DocWatts

I'd also recommend 'Nexus' by Yuval Noah Harari, which is a deep dive into human information networks. In it, he goes into why the so-called 'marketplace of ideas' - the notion that the best ideas supposedly win in the end - is dangerously naive.

If you're interested, I wrote an entire Substack article on how 21st century authoritarianism isn't just a political crisis - it's also an epistemic one, rooted in how we respond to uncertainty in a complex world. Substack: How Broken Ways Of Knowing Feed Modern Tyrants The authoritarian bargain - from Nazism to Maoism to MAGA - is the emotional comfort of certainty without the burden of truth-seeking. It’s the epistemic version of having your cake and eating it too. Emotional validation without introspection, certainty without responsibility, belonging without accountability - what’s not to like? Too bad, then, that the cake is poisoned and the person selling it knows it. Even worse, most of the people eating it know it too, but have convinced themselves that the poison is an acceptable trade-off for the intoxicating feelings it provides.

Timothy Snyder - one of the leading experts on fascism who wrote On Tyranny - is sounding the alarm bells that Trump is trying to incite a second Civil War. Below are some quotes from the writeup, but I'd recommend reading the Substack article in full - it's chilling. When people whose job it is to study fascism are telling us that the moment we're living through is a flash point, we should take them seriously. If you've ever wondered what you would have done in Nazi Germany or the US Civil Rights struggle, you're doing it right now. A second civil war and the reforging of the United States into a white supremacist police state isn't a foregone conclusion, but preventing it requires that we be brave and step up to the moment. That means no more equivocating, no more burying our heads in the sand, no more compromising with extremes that need to be rejected. And no more saying that 'this doesn't effect me'. If you're on a conscious politics forum, you should be more willing than the average person to take responsibility for the current moment, and not watch from the sidelines as a petty, inhumane dictator tries to plunge your country into violence and chaos. RESOURCES - How YOU can get involved in the pro-democracy movement: No Kings Day: https://www.nokings.org/ Indivisible: https://indivisible.org/ 50501: https://www.fiftyfifty.one/ _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Trump's Civil War - Timothy Snyder https://substack.com/home/post/p-165796793?source=queue "Earlier this week Donald Trump called for a second civil war at a US military base. This scenario can be resisted and prevented, if we have the courage to listen, interpret, and act. And this Saturday we will have the occasion to act. In general, we imagine that the US Army is here to defend us, not to attack us. But summoning soldiers to heckle their fellow Americans is a sign of something quite different. Trump seized the occasion to summon soldiers to join him in mocking the press. Reporters, of course, as the Founders understood, are a critical check on tyranny. They, like protestors, are protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Trump was teaching soldiers that society does not matter, and that law does not matter. He "loves" soldiers. He is personally responsible for the pay raises: "I gave you so much money for four years it was crazy." "We're giving you an across-the-board raise" This is the way a dictator speaks to a palace guard, or a fascist to a paramilitary. We are witnessing an attempt at regime change, rife in perversities. It has a historical component: we are to celebrate the oathbreakers and the traitors. It has a fascist component: we are to embrace the present moment as an exception, in which all things are permitted to the Leader. And of course it has an institutional component: soldiers are meant to be the avant-garde of the end of democracy. Instead of treating the army as defenders or freedom, Trump presented soldiers as his personal armed servants, whose job it was to oppress his chosen enemies -- inside the United States. Trump was trying to instruct soldiers that their mission was to crush fellow Americans who dared to exercise their rights, such as the right to protest."

If there was ever a time to to be crystal clear in our messaging - and to do so in bold and uncompromising language - it's right now. This isn't all that complicated: Trump is intentionally manufacturing a crisis so that he can invoke martial law. ICE is kidnapping people off the streets in violation of our laws and the US Constitution. Trump is a traitor, and MAGA is the American equivalent of the Nazis. The regime needs to be resisted. The most effective way to do so is through mass nonviolent protest and civil disobedience. Standing up to tyrants is a reflection of core American values. The US flag doesn't belong to insurrectionist traitors, which is why we'll be flying it at the protests.

