Until then all new posts and updates will be on my main Substack, so if you want to keep following my writing, make sure you’re subscribed there.

Thanks for reading along — more soon.

I am PISSED OFF that it took me reaching the end of this series to realize what I’ve been trying to say all along.

Perhaps I’m just human, all too human—maybe only by muddling through does the through-line become evident.

Then again algos seemingly do the same.

Anyways, with my whining out of the way, let’s review this series:

What have I been trying to say this whole time?

The Thesis

                      Linguistic conflict is structurally inevitable in modern life.

The reason is that words don’t merely describe social reality, but construct it. Said differently: in social domains, language is reflexive. However, nearly everyone operates under a false folk theory of language that denies this.

And this shared false theory does double duty:

• It holds social reality together (someone says something → people act as if it were true → in doing so they make it true)

• It also enables attempts to reshape it through linguistic attacks.

Because social reality is downstream of what people collectively believe, and language changes what people believe… controlling language becomes a way of controlling reality.

The false folk theory of language is, at its core, a philosophical model. People don’t misunderstand grammar; they misunderstand what words are and what they do: they think that names attach to essences / categories reflect natural kinds / definitions fix reality / meaning is a picture in the head.

Those are metaphysical and epistemic—i.e. philosophical—errors. They have linguistic consequences, sure. But they’re not linguistic errors. That is just how they manifest.

The entire series has been about how these shared philosophical mistakes are the terrain that allows persuasion aimed at shaping social reality to unfold through conceptual conflict.

Methodology

Awesome. With that out of the way, some self-critique: I worry about this series. Specifically about the examples used. Two reasons.

One is that they overwhelmingly come from the Internet. People might justifiably think this whole thing has been just “Twitter inside baseball”. I’d like to push back on that.

Fact is that the Internet is the perfect laboratory for studying these dynamics because it’s such a high-velocity environment for everything, including language.

It’s online that language evolves the fastest, which makes its evolution happen at observable speeds: slang, memes, political labels, identity terms, moral categories—all evolve at the speed of light.

There’s even a meme (’slang overload’) for this phenomenon for goodness’ sake.

It’s a bit like studying fruit flies except for linguistic evolution: short cycles make for visible patterns.

Compare, say, “Latinx”—first proposed in 2004, when we were online but not as online—to “Brat”—twenty years later. “Latinx” took 15 years to go from proposal to peak adoption around 2019 and then three more years to reach widespread rejection in 2022. A nearly two decade cycle. “Brat” went from Charli XCX album aesthetic to being adopted by Kamala Harris’ campaign to saturation, becoming “cringe” and dying, in about 3 months. Being more online has made the cycle faster and online is where it’s fastest and, thus, easiest to observe.

Latinx

Brat

Which segues into the second reason I worry: language evolves the fastest online because it’s where linguistic competition is fiercest. Competition is fiercest there because the stakes are political. So many of the examples end up being political. But I worry that using those might trigger people and make it too easy for them to dismiss the whole thing as outgroup ramblings. The whole area just is anti-mimetic, littered with deliberately crafted semantic stop signs made to make people look away. It works and I don’t know what to do about that.

The End

All of the above can all be distressing to see clearly: Socrates got killed for destabilizing social reality; Plato coined ‘noble lies’ as his own response and avoided the same fate. Societies have often strained over too much insight into their own working. It’s entirely possible to me that should the ideas in this series become popular they could destabilize the good parts of social reality (Arguably this already happened with post-modernism.) I don’t know which way the calculus leans.

I do know this, though: language is what many people think with, and it’s been so tampered with it has become difficult to think at all. Further, social reality is, first and foremost, constituted by shared thought. That makes me worry for the stability of our social reality as is and I’m confident that, should it falter, proper thinking is necessary for whatever comes next.

So let me say the quiet part out loud, the reason we’re fighting over language so much, the thing this whole series has been circling:

The Map is the Territory.

What is Reality?

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” — Philip K. Dick

According to Philip K. Dick’s widely circulated definition, reality is whatever doesn’t go away just because you stop believing in it. That is: reality is whatever has belief-independent existence.

His definition captures material reality very well. Storms, rocks, chemical reactions, orbital mechanics—all phenomena that entirely disregard whatever you believe about them.

But is material reality all there is?

I’d venture to suggest that a good yardstick for “real” is impact and that, by that measure, we’re as affected by things that aren’t material at all.

Social Reality

“True if Big” — Me

Men barge in and say they’re the Police, here to take you to Court for Violating the Law by not paying your Taxes to the State.

Notice anything about the previous sentence? Perhaps the odd capitalization?

I capitalized every term that is not materially real but that is—as you realize now, sitting in the Jailhouse— very much real in its impact.

The Police, the Court, the Law you Violated, Taxes, and the State are all belief-dependent, but stick sufficient belief together and you get institutions: illusions with consequences, also known as “Social Reality”.

Just because it’s illusory doesn’t mean it’s not load-bearing

You can imagine people who philosophically disagree with the existence of Taxes, the State, the Law, the Courts, and the Police. You can even imagine someone so terminally materialistic—prior to their stint in Jail— that they take Dick’s definition sufficiently to heart to believe Taxes, the State, the Law, the Courts, and the Police are not real because they go away once you stop believing in them. Unfortunately, they still believe in you.

Fact is, someone unilaterally dropping their belief in something that is socially real does very little to make it go away. The President is the President no matter how many times you individually shout “Not my President”.

If you got everyone else to do it too, however…

It sounds promising until I clarify that by “everyone” I mean everyone: the President is the President because everyone believes everyone believes everyone believes (sic.) he’s the President. If everyone stopped believing it (and stopped believing everyone else believed everyone else believed it) he’d stop being the President that very moment.

But not before then.

Which leads us to a new reading of Dick’s dictum: “Reality is that which, when you [unilaterally] stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Social Reality is what we’re fighting over

Language is great for accurately describing the material domain. To map that part of Reality. It works stupendously for that.

In the social domain, however, things are different: language about social reality quickly becomes a way to fight over it.

And the reason is simple: in social reality, language is reflexive: the map doesn’t just describe the territory—it shapes it.

It is precisely because people don’t know that, because people mistakenly believe language functions the same way in the social domain as in the material domain, that controlling language is a viable way to control reality. While material reality is immune to language, social reality is made out of language.

And that is why the infowar is linguistic and why it is ongoing: the ongoing mistake keeps the incentives for the conflict alive: control the map—the categories, the names, and the framings used—and you control what becomes socially—and thus actually—real.

So, to answer our opening question: the battlefield is language; the stakes are social reality; and the prize is the Map.

Non-kinetic warfare is the use of indirect, non-violent, and non-physical methods to influence, destabilise, or coerce an adversary. It includes cyberwarfare, economic warfare, diplomatic warfare, space warfare and, most relevant for our purposes, information warfare.

