No post today, as I was drafting a long-form article that I felt was better suited for Substack.
It starts like this:
You’ve had the argument. Everyone has. You present evidence. Your interlocutor presents counter-evidence. You cite data. They cite different data – or the same data, read differently. Eventually, someone says something like how can you possibly believe that, and the conversation is effectively over, though the words might continue for another hour.
What’s left is the quiet conviction that the other person is either ignorant, stupid, or arguing in bad faith. Perhaps all three. And you can be certain they’re extending you precisely the same courtesy.
I want to suggest that something structurally different is going on – something that none of the usual explanations (media bubbles, declining education, algorithmic polarisation) quite reach. These explanations aren’t wrong, but they’re shallow. They describe accelerants. The thing they’re accelerating is more foundational.
This essay draws on ideas developed more fully in The Architecture of Encounter, A Language Insufficiency Hypothesis, and the Mediated Encounter Ontology of the World (MEOW) framework (also available in The Architecture of Encounter). Also check out When Language Fails. For the technically inclined or the morbidly curious, these provide the formal apparatus behind the claims sketched here.
Philosophics 