Hitler's brown shirts - armed street gangs - would deliberately force their way into areas where they were not welcome in order to provoke street fights, then claim that they were 'attacked' when the groups they were terrorizing defended themselves. Nazis - and their American equivalents - are nothing if not uncreative in their tactics. Masked men who are refusing to identify themselves as law enforcement are kidnapping people off the streets. Without proper identification and due process we don't know who these people are or if the people they are trafficking are even in this country illegally. They could be Proud Boys in tactical gear bought off from Amazon for all we know. If Trump wanted to enforce existing immigration laws more strictly, there are legal ways to do that which follow due process. Hell, Biden deported more people than Trump at this point in his presidency, and he didn't have any problem following the law. These raids aren't about enforcing immigration policy - they're state sponsored terror designed to clamp down on dissent, and create a manufactured pretext for invoking martial law. Don't let anyone gaslight you that these tactics aren't strait out of the Nazi playbook.

To my knowledge none of this behavior is connected to the planned protests organized by #50501, Indivisible, or any other pro-democracy groups. I've attended more than half a dozen of these planned events where exactly zero acts of violence or property damage occurred. What's happening in LA has the feel of people reacting in a viscerally emotional and unplanned way to having their communities terrorized by ICE. Trump - or to be more accurate, the people behind the curtain like Stephen Miller - are intentionally trying to provoke violence, and escalate the situation to justify the invocation of the Insurrection Act. The governor of California, the mayor of LA, and even the chief of the LAPD have all said as much. The regime is hamfistedly manufacturing a crisis in order to build the groundwork for quasi-Martial Law. I say 'quasi' because there's no constitutional or legal framework to invoke marital law, 'declaring' it is akin to ripping up the US Constitution and throwing it in the garbage. But to your point - yes, optics matter, and we want the protests to be nonviolent. On April 5, 5.2 million people took to the streets in defiance of the Trump regime, without a single instance of property damage or violence that I've heard of. We can marshal how people behave at planned and organized events, but people also behave in somewhat predictable ways to being brutalized that no movement can fully control when we're speaking of a nation of 330 million people. So we need to be doing two things: 1) Emphasize like a broken record that protests are more effective when they are peaceful. Note that 'peaceful' doesn't mean non-confrontational or non-disruptive - just look to the civil rights movement to see how effective civil disobedience can be to a nonviolent resistance. Protest movements need two things to be successful - attention and positive optics in the eyes of the public. Violence grabs attention but it's counter productive to maintaining positive optics in the eyes of the public. This is hugely important because positive optics is a large part of what keeps participants safe -- it makes crack downs much riskier for the regime because of the horrible optics of using disproportionate force against a peaceful movement. 2) Don't cede any ground whatsoever to the regime or its apologists on this issue. The regime is clearly in the wrong for intentionally provoking these communities with its Gestapo-like tactics. ICE agents are Trump's brown shirts - brutalizing thugs that have absolutely no legal basis for the cruelty they're inflicting. There are ways to remove people who are in this country unlawfully that follow due process and the rule of law. That's not what these ICE raids are - they're about inflicting terror. (Not so fun fact - Biden deported more people than Trump did at this point in their presidency, and didn't have to break the law to do so). Nazi apologists are going to try to equivocate a handful of people vandalizing cop cars with ICE agents literally disappearing people to concentration camps. The idea that everyone in the country loses their Constitutional Rights to free speech and free assembly because a tiny handful of people engaged in property damage in response to provocation is a narrative that we need to be pushing back against hard. Make no mistake - the regime is crossing a huge red line here by deploying the Marines against US citizens. This is hugely, unprecedentedly illegal. The Posse Comitatus Act is quite explicit about this.

From Senator Chris Murphy, who's got a good head on his shoulders for his understanding of the Trump regime: "Here’s what you need to know about what’s going on in Los Angeles. The state and city have the means to control the protests. Donald Trump is getting involved to intentionally make the situation more violent. And potentially to create a pretext for some sort of martial law."

That line of tanks in the video? Those will be tearing up the streets of Washington DC, all so the insecure tyrant can throw himself a lavish North Korean style military for his birthday. $45 million taxpayer dollars are being spent on this disgusting farce at a time when Trump is firing tens of thousands of veterans from our federal workforce along with devastating budget cuts to the Department Of Veterans Affairs.

Also keep in mind that these crack downs are taking place on the eve of Trump of spending $45-90 million taxpayer dollars to throw himself a lavish North Korean style military parade for his birthday. That endless line of tanks in the video? Those will be tearing up the streets of downtown Washington DC this Saturday. If you haven't signed up, consider joining us for the No Kings protests on June 14 - which will be taking place everywhere else in the country other than Washington DC.

