Interesting article. I think your notion of truth vs. rhetoric cultures can be generalized by considering what metric different informational cliques optimize. "Truth cultures" maximize predictiveness and hard results; "rhetoric cultures" tend to maximize for persuasiveness, either with respect to the greatest number of people possible, or with respect to some subset of people. For example, law is a rhetorical culture because it maximizes persuasiveness to judges and juries. Politics is rhetorical because it maximizes mass persuasiveness. The main problem with rhetoric cultures is that what people find persuasive is an extremely biased estimator, due to cognitive biases and mistaken priors. Rhetoric cultures can compound this issue by further messing up priors. For example, St. Augustine argued that the antipodes did not exist based on the literal truth of the Bible. This was persuasive in his time but not predictive, and it worsened priors from "everything in the Bible is literally accurate" to "Australia does not exist".
Interesting. I thought you might be losing your way with QAnon, but it seems it was largely rhetorical :)
Good piece of writing. Informative and well presented.
One nit be I’ll pick is the the Johnnie Cochran line is, “If it _doesn’t_ fit, you must acquit.” :)
Keep it up. You are good at this.
Interesting article. I think your notion of truth vs. rhetoric cultures can be generalized by considering what metric different informational cliques optimize. "Truth cultures" maximize predictiveness and hard results; "rhetoric cultures" tend to maximize for persuasiveness, either with respect to the greatest number of people possible, or with respect to some subset of people. For example, law is a rhetorical culture because it maximizes persuasiveness to judges and juries. Politics is rhetorical because it maximizes mass persuasiveness. The main problem with rhetoric cultures is that what people find persuasive is an extremely biased estimator, due to cognitive biases and mistaken priors. Rhetoric cultures can compound this issue by further messing up priors. For example, St. Augustine argued that the antipodes did not exist based on the literal truth of the Bible. This was persuasive in his time but not predictive, and it worsened priors from "everything in the Bible is literally accurate" to "Australia does not exist".