://metarationality.com/perception and https://metarationality.com/reasonable-reference .
> Would you know any particular sources that are worth looking at for this standard story?
I don't know of any good overview discussion. What we each wrote is absolutely standard stuff that you'd get in any graduate course, but it's scattered across a lot of specialized academic texts.
Lyotard's _The Postmodern Condition_ is one key text, and it's quite short and relatively understandable. It only covers one corner of the story, but maybe it's the best starting point? https://meaningness.com/further-reading#Lyotard
Amazing, thanks. I'll go take another look at all of those.
Also, with the standard story of intellectual history, this seems similar to what you at one point mentioned you found when looking into nihilism - everyone kind of knows about it, talks about it, can gesture to a general body of literature, but there doesn't actually seem to be an agreed authoritative source. Sounds like something that it would be worth someone doing at some point.
In terms of cultural evolution, Axial philosophy (purity myths) didn't need to be perfect, just better than paganism.
As agrarian city-states emerged (slave and peasant economies replaced nomadic tribes) there was a need for more complex social hierarchy, roles, rules), beyond tribalism. Greater social trust was required than in tribal systems.
Aurobindians, Jean Gebserians and Wilberian integral theorists find Karl Jaspers’ idea of the Axial age useful because it frames Kegan’s stages as an evolved response to the disruption created by the chaos and violence of the Bronze Age Collapse.
One of the best summaries , like it or not, of that stuff is Ronfeldt's TIMN model.
(Note that Ken Wilber massively flubs evolutionary theory.)
Also, Vervaeke has a YouTube discussing “the religion of no religion “ with Jordan Hall , futurist, from years ago that is a pretty good intro. Their conversational weirdnesses are entertaining (IMO).
Thanks, yes, I agree with all of this.
And, our situation is very different from that of 2600 years ago, so the ideas they came up with to transition from pastoralism to early urbanism no longer function well. Of course, we've augmented those with vastly more. (Hence: we haven't *lost* anything, we've gained much more sophisticated ideas about meaning).
Some of the legacy stuff is actively harmful. Much of it has, in fact, been discarded as centuries have gone by. But some mistaken foundational ideas (e.g. essentialism) remain as large distorting forces, and need to be rooted out.
From what I can tell, both good/better and bad/worse ideas can emerge in a disrupted system.
In Martin Van Creveld's description of failing modern nation states, legacy structures that regulate the expression of pathological personality traits (criminality, piracy, socially predatory and parasitic behavior) are disrupted, then they decline and social disintegration sets in. The disruption is usually described as being caused by neoliberalism, globalism, the displacement of economics of national/local productivity with global suburbanization and consumerism. Then bad ideas (wokeism, feminization) begin to flourish.
In that context, there is a sociological "loss" of regulation of the expression of pathological personality traits such as sadism, narcissism, sociopathy and Machievellianism ("dark triad/tetrad", "cluster B").
I can't see most of the apparatus of elite intellectuals having much anti-fragility to such disruption. On the contrary, facilitating the bad expression of pathological personality traits is rewarded and profitable via badly regulated internal finance and corrupt NGOs (recent examples being SPLC and the NoKings protests, which were funded to $100,000,000s by a communist billionaire tech bro out of China, Neville Roy Singham). (On the political "right" we see vast pathology gaining influence via Christian Zionism and it's defense of genocide and insane war mongering.)
To be clear: the emergence of things like heterodox thinking as an alternative to standard/mainstream, elite intellectual thinking or mainstream culture in general is good.
At this point I'm sceptical how benefit it provides to most people. Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi and others have done deep dives into how bad ideas flourish among monied elites.