Because performative cruelty is the entire point of these raids. There are ways to remove people who are in this country unlawfully that follow due process and the rule of the law. That's not what these ICE raids are. Without due process, anyone who the regime doesn't like can be disappeared as an 'illegal' and trafficked to a foreign gulag. This can and has been happening to people who are here legally. And to American citizens. Step out of line and you too could be disappeared to a concentration camp in El Salvador- your American citizenship be damned. Creating an atmosphere of fear that has a chilling effect on dissent while the regime consolidates power is the real aim here. That and pursuing an openly white supremacist agenda. Two of the regime's biggest intellectual influences - Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel - have been explicitly calling for American democracy to be replaced by a corporate dictatorship. One of the books that's being traded back and forth by people within the regime like Stephen Miller and JD Vance calls Liberals and Leftists 'unhumans' who need to be liquidated by the state - while praising fascist dictators like Pinochet and Franco for carrying out this horrific vision. Project 2025 itself and leaked internal memos have openly called for the US military to be turned against the American people - in fact that was an explicit part of Trump's coup strategy in 2020, had he been able to successfully overturn the results of the presidential election. In sum: never, ever give the Trump regime the benefit of the doubt on anything. Rule of Law is an impediment to this regime's aims. And ICE is the American gestapo.

Thank you for helping to spread the word. Show up on June 14th, bring a friend, encourage others to show up. Trump may project an image of himself as a strong-man, but he's resorting to these strong-arm tactics because his regime is weak and unpopular. His regime is using this show of force in LA as an intimidation tactic, hoping that we'll obey in advance. Don't fall for it. There's not enough troops in all branches of the military for him to occupy a country of 330 million. Moreover, he's assuming our service members are mindless automatons willing to enforce Trump's illegal orders without question. Don't do this regime's work for it, don't give this regime power it doesn't have. I'll continue exercising my Constitutional Rights to free speech and peaceful assembly as a proud member of the pro-democracy movement, and I hope everyone here will as well. I'd also strong encourage everyone here to join their local chapter Indivisible - one of the hub organizations in the pro-democracy movement - to stay informed about events in their area, network with people in your community, and make sure that we're participating in these events with a long term strategy for how to weaken Trump's regime. https://indivisible.org

Just a friendly reminder for folks in the 'States that a huge, national protest is being planned for Sat, June 14th. While Trump is throwing himself a gaudy North Korean-style military parade with tanks rolling down the streets of Washington DC for his birthday, millions of us will be taking to the streets in a NON-VIOLENT day of defiance against his regime everywhere else in the country. More than 1600 protests have been planned all across the country - from big cities to small towns in Ruby Red districts. In the April 5th 'Hands Off' protests, 5.2 million of us came out to say hands off our rights, hands off our constitution, hand off our health are, hands off our bodies, and Hands Off our immigrants. The June 14th No Kings protests are poised to be even bigger. You, yes YOU, have a role to play in the pro-democracy movement. The larger these recurring protests are, the more it puts the lie to Trump's claim that he has a mandate from the American people. And the more courage it gives for politicians and institutions to stand up to Trump's bullying. Find your protest here: https://www.nokings.org/ https://indivisible.org/

Not true! The American right is a strong advocate for the 'freedom' of mediocre white men to fail upwards into positions of power. Their whole cultural project is essentially DEI for white people - no matter how incompetent you are, they'll make sure no highly qualified person of color is able to take away your God-given place in the dominator hierarchy. Which is how we end up with a failed businessman who bankrupted a casino for president, and an alcoholic talk-show host who drunk-texts war plans as Secretary of Defense. 🫡🇺🇸🍻

I can respect this position. For what it's worth, coherence is never total - it's always limited, partial, and incomplete. The world would be a far less interesting place without Zarathustras to pull down our totems of coherence, and tell us that the holy idols we've invested ourselves in are frauds. I'd just counter to Zarathustra that the whole point of deconstructing our myths of coherence is to build something more truthful, flexible, and inclusive in their place. Not as a 'final' totem - nothing is ever final - but as a stopgap for the next iconoclast to come along and remind us that our reconstructed idols have their own cracks. Just like evolution doesn't have an 'end point', there's a dialectic here that's non-teleological. In other words, I think there's a good amount of productive tension between coherence and rupture. When I claim that all views are localized, limited, and incomplete, I'm not making a special exception for my own pluralistic viewpoint. I'd be disappointed if there were an end point to this process.

