36. Mock Shocks and Rube Revelations 🔗

Looking for that Hangover 3 scene where they’re planning the break-in around a model of the target house and Alan says “guys, you know this isn’t the house we have to break into right? Te real house is much bigger!”

A lot of supposed radical acts of truth strike me as like that

It’s the opposite of the mock shock affected by sophisticated cynics at revelations they consider not shocking st all, the “I’m shocked, SHOCKED” line that nobody uses these days in non-mocking ways.

Maybe opposite of Mock Shock is Rube Revelation?

When people act like they’re doing a brave act of radical truth telling, and are sincere about it, but nobody else is enlightened because they weren’t confused about it in the first place. The rube just projects their childish confusions onto a nonexistent common knowledge gap.

Rube revelation is to genuine heresy as bullshit is to truth. It’s not deliberate attempt to pass off common knowledge banalities as radical heresy, its an indifference to the distinction

Often cascades of rube revelation are started by something like a marginal common knowledge act. You take something 80% get (and know others get) that is too simple to mention and loudly belabor it at ELI5 level as radical insight till the 20% rubes get it.

This gets the rubes...

a) stoked on a supposed elite conspiracy to hide deep truths (which is really just not belaboring the obvious)

b) rolling on a rube revelation cascade that’s 99% banality, 1% accidental nefarious-elite-machinations unmasking

There is something deeply disingenuous about this. Playing mock martyr to raise a mook army of newly enraged rubes reveling in faux-red-pill “enlightenment”.

Among other things this is where conspiracy theory epistemology starts.

The instigator of the Rube Enlightenment gets lionized as a liberating Paladin for the masses, newly armed and empowered with The Truth to act against evil elites. Now that they know the earth is flat and that q anon is The Truth, it’s all deep state x-files lies.

The massively energized rube detective force is now on the move ripping the mask off the face of naked elite oppression. For every pizzagate that turns out to line up with an Epstein scandal, a million libraries must be burned, a million flat-earth theories enshrined as knowledge

An age-old pattern: wannabe kings allying with peasants to take down the feudal gentry in the middle. It’s an example of what Jaron Lanier labeled Digital Maoism (in Edge, ironically). Hack the Noble Lies to install the People’s Truths forged in the fires of righteous rage.

Whether the People’s Truth finds expression in a new Rule of Woke Law or the Cleansing Commandments of Divine God-Emperor Zorgon the Heretic makes no difference.

It’s a Book of Rube Revelations in either case. Fundamentally a stupid person’s idea of political wisdom.

This isn’t bothsidesing. It is signalsiding. Bothsidesing is acting like both sides of a false symmetry have equal validity, either because you’re dumb or because you’re disingenuous.

“the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth”). You really think we’re great-truthing?

If both sides are 90% noise, do the math. About 81% of the time both sides are being stupid, 9% of the time one side is right by accident and the other side is bothsidesing out of stupidity or malice.

About, 1% of the time it’s a great truth in contention. By accident probably.

Signal-siding is basically ignoring the stupid people, and continuing to actually think, even at the risk of perhaps missing the 1% great-truth debates.

Centrism is stupid or disingenuous because it acts like bothsidesing is meaningful 99% of the time instead of 1%.

Noise vs noise does not net to signal via mutual cancelation (heh!), it is noise squared.

Signal is neither consensus or heresy by cosmic preference. Nor is it common sense or esoterically technical by preference, Signal is indifferent to self-important epistemic posturing.

The truth, such as it is, does not lie on the Rube Revelation spectrum at all. And smart elites who should know better but act like it does, raising mook armies and winking at the snowballing crackpottery and Maoist trials of their rivals among the elites are just seeking power.

If vast armies of enraged rubes rally around you, celebrating how you, the Rare Good Elite are absolutely tearing apart those awful Typical Bad Elites, you’re probably not catalyzing a Great Consciousness Raising among the masses. You’re cynically making a play for more power.

Basically, in this environment, anyone who attempts to shape opinions on a large mass-media scale, pwning millions of minds to coerce hundreds of millions of minds into ideological submission, is basically a bad person. It’s as clear a tell as pouring gasoline into a fire.

When you avoid the temptation to traffic in the Epistemic Status: Rube Revelation idea economy, you will find your audience hitting a low ceiling. Signal-siding in a noisy environment is like trying to have a conversation in a loud party with blaring music and drunken brawls.

Only the 5 people next to you and straining to understand you above the noise are signalsiding whatever you are saying.

If the whole room hears you above the noise, music, and brawling, almost certainly you yelled something loud, stupid, and dangerous. Like “Fire!”