I want to talk about information warfare here in a slightly looser way than what is engaged in by state actors. By it I mean “an adversarial information environment where the units of communication aren’t neutral but strategic.” To understand the difference think of “this”, “that”, “a”, “who”, “why”, “when”, “because”, “so that”. All of those are neutral units of communication.

But not all units of communication are like that. Especially online, seemingly innocuous units are often strategic.

Memes

“All crows are black birds, but not all black birds are crows.” So goes the old trope meant to illustrate the notion of logical entailment. Correspondingly, although many funny online pictures are memes, not all memes are funny online pictures.

In fact, funny online pictures are but a subset of memes. Memes are units of thought that spread. And those are frequently linguistic, not pictorial at all.

Consider a few widely-circulating linguistic memes found in the wild (Twitter):

• “Ragebait” / “Clickbait” / “It’s bad on purpose to make you click”

• “It’s not happening and it’s good that it is”

• “Current Year”

These aren’t innocent internet tropes. They’re defensive moves in an adversarial game being fought at the linguistic layer:

• “Ragebait” and its relatives exist to defang and weaken the incentive structure of the online economy by making it obvious. All of them scream at you “Stop! You’re getting played!”

• “It’s not happening and it’s good that it is” names a pattern in how uncomfortable truths get slowly rolled out. Because this pattern relies on denial (“It’s not happening”) the fact that people not only claim to see the denied phenomenon but also see one another claiming to see the meta-pattern—by tweeting the meme out—is particularly powerful.

• “Current Year” serves to puncture a certain kind of progress-justification that relies on… ‘because it’s [Current Year].

Note how every single one of the above (1) is a meme, (2) is not a funny picture, (3) spreads from person to person, and (4) works as an operational unit in a conflict, their casual—almost funny—presentation aiding their real function, by obscuring it.

Although these originate online, they have bled profusely into real life and, with them, so have a number of offensive linguistic memes like:

• “Fascist”

• “Racist”

• “Denialist”

• “Science-denier”

These have lost their original meaning and now function as semantic stop-signs meant to shut down inquiry. Strategic units of communication intended to corral rather than describe.

Why should I care

Two reasons.

One is personal. Most people think through language. The concepts you use to form beliefs have come overwhelmingly from outside yourself. If language is the medium of your thought, and that medium is being tampered with, then your beliefs are just someone else’s incentive structure, playing out in your head. This might understandably upset you, on a purely selfish level.

The other reason is shared, and has to do with what is being fought over.

But that’s for tomorrow.

First, recall how Wittgenstein characterised the Augustinian picture of language:

• Words name objects.

• Sentences are combinations of names.

• The meaning of a word is the object it stands for.

• Learning language = learning which names attach to which things.

From this picture, several structural assumptions follow. It is those assumptions that enable the four types of mistakes below.

Picture Theory Mistakes

Mistake #1 — Naming = Reality

The Augustinian assumption:

A word names an object; the name reflects its essence.

If names reflect essences, then a softer name means a softer thing, a sacred name a sacred thing, and an authoritative name real authority. This is exploited by creating or subbing in names that make people feel differently about what’s named.

E.g.:

• “Collateral damage” ← dead civilians

• “Enhanced interrogation” ← torture

• “Baby” ← foetus

• “Mostly peaceful protest” ← riot

• “Fascists,” “Racists,” “Denialists,” “Science-deniers” ← people on the opposing side

• “Experts,” “Scientific,” “Pro-science” ← people on our side

Mistake #2 — Definition = Meaning

The Augustinian assumption:

Words have fixed meanings; meanings live in definitions.

If meaning just is the thing named, and the definition captures its essence, then to know the definition is to know the thing itself. This mistake is exploited by changing definitions as if that changed the underlying reality.

E.g.:

• “Patriot” → supports our policy agenda

• “Science” → institutional consensus

• “Harm” → anything we dislike

• “Terrorism” → violence by people we disapprove of
  
  

  

A particularly egregious example

Mistake #3 — Use = Mention

The Augustinian assumption:

Using a word is applying the name of the thing.

If using a word is “correctly naming the object,” then the essence of a thing is encoded in its name. The exploit here is to get you to use a label that bakes in a judgement so it doesn’t have to be argued for.

E.g.:

• “Pro-life” cannot but be life-affirming

• “Microaggressions” cannot but be aggressions

• Opposing “Hate speech” cannot but be hateful

• “Trans women are women” cannot but be a tautology

• “Love is love” cannot but be a tautology

• “OpenAI” cannot but be open

Mistake #4 — Categories = Essences

The Augustinian assumption:

Words carve nature at its joints; categories correspond to real essences.

If categories are treated as natural kinds, then shifting their boundary looks more like discovering the truth than redefining a term. This is exploited by getting you to accept a new boundary, because shifting who counts as X smuggles in a new conclusion about what X “really is.”

Examples:

• “You ain’t Black if you don’t vote Dem” excludes political opponents from the ethnic category

• “Real America” excludes urban/coastal areas

• “True patriots” excludes dissenters

• “Journalist” is boundary warfare between credentialed reporters and independent/citizen media

• “Scientist” excludes heterodox researchers from category

• “Terrorist” vs “freedom fighter” name the same acts but political alignment ensures different categorisation

• “Hate speech” vs “controversial opinion” — same

These four mistakes share something: they’re invisible to people who hold them. If you still believe the picture theory, you can’t see these as mistakes: they’re just how language works. But if you do see them, like the people who crafted the examples above? Then you can extract value from everyone else.

Arbitrage

You think this wouldn’t fool anyone. You’d be shocked.

In financial markets, arbitrage means spotting price asymmetries and profiting from the gap. The same pattern applies here: there’s a gap between what people think language does and what it actually does.

That gap creates the four mistakes—or, attack surfaces—above. When someone exploits these gaps, they’re doing semantic arbitrage: extracting political or social value from the mismatch between folk theory and reality.

When this becomes systematic, that is, when actors coordinate around these exploits, or actively manufacture the confusion they’re profiting from, you’re no longer looking at isolated instances of manipulation.

You’re looking at war.

Over the past 11 posts of this series we’ve been documenting a lot of… weird aspects of language:

• Names can kill what they describe;

• They can breathe new life into old;

• Changing them changes how people react to the same thing.

• You can use them to dismiss;

• and to demand compliance.

How come these are the case, like, at all? Why do names have such strange, quizzical powers? My suggestion is that it’s for the same reason that had our physicist friend panic: the same way people have a folk theory of physics they have a folk theory of language. However, while most people don’t deal with speeds or sizes that would break the folk theory of physics, they very much do deal with things that break their folk theory of language. Not only that accidentally break it, but that were designed to break it.

But, to appreciate that, we first have to understand what the folk theory of language even is.

The Picture Theory

“When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were, the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus I gradually learnt to understand what things the words stood for; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.”
— Confessions, Book I, Chapter 8.