I thought I might share a write up on perspective-taking for my philosophy book, which is part of a chapter about how All Perspectives Are Partial. In this chapter, I explore the limitations of both Relativism and Absolutism, while offering Pluralism as a more productive alternative for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. (If you found this write-up useful / interesting, you might also like this earlier article on Perspectives And Purposes) https://www.actualized.org/forum/topic/108568-perspectives-and-purposes/ _____________________________ Perspectives - Localized, Limited, And Incomplete This article is part of an ongoing series about how all perspectives are partial. 'Partial' means localized, limited, and incomplete - inevitable consequences of having a perspective at all, rather than a God's-eye view. The pivotal insight we'll be exploring is that our assessments are never neutral or purpose-free. Instead, they have everything to do with where we stand in relation to the world. Relativism - Freedom Without Direction When our cherished certainties hit a dead-end, how do we find our way to a more promising trail? Road-weary from trusting in failed certainties, we might be tempted to forsake paths altogether and veer off into the meandering forest of relativism. The thicket beckons to us because buried within lies a genuine insight. The revelation? Our viewpoints aren’t straightforward snapshots of Reality - they’re interpretive lenses that reveal and distort. Much like the fovea is to the human eye, our interpretive lenses have a focal point which brings certain selective elements into sharp clarity - and a periphery where everything else recedes into a blurry, indistinct background. The crucial insight? These focal points aren’t universal or arbitrary - they’re intimately tied to a horizon of significance that we negotiate with our culture. Negotiate, because our individual viewpoint is always situated within a social landscape that serves as our starting point for sensemaking. We can adapt, refine, and push back against this inherited framework - but we can never step outside of it entirely. To state it more simply: what we see depends on what we’ve been taught to look for - and what’s important to us. To see this in action, consider two archetypal lenses with very different focal points - the view of a scientist, and the gaze of a mystic. One directs their attention towards aspects of Reality that can be modeled through precise, mechanistic investigation. The other turns their perception to the ineffable horizons of our lived experience. What’s in sharp focus for one viewpoint is an indistinct blur for the other, yet both are attending to different aspects of the same shared Reality. Crucially, neither of these contrasting lenses is worn by a detached observer - their adoption is an outgrowth of our concernful involvement in the world. And each is drawing from a shared pool of human experience, namely an appreciation for wonder and the joy of discovery. In the end, what separates these viewpoints is not the Reality they inhabit, but which aspects of it direct their gaze. Relativism too emerges from our entanglement with the world. The emotional impetus? To not be fooled by false certainties - and to prevent ourselves from being weighed down by the baggage that accompanies them. Following relativism into the brambles, aspirations towards a ‘view from nowhere’ are unmasked as a naive pipe dream. Certainty? A bedtime story for children, not the currency of serious thinkers. With an unapologetic smirk, relativism is the irreverent iconoclast to our holier-than-thou pretensions. Emerging from the forest of equivocation, it takes a flattening steamroller to our patronizing dismissal of rival perspectives. In the midst of a shouting match between ‘obviously correct’ viewpoints, relativism announces that the referee is a fraud, and the rulebook is full of holes. And instead of offering up a replacement, it insists that the rules are made up and the points don’t matter. If throwing out the epistemic scorecards sounds like a cop-out, consider the host of everyday situations where we have no trouble applying it. When we see two paintings of a sunset hanging next to one another in a gallery, we don’t hem and haw over which one is the ‘correct’ interpretation. And the fun of arguing that chocolate is objectively superior to vanilla stems from the obvious absurdity of the question. What relativism forces us to confront is that this interpretive dimension reaches beyond the trivial into domains with tangible stakes. Scientific paradigms, ethical frameworks, political ideologies - all are to some degree conditioned preferences without a universal measuring stick to determine which is ultimately ‘correct’. When confronted with the smug assertion that ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’, relativism responds with cool confidence that ‘there’s no such thing as an uninterpreted fact.’ Make no mistake: the truths of relativism are partial. Masterful at tearing down self-supposed ‘certainties’ long past their shelf life. And conspicuously absent when the time comes to build something better in its place. When we’ve been suffocating under stifling absolutism, relativism’s insights can be a revelatory breath of fresh air. But just as we wouldn’t want to spend the rest of our days in the oxygen tent that saved our life, relativism serves us better as a waystation than a final destination. Liberating as it feels on first arrival, we soon discover that the trackless forest isn’t a long-term home. While “it depends” can be a valid response in some situations, it’s of little guidance when the world pushes us to pick a lane. The equivocating compass of relativism proves itself a poor tool for distinguishing promising directions from those that lead nowhere - and those that would send us tumbling off a cliff. Beyond mere impracticality for real-world decision making, there’s a sunless valley within Relativism’s domain that attracts predators. While a ‘live and let live’ policy to perspectives may sound benign, in practice it can be a Trojan horse for dangerous bullshit. One where opportunists emerge from the shadows to offer us ‘alternative perspectives’ on established facts about everything from vaccines to the Holocaust. Its liberating potential isn’t just for the genuinely marginalized - it’s also a boon for charlatans and extremists. Meander long enough through the trackless forest and sooner or later you’ll catch sight of a stray Nazi. The Path Of Pluralism - Calibrating Perspectives With Purposes So where does this leave us? Fortunately, a Sisyphean trudge over the same dead-end path - or wandering aimlessly through the woods, for that matter - are not our only options. If we adjust our focus from the obvious to the overlooked, we may notice a road less traveled - the path of Pluralism. Less traveled because it demands more from us - more humility than the rigid certainty of absolutism, and more discernment than the equivocation of relativism. Offering neither the false comfort of the former nor the illusory freedom of the latter, the Path of Pluralism provides its practical dividends for those who are willing to put in the work. This is because pluralism is a practice - not something you believe in, but something you do. Why seek out this more demanding trail? Because the utility it provides is worth the trouble. In a world where control is an illusion and detachment from outcomes is a tall-order for most, pluralism gives us needed tools for navigating ambiguity without getting lost in it. The essence of its pragmatic wisdom? Pick a lane - but know where the offramps are. Stated simply, there are usually multiple valid vantage points for approaching a given situation. Yet this openness comes paired with the astute recognition that there are often very good reasons to reject some approaches out-of-hand. In a messy Reality where control is an illusion and complete information is a pipe dream, it’s attunement rather than perfection that’s sublime. Attunement means calibrating our perspectives with our purposes. The key lies not in finding the perfect setting, but in adaptive adjustment. Like balancing on a bicycle, it’s a continual process of minute course corrections in response to ever-shifting conditions. Our initial vantage point doesn’t have to be perfect - it just needs to be a reasonable first-approximation that’s receptive to the changing terrain it traverses. ‘Receptive’ means structured to evolve methodically rather than haphazardly in response to situational feedback, with clear criteria for where it applies and where it doesn’t. And crucially, this entails being capable of abandoning our approach if it’s no longer serving us. Or, to put it plainly: while there are multiple ways to crack an egg, that doesn't mean that the edge of a bowl and a sledgehammer are equally effective methods for making an omelet. Pluralism acknowledges a diversity of viewpoints while recognizing that some of these serve our purposes, while others leave us with a mess.

