William Gillis 🏴 @rechelon@mastodon.social

But this isn't even remotely proof that convergence is only possible via violence and that, left to their own devices, people will diverge from one another into mutually incomprehensible discursive worlds with no common regularities of structure in maps/values/etc.

It should be no surprise that coercively hegemonic ideological frames grow particularly weak from not needing to actually be persuasive when they're being subsidized. Remove the subsidies and we see a mass proliferation of bad memes in a society that atrophied under the hegemony.

In any case there's a far better explanation for the proliferation of divergence in our era, which is to say that we briefly had artificially universal fake narratives, fake values, fake maps, imposed by centralized violence. But that system broke down.

The fact that wide divergences in values and worldviews are occurring right now at a societal level is not particularly illuminating because it's a very limited dataset. Even the last ten thousand years is a tiny dataset when it comes to exploration of ethics and physics.

As we get old we might each experiment in unique contexts and develop divergent hyper particularized tastes, one person liking peanut butter with mustard, another salmon with ice cream, while still converging in terms of how we think and what we value.

So we know that there are convergent tendencies within a subset of Things That Matter and we know that there's nothing in principle stopping such convergence from extending to the entire set of Things That Matter. Why assume then that divergence will dominate?

Moreover we know that there are relevant connections across the Humean gap as a result. The convergent creation of regularities in our maps of the world creates convergence upon certain regularities in our moral values (if only the trivial one of accuracy as instrumental value).

At the same time we *know* that there are emergent convergences in epistemology, the regularities of physics are universal and minds that don't care about preserving corresponding regularities within themselves as maps will walk off a cliff ignoring gravity.

Divergence in some cultural and contextual particulars is inherent and indeed related to entropy; any system becomes more entangled with its environment over time in complex ways. But we don't care about a lot of those particulars because they're *irrelevant.*

What I object to in Rao's narrative is not the existence of such dynamics, but the sweeping assumed universality of the narrative. It is, in short, nihilist (both morally and epistemologically). It ASSUMES there's no universally accessible truth to be gravitated towards.

Example: When I was six and thrown into a room with a small number of random kids from the wider population it was pretty easy to be like "we both like Jurassic Park, we're friends!" but as you age you develop a lot more opinions & litmus tests. "What is your position on Qanon?"

Rao admits the existence of localized clustering where folks with commonalities group together to preserve those commonalities, but those groups in turn diverge from one another as they each pick up more and more particularities.

The descriptive appeal in our context/era is of self-evident and there are certainly processes that behave like so. Minds often grow more individuated over time in terms of experiences, perspectives, etc, leaving less common overlap with others.

Rao has a narrative of social divergence over time that's leveraging implicit comparisons to entropy pretty hard. Basically: the total shared frameworks between individuals decrease. I think this is dangerously wrong. https://ribbonfarm.com/2022/02/23/divergentism/

mutualists in the 1890s 🤝 mutualists in the 2020s

brutal takedowns of georgism