It is with this very quote that Wittgenstein opens the Philosophical Investigations to introduce the theory he’ll spend the rest of the book dismantling and, with it, his own previous view, first expressed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Here’s how Wittgenstein paints Augustine’s theory of language learning above:

• People point to objects;

• They say the corresponding word;

• The child associates the word with the object.

Augustine’s is a referential model of language: words are names for things. Sentences are combinations of names. First a thing exists, then we attach a word to it. Like placing a sticker on a jar. The meaning of the word is the thing it points to.

This is what philosophers have since called the “Picture Theory” or “Augustinian Picture” of language:

• Words = names for objects, properties, actions, feelings

• Sentences = combinations of names

• Meaning = reference (the thing named)

• Understanding = mentally matching words to their corresponding objects

Augustine’s theory works great. For physical objects.

The word “Tree” points to trees. “Rock” points to rocks. For a child learning language by watching adults point at things and saying their name out loud, the Augustinian Picture Theory seems obviously true.

But the theory is meant to extend well beyond just physical objects: it implies that each word corresponds to a thing, in the broadest sense—an object, property, action, feeling, etc.—and that the meaning of the word is the thing it stands for. But is it though?

Counter-example that will be outdated in the length of one TikTok

We can skip Wittgenstein’s 1953’s carefully crafted counter-examples: online language mutates so quickly that counterexamples to Augustine abound. On the other hand, this very turnover means they’ll be outdated by the time you reach the end of this essay. Read on while you still can.

Meaning Without Reference a/k/a “67”

“Six Seven”: all the kids are saying it and all the seniors want to know what it means. A capricious example, had Dictionary.com not crowned it Word of the Year 2025. Here’s what they had to say about it:

“Perhaps the most defining feature of 67 is that it’s impossible to define. It’s meaningless, ubiquitous, and nonsensical. In other words, it has all the hallmarks of brainrot... Still, it remains meaningful to the people who use it because of the connection it fosters.”

Read that again: “the most defining feature” is that it’s “impossible to define”. It’s “meaningless” yet “meaningful.”

According to the Picture Theory, this is impossible. If meaning is reference—if a word’s meaning is what it points to—then a word that points to nothing is, ipso facto, meaningless. Full stop.

But “67” is meaningful: it signals in-group membership, it conveys a vibe, and creates social connection. It does work language is supposed to do. It just doesn’t refer to anything in particular.

The picture theory says: no reference, no meaning. 67 says: well, it doesn’t say anything. But it still means something. And that’s kind of the point: yes meaning, no reference. Ergo, the Augustinian picture is wrong.

Why The Wrongness Matters

Augustine is wrong and, with him, most people in the vise of the folk theory of language.

It is the wrongness of their shared theory that makes the “weird” aspects of language documented in the intro, and all along this series, seem weird in the first place! If names were merely stickers on a jar it would be very strange indeed that altering the sticker would alter the content.

But names aren’t stickers! People think they are—neutral labels on pre-existing things—but they’re actually more like levers! They build and destroy and coordinate and birth and kill and summon and bind and distort and camouflage and sanctify and contaminate and collapse and edify and weaponise and and …

Anyways—point being: there is a gap between what people think language is, and does, and what language actually is and does.

It is due to that gap that it is possible to:

• Invent phenomena through naming alone (if there’s a word, there must be a thing → people act as if there were, effectively bringing into being);

• Change reactions by changing labels (different words → different “things”);

• Control identity by controlling what names mean (shift the boundaries → shift the behavior);

And many more things we’ll see tomorrow.

Specifically we’ll see ways this gap gets exploited.

Remember my panicky physicist friend? Truth is people’s folk theory of physics might make them worse bowling players, but they don’t need to know the second law of thermodynamics to not let their hand linger too long on a stove.

The key difference is that, with language, people aren’t just passively getting things wrong. No. They’re being actively exploited.

And tomorrow we’ll explore how : )

Every few years, we coin a new name for the same old thing. “Homeless”. “Unhoused”. “Person experiencing homelessness”. Each arrives fresh and clean, only to decay shortly after. What gives?

It happens because two sets of preferences are at odds:

• Advocacy groups want neutral, humane language that invites closeness to the underlying phenomenon;

• The public wants distance.

That tension creates an endless race. Advocates find and popularise a new neutral term. Over time, it absorbs the same stigma it was meant to escape. Eventually it comes to feel as dirty as the term it came into existence to substitute, and a fresh new name is necessary.

This endless race creates the selection pressure that keeps names evolving.

And I mean that technically.

The Naming Arms Race

First, to dispel a common misunderstanding: “evolve” doesn’t mean “progress” but, rather, “adaptation”. Adaptation through heredity, variation, and selection.

					                  Not that, but this.

That’s not how most names change. Most change through random drift due to use. But others evolve as the consequence of an arms race between different forces. In our example above, those two forces would be:

• The Name — a new name, with its temporary neutrality and viability; and

• The Stigma — the accumulation of old negative associations on it.

It’s as if the name were the prey, and stigma the predator. Except stigma doesn’t chase the name as much as it is attached to its tail: the name points to the stigmatised referent. Can’t point at the referent without also pointing at the stigma. Not forever, anyway.

But for a little while? Sure. That’s why when advocates successfully introduce a new neutral term, they temporarily open an arbitrage window: the new term circulates stigma-free, allowing discussion of the underlying phenomenon. This period, before stigma returns, can buy just enough time to shift public policy or public consciousness. But the public is fooled only temporarily—eventually common knowledge reasserts itself about what the new term means and, within months to years, all the old associations reattach themselves to the fresh label.

This arms race—between prey and predator, new name and old stigma— generates real evolutionary dynamics:

• Heredity: each new term “inherits” the same referent as its predecessor, creating a lineage of labels for the same reality;

• Variation: advocates coin new words as old ones saturate with stigma; and

• Selection: opposing social forces decide which survive, and for how long.

To go back to our original question: kind words never last because they’re just one move in an arms race that is endless. And that race—between fresh names shedding old stigma, and old stigma latching on again—never ends because the social reality beneath it never changes: the public still wants distance while advocates still push for closeness.

Until that changes, there can be no end and no final victory for either side. The process will remain endless: every few years, we’ll coin a new kind word; and, shortly after, it’ll die.

But that was yesterday and today is today. Where yesterday Alice and Bob were just different people earnestly and sincerely engaging with whichever frame they each thought more accurately described the world, today things are different.

Adversariality in Classification

Bob and Alice’s patience has run out. Today Bob—and I know I’m stretching the limits of imagination here—has come to believe Alice is effectively promoting the Apocalypse while Alice, in turn, now thinks Bob is the last thing standing between humanity and the land of digital milk and digital honey.

Because they think the stakes are that high they’ve decided to stop engaging in good faith and instead just spread their views: Alice’s that Bob is a Doomer—and thus can be dismissed just on the weight of his personality defects—and Bob’s that he’s an objective scientific researcher—and, thus, cannot. Again, sorry for stretching the limits of imagination suggesting anyone would engage in either of these.

