Sunday, January 10, 2021

New Epistemic Principle

Could I have predicted Trump would lose the post-election? Is there a consistent, reliable principle? There is.

The fact I couldn't tell you what he was thinking would have allowed me to safely conclude he was quite fucked.

What I'm thinking is generally competent. If I don't know what you're thinking, it's going to be far from competence, and thus will fail, barring miraculous intervention. 

Looking for instances where this principle does not retrodict effectively, I come up with The Last Psychiatrist and Spice and Wolf, which have an unquestionably different feel. In each case I can tell there's something above my understanding. Rather than baffled, I'm curious. Trump is quite intelligent (principle: journalists are the opposite of true) but naturally he's no match for a properly trained scholar. He's thoroughly incapable of thinking anything beyond my capacity.

It didn't occur to Trump to secure the election process, even though he was obviously the victim of severe fraud in 2016. (The real vote was something like 40-58 for Trump.) It likewise did not occur to him to learn from his failures in office, and thus he continued to fail his way out of office. Or, for that matter, to learn from his successes and repeat them. E.g. his black vote skyrocketed because it turns out ninjas prefer to have jobs over not having jobs. However, Trump did not have the necessary training to trace this successful job-unblocking, or others like it, which meant he could not double down. Don't be like Trump: get this training in ASAP.

1 comment:

Parisian said...

You mean that all thinking you don't perceive, or remains unknown to you, is incompetent thinking? Otherwise you'd know what someone was thinking? So, the other person tells you what they're thinking, say. What if it's still incompetent? Can you then understand what they are thinking, since they've described it to you, even though it's as yet still incompetent? Do you then offer training to correct the incompetence? In which you show them why their thinking is incompetent and how they can repair it with training you or someone like you would offer? Do they tell you something specific, in order to clarify to you the specific confusion, or do you just tell them that what they're thinking is incompetent in general? I realize this is incompetent, since I'm not able to be sure what you're talking about. So you help 'job-unblock' and other things that need unblocking? If the person doesn't know even what you would need to know to assure them of success, why wouldn't it be a vast array of things? Wouldn't you have to be specific and get answers to what they're thinking or think they're thinking in order to convince them that that way of thinking didn't make sense? How would they know you could make them more successful than Trump unless you proved you were yourself successful? Just saying you are capable of all these things does not prove it, so don't you need a better sales pitch? They'd have to have a good reason to trust that you knew how to give them what they need, and you alone or someone you also recommended. How do you convince them they need to lay themselves open to your judgment of competence or incompetence? Would you just tell me "I don't know what you're thinking, so it has to be incompetent?" Does it have to be thinking about something as specific as joblessness or some other felt failure?

Trump can only be said to have partially failed. Do you know what he's thinking about now? Just because he said he wouldn't 'interrupt the peaceful transfer of power' and lost his Twitter account does not mean he failed in a general sense, except as president. He's not capable of perceiving anything he does as failure because of external action, is he? If he was 'a true patriot', how can he have failed just because of the general consensus...or is it the general consensus. What I read is that nothing has stopped this movement from propagating itself, and that he is still president. And even if he is no longer living in the White House, why, with such a following, who, incidentally, do not agree with you that he has failed even if they say things like 'stolen election'. Some may see him as 'no longer living at the White House' if that transpires, but that doesn't mean they see him as 'failed'.

This is incompetent because you may be interested in being lucid only to those who consciously belong to the same ideologies, sensibilities, so I am just tracing the post for the hell of it. I wonder who would tell you all the things you need to know, why they'd think there was no alternative.