Say Alice is making some point to Bob, and Carol is listening and doesn’t like the point and tries to stop Alice from making the point to Bob. What might be going on? What is Carol trying to do, and why? She might think Alice is lying / disinforming—basing her arguments on false information or invalid arguments with false conclusions. But often that’s not what Carol reports; rather, even if Alice’s point is true and her arguments are valid reasoning from true information, and Carol could be expected to know that or at least not be so sure that’s not the case, Carol still wants to stop Alice from making the point. It’s a move in a “culture war”.
But what does that even mean? We might steelman Carol as implicitly working from an assumption like: maybe Alice’s literal, decoupled point is true; but no one’s a perfect decoupler, and so Bob might still make mistaken inferences from Alice’s true point, leading Bob to do bad things and spread disinformation. Another interpretation is more Simulacra: the claims have no external meaning, it’s a war for power over the narrative, and you want to say your side’s memes and block the other side’s memes.
Here’s a third interpretation, close to the Simulacra one, but with a clarification: maybe part of what’s going on, is that Bob does know how to check local consistency of his ideology, even though he lacks the integrative motive or skill to evaluate his whole position by modeling the world. So Bob is going to copy one or another ideology being presented. From within the reach of Bob’s mind, the conceptual vocabularies of opposed ideologies don’t have many shared meanings, even though on their own they are coherent and describe at least some of the world recognizably well. So there’s an exclusion principle: since Bob can’t assimilate the concepts of an ideology opposed to his into his vocabulary, unless given a large activation push, Bob will continue gaining fluency in his current vocabulary while the other vocabulary bounces off of him. However, talking to someone is enough activation energy to at least gain a little fluency, if only locally and temporarily, with their vocabulary. Carol may be worried that if there’s too many instances of various Alices successfully explaining points to Bob, then Bob will get enough fluency to be “over the hump” and will start snowballing more fluency in the opposing ideology, and eventually might switch loyalties.
Say Alice is making some point to Bob, and Carol is listening and doesn’t like the point and tries to stop Alice from making the point to Bob. What might be going on? What is Carol trying to do, and why? She might think Alice is lying / disinforming—basing her arguments on false information or invalid arguments with false conclusions. But often that’s not what Carol reports; rather, even if Alice’s point is true and her arguments are valid reasoning from true information, and Carol could be expected to know that or at least not be so sure that’s not the case, Carol still wants to stop Alice from making the point. It’s a move in a “culture war”.
But what does that even mean? We might steelman Carol as implicitly working from an assumption like: maybe Alice’s literal, decoupled point is true; but no one’s a perfect decoupler, and so Bob might still make mistaken inferences from Alice’s true point, leading Bob to do bad things and spread disinformation. Another interpretation is more Simulacra: the claims have no external meaning, it’s a war for power over the narrative, and you want to say your side’s memes and block the other side’s memes.
Here’s a third interpretation, close to the Simulacra one, but with a clarification: maybe part of what’s going on, is that Bob does know how to check local consistency of his ideology, even though he lacks the integrative motive or skill to evaluate his whole position by modeling the world. So Bob is going to copy one or another ideology being presented. From within the reach of Bob’s mind, the conceptual vocabularies of opposed ideologies don’t have many shared meanings, even though on their own they are coherent and describe at least some of the world recognizably well. So there’s an exclusion principle: since Bob can’t assimilate the concepts of an ideology opposed to his into his vocabulary, unless given a large activation push, Bob will continue gaining fluency in his current vocabulary while the other vocabulary bounces off of him. However, talking to someone is enough activation energy to at least gain a little fluency, if only locally and temporarily, with their vocabulary. Carol may be worried that if there’s too many instances of various Alices successfully explaining points to Bob, then Bob will get enough fluency to be “over the hump” and will start snowballing more fluency in the opposing ideology, and eventually might switch loyalties.