For the twist: even in the scenario above, where Alice and Bob decided that the ground truth doesn’t matter, their goal—of spreading their view—would be best served by pretending they’re being merely descriptive. “I’m not renaming! I’m not inventing! I’m merely naming!!”

Said differently: two days ago the source of complexity was just that these questions are actually ambiguous. Today I’m saying that that ambiguity is load-bearing: it provides camouflage for bad-faith actors to disguise adversarial moves as innocent taxonomic confusion. Again, sorry to stretch the imagination.

Both bad-faith actors, good-faith actors, and genuinely confused people engage in taxonomic confusion, so you can’t use that fact as a way to distinguish between them—😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

Further, yesterday we saw how taxonomic questions collapse into naming battles. And, if that is so, and adversarial dynamics spring up in taxonomic questions, you’d expect to see adversarial dynamics in naming too.

Adversariality in (Re)naming

We’ve talked about renaming for --- reactions, or, as they’re known in common parlance: slurs. A slur is, according to Wikitionary, a “word or grammatical form expressing a negative or disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone or something”.

Wait—Eve? What are you doing here? Wait, what? Alice called Bob WHAT?

…

*deep breaths*

…

Ok. Let’s make the most of this. Case study: “Is t*ch-bros a slur?”

When I google that question, the first thing I get is Gemini’s AI summary saying it “is not officially considered a slur.”

I’m sure people on the receiving end of it would disagree as it very much does express a “negative or disrespectful connotation, a low opinion, or a lack of respect toward someone”.

This is, of course, another instance of how questions of classification hide questions of axiology: if “-bro” is a slur then you shouldn’t use it. But people want to use it, people want to disparage their (perceived) ideological enemies, making the question contentious. As we’ve also seen names drive reactions, giving (re)naming its power: whoever controls the name controls how people react to something.

Which brings us to the question of who gets to arbitrate whether ‘-bro’ is a slur. Notice how Gemini AI said “is not officially considered a slur.”—”Officially”? And “not considered”—considered by whom? Tech workers who use Twitter? Or, journalists who write about tech? The asymmetry matters: media institutions can impose ‘tech-bro’ while tech twitterati struggle to make ‘journos’ stick. Platform matters.

The techbro/journos question illustrates how different (groups of) people have different interests as to what something gets named.

And because names catch better if people think they’re just accurate descriptions we get everyone pretending to just try to be accurate, whether or not that’s what they are doing.

Those adversarial dynamics make some names actively contested, and that’s why they keep changing.

But that’s for next time.

                                                              A timely local example.

Notice how implicit in the question of “What to call Bob?” is the question “What is Bob?” i.e. “What should we primarily understand Bob as?”, “What interpretative frame should we apply to Bob’s statements by default?”

If we fall into the “Bob is a Doomer” camp, then his statements should be interpreted as being more revealing of his personality than of whatever they are ostensibly about. But if we fall into the “Bob is a Researcher” camp, then his statements should be taken to be more about whatever he is researching than about himself.

While, in the first scenario, we get to just dismiss whatever Bob says off-hand; in the second, we get to fret about it. Such is the power of names.

Because they disagree on what to call Bob, Bob and Alice also disagree on how to classify the words they’re using to describe him.

Classification is hard. That difficulty—to earnestly say whether something is naming or renaming—gets compounded when the word being classified touches upon social matters. That very difficulty allows both Bob and Alice to legitimately hold on to their ground, the ambiguity enables a fight as each of them gravitates toward the name that frames things in ways that feels true to them, while different things feel true for either.

But this kind isn’t limited to Alice and Bob. At any moment in time there’s many other such battles:

• “Estate Tax” vs “Death Tax”

• “Suicide” vs “Euthanasia” vs “Death with Dignity” vs “Canada”

• “Abortion” vs “Choice”

• “Terrorist” vs “Freedom Fighter”

• Etc.

A different way of saying all of the above: the naming battle (which name should win? what should we call Bob?) and the classification question (is this naming or renaming or inventing?) can’t be cleanly separated.

That’s why I flip-flopped on “Doomers” and “Jhanabros” calling them ‘Inventing’ on “Making A New Type of Guy to Get Mad At” but ‘Renaming’ on “What’s in a Rename”. It’s hard to separate the question from the the territory being fought over.

For instance: Alice called Bob a Doomer. Carlos overheard and said it was “Naming”. Eve retorted it was “Inventing”. Carlos and Eve’s are now not just dispassionate observers engaged in a definitional dispute separate from Alice and Bob’s “real conversation”: they’re now part of the main event too.

When someone asks to adjudicate whether X is naming, renaming, or inventing, they’re asking to take sides in a values dispute dressed up as taxonomy. Axiology cosplaying as ontology cosplaying as classification. The complexity doesn’t come from the analysis: it’s baked into the question being asked.

And if this is what happens when Alice, Bob, Carlos, and Eve are all engaging in good-faith and trying to be accurate, imagine what happens when someone isn’t.

So—what gives? Am I confused?
Or is this just… hard?

Classification is Hard, so let’s start with easy ones

I want to distinguish between three ways of classifying new words: Naming, Renaming, and Inventing. Analytically, here’s how to tell them apart:

• Naming → A pattern exists. Later, a new name is created for it.

• Renaming → A pattern exists, already named. Later, it is given a new name.

• Inventing → A new name is created for no pattern in particular. The name might promote a pattern coming into existence or can get reappropriated for an existing pattern.

Let’s go through examples of each of these.

Naming

This is the simplest case. Something exists, and it’s given a new name: ”tree”, “red”, “thunder”. Most names are of this kind.

Renaming

Something exists, already has a name, and is given a new name. Renaming is easier to see when it fails, just as the mechanics of things become more obvious when they break.

                                                        A failed attempt at renaming.

Inventing

The word “Bitcoin” was invented to describe… Bitcoin. The word and the thing it described co-emerged.

“Chortle”—now meaning “to laugh in a breathy, gleeful way; to chuckle”—first appeared in the nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” as a meaningless word, and only later acquired the modern meaning.

So far, so easy. Let’s make it harder.

Hard

1980s. Western-trained psychiatrist Dr. Sing Lee was practicing in Hong Kong when he noticed something odd: cases of self-starvation existed locally, but none resembled Western-style anorexia nervosa i.e. no obsession with thinness, no fear of fatness, and no dieting culture.

Then, in 1994, a teenage girl named Charlene Hsu Chi-Ying collapsed on a busy street and publicly described her condition using the Western label anorexia. The story spread through Hong Kong’s media and, within months, Lee began recording a surge of new cases that perfectly fit the Western template: young women refusing food out of fear of gaining weight.

