I have to suspend disbelief when I read Rao's sociological theories. They oversimplify and bend things to make reality fit into these elegent intellectual structures, but they are fun to read, and I sometimes gleen novel ways to look at the world. Also, the entire edifice doesn't necessarily need to hold together for his central thesis to be true.
I do wonder, though, if he wouldn't come closer to finding the truth if he kept his analysis more grounded, and spent less time playing at building grand theories. It's a neat rhetorical trick to disparage four social trends as cults by suggesting they are all the same phenomenon instead of evaluating each on its own merits, but I wonder if the effect is less to increase the reader's understanding than to simply nudge the reader to take on the same views as the author because the reader is seduced by the order Rao's theories create out of our chaotic reality. It's fun to read in any case.
I often feel like I disagree, sometimes viciously, with the details of his arguments (see: these four particular cults) and especially with the context into which he puts them and thus the resulting conclusions, but I usually also feel like he's hitting on something important and true nonetheless. Guess that's a good reason to still read his articles!
It also feels like a cheap way to profit off of contemporary polarization by invoking four incendiary controversies of the day and posturing as one somehow above them all.
I think the equivalence between these is very weakly argued:
The DEI cult is fueled by the genuine issue of social justice
The ESG cult is fueled by the genuine issue of climate change
The trad cult is fueled by the genuine issue of the meaning crisis
The AI safety cult is fueled by the genuine issue of AI regulation
For example, ESG seems to largely exist as a cover for not taking substantive actions to decrease carbon emissions since those would be both unprofitable within specific companies and broadly unpopular in most societies. There isn't the same kind of socially cohesive group of proponents as eg AGI x-risk rationalists.
Good point and one I came here to make after reading the article.
In my experience the DEI and AI safety crowd are mostly sincere in their belief and desires .. leaving aside whether their approaches are sound.
By contrast a great many corporate level ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) programs are knowingly cynical in promoting green washing schemes that pay lip service to reducing carbon emissions but don't bear looking into details.
I don't read the post as drawing an equivalence across these four, but I think the two you picked out are actually the most comparable pair. Certainly corporate profit interests have harmed ESG discourse, but the leading AI developers right now are corporations and it's only a short matter of time before whatever legitimate AI risk concerns will get contaminated by profit-protecting PR campaigns.
The piece makes sense, but likening the { stupid Arena Man with inaction and no expertise } to a priest was lazy writing. Anyone with any religious background isn’t going to understand your analogy at all (which is based on a certain movie depiction of priests from a religion-hate angle), because contrary, real priests are quite wise and get a lot done for the community.
I suspect the term "priest" was used metaphorically.
It describes anyone who assumes the authority of God's Voice.
If granted, this authority is absolute, brooks no disagreement.
It leaves no room for "pluralism". There is one right, what I say. One wrong, what I say.
The priest silences dissent, calls it heresy.
Most terrifyingly, if the group agrees that the priest has this authority, then he does.
I'm glad there are good priests - I'm sure most of them are fine.
But the role itself has a critical flaw.
The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed.
I wish there was a place where kind and caring people could be supported in their efforts to support the community, in general.
Because that's the essence of their goodness, not being a priest. IMHO.
Slightly OT, but it's interesting to note that there's a somewhat-developed thread of decentralization and independent thought running through the New Testament.
The most famous is probably Jesus being asked to weigh in on a political/religious debate ("which city has religious supremacy for Jewish people?") and answering effectively "What matters is individuals following God sincerely wherever they are," in John 4:19-24.
Paul also communicates something to the effect of "human teachers are fine, and may do good, but seeking God and following Jesus is what matters, not what a human teacher says to do," in 1 Corinthians 3.
I think there are other spots that develop similar themes too, but I'm rusty (and no longer relate to the text as I did when I was an evangelical Christian anyway).
My point is just that "the priest as arbiter of truth and central power in a church" is in fact the opposite of what the NT actually preaches, despite its commonality in Christian religious communities from Catholicism to independent Baptist churches.
