Neutered Wisdom, Logicbros, and Weaponized Metalanguage
Tomorrow’s events:
Live Journaling w/ Peter Limberg. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
Evolving Ground: 04 Principle & Function w/ Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes. May 23rd @ 12:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Newly posted event:
Beyond Pick Up Artistry: Witnessing Beauty w/ Zan Perrion. June 21st @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
An event to (maybe) get excited about:
Where are the Elders? w/ Stephen Jenkinson. June 8th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Stephen Jenkinson visits The Stoa to discuss the lack of eldership in our culture. The last time I spoke with Jenkinson was shortly after COVID came online, and that conversation threw me into the daemon hard.
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May 22nd, 2021
I will be continuing my musings on reasoning, and today I will write about what I see are the three failure modes of learning the metalanguage of reasoning: neutered wisdom, logicbros, and weaponized metalanguage.
I see only a few types of people teaching the metalanguage of reasoning: apologists, skeptics/atheists, and academic philosophers. The first two are pretty boring to me, and they directly or indirectly communicate that if you reason well you’ll obviously end up with certain viewpoints, such as becoming a Christian or an atheist. These types usually end up reasoning in service towards formal religion or scientism.
The other group that teaches a reasoning metalanguage is academic philosophers. They are usually atheists as well, but they have diversity and nuance in their positioning on the topic of God, and the way they teach reasoning is less biased and has less resentment than those teaching reasoning in the wild.
Given this, I do view academic philosophers as the best people to learn how to reason from, but I did dunk on them in a previous entry for their neutered vibe:
There was some good stuff in academic philosophy, but a lot of it was dry. I do like academic philosophers, but I didn't find much thumos in academic philosophy departments. The whole place had a neutered vibe. I was disillusioned. The philosopher, at least the disembodied academic kind, was not someone I was going to model my life after.
I would say that academic philosophers have a neutered wisdom. I mentioned that term here before, in reference to my dislike of TED Talks ...
Sure, some really smart people come on there, and tell you really smart things, but it is the whole feel of the thing I do not like. It is too slick, and there is no mystery. I call it “neutered wisdom,” because there is an impotent obviousness to it all, and all the speakers have to be Blue Church kosher of course, Dugin and Jensen are not the types that get invited to TED Talks.
I’ll define neutered wisdom as a person or group of people who have the conditions for wisdom to flourish, but something has been removed which takes away a sense of aliveness, the kind that allows for emergent thought. For TED Talks, perhaps it is the incentive structures in place to support an infotainment industrial complex, along with a preoccupation to status signal good opinion.
For the academic philosophers, the academic incentive structure is at play of course, but how the academic philosophy curriculum is designed also seems to be a source. The majority of academic philosophy is not about applying good reasoning to one’s life. It is about learning the history of philosophy, and then applying good reasoning to expand on some tiny facet of what Descartes, Rousseau, or Kant thought about.
There are definitely some live players in philosophy departments around the world though, such as Nick Bostrom, who is philosophizing in such a way that interacts with the world outside of the classroom or in some obscure philosophical journal no one reads.
I am not against academia, because I am from academia, but I recommend that one be argus-eyed when learning reasoning in academia, as an escape velocity of disembodied reasoning can occur. One needs to tether their newfound reasoning capacities to what matters most in their lives to prevent this. This is the Stoic way of reasoning.
The other failure modes of learning reasoning come from learning the reasoning metalanguage outside of academia. Ben Burgis, who wrote a nice little book called Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left, coined a term I quite like called ‘logicbros.’ These are men on the anti-woke side of the woke versus anti-woke battlefront of the culture war who flex their understanding of the reasoning metalanguage in order to win arguments.
It is pretty cringe, seeing people call out fallacies in livestream YouTube chats of debates, as if that is going to do anything. It is not going to get people to change their mind or get any of us closer to the truth. Let us call it what it is: a dorky attempt to get one-upmanship via chimp politics. I imagine this is why I have seen both socialist left and reactionary right types call the Intellectual Dark Web the ‘Intellectual Dork Web.’
If you learn reasoning, and are coming from a resentfully unexamined place, then you’ll end up weaponizing reasoning, or weaponizing the metalanguage of reasoning. This is what Scott Aikin has called ‘weaponized metalanguage.’ Logicbros weaponize the metalanguage of reasoning in the culture war, dunking on the cancel-happy woke types, who usually are quite bad with their reasoning game, and who are often incoherent with their argumentation, which is why Ben Burgis wrote his book.
Weaponized metalanguage happens elsewhere, and not only amongst the logicbros. Politicians use it in debates and journalists use it in their hot takes. If people are in rivalrous mode, anything pretty much can be weaponized. Weaponized metacommunication is a similar phenomenon. The classic example here is people using nonviolent communication (NVC) in passive-aggressive ways.
Love cannot be weaponized though, neither can wisdom, which is intimately tied to love. Sure, the various signals going on surrounding love and wisdom can be weaponized, and so can the false notions of the words. I also think you can wisely use weapons, including argumentative ones, with love, when it is prudent to do so. I am not a totalizing pacifist.
But yeah, I do not think love nor wisdom proper can be weaponized. Perhaps that is what makes real philosophizing so good; it is the love of wisdom.
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