From 1983 to 1987, Lee had seen only two or three cases per year of self-starvation, none involving fat-phobia. After 1994, both the numbers and the symptoms changed rapidly: fat-phobic, Western-style anorexia nervosa became the dominant presentation. ([source])

Lee’s conclusion was that the word itself, and the cultural narrative it carried, had conjured the disorder into existence where before it hadn’t existed.

Perhaps you agree with Lee — “Anorexia didn’t exist before 1994 in Hong Kong.”

Perhaps you don’t — “Anorexia did exist; they just didn’t call it that.”

The point is: it’s hard to say. Not only is it hard to say but it matters.

If the disorder already existed, naming was useful: it let doctors import existing Western medical knowledge.

If it didn’t, the spread of the name was catastrophic, effectively generating a new illness almost ex nihilo. A case where naming itself became a public-health threat, suggesting we might need to carefully control which diagnostic labels spread, an idea that cuts against the purported Western commitment to information freedom

The point is this: for any one word we might plausibly care about, it is more likely than not to be a difficult to classify edge case because classification isn’t neutral—it implies an ontological claim: are you “merely” describe something that already exists, or are you renaming it in a more positive or more negative way, or even trying to bring it into existence through the act of naming it?

This territory—of naming, renaming, and inventing—is ambiguous and this ambiguity not only matters but can be actively exploited.

But that’s for another essay.

Ready? Here they are:

20 min

Twenty minutes

A third of an hour

One third of the clock's turn

1,200 seconds

That was easy enough. Now the question: Did reading those all feel the same? Because they mean the same.

The purpose of this short exercise is to illustrate a more general principle: different names cause different reactions to the same thing. I’ll say that again because that’s how big a deal I think it is: different names cause different reactions to the same thing.

It is from this general principle that renaming derives its power: both to make people react more positively to something and to make them react more negatively toward something else. Let’s look at the capacity to create more positive reactions in turn.

Renaming for +++ reactions

Renames can soothe, legitimise, even re-enchant. Here are some historical examples:

• “Shell shock” → “Combat fatigue” → “PTSD” → “C-PTSD” — Each renaming reanimated attention and increasingly reframed from combatant moral weakness to neurological injury to chronic relational harm.
  

• “Cybernetics” → “AI” → “Cognitive Science” → “Machine Learning” → “AI” — Through its various funding winters “AI” was renamed to keep the money spigots turning.
  

• “Autism/ADHD/etc.” → “Neurodivergent” — The term pulled the frame away from medical pathologization and toward positive identification.

• “Global Warming” → “Climate Change” — This rename broadened the scope and extended the issue’s shelf life once “warming” fatigue set in.

• “Lounge music” → “Chill-out music” → “Lo-fi” — Turning background kitsch into ambient cool.

All of the above renewed and broadened interest in what they renamed. But renaming can also have the opposite effect: driving people away from what is renamed.

Renaming For --- reactions

Renames for negative reactions are what Scott Addams calls “linguistic kill-shots”. Donald Trump is a big fan. Just ask ”Low Energy Jeb Bush”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Lyin’ Ted”, “Little Marco”, “Pocahontas”, “Sleepy Joe”, “Cryin’ Chuck”, or “Crazy Bernie”.

But it’s not just Trump who’s engaging in this: he’s just particularly skilled at it. In fact, a lot of online discourse can be modelled as being no more than this. The coinages “Doomers” or “Jhanabros”—both of which we have just addressed —are an instance of this, but so are the “Woke Right” and “Longhouse” coinages and many, many others.

All of these are instances of attempting to rename something to cause the negative reactions of driving people away from associating with what is being renamed.

Note how these new coinages generate Google searches asking ‘what does this mean?’ - we’ll explore why that matters in the future.

Why Renaming matters

Because renaming changes how people react to things there’s an incentive to attempt it, either to make people more inclined toward or away from something.

Another way of saying this: names don’t just describe reality, they tilt it. Whoever controls what we call something controls how we feel about it. And that insight is why, as we’ll see, names are so fought over.

But what if I told you that you don’t even need algorithms to have an excuse to get mad? If I told you you can craft your villains from scratch? That you can just Make Up a New Type of Guy to Get Mad At?

Perhaps you’re unconvinced. “Why would I want to do that!?” But Being Mad is full of perks! It’s validating—if we’re on opposite sides and you’re bad, then I must be good. It allows you to righteously dismiss an entire group of people without having to engage with what they have to say, and it allows you to project bad qualities onto this out-group so that you never—ever—have to confront yourself.

“How do I start?” “What’s a good Type of Guy to Get Mad At for someone just getting into it?” Don’t fret. Thankfully, others have paved the road before us. Let’s examine three recent Types of Guy To Get Mad At so you can get some inspiration.

Types of Guys to Get Mad At

“Jhanabros”

Since we ended the last post on a note about “enjoying the sunshine”, I thought it appropriate to address the Jhanas and, of course, “Jhanabros”.

Jhanas are states of deep meditative absorption. Basically, the same way our minds can recurse on negative emotions—like when fear of fear turns into panic—they can recurse on positive ones—like when pleasure of pleasure turns into Jhana 1.

               Negative states looping on themselves, positive states looping on themselves

A proper hagiography of the popularisation of Jhanas is beyond the scope of this essay but I believe they started getting popular on Twitter with Nick Cammaratta incessantly tweeting about them at the same time as Jhourney sprang up selling a course for people to achieve them in a week. Jhourney’s tagline—“bliss of demand”—is some of what I was gesturing at yesterday when I suggested getting acquainted with the sun before attempting to stare into the void.

Anyways, Jhanas got big on Twitter. Soon enough, so did the term “Jhanabros.”

Now, “Jhanabros” doesn’t really refer to anything coherent. There are just people interested in Jhanas. But it sounds like it refers to something and that whatever it refers to isn’t great. Would you want to be a “jhanabro”? Of course not. Better to not explore it further: disparagement through neologism. And, just in case you’re tempted to dismiss this as Twitter inside baseball, here’s a 2024 article from The Atlantic. Notice anything?

“Jhanabros” follows the recent trend of appending ‘-bros’ to coin a disparaging neologism. It works as a template for mass-producing villains: fill in any subculture and just press enter. Financebros. Cryptobros. Gymbros. Podcastbros. Techbros.

However, given that I’m writing this in Berkeley, California, I’ll skip -bro discourse and jump straight to the “Doomers”.

                (Someone should do a proper history of the use of the suffix -bro as a slur)

“Doomers”

​​”Doomer” originally refers to the meme above. First posted to 4chan September 16th, 2018, you can see searches for it spike then. More recently the term has been reappropriated to refer to “AI Doomers”—people concerned about existential risks from artificial intelligence. You can see searches spike again recently.

The same way “Jhanabros” is used to dismiss people interested in jhanas, “Doomers” to dismiss those worried about AI risk. “Shut up, Doomer” shuts down discussion, no arguments need be addressed. The label does all the work.

Interest in “Doomer” over time. Notice the spike in 2018—when the meme was posted to 4chan—and more recently, when it started being hurled against AI people.

