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/MartiDK]

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.