I'll confess I'm not well versed in Lacan, but your shift in emphasis from an outside-in to an inside-out framework for meaning-making makes a lot of intuitive sense. We might not even have a disagreement so much as we do adjacent perspectives - which is great, since I'd get less out of these interactions our viewpoints were too similar or divergent. In other areas of my work, I've emphasized our connection to the Life-World - that shared, experiential world which serves as our primary ‘Reality’, long before we start theorizing about it. I strongly resonate with your point that this primordial ground - our first contact with this shared, experiential world - resists symbolic consolidation. 'We know more than we can tell", as Michael Polanyi put it. Something is always lost when we try to capture our ineffable connection to this visceral ground through concepts. Abstractions about what's ultimately 'real' are our attempts to uncover intelligible patterns within this visceral Reality that are relevant to our needs and concerns. Returning to my color example, we can try analogizing the color 'red' to other senses, give a mechanistic breakdown of how visible light interacts with rods and cones in our eyes and is converted into electrical signals that travel through our nervous system, but in the end color has to be experienced to be understood. Likewise, hermeneutic barriers can be bridged but not fully closed (No matter how much I try to put myself in the shoes of another, there's only so much I can do grok another subjective viewpoint. In practice though, intelligibility doesn't need to be perfect, just 'good enough' for our shared purposes). I'd differ in emphasis slightly with your inside-out framing, in favor of a co-constitutive approach to meaning. The world itself (or your relationship to it at any rate) is constitutive of your 'in-here'. That's not to say 'you are the whole universe', just that the boundaries between the outer and inner realms are porous, and constant exchange is the norm. The way I've analogized it is that mind and world are two sides of the same coin - just as hot and cold are two poles of a unified phenomena we call temperature. Meaning, then, isn't subjective or subjective, it's relational and emergent. Just as a concert emerges from the resonance of performer, venue, and audience, meaning emerges from the dynamic interplay of mind, body, and world.

