97. Explainerism vs. Inventoryism 🔗

Just hit me that explainer journalism is the one genre of modern pre-Weirding media that survived the Great Weirding completely intact. Didn’t miss a beat.

It got big explaining the subprime crisis and has taken everything since 2007 in its stride.

Vox-style in particular. Later Bloomberg and now half of substack’s top shelf stuff. It’s never surprised by anything and has 20-20 hindsight reassurance for everything.

The View from Knowhere 😂

I like the better stuff like Matt Levine but the median explainer newsletter or byline is kinda awful

The worst stuff is of course particularly bad faith and disingenuous but even the best stuff by the hardworking good faith types seems to have an epistemological weakness running through it I can’t quite put my finger on

Gonna sleep on this and dream mean critiques

Having slept on this, I think the problem is actually a statistics-based epistemology. Doesn’t matter if it’s Fisherian or Bayesian, Silverman or Talebian, rationalist or traderist. If your world view is rooted in statistics, it fails to comprehend phenomena past key boundaries

The boundaries are ontological.

1-0 boundary (existence to non-existence, ie death, ruin, non-survivorship) which they recognize but don’t grok

0-1 boundary: things coming into existence from outside modeled realities

Non-ergodicity boundary, which breaks 90% of their thinking

Explainerist thinking, done well, is strongest while categories are already established and robustly persistent and plurally instantiated in ergodic ensembles. It struggles where any of these weakens.

Silverman = Silverian as in Nate Silver

You can see explainerists struggle with ontological analysis. For eg, while studying statistics of inventions and discoveries is vaguely interesting, it’s sort of besides-the-point metadata. The core phenomenology is path-dependent ontic creative destruction.

Thiel tries to square this circle by posing a calculus vs statistics allegorical dichotomy. Where “calculus” is the determinate limit of degenerate statistical regimes (outliers, super early/late things, very low-noise regimes like orbital mechanics). This is doomed.

Doomed because you only grapple with the ontological unknown-unknown in terms of the inviolate known. Even the “black swan” metaphor fails, constructing the new category via combinations of old categories.

“Flying car” (airplane + car) is an explainerist thing to dream of. A composition of existing categories with known values and a plausibly value-able composition. It is a pre-processed 0-1 that can be explainerized even before it appears (“here’s why flying cars have struggled”)

0-1 is a revealing frame. A 0 is a thing that does not exist in reality but is already modeled, valued, and accommodated in your reality. A very low (but NOT zero) likelihood future you can try to move from outlier to core through strategic action.

“Non-being to bring” != 0-1

“140 characters” is a raw phenomenological, ontologically uncomprehending way to react to the sudden appearance of twitter. That’s a non-being to being event that cannot be pre-explained or valued. It is not a “black+swan” or a “micro+blog”. It’s a new ontological primitive

Imagine a ship of Theseus but for ontological categories. The mast breaks and is replaced with twitter. The sails rip and is replaced with quadrotor drones. Your reality is going categorical creative destruction. The explanatory ground of your world is being undermined.

This is not primarily a “rare, outlier path dependent” thing though it might be that too. It’s a paradigm shift in the foundations of the explanatory impulse altogether. You can still do calculus and statistics. You just have to work with new categorical primitives.

I think this is why explainerist thinking feels so alien to me. I can sort of do it, but it feels painful and boring and missing the point of whatever I’m thinking about. Because usually my interest is in figuring out what new category is coming into being and how it behaves.

Edit: Having made my finer distinction, I’ll replace the 0-1/1-0 terms up thread with NB-B and B-NB (nonbeing-being, being-nonbeing). 0 is the wrong signifier for non-being. We didn’t have zero twitters in 2005. We had twitter not-being.

It’s not that explainerism doesn’t work at all on the new thing. It just has poor traction. You can still explainer (I’m verbing it to distinguish it from explain) it to the extent it impinges on existing categories but you’ll miss all the substance that inheres in the newness

For example, if zombies appear tomorrow, you can explain statistics of zombie attacks, what the most efficient beheading tool is, etc. But you won’t get at the intension-with-an-s of zombieness. And as the category comes to dominate more of reality, your explainering will weaken

Yes… the only question the old ontology can meaningfully pose about the new one is how to kill it, banish it back to non-being instead of either accommodating it or worse, being accommodated by it tweet^[1]

Explainer podcast: “There’s basically 3 ways the market can react to zombies: increased demand for machetes, inverted bond yields, and increased federal incentives for new machete-tech. Investment in DARPA X-tech fell from 0.1 to 0.01% 1960 to 2022, so it’s down to the first 2”

“Well last month, zombies actually appeared, growing at 100% week-over-week, and it looks like machete demand is up as predicted, but curiously, the demand for high-carbon steel was down during the same period. Turns out, there are weird incentives at Chicago Metal Exchange!”

“Bond yields however,… hold on a sec, someone at the door…”

“What noooo!!”

“Braaaaaaaiiiiiiins”

I hate to parody Matt Levine like this since he’s one of the Good Ones, but that’s the problem. Even the good ones are trapped by explainerist epistemology.

The Great Weirding has been about 1/3 ontological primitives being swapped out for new ones. So explainerism has come to seem like 33% more surreal to me. I’ll read a thing and want to yell “DO YOU NOT SEE THE ACTUAL ZOMBIES BEHIND THE MACHETE FUTURES??”

When ontologies shift, there’s a shift both in how you explain things and what is worth explaining

In some ways explainerism is an economist’s disease wherein money is always the only thing worth explaining and the only means for constructing explanations. Market theology.

The opposite of explainerism is probably what could be termed inventoryism. Where all you do is characterize, categorize, memeify, and taxonomize the newly beinged. It gropes in the dark where explainerism is confidently looking where the ontological light shines.

Inventoryism chooses confusion in the face of the totality of being over comfort in the declining explainability of a shrinking part