technoyogi bullshit and cure-by-rubricism
A concept can get fuzzy unless you have a defined rubric to determine what it is. Someone might say that you assaulted them if you just touched them, and assault does carry a component of unwanted touch. But it's not *just* that; assault has a rubric of criteria that must be satisfied before it's assault. Many words and concepts are this way, and can be thought of this way, and should be thought of this way.
Rubricism is an attitude or method highly practiced in legal circles to ward off sloppy semantics; there's not enough of it, because not enough people distinguish between what words actually mean.
This first image parodies what happens when we don't think rubricistically. It's mocking people who don't know how to identify things like trauma or mental illness or abusive behavior, or red flags, or whatever when these things are thrown about as accusations. There is a #believeme ethos and it so goes that if you *don't* believe me at face value you've done something bad; the legal community is the opposite about preventing the sort of thing pictured above precisely because they think in terms of rubrics. It should be obvious why: in legal proceedings, the consequences of fuzzy terminology or misused terminology can be dire. Someone may actually be locked away for years if your understanding of what constitutes assault is poor.
In other fields like psychology, where readers can can pick and choose the terms as they want to describe themselves, there are far fewer consequence for getting this wrong, where pop-psychology bleeds into academic psychology and becomes a kind of universal dialect for therapy discourse which becomes a quasi-moral language for AWFLs and other comfort class bourgeoisie.
I don’t know who this is, nor do I care, because we are looking at the content. The account is an example of what's been called a technoyogi: woo spirituality rhetoric that's coopted just the right amount of STEM jargon to appeal to the techbro class of reader who may otherwise be turned off by a tech-normie art school hippie chick. An "anti-guru of materialist spirituality" is the precisely sort of thing studied in "On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit". (journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.html, 2015.)
"Anti-guru" is Buddhist enough *and* counterculture enough to appeal to Californians who might know better otherwise; "materialist" is a common workers in STEM who know enough philosophy of science to self-identify against what they think woo or pseudoscience is, and "materialist spirituality" is just enough of a combination of both to make techbros think this one isn't like the other girls and isn't meaningless. It is, though.
The frustration expressed by this Rupi Kaur parody account — which is great — is a frustration at what happens when you *don't* have a rubric. How am I to date when any flirtation is lovebombing? And so on.
A rubricist way of thinking about the terms can say "lovebombing is [thing 1], [thing 2], and [thing 3]"; "boundary-testing is [thing A], [thing B], and [thing C]"; and if you go farther to say "lovebombing ISN'T [thing 4], [thing 5], [thing 6]" and draw counterfactuals for what these things definitely aren't, and then separate close-cases (not edge cases, but easily confused cases) you can get a precise understanding of these terms and not be bogged down by this anxiety.
I did something like this nine years ago when "gaslighting" was still gaining traction: alfredmacdonald.com/2012/11/07/gaslighting-what-it-isnt/ and I encourage you to think this way in your personal life and not just rely on people who write things on the internet to do it for you.
This is is a different technoyogi from the one previously cited —
— but it exploits the same principle. "Yeah, you'd normally think I'm a hippie selling you bullshit. However! I know tier 1 tech support. As you can clearly see that I understand computers, I can't possibly be one of those bullshit hippies."
... how does one even *parse* this? Yeah, we've all done LSD before too. What does it even mean to say you "have experience with psychedelics"? Or "plurality"? Or with rationality? Or with ADHD? Did you synthesize the psychedelics or did you just ... do them? Does having experience with ADHD mean you *have* ADHD or that you sometimes DM people who are ADHD? Because those are vastly different worlds. Does "experience with nonviolent communications" — actually, what are violent communications? Full contact sign language?
This isn’t a dunk. TITCR. This is an example of someone being rubricist in the wild; that is good, there should be more of that. They have a multi-criteria way of looking at the phenomenon of lovebombing: must (1) shower victim with intense affection and must (2) be part of a cycle of abuse. This person is doing the correct thing.
Is there a rubric for any of this? What are "anomalous noumena"? What does she mean by "existential terror"? What are her criteria for "terrifying"? Again, this is not a STEM way of thought. (Strictly speaking this is analytical but I mean "analytical" as opposed to "empirical", not in the sense of "analyzing".) Humanities dorks with law degrees can be much more precise than this, and they are.
Okay, I could easily start repeating myself here, so let’s look at this differently:
In a controlled weight loss study, when obese subjects thought they were consuming less than 1200 calories per day they actually consumed 2468 on average. This is from Lichtman et al. 1992 and neatly summarized at instagram.com/p/CKMhTKUhSpZ/ but consider the implications for a second:
calories are a thing you can track with arithmetic
calories are displayed on the overwhelming majority of food packages
when not displayed, they are googleable with the rectangle you're probably reading this on
the only way you might consume calories without realizing it is if you put sugar in your drink and forgot, or lubed up your hands with oil for whatever reason and licked your fingers a lot, or some other uncommon circumstance of this kind
short of that, you definitely know when you're eating something or not eating something
subjects who used no measurement tools and just guessed were off by 205.67%.
What does this person even mean by "energy"? You don't have any way of energy tracking. How do they know any of this isn't completely made up? (Don't answer that; it's rhetorical. They don't.)
People WANT TO BE not-obese. They are almost certainly made to feel bad about it. The subjects in Lichtman et al. 1992 were not screwing around for fun. If a person with bad tracking methodology (which is what the obese subjects were) can be off by that much, changes in something that you *can't even define the existence of* can be dismissed at face.
... *What* does it mean for "a carnivorous map to devour the territory and absorb it into itself"? The aphorism "map is not the territory" is a pithy aphorism to say that representations of reality will be imperfect compared to reality itself. I guess charitably this could be read to be making an argument for Baudrillardian hyperreality but I'm not holding my breath after a progress update on connecting energy loops.
Hi, it’s me. This is rubricism in a negative sense, i.e. this post lists exclusion criteria or examples of what religion isn't. I'm inviting people to question their confidence in the claim that something is "like a religion" when it almost certainly is not. The onus is on the "it's like a religion" claimant to explain why this this this thing is a religion, rigorously, and with a rubric. Usually, they never do. (Although to his credit John McWhorter certainly tried.)
This is a famous post, or at least the most famous I know of by the legal blogger Popehat. RICO is not quite "gaslighting" because you aren't exactly likely to hear "babe, you're committing a RICO violation" during an argument like you are with "gaslighting." It is however similarly abused in a niche of political debates, and this article is valuable for anyone who might find the term misused.
If you try to say that people are misusing terms like love bombing, or gaslighting, or whatever — all of these things need rubrics. That's how you resolve this bullshit: you get a system by which you could, just, know what these fucking words mean. Multi-checkbox rubrics are that. When you don't have that, you nourish technoyogi bullshit.
Such as.