One of my realisations I've come to during my newsletter/blogging pause is that the vibes crowd has thoroughly won, both in tech specifically and in general. Facts don't matter. Research doesn't matter. If it has research aesthetics and has the vibes you like, people treat it as truth. Motion and churn with the right vibes count as progress. Revenue is treated as evidence of inevitable future profit, no matter how irrational the underlying economics are.
There's no convincing or reasoning with people if they think your facts have a bad vibe. Explaining things, with references, has no impact because the references are gauged based on vibes and not how well the studies were structured or how well the paper is argued. There is no difference today between decision-makers in tech and the antivaccination crowd. They both operate on the same epistemology and worldview
What's worse is that most of the popular critics of this worldview and state of affairs are running largely on vibes as well. Same methodology. Same cherry-picking of references. Same kind of reasoning through showmanship.
It's quite disheartening on the whole and makes me question the point of writing essays like I have over the years.
@baldur I've definitely had to resort to showmanship and other trickery to get through to people in some of the "hype debunking" stuff I've done, unfortunately.
The silver lining is that once the point of "there are counterarguments" is established through showmanship, people tend to be more willing to engage with the in-depth analysis around the topic - but really the showmanship shouldn't be necessary, and it's immensely frustrating that it is.
(I also don't think this is a new problem; it has existed since *at least* 2013, and probably earlier)
@joepie91 This is exactly what Neil Postman was writing about in Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985, so this is definitely a longterm trend that’s just becoming more and more obvious, I think.