It's almost like humans have something to gain from power and use whatever levers they can to gain it...
Indeed. I find myself alarmed that in the 21st century so many adult minds have been captured by churches that claim to speak for God, and extract a heavy cost from their membership, and justify it in every way, eventually arguing that profit and money is evidence of God's grace. You, in transferring your money to the church, are acting as an instrument of God. And you've given us the ability to give back to you all the made-up good things we can claim, knowing that we won't be held accountable by anyone, especially not the ones we've taken so much from.
> But the role itself has a critical flaw. The bloody history of every church demonstrates what happen when men speak for God and are believed.
To quote Chesterton, “There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it.” Pluralism is a dogma like any other. The stereotype of bloody religious wars is a tired and melodramatic one. The bloodiest wars were not religious, or I should say, not traditionally religious. Look at the bloody revolutions and wars fought for the sake of liberalism, liberty, republicanism, communism, socialism, and so on. These, too, can be said to be religious wars because man is religious in the broad sense. What he takes to be the highest good becomes the object of his worship and that which orders and organizes the rest of his life. That is why there is no such thing as "neutrality". "Neutrality" is a liberal concept that attempts to establish liberal norms and sensibilities as the One True Way by trying to pass them off as something prior to debate or beyond debate. It's a need trick to attain hegemony.
And consider that if a "theocratic" power tried to extinguish your preferred variety of pluralism through peaceful means, and the "pluralistic" camp was unable to resist through peaceful means, is it really that improbable that the latter might resort to violence?
> The bloodiest wars were not religious, or I should say, not traditionally religious
The bloodiest war fought on European soil, right up until World War One, was the Thirty Years' War. The world wars' higher death toll can be attributed to 20th century technology; the Thirty Years War was fought with 17th century weapons yet still led to the death of 5-8 million people. And sure, while there were political motivations involved - you could say the same of any religious war, including the Crusades - the driving force was the schism between Protestants and Catholics.
In the piece, the Arena Man and the Priest in the Arena are two different archetypes.
You may not agree with the analogy, but you understand it. Also, many people with extensive religious backgrounds do not think highly of priests. I used to admire the priest who runs a soup kitchen near me until I spoke to him at length and discovered his contempt for the people he feeds.
Excellent summary of how particular social groups lay claim to a dominant, universal, and unimpeachable voice in their chosen domain.
One point that I'm surprised the post didn't raise: the notion that such groups are often able to claim authority because "this time is different". In true messianic style, the underlying genuine issue must be framed as both uniquely important and imminently approaching a tipping point. As such it is too urgent for observers to study the issue and form their own views - instead they must defer to the insiders before it is too late.
This strategy is all the more dangerous because, at least in the cases of AI and climate change, inaction does imply catastrophe and the consequences to civilization are vast and potentially permanent. When the diagnosis of the problem is perceptive, eloquent, and mostly accurate, people tend to assume the proposed solution must be right as well.
The clearest indicator of a priest-in-the-arena, and the associated social movement aimed at institutional capture, is the motte and bailey: implying and advocating for an extreme position, then retreating to a reasonable and harmless one when pressed.
(The crisis is coming - put me in control - we must change everything!)
"Oh, you misunderstand! I was simply advocating for a sensitive and cautious approach."
Usually people back off from the extreme position when writing for public consumption. At least in that regard, the "AI-not-kill-everyoneism" camp is startlingly frank about reading the subtext out loud.
I don't know if it's really even reflective of any particular social group, as opposed to a reliable rhetorical maneuver that's just too effective to die out. History is made by people and organizations who use this One Simple Trick™, for better and for worse.
According to eternally recurring themes in myth-legend-history the next one in the sequence is: the engineer/developer/artist in the arena.
From the Aesir/Vanir, the Titans/Olympians to the French & Russian revolutions.
“The ultimate structure of the myth, then, is that the three estates of Proto-Indo-European society were fused only after a war between the first two against the third...”