But “Doomers” aren’t the only ones getting told to shut up.

“Karen”

                                                                  “Karen”

“Karen” is pejorative slang for a middle-aged, middle-class white woman perceived as entitled and demanding, often asking to “speak to the manager.”

The term became hyper-popular around 2020. Notably it came to fill a niche in the culture: lots of people want to be dismissive of women and tell them to shut up but, until then, this was generally frowned upon.

Coining “Karen” suddenly made it ok.—I told you Making up a Type of Guy to Get Mad At comes with a lot of perks!

You might be saying: “Uh, first of all, ‘Karen’ isn’t a Type of ‘Guy.’ Second of all, “Jhanabro” and/or “Doomer” and/or “Karen” aren’t ‘Made Up’; they’re accurate descriptions of how some people actually are!”

Fair enough. Let’s address that next.

Upcoming: Naming, Renaming, and Inventing

Perhaps you’re familiar with Alicorn’s 2015 Rationalism Gothic:

You utter a statement. Someone says, “Yet. Growth mindset.” This happens more and more. If you are very careful in your phrasing, you may hear, “So far,” instead. You speak in soft whispers, alone. Pessimistically. “Yet,” says a voice. “Growth mindset.” Silently, in a deserted office, you say nothing. “Growth mindset,” says the voice. Louder. It is growing.

In my story, that “someone” is Visa . Every time I got Mad Online, Visa would jump out of the Twitter bushes with the same maddening line: ‘Focus on what you want to see more of.’ Dreary.

“Dreary”? Yes. You see, I came across Alicorn’s “Rationalism Gothic” very late into my rationalism journey. By that time I had already long devoured the Sequences, and set my heart on adhering to the Twelve Virtues of Rationality, like that of “Surrender[ing] to the truth as quickly as you can”. Which is why his advice felt the same as someone asking me to shapeshift into this:

                                                                   Not me

My head was already deep into the rationalist ostrich rabbit-hole. And while it was the second arguably-religious hole I fell into, it wasn’t the last.

Buddhism

I’m into Buddhism. Big time. Long story but I can promise you it very much followed from the first and sixth virtues—namely, “curiosity”, and “empiricism”.

In Buddhism there is this idea of “protecting the senses” or “guarding the sense doors”. The idea is to prevent you from getting swept away by craving (desperately wanting something) or aversion (desperately wanting away from something) upon perceiving it.

They call it “indriya-saṃvara” meaning “sense restraint” and it’s sorta like what we’d call attention hygiene: being mindful of what you’re paying attention to, what effects it causes in you, and so on.

The twist is that in Buddhism “senses” refers not just to our Western 5 senses, but also includes “mind” or the “mind-sense” as a further 6th sense, on the same level with Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, Touching, “Mind-ing” [Apologies for the clunky construction but naturally we don’t have a natural verb form like we do for the other senses in English]

Senses in the West vs. Senses in Buddhism (btw if someone has a better depiction for the mind sense than a brain icon I’d appreciate it.)

Now, Buddhism was the most recent arguably-religious hole I fell into. But it wasn’t the one I was born into.

Christianity

Christianity, the tradition I was born into, boasts a whole “psychology of sin”. Before I go further let me address that word—”sin”—for I know how triggering it can be.

“Sin” is often thought of as being about “breaking arbitrary rules”. This is a modern misconception derived from the paucity of our theology.

The New Testament word for sin—”hamartia”—literally means “to miss the mark.” “Sin” does not describe something prescriptive, in the form of random rules you’re not meant to break but, rather, something descriptive, namely: the act of going against the grain of reality.

Moral teachings, thus, aren’t random divine decrees but rather maps of reality and how it works. “Sin” is a big sign in the map saying “IF YOU GO DOWN THIS PATH YOU’LL FUCK UP YOUR WHOLE LIFE.” Or, as St. Augustine more elegantly put it: “The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder”.

“[Act] is a sin.” is, therefore, an empirical claim: engaging in [Act] will deterministically make your life worse.

Ok, with that out of the way, let’s return to the psychology of sin. In Christianity sin exists on a descending ladder of how deeply you engage in it, with each step on that ladder reliably fucking up your life and mind further and further. (This is a further empirical claim.)

The steps on that ladder go as follows:

1. Suggestion (Temptation) — a sinful thought or image appears; not yet sin;

2. Delight — you linger on or take pleasure in the thought;

3. Consent — you inwardly agree or decide you would do it;

4. Action — you carry it out in word or deed;

5. Habit (Vice) — repetition forms a lasting disposition toward that sin.

I’m sure you, too, find this fascinating but by now you must be wondering why you should care. Well, here’s why: I want you to consider that both Christianity and Buddhism can be understood as empirical, proto-sciences of… “humaning”, for lack of a better term.

These “sciences of humaning” attempt to answer questions like “How can I lead a good life?”, “How can we uproot suffering?”, “How can we experience unconditional happiness?” or even, “What leads to union with God?”. They’re sciences in that they consist of disciplined experimental study. Just a bit unconventional in that they study inner life and only care about prediction insofar as it enables transformation. “Sciences of humaning” is a very clunky name too, of course. A much better name would be “Sciences of the Soul”.

The “soul” being what distinguishes a human from a robot. A robot is but a look-up table of inputs and outputs; a human is an “ensouled” being—one changed by what it does, and by what it attends to. Put differently: you are not a robot.

Conclusion

You are not a robot: what you attend to changes what your mind is drawn to and generates.

You are not a robot: looking at true things now affects your capacity of looking at true things in the future—just think about all the EAs/Rationalists that “burned out” and develop mysterious psychosomatic ailments that conveniently gave them moral license to stop focusing on truths that are hard to look at while keeping their identity intact.

You are not a robot: you have an ego, an identity. Some updates hurt, they’re triggering, even overwhelming.

And all of this is okay.

You are not yet able to engage with every true thing. And that’s okay. It’s why I tried to proactively defuse the “sin” trigger earlier. It’s okay. According to Christianity, you are fallen, and it’s okay. According to Buddhism, you are ignorant, and it’s okay. You don’t have to already be what you are not yet. You don’t have to already be what you are not yet.

I should say it: I very much still hold dear the value of looking at and knowing the true things. But I’ve made my peace with the fact that the cost of seeing some more true things now is to not see further true things later on and so, I’ve decided to maximize my truth capacity over time instead.

Thinking that you are or should already be that which you aren’t yet is what Christianity would call the sin of arrogance. You need (epistemic) pacing—a kind of (epistemic) humility.

                                                      For my visual learners out there.

In sum: let your eyes adjust before you stare into the abyss. There’s no rush—the abyss isn’t going anywhere. And for now, enjoy the sunshine.

Anyways, Visa was right.