I actually resonate with more of your thoughtful critique than you might realize, and I %100 agree with this point in particular. Beautifully said. (And yes, the shadow of Heideggar looms large over my body of work). I'd contend that purposes are primarily value driven. Values, then, are emotionally intuitive starting points that resonate with us because of our life experiences. Just as something about a color like 'red' remains stubbornly ineffable when trying to describe it to someone without eyesight, values have a requisite horizon of experience to be significant for us. Lived realities, rather than choices on a menu. That said, even though values are driven by emotion and survial rather than intellect, they are open to reflection and refinement (human beings can and do develop, after all). While there's no universal cipher that can tell us which values to adopt in an a-perspectival and a-situational way, in practice human beings can and do arrive at shared forms of meaning and purpose. The situations we navigate are bounded by shared biological, material, and existential constraints. We aren't just situated as individuals - we're situated together, as families, as communities, as a human species, as one link in the community of life. Not 'one big, happy family' - conflict is unavoidable, survival exacts a sharp price - but concentric circles of shared concern that radiate outwards from the individual, overlapping with the circles of others in more or less partial ways.

Hard agree there - it's akin to picking up 'The Selfish Gene' and coming up with a spurious interpretation of the book based on the title alone. When the book itself is an account of how 'selfish' genes give rise to altruistic behavior.

I would say that theory selection is intuition driven, with our intellect largely serving as post-hoc rationalizations of these emotionally grounded starting points. The values that guide our theory choice are a reflection of our life experiences. Moreover, they're grounded in a broader human evolutionary context, and patterned in non-arbitrary ways by the various social and cultural contexts that we're embedded in. That said, these ingrained responses aren’t set in stone - they can be recognized, examined, and gradually reshaped through deliberate reflection and receptivity to the world. I'd frame that this is something of a middle path between the perennial and constructivist camps - the former sees human nature as fixed and universal, and the latter sees human nature as fluid and malleable. I'd contend that our dispositions are neither wholly immutable nor infinitely plastic - they're responsive to experience, but not unanchored. We have influence but not control over the dispositions that shape theory choice.

