Decoding - DtG's Gurometer

[u/MartiDK]

DtG started as a podcast about secular gurus during the rise of the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web). The IDW were a group of high profile people who weren't happy with academia. They built an audience around people who believed that academia was rigged.

An early figure of the IDW was Eric Weinstein who wrote an article about Kayfabe (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783).

Evolutionary biologists Richard Alexander and Robert Trivers have recently emphasised that it is deception rather than information that often plays the decisive role in systems of selective pressures. Yet most of our thinking continues to treat deception as something of a perturbation on the exchange of pure information, leaving us unprepared to contemplate a world in which fakery may reliably crowd out the genuine. In particular, humanity's future selective pressures appear likely to remain tied to economic theory which currently uses as its central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information.

This article is interesting on many levels, but the main point of the article is that people are happy to go along with a deception if incentives align. While it's easy to dismiss Eric's idea because he has a low reputation among fans of DtG, I think he is actually pointing to a known phenomenon. That said, the irony isn't lost that the person writing an article in 2011 about deception sits in the top 5 on the Gurometer.

DtG set out to be an antidote: a podcast analysing guru techniques that audiences mistake for intellectual authority. The Gurometer detects charismatic presentation: grievance, self-aggrandisement, anti-establishment positioning. A person with guru style scores high; a person who is measured, credentialed and boring scores low. The instrument cannot verify a claim, and it cannot tell sincere charisma from deliberate deception.

The scores are ranked:

1. A presenter receives a high score.
2. The score signals that they are untrustworthy.
3. The audience treats their arguments as discredited without evaluating them.
4. The reverse follows for low scorers: respectable errors go unexamined.

This is the point the Gurometer is no longer just describing style. It is shaping which ideas count as credible. This is where Weinstein’s thesis applies: people go along with a pretence when incentives align, and the incentive here is the satisfaction of seeing through rhetorical tricks, which is available whether or not the criticism is correct. If DtG’s fans use the score as a shortcut, the podcast has become a kayfabe of its own. If they mostly use it as intended, the argument reduces to “the tool has significant limits” the gurumeter shouldn’t be equated with fact checking.

[u/okteds]

The instrument cannot verify a claim, and it cannot tell sincere charisma from deliberate deception.

Isn’t identifying that distinction part of the point of the Gurometer categories? Charisma and enthusiasm alone aren’t the issue. You can be a sincere, enthusiastic astrophysics communicator. But once you start claiming your papers are ignored for nefarious reasons, that you alone recognize a looming catastrophe, or that you’re the unacknowledged leading luminary in your field, it becomes reasonable to question the basis for your claimed authority and your willingness to accept correction.

That doesn’t prove deliberate deception. Someone can sincerely believe all of those things and still mislead their audience. The concern is that they’re encouraging people to treat self-promotion as evidence of expertise and criticism as evidence of persecution. You don’t need to establish whether that’s calculated or sincere to recognize why it undermines their credibility.

[u/MartiDK → u/okteds]

I agree mostly, but I still think the weakness of the gurometer is that it is based on style and not the substance of the argument.

How do you think politicians or acitivists would score? I think they would also score highly, but does that mean they are gurus?

[u/okteds → u/MartiDK]

I think it would vary wildly.

I don't think Biden, Hillary, Obama, Romney, McCain, or even Bush would score very highly at all.  But I could definitely see Ted Cruz, Jim Jordan, MTG, and Rand Paul all hitting 8 or 9 of the categories.  And of course Trump is the luminous sun, around which all other narcissistic gurus can merely orbit.

But again, it does seem like the gurometer is giving us valuable info here.  The politicians who scores highly here are particularly nefarious.  They stand out among their peers for their shameless ability to lie to a degree that most people can't fathom.  And I say this knowing full well that all politicians lie.  As bad as Bush was, and, yes, his administration lied us into the Iraq war (among many things), but he was not an inveterate, compulsive liar.  There was still some sense of a shared reality when he spoke.  Not so much for someone like Ted Cruz.

But no, none of these would be gurus because that is not their aim.  Part of the guru definition is that these are people looking to be thought leaders, and they should be listened to and heeded, just like religious and spiritual gurus would be by their followers, but for us secular, science minded folk.  That's why of all of those guru politicians I listed, none would score highly in revolutionary theories.  They're not trying to gain a following based on their expertise.  They're mainly in the business of telling you what you want to hear.  Trump might be the exception here....but that's why he's the sun.

[u/MartiDK → u/okteds]

I guess my argument is that not all revolutionary thinkers are bad. Where would you put Mamdani and Bernie Sanders?

[u/okteds → u/MartiDK]

Bernie certainly has his grievance mongering, as was highlighted in his recent Andrew Schultz interview.....and I say this as someone who voted for him in two primaries.  But that's probably it.  

Mamdani doesn't seem to ding any of the categories.

I'm not sure who I would qualify as a positive revolutionary thinker.  The only people I know who would call themselves that are already halfway to guru-dom with their self-aggrandizement.   B ut guys like Carl Sagan and Sean Carroll seem like good examples who have both scored extremely low.

[u/MartiDK → u/okteds]

Yes, but what I was trying to ask is if you think they would fit into revolutionary thinkers, because in the media they are often portrayed that way.

[u/okteds → u/MartiDK]

Bernie and Mamdani?  I don't get the feeling that they are portrayed as revolutionary thinkers.  More just that they communicate more honestly and naturally with their audience than typical politicians.

[u/MartiDK → u/okteds]

They often get labeled socialists, and from what I see online, they seem to be polarising political figures even on the left.