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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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And the problem is that ordering those insights into a coherent framework only does one thing: it creates a new esoteric tradition.

Interesting. What do you consider an “esoteric tradition”?

And the more a model follows the following criteria, the better it is:

How did you come up with this list of four criteria? As far as I can tell, they don’t appear to be a standardized part of the field of conceptual modeling.

Thanks for the continued book recommendations. I have started on Maps of Meaning, and intend to visit the other ones you mention about traditionalism and social cycles as well.

What do you consider an “esoteric tradition”?

In this context, any conceptual framework that contains a dynamic of initiation. Which is to say one where the concepts have two meanings: an exoteric meaning (face value for the uninitiatied) and an esoteric meaning (secret or deeper for the initiated).

It is actually surprisingly hard to create an ideology that is not esoteric in this way, because any sufficiently coherent system requires using words in non-obvious ways. Physics, despite being fully available to the public and not deliberately rife with secret handshakes and rituals, is still esoteric because you need to make a non trivial effort to understand what "spin", "energy", "charm" and other jargon actually refer to, and it's almost impossible to intuit accurately from the context alone.

How did you come up with this list of four criteria?

Stole it from a Naturalist who stole them from Quine. The criteria are staples of epistemology that all have theories of truth constructed around them, I just use my own words here but there's many reformulations of them.

It is actually surprisingly hard to create an ideology that is not esoteric in this way

It would appear so, by this definition. Why do you emphasize “esoteric” traditions, then, rather than just traditions if nearly all of them will involve some amount of jargon or deeper meaning?

Stole it from a Naturalist who stole them from Quine. The criteria are staples of epistemology that all have theories of truth constructed around them, I just use my own words here but there's many reformulations of them.

I see. What are the usual ways of referring to these criteria? Searching for epistemological coherence, for example, leads me to the coherentism versus foundationalism debate, which doesn’t quite appear to be what you were mentioning with coherence as a desirable property of all models.

Why do you emphasize

Because that's all that's required to create the sort of cultish social dynamics that you bemoan and I'm trying to make the point that they're a common feature of complex formal systems of meaning. Not unique to religions.

What are the usual ways of referring to these criteria?

The truth article has a decent survey and you can intuitively map theories of truth to the criteria: Accuracy is Correspondence/Empiricism, Efficiency is Deflationism/Minimalism, Coherence is Coherentism/Anti-Realism and Flexibility is Pragmatism.

I see. Thank you for the informative discussion! I have much to research now

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