I'll tackle the first question for now, since there's a lot that could be said on the subject, depending on how deep in the weeds we want to get. My broad 'take' on theory selection is rooted in pragmatic efficacy and ontological pluralism rather than a correspondence model tied to an inferred mind-independent Reality. Under this purview, a predictive theory is better than its alternatives when it's: A qualitative improvement in our problem solving capabilities - the newer theory solves problems that the older theory couldn't. For instance, GPS systems designed solely on Newtonian mechanics would fail to track our position with precision, since the satellites operate under conditions where relativistic time dilation becomes significant. Accounting for this requires the theoretical framework of general relativity. It should extend the scope of phenomena that can be mechanistically investigated. Our everyday lives are lived on the mesoscale - that comfortable, human-sized spatial and temporal scale that our perceptual systems are evolutionarily adapted to. A more powerful theory can show us how things that are invisible to us from our everyday vantage point can nonetheless affect us at the mesoscale. Germ theory being the classic example. Can predict and explain persistent anomalies that plagued earlier theories. For instance, Ptolemaic gravitation had to be modified in increasingly convoluted ways when observational evidence repeatedly failed to align with theoretical predictions. Can offer a better economy of assumptions and theoretical constructs in relation to what it's trying to explain. 19th centuries of light posited a theoretical construct called the Luminiferous Ether, out of the assumption that light was a wave and thus needed a medium to propagate through. When Michelson and Morley tried and failed to detect this medium in their famous experiment, physicists began modifying the properties of the ether in increasingly contrived ways. Eventually, Einstein's theory of relativity made the Luminiferous Ether obsolete, replacing a web of convoluted assumptions with a simpler and more productive framework. Theories are akin to gestalts which structure phenomena into a meaningful whole. Two people can look at the same observational evidence and 'see' different things from the same set of environmental stimuli, depending on their interpretative lenses. Gestalts are how a set of isolated elements coalesce into meaningful patterns that we can make sense of. Fruitfulness - a better theory should generate new research questions, suggest novel experiments, and lead to further discoveries. A theory that stagnates or closes off the path of inquiry is less appealing. It's not just about solving existing problems, but expanding the scope of problems that we can discover. Consistency - we want our theories be internally coherent and externally compatible with other well-established scientific theories. This is why a scientific theory that contradicts the 2nd law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) is a non-starter. A better theory recognizes that the territory they're trying to map will always carry some degree of indeterminacy. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics - like waveform collapse and uncertainty - arise from trying to force macroscopic concepts from classical mechanics onto a domain they weren’t designed for. Theories that remain clear-eyed about these kinds of framing limitations are preferable. Rather than denying indeterminacy, they acknowledge where their conceptual tools strain or break down. Theories that display meta-theoretical self-awareness are preferable - in short, they don't mistake the map for the territory. Meaning they don't reify their theoretical constructs into fixed features of a mind-independent Reality. A meta-theoretically reflective view of physics, for instance, holds that physics isn’t an objective inventory of “what is,” but an iterative model of how reality behaves, which reflects our practical interests (e.g., building functional machines, predicting motion, manipulating our environment)

Karl Popper's been on my reading list for some time now - both for his philosophy of science and his sociological takes. I thought Kuhn did a pretty thorough job of demonstrating that theories aren't falsified so much as they are abandoned for a another theory with better pragmatic efficacy. Evidence always underdetermines theory, because there's no such thing as an uninterpreted fact. A theory that's out of step with observational evidence can always be modified in increasingly ad-hoc ways to 'save' a theory. The history of science shows that the old guard is often recalcitrant to change their views just because of pesky evidence - plenty of folks tried to 'save' the luminiferous ether, or objective space and time. The intuitions that theory selection is grounded in has a ton of inertia behind it. Eventually the cost for doing so becomes enough high enough that it gets outcompeted by a newer theory that predicts and explains a wider range of phenomena while generating fewer anomalies - which is how we can still have 'progress' within a Kuhnian model of science.

Cards on the table: I've probably read more Thomas Pychon than I have postmodern academic philosophy. Derrida is the type of philosopher I've learned about through osmosis rather than a deep dive of their work - ditto for Focault, Butler, etc. Postmodernism has just never excited me like phenomenology and more metamodern oriented philosophy has. Here's a list of philosophers that I've been influenced by, which my work is to some degree an attempt to synthesize and make more accessible: Fransisco Varella Evan Thompson Eleanor Rosche George Lakoff Mark Johnson Martin Heidegger Maurice Merleau-Ponty Hubert Dreyfus Ken Wilber Alfred North Whitehead Jonathan Haidt Thomas Kuhn Julia Galef John Verveake Thomas Nagel Charles Taylor I'd say the largest influence on my own work is a book called 'The Embodied Mind' by the first three authors on that list - with B&T-era Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Thomas Kuhn being close seconds. (The philosophy of science is near and dear to my heart).

Thanks! I'll chalk that up to the good 10-20 hours a week I've been spending on my book for the last two years - would be a bummer if I hadn't gotten any better at writing during that time!

I'd say what Leo is really, really good at is taking advanced epistemic, ontological, and sociological insights and stating them in accessible language. Thar said, probably the best thing I've done for my own epistemic development is branch away from Leo's work, and put a lot of time and effort into developing my own ideas (which often overlap with Leo's, but also branch off in some significant ways - and this is a good thing!)

Thanks, appreciate it! When I was reading through 'Being and Time' and 'The Phenomenology Of Perception', I remember thinking that there's got to be a more accessible way of conveying these insights. Grounding abstract concepts in tangible everyday metaphors and familiar examples, and writing in (what I hope is a more) engaging writing style are my tactics to that effect.