“Christian” was, in fact, the only type of guy, for the longest time. At least in the West. However, we of this temporal world sit amidst a veritable EXPLOSION of types of guy: you got your gymrats, your CrossFitters, your gamers, your sneakerheads, your hypebeasts, your MAGA but also your Blacks, your democrats and republicans, and on and on and on.

ok, but how come tho

Glad you asked.

Making a New Type of Guy To Comply

All the Types of Guy mentioned above exist to instantiate the very same trade: that of identity in exchange for loyalty.

That loyalty can be to a brand—like in the case of Christians, gymrats, crossFitters, gamers, sneakerheads, or hypebeasts—or to a politics—in the case of Blacks, democrats, or republicans.

Now, you might be skeptical. Warrantedly so. You might even think this is just me making stuff up. If that’s the case here is a 20-page thesis (Peretti, 1996) describing how late capitalism accelerates the production and consumption of identities, and a 2022 “update” by Toby Shorin. While Toby stops short of stating it as a literal trade, his framework makes clear that loyalty is the currency by which identities are sustained.

It might be tempting to dismiss both of these as circular references to even more idle philosophical speculation. Except “Peretti” above refers to Jonah Peretti, also known as the founder of Buzzfeed. His theory has been very much battle-tested, and found workable. At least workable enough to IPO a company at $1.5B.

As you recover from the whiplash that number might’ve caused a hazy memory comes back—did he write “Black”? Maybe it was a typo. Let me stop you right there. It’s not. Joe Biden infamously said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black”

                                                  If it’s stupid and it works, it ain’t stupid.

This is of course a demand for compliance in exchange for identity. It’s a very neat trick: first you’re sold an identity (“You are Black.” “It is Good to be Black”), and, once that’s done, you shift the meaning of that identity to entail whatever you want people to do. It’s far, far harder to argue the case for something on its own merits rather than to leverage identity by saying “Real Patriot Black Men vote for me,” or whatever.

Do notice how both I and FiveThirtyEight’s graph above—and hopefully Joe Biden— capitalised “Black”. Being black is partially a brute fact, partially a socially constructed entity. But being Black is pure identity.

Now the above is all ghastly, of course. Maybe it makes you mad. It would be understandable if it made you mad. Perhaps I may interest you in projecting that anger at a strawman?

Upcoming: Making a New Type of Guy To Get Mad At.

For the rest of the month we’ll be investigating the—for lack of a better word—strange relationship between words and reality, especially in multiplayer contexts.

Now, I’d give my life (well, if I knew I’d have a second one too) to be able to give you a very precise map of what’s ahead of us.

Sadly, I can’t do that. To the best of my knowledge, no one can. And no one can because no such map exists. The area we’re investigating is unexplored: there is no map—this is an area of inquiry that is coming into existence as your eyes read these very words.

And exactly what is this area of inquiry, you ask? Well, I’m glad I made you ask:

In yesterday’s post we discussed how naming something can kill it. How the moment you successfully name something whose survival relies on remaining nameless you wound it. Mortally so.

That—the fact that giving something a name can start to unwind it—is a strange relationship between words and reality. But it’s far from the only one.

You also have the opposite phenomenon where a name conjures something into existence. In the olden days this was captured through the word “Abracadabra”—literally: I create as I speak. Nowadays we just call it “meme magic”.

Ok, so names can both destroy and create. That’s not that weird, though. Oh, alright then. Challenge accepted—Here’s something else of what names can do:

Names can change how people feel, think, and act towards things. And by this I mean: different names can change how people feel, think, and act towards the same thing(!)

Shakespeare, famously, didn’t think so. He wrote that “a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”. Would it though? Imagine people calling roses “vomitoriums”. Do you feel like smelling one right now?

A silly example, sure, but the effect is still real: do you feel the same about the same set of people if I describe them as a “group” as you feel if I described them as a “clique”? How about if I describe them as a “mob”?

Again, silly. Or is it? Donald Trump—of “Crooked Hillary”, “Pocahontas”, and “Sleepy Joe” fame—certainly seems to think it’s serious business.

The fact is: Different names trigger different reactions. But it’s not just that names modify somatic reactions. No. Different names make certain thoughts harder to think. “Is OpenAI closed?” sounds like a contradiction, while being an extremely pertinent question.

Different names change our emotional reactions and what we can and can’t easily think. Those are two kinds of strange relationships. But, even more strangely, different names make certain actions easier, and harder, to take. Can anyone really be against the “Bill To Make Everyone Happy”? Again, it sounds like a joke, but what is the “Big Beautiful Bill” if not “Build Back Better” by any other name? Except changing the name changes everything.

Shakespeare was wrong, and his was an enduring mistake. So enduring, in fact, that every example first sounds like a joke. And yet they’re as serious as can be: culture war, politicking, AI. This contrast—between the massive impact of names and how lightly we treat them—creates an opportunity for arbitrage. And wherever that springs up, soon after, so do players aiming to take advantage of it. Once they do, you get adversarial dynamics that unfold over time and, with them, a whole new level of weirdness.

And this, my dear friend, is the area we’ll be charting in the coming days.

The rest of this essay is dedicated to unpacking the following diagram:

Put simply: A new phenomenon emerges. No one has a name for it. As it grows everyone feels it, but doesn’t really have the language to point to it at all. Trying to talk about it is awkward and stilted. Yet, the phenomenon is growing at increasing speed. This period is the arbitrage window. When the phenomenon has grown big enough more people try to put an effort into naming it. Then, some people start attempting to name it. Most of these fail to take off1. Eventually one sticks, reaching critical mass. Everyone can now do what they couldn’t do before: talk about the phenomenon and start coordinating how they act towards it (usually to do away with it). The arbitrage window starts shrinking and the cycle is over.

OK, we nailed it: a diagram is 130 words. Great essay, see you again tomorrow.

Just kidding, let’s be serious for a moment and unpack this properly, that is, stage by stage.

Stage 1 — The Phenomenon exists (unnamed)

The first stage is marked by the emergence of a new phenomenon. This new phenomenon might be just about anything: a new way of behaving, of being, of orienting towards the world. A new identity, a brand, a genre, a politics. It isn’t even yet necessarily clear what it is. Just that something new has started to take off.

What’s most important is that, at this stage, simultaneously there very much is something new and it cannot be named. It just doesn’t have a name yet. For most people it goes entirely unseen. Once you see it you can’t unsee it—but before you’ve seen it. The people who do see it are not even sure whether they’re seeing it or hallucinating it. Attempts at gesturing towards it flatline as no one can stay engaged with the “Oh, it’s kinda like” “It reminds me of” “I’m not sure how to say it…” for too long.

This Stage marks the beginning of the arbitrage window: all phenomenon, no name.

Stage 2 — A wild Neologism appears

At some point the phenomenon is sufficiently ubiquitous for many people to independently start trying to name it. Many names are attempted, some consciously workshopped as to the merits of their memetic spread.

“Ragebait”, “Clickbait”, or “It’s bad on purpose to make you click” are all independently emerging neologisms intended to name the very same modern noxious phenomenon—the deliberate attempt to annoy people in exchange of ad money—to divest it of its power.

