As way of introduction, Tyler Cowen writes:
We're a Niche, We Just Didn't Know
That is the new Medium essay by Anna Gát, it is the best attempt I know of to formulate a "new ideology" of sorts, or maybe a new manifesto, but also a post-political one. Here are a few scattered bits:
- Let’s imagine the I.I. [Inter-Intellect] as a loose-knit on/offline niche of people with similar mental energy: we seem to have roughly the same companion kindness information needs, activity levels and communication preferences…
We seem to prioritize open discussion and collaboration across differences, and establishing projects that can address real-world questions better…
We believe individuals are capable of acting virtuously without external intervention and judging the consequences of their own actions, and that open discussion of our life plans, decisions or progress can inspire others.
“Example over slogans” is the tldr…
Being conscious of this, the I.I. is age-agnostic and instead problem/progress focused.
I literally could tag everyone on hubski but
mk thenewgreen lil wasoxygen veen kleinbl00
Remember when we wanted to turn hubski into a coop community of sorts?
This essay made my skin crawl. The author seems so self indulgent and self involved while grasping desperately for a group identification. But hey, I'm the guy who wanders off while we are all supposed to put our hands in the middle and give three pumps and a cheer. I can agree with almost everyone of the "polling questions," but the idea that this is some kind of new way of living is laughable. Here's a question, do you have a love of learning and an interest in the well being if your fellow man? You do? Cool, guess we can skip this fucking essay. Most the people I know who embody these values the most are on the board of our neighborhood association, a faith leader, an old lady agitating for positive changes in the community or are driving their truck and trailer around picking up garbage from homeless camps and giving the litterers free socks. Maybe I'm being mean and we are talking about a brand new type of special snow flake but probably not.
I'm sincerely happy for you that you know a lot of people that embody these values. I'm only just getting there. I've had to create community, having felt intense isolation that at times bordered on a major depressive disorder. And while a large part of that community is around me in meatspace, a lot of it has taken place excitedly online, over email, on weird link aggregators with people with funny usernames who I give a massive shit about. I say this knowing full well that there was an internet before I was born ('91) with people doing just the same. I hope our celebrating doesn't take away from your strong identity as someone grounded in a community that embodies these values. And yea, the writing is cringey at times.
Huh. Yeah. I can kind of see that framing when you put it that way. In her defense, when we're younger we tend to put more weight on our personal ideas and discoveries and treat them bigger than they might be. Everything we discover is still new, therefore there's an inherent air of excitement to those discoveries, and enthusiasm abounds. Just think of all of the high school and college kids who are just getting into politics, philosophy, etc., and think they suddenly have the whole world figured out. I think its not very well written which doesn't help her come across all that well. Let's face it, pretty much anyone can write something for Medium, so the quality of the content is kind of all over the place there. I got a slightly different impression from it, feeling that she's kind of come to an "A-ha!" moment where she's simultaneously discovered that she as an individual has something to offer the world and that she sees the same out of so many others and is trying to find ways to connect and make those connections meaningful. Which, on the one hand is sad, because I don't think that the realization that people are wonderful and worth knowing should ever be an epiphany for anyone, but on the other hand when someone does make that realization, well it's a good thing. We hopefully get one less person confining themselves with isolating behavior and instead we get one more person who wants to be a part of the world.The author seems so self indulgent and self involved while grasping desperately for a group identification.
I hate to rain on the parade, but there are two reasonably good books about extra-structural intellectual groupings, The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom and The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson. And if Naill Ferguson is writing about it, it's old, dead, cut and dried. Both books argue that historians tend to view the world through hierarchies because hierarchies are recorded. Hierarchies leave evidence. Hierarchies are official, have bylaws, and are operated out in the open. Networks, on the other hand, are loose, fluid, and sub-rosa. Ferguson goes as far as arguing that the Bavarian Illuminati launched two centuries of conspiracy theories simply by writing shit down and making the normies nervous when in fact, they weren't doing anything that wasn't already being done at cafes and salons all over Europe. Starfish and the Spider points to the progress made by loose, disinterested groups of people who are linked primarily by their affinity for something, with no hierarchy or chain of command to accomplish a task. The classical example used is the Mescalero Apache, who dominated the plains until the US Government set them up as landowners, at which point their allegiance switched from the Apache way of life to the American way of life and the whole organization collapsed. Square and the Tower makes the argument that all us armchair politicos get more than our fill of Henry Kissinger not because he's a powerful politician, but because he knows absolutely everyone which means if there's a geopolitical deal anywhere in the making, everyone involved is one degree removed from Henry Kissinger. We're not taught this stuff because it's pure elitism - after all, you got in on your merits, right? I only found out from this article: ...that a producer I've been friendly with for a decade doesn't have "old Hollywood" money because his grandfather invented the mobile as he likes to say, but because his dad invented the Back Street Boys. But let's get real: my buddy went to good schools with the kids of other people who wanted to send their kids to good schools and while we can be mad that Felicity Huffman paid for her kid to get in on a tennis scholarship or whatever, the fact of the matter is the world has been run by Old Boy's Clubs since it was Thag and Ag and always will be. Both books argue that these networks are not aberrations but are the archetypal human response to organization - you need a hierarchy for officialdom and you need a network to accomplish things in spite of the hierarchy (the "tower" and the "square" of Ferguson's book). So of course a bunch of intellectually curious naifs are going to start chatting with each other online. I'd go as far as pointing out that the ones who are good at "online" are the ones who were able to buttress their in-person communities to the mutual benefit of both while the ones that eschewed online communities are either really good in person or really, really alone. I know both types. One is definitely happier than the other. Sure. Networks are great. Just know that the more you celebrate them, the more you paint them up, the more you talk about how awesome they are, the more someone is going to accuse you of being a lizard person and the less you can focus on the joy of inquiry.