(The third being not those who engage in (corporate) warfare or (rhetorical) magic, but those who working with concrete stuff (modern day fertility cults))
From the wikipedia article on the aesir-vanir war.
For the decentralized subculture, perhaps “the persons above the arena”
I get the authors criticisms of other cults, but he had to dispense with the competence and the real of his arena man strawman first. The whole point of nihilism is you can't argue with it because once you've accepted the burden of proof of arguing against literally, nothing, there's no resolution. It's tedious, and I think in this case the author is yet another intellectual predator trying to mislead the lost and calling it enlightenment. History will remember him as a good critic.
I find a charge of nihilism with no coherent support rather tedious. At worst this is a bad take. Good heavens, why would a nihilist even bother writing such a piece? The author struck me as someone genuinely concerned about a pattern he's seeing in public discourse, a kind of "grand unified theory" of why things feel like they are falling apart. The goal being, I would assume, to remove the people tearing the zeitgeist apart from the public sphere.
If anything, the nihilist is you, for disparaging a noble goal.
The support is that the author needed to neutralize competence, risk, skin in the game, and the real as a straw man before the rest of his points could be made.
That rhetorical neutralization for its own sake, and holding it as equivalent to a positive case is the belief in nothing that I referred to. We can do fancy versions of 'no, you' but the Achillies heel of a lot of critical ideas is that they are in fact, only critics and spectators who don't have any respectable standing for the things they are problematizing, and reconciling that with the actual experience of the man in the arena is the limit on the value of their contribution.
My point is, having opinions about the things others actually, physically do, particularly from the perspective of the artifacts of ideology, is arguing from a moral position of weakness. The reason that Breaking Bad meme is so popular is because there is an essential quality to the statement, "we are not the same." The competency of the man in the arena is not something one gets to affect.
You are the second person in a month on HN I've found utterly indecipherable. This despite having sentences that sound like they should have some sort of meaning. Your sentences read like they've been frankensteined together by a philosophy major looking to impress a TA. If you could try to dumb it down, use small words and explain your points simply, it might go better.
Hooked up with both a few times but I'm definitely more into logic.
Logic is so cold, so...unforgiving. And fair, so fair. Logic is the fairest of them all.
In my perhaps under-informed and uncharitable impression, Venkatesh Rao always seemed a bit of a rather coldly calculating amateur social theorist. The way he dismisses entire categories of people in his Gervais Principle analysis, which made him viral in the first place, felt mildly sociopathic.
So I'm rather surprised that he's labelling Elon Musk here as a "priest in the arena," since most similar blogger types probably embrace Musk's ruthless cost-cutting and preening at Twitter as necessary things that hard men do.
Wondered what the acronyms mean, so asked ChatGPT:
Given the acronyms DEI, ESG, AI, and trad, what does each stand for?
------------------------
DEI: DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is a term used to describe efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace, in education, and in society more broadly.
ESG: ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. It is a framework used by investors to evaluate the sustainability and ethical impact of a company before investing in it.
AI: AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. It refers to the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and language translation.
Trad: "Trad" is a shortened form of "traditional," and is often used to refer to traditional values, beliefs, or practices, particularly within certain subcultures or communities. It is not an acronym, but rather a colloquialism.
It's not a very balanced take on the affair. Ascribing the whole concept of a stochastic parrot to one guy and subtly dismissing it, is blatantly unfair.
We come up with those interpretations like 'robot parrot' individually and just because one guy wrote an article he is speaking for me?
This article is extremely poorly written. The author makes many claims without justifying any of them. To the extent it had a point, the So What of the point gets lost.
I do wonder, though, if he wouldn't come closer to finding the truth if he kept his analysis more grounded, and spent less time playing at building grand theories. It's a neat rhetorical trick to disparage four social trends as cults by suggesting they are all the same phenomenon instead of evaluating each on its own merits, but I wonder if the effect is less to increase the reader's understanding than to simply nudge the reader to take on the same views as the author because the reader is seduced by the order Rao's theories create out of our chaotic reality. It's fun to read in any case.