“Woke” is another particularly relevant one.

                                                        Trends SJW vs Woke

Notice how SJW (“Social Justice Warrior”) which preceded it got nearly completely dropped once a better term was found to name what was, at heart, the same phenomenon.

The spread of this neologism was done, in part, by things like the “Woke Capital” Twitter account. This account spent years chronicling the flirtations of Megacorps with, among other things, the LGBTQ+ movement through posts that were nothing but images and which, when consumed in quick succession, gave you an intuition for the gestalt, the phenomenon, that the name “Woke Capital” was attempting to point at.

                                         The type of image “Woke Capital” would tweet.

Unfortunately it is not possible to find the original tweets of that account anymore. I presume it disbanded after it “won”.

However, it is possible to see another account attempting to follow the very same trajectory. The neologism “YooKay” was coined by Kunley Drupka, through the Yookay Aesthetics X account and it dedicates itself to doing the kind of work that @WokeCapital used to do, but for what it calls the ‘New Britain’.

                                          The type of image “YooKay Aesthetics” tweets.

The Yookay Aesthetics is being relatively successful (50k followers with 3k posts). You can also see it succeeding both in the growing interest in “YooKay” as a search term, over time and in being addressed in more legacy publications, like Compact Magazine.

                                                                   Trends YooKay

Stage 3 — A Neologism reaches critical mass

“Woke” is now just a term in our culture. We can use it in conversation without having to explain it—everyone knows what the speaker is trying to refer to. It’s hard to remember that there was a time when that was not the case. But there was. This difficulty to remember that things could be, and in fact were, otherwise is just what happens once a neologism has achieved critical mass.

The importance of critical mass is that once a term is sufficiently widely shared, inferential distances get sufficiently shortened that people don’t have to wait around for your attempted gesturing and you can just say one word and they know what you mean. And because that is possible the word itself becomes a Schelling point to coordinate behavior around.

It’s literally impossible to formulate the question in public discourse “Are you pro-/against- Woke/Woke Capital/the YooKay?” before the terms have reached this stage. But it is definitely possible to formulate it after they have. And, because it is, it is possible to re-orient towards them. “Do we actually endorse this?”

While before they could be named they just… happened, they were just “what is” and “how things are”. After the name has reached critical mass the public discussion shifts from whether they’re a thing to whether they should be.

Stage 4 — The Phenomenon declines

The arbitrage window was the time between the moment the phenomenon emerged and the moment a neologism for it reached critical mass.

During this moment the phenomenon could just chug along unnoticed and unimpeded. It’s very hard to see what you can’t name, much less to fight it. The golden age is over.

Once the arbitrage window has closed the incentives flip and the phenomenon starts very actively receding. This is seen in people (and megacorps) distancing themselves from it, or retconning the past to imply they never were associated with it in the first place.

                                                      @WokeCapital won. Game over.

Wow, turns out a diagram is worth 1000 words too. Weird.

1

E.g.:

Type1/Type 2 errors refer to two classes of errors in statistics. Basically, the two kinds of mistakes you can make when testing a hypothesis: to mistakenly think an effect exists, or to mistakenly think that it doesn’t.

Type 1 refers to this first class of mistakes. The “false alarm”. When you think there is an effect, but there isn’t.

Type 2 refers to the second class. “Missed detection”. When you think there isn’t an effect, but there is.

The reason why I’m writing about this distinction is not just to make people mad online—that’s just an incentive. The reason is to spread Type 1/Type 2 errors as an epistemic tool. (And there’s the connection to Kahneman. Don’t tell me you had made the Type 2 missed detection error of thinking I’d ever invoke his name as mere literary device.)

“Ok, I agree: making people online mad is fun. But I don’t really see the value of this distinction as an epistemic tool”, you say? Ok, here’s the epistemic kicker: you cannot reduce both classes of error to zero.

Once again for the people in the back—the ones the kicker didn’t reach: you. cannot. reduce. both classes of error to zero.

What this means is that you’ll always err, that you cannot not err. Worried about missed detection and increasing the sensitivity of your measurements in response? Now you have to deal with more false positives. Annoyed at all the false positives, so you decreased it? Now you’ll miss some real instances. There’s no getting around it. Error is baked in.

Cool, eh? Oh, and, speaking of being mad online: this little epistemic nugget explains a lot of online discourse.

(Did… did you also Type 2 think the quip about being mad online was just a quip?)

Type 1, Type 2, and Being Mad online

Tautologically, whatever discourse is going on online is the discourse that people are engaging with. A very reliable way of getting people to engage is to trigger strong emotions, especially negative emotions. Like making them mad.

Now, one of the ways to make people Mad Online is to—and due apologies for exhuming a SJW term, I understand it’s passé—to deny their lived experience.

And, if you have two sets of people, each of which who, in their attempts to validate their own lived experience, intrinsically must deny the others’… now that’s a surefire way to generate discourse.

How does that connect to what we were just talking about? An example, to make it concrete:

Illustrated above is a classic engine of online discourse. On one side you have people arguing for full personal responsibility: your shoulders ache with the weight of the world. The Jordan Peterson style crowd. On the other you have people who argue for understanding the deep systemic incentives causing personal individual outcomes. More on the Social Justice side. (Three times, really?)

Now you can just guess that the people who are now saying “It’s all personal responsibility” were making the Type 1 error of wrongly judging things to be systemic that weren’t and that they started flourishing once they stopped making that particular mistake. Conversely you just know that all the people claiming everything is systemic had just the opposite experience: they treated as personal things that really weren’t and, in all likelihood, burned out big time.

The point here is this: tacking towards making the opposite mistake you’ve been making feels Very Insightful And Empowering no matter what your starting point was. But if you’re empowering insight was “I can take control” (correcting from Type 1), then hearing “it’s all systemic” threatens that hard-won agency which feels invalidating. If someone’s relief was “it wasn’t my fault” (correcting from Type 2), then hearing “take personal responsibility” re-triggers the self-blame.

No one enjoys feeling invalidated. No one enjoys feeling blamed either. So you can rest assured flame wars will follow. Boom: we have derived discourse.

No one is wrong and we should all be friends (but won’t)

To summarise: in any domain where people have been erring in a particular direction enacting a categorical stand in the opposite direction will in all likelihood be beneficial.

Hopefully, this now seems obvious. Now, I’m not particularly smart, so I cannot be the first person to think. I’m also very online. So how come neither of us had heard about this before?

The reason is this: it is the very categoricalness that makes the formulation useful for those who were erring the opposite way which makes it triggering for those who just corrected that error. And because it is triggering people get Mad Online which gets them to reply which boosts the visibility of the categorical claims they’re replying to. Boosts them, relative to all others.

In all likelihood the non-categorical… the nuanced take exists, and has already been written up before.

You just never see it because it makes no one mad.