But let's get real: my buddy went to good schools with the kids of other people who wanted to send their kids to good schools and while we can be mad that Felicity Huffman paid for her kid to get in on a tennis scholarship or whatever, the fact of the matter is the world has been run by Old Boy's Clubs since it was Thag and Ag and always will be. Both books argue that these networks are not aberrations but are the archetypal human response to organization - you need a hierarchy for officialdom and you need a network to accomplish things in spite of the hierarchy (the "tower" and the "square" of Ferguson's book). It certainly seems like an archetypal human response. I didn't see the connection until you point it out, but C.S. Lewis wrote much more generally about the inner ring (and then warns us that the desire to be in the inner ring is responsible for a lot of the evil): This all said, I still just see the OP as a beacon to like-minded people. Not a celebration per se, but a hey, gather round if this sounds like it's up your alley and it seems like right up Hubski Road.We're not taught this stuff because it's pure elitism [. . .]
In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.
I think my objection is that there's no there there. I mean, how's this for a manifesto? We believe individuals are capable of acting virtuously without external intervention and judging the consequences of their own actions, and that open discussion of our life plans, decisions or progress can inspire others. That's everything and everyone from the Girl Scouts to Tumblr. It is not a narrowly-defined exemplar of beliefs. This whole thing is an exercise in "you are already awesome - you just need to join The Awesome Society" and I've never been much of a joiner.Are you already a member of a vaguely-defined elitist circlejerk? ANSWER THE POLL
The I.I. is publicly inquisitive about societal changes, and promotes open discussion about what values people really consider fundamental today.
I agree with this. Also, organization is a transformation followed by calcification. Whenever you create a group to accomplish a goal, you cut out diversity.Just know that the more you celebrate them, the more you paint them up, the more you talk about how awesome they are, the more someone is going to accuse you of being a lizard person and the less you can focus on the joy of inquiry.
The elimination of diversity can come from the creation of some unified goal or purpose, but not always. The root threat to diversity is the shunning of ideas and/or behaviors that run counter to group think. Sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad, but either way the creation of a group identity comes with the pressure for individuals to conform unless the embracing of diversity and individuality is part of the core group philosophy. Even then though, there will always be pressures to conform, such is part of being an active member of a group after all. That said, I wouldn't describe members of Hubski as "intellectuals." Instead, "intensely curious" stikes me as a much more accurate descriptor. It leaves room for intellectualism as a trait, but it also embraces equally important attributes in people such as enthusiasm and joy, openness to discovery, encouragement and support. Don't get me wrong, there are some very, very smart users here on Hubski but I think that on a regular basis everyone on exhibits the capacity to be much more than that.Whenever you create a group to accomplish a goal, you cut out diversity.
My thinking has long been that the best approach is to provide fertile ground, but not sweat definitions or purpose. We aren't a new thing, we just have new options. We've connected by cafes, mail, BBSs, forums, community centers, HAM radio, etc. Some of the aspects seem inherent to intellectualism, such as age-agnosticism and self-education. But, as for the re-thinking of competition/post-political stuff, IMO, that's determined by external factors and probably shifts with the times.
The thing I'm picking up from the comments is this - It seems to be a commonly held belief that all the meaningful arrangements of the ways humans can relate to one another en-masse and interpersonally have been defined already. That is to say, there's no possible set of connections that a person can have with other people that can't already be described by existing language. I think I hold this to some degree. I'm trying to think of genuinely novel arrangements of personal closeness versus distance, physicality/non physicality, romantic/nonromantic, friendly/ antagonistic, etc. And I can't come up with anything new. There's already a label for any type of relationship I care to think of. It's possible that this is a linguistic limitation, not a social-dynamics one. After all, Hindi has all these specific names for different relations, so an element of this phenomenon is definitely a limitation of our words. In what way does it change a person's worldview to have increased linguistic granularity with regard to social dynamics I wonder?