Updating their priors, again, a post by Joe Weisenthal

I haven’t watched the full episode, but this is a funny clip of the great Joe Weisenthal, and he makes a brilliant point about the tech bro community. For all their bullshit about updating their epistemic priors and tending their epistemic mental gardens, terms Joe dunks on, these people have some of the dumbest blind spots ever.

I wholeheartedly agree with his other point too: we’re all afflicted by Dunning-Kruger. We walk around thinking we know more than we do.

This ties back to the first post, my opening rant about knowing history. I didn’t write it there, but if history teaches one thing, it’s to be humble. I did say that it shows us the shape of our ignorance, which comes to the same thing. Engaging with history, or rather the right kind of history, can stop us from strutting around like a proud cock, thinking we know everything under the sun. It can cure us of the conceit that we can understand the actions of millions of people, and of the conceit that we are that smart. Here, Joe is talking about tech bros.

The clip is also a weird byproduct of the internet, which takes me back to another piece in this week’s Haul. Clipping a video out of its broader context is one of the internet’s peculiarities, and I don’t mean that pejoratively, at least not here. Clipping has become a very interesting behavior, at least to me: the clip is now the token of currency on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. People clip the banger, the money shot, the most snarky, incendiary, outrageous, funny, shocking, lewd, vulgar or provocative moment in a conversation or a movie, and it travels the internet context-free, becoming a thing of its own, divorced from what it was part of.

This was a clip from Joe’s conversation with Skanda Amarnath (opens in a new tab). B.