Epistemic Haystack Portal
Critical inquiry can only go so far.
Welcome to the tweet - menagerie of Doxometrist
Men base their whole personal philosophy based on a single book they read between 16 and 21.
We can experience successive redpills but they always end somewhere, and are not fully digested. Most often there are still little pills and tablets, blocking the epistemic tract with unexplained questions, but we get on with our lives. We, the young men, quickly sketch a broad picture. We are led by bias towards what we care about the most at a time, and then leave the smaller bits unfinished.
Economically or thermodynamically, it's a reinforcement learning problem of finding the stable equilibrium. The marginal costs of going down (deepening knowledge) increase, and there are other dimensions that keep pressing you to find the most stable place.
leap of faith
How does this questioning-failling start? This is often prompted by yearning, by dissatisfaction with the personal status position, and looking for tricks to subvert the local status hierarhy through a pincer manouver. This is often a Descartesque exercise in 'let's get rid of all beliefs for a moment and start fresh'.
It is a Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the investigation, and the fall is largely random. Some book falls into a young man's hand, often by a suggestion from an esteemed older man, and it creates his future reading list in a path-dependent manner.
Imagine a video game character doing a leap into a haystack from a tall tower. That's the process we're talking about.
Icarus fell from even higher. The height of the fall is equivalent to the complexity of the previous belief system. A son of a rabbi would work with a more inherited complex belief-tower than a winery worker. If someone falls to the normie level complexity and flavor, that's sea level. But there are deeper things, more unexamined assumptions with odd conclusions.
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You are Icarus and I don't want you to fall down just to the sea level.
I want you to fall deeper, into the wine-colored sea, past the diving penguins and killer whales.
I want you to fall down until R'yleh, where C'thulhu lies waiting.
The assumptions will be examined until the language exhausts itself.
The goal of the Epistemic Haystack project is to arrive at less path-dependent way to have stable beliefs.