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Interview with Neil Levy on Intellectual Signalling (Audio) *UNEDITED (Patreon)

Published:
2022-09-02 04:01:14
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

A discussion with Neil Levy on his recent work on intellectual signalling and how it interacts with guru dynamics and other concepts like civility porn.

Some interesting debates about how we can distinguish trustworthy sources as well.

Audio version and apologies if levels are a little off no post-processing applied yet so it is truly RAW.

Comments

Tim Tripp

Good point about calling bullshit too soon. I am guilty of this vice or at least dismissing other opinions with too little thought. I am not sure you can say the antilock down crowd were right though, in Canada now yes. Two years ago? I don’t think so given that “locking down” stopped the spread and reduced the death rate. Is there data backing up what Neil is asserting?

Paul Bowman

Really enjoyed this. I will add Neil's book(s) to the (already impossibly long) reading list, for sure. I was particularly intrigued by his last point about the sincerity of belief amongst adherents of some of the wilder CTs (flat earth, Ickeian reptilians, etc). Putting the ludic into the ludicrous. I think it's an interesting question. I've long had a hunch that things like the "Birds aren't real" attempt to "satirise" CTs are possibly entirely missing the point on this score (quite apart from the problematic classist sneering aspects). The problem is - and Icke is a good case - that people may be getting into the whole reptilian thing for "the craic" because they want a bit of fun and to re-enchant the world and play Dorothy catching the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. But beneath the layers of plausible deniability, crazy-like-a-fox act, Icke is a stone-cold serious antisemite who is well aware what he is up to (he held a meeting with the British fash, the BNP, and NF back in the 1990s in Kings Cross, that we mobilised against - in the end the fash found him too "crazy" for them to form a useful alliance with, their styles didn't mesh). So the question of how harmful this playful engagement with wild CTs for the fun of it, actually is, is a very open question that needs careful examination.

Exai

Neil was a great guest! As above, I particularly enjoyed airing out my potential disagreements with the pod WRT pseudo-profundity/bullshit. I'm curious where people like Derrida, Baudrillard or Lacan would fit on that chart -- it's no small irony that they have a style of writing/speaking which evokes an affect surprisingly similar to the most flamboyant speculative outbursts of Peterson's mysticist clique. Putting aside how I can find varying respect for the former and very little for the latter, the main difference in this area seems to me that the Frenchmen's writing is aimed to academic audiences and engages in conversations that were particularly important to French intelligentsia in their time, whereas Peterson's target is someone who doesn't really read, but wants to feel like they do and that they might manifest into a character from a Dostoyevski novel (written by Jordan B. Peterson with a foreword by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) receiving an aeon of metaphysical cock and ball torture. The scaffolding for achieving this affect requires you to speak the part, to dress for it, too. I might've said this myself some years ago but IIRC Virginia Heffernan, in a previous episode, pointed out something like how just as the psychoanalyst is (in Lacanian dogma) the subject supposed to know, the locus of knowledge, then this is also what Peterson is in the capacity of a religious prophet: he is seen as the precondition of hidden knowledge, and the interpretation of his obscurity is the discovery of insight. In this structure, if you just tell people to wash their balls and go to sleep at 9PM without all the metaphysical baggage and dragons, you're not really saying anything meaningful at all. If you know washing your balls kills the Dragon of Feminine Chaos, you will also understand that taking out the trash stands for a minor victory in beating back the communist plot to destroy America. The process is the message, and that's what is missed in some ways of understanding how this stuff works, I feel. Now, I'd argue that the culture which self-identifies as analytic philosophy is often just as interested if not even more obsessed with the aesthetics of communication than the worst of these decadent French intellectuals. In this, writing should be something more like a line dance than a poem. One might create here something like a category of pseudo-cogent bullshit. You could easily extend this to someone like Nassim Taleb to separate him from Peterson et al. Beyond my provocations (towards myself even), the stuff that is happening here fits into a kind of intellectual signaling which is far more common (and ambiguous on the bullshit part) than Chris & Matt have sometimes given it credit for, and I think this pod did some good work in expanding on its valuable topic. Your sensemaking awards will be in the mail.