| My gut-level reaction (and this guy's clearly advocating for the merit of gut-level reactions! :D ) is this: This is about priming people to buy into some propaganda system, for instance one constructed for political purposes, and reject their existing assumptions. The weird swerve at the end is the payload. The reason to do this is, if you're knowingly maintaining a propaganda system that works towards some known purpose, and you want people to fall into it more readily. This doesn't discount the validity of the initial concepts: local maxima are real, and our ability to thoroughly understand things is limited. But we remain functional through pretending we can indeed understand things, and there's usefulness in that. Generally, axioms are brought into question when specific details don't line up with our theory. In a vacuum, 'abandon all theories!' is a fine position to have. In reality, 'abandon all theories!' is a set-up for getting fed a pile of information that benefits somebody else, because you become a willingly useful idiot ready to be programmed by anyone. Running into somebody like this, I find the initial 'abandon all theories!' attitude to be refreshing. I even agree with some of it. If the NEXT THING he tells me is all about how Pepe's face is on the Moon outlined in craters, I've learned to be extremely suspicious of what the guy is really selling. Because even if he is himself sincere… there is somebody up the chain pursuing 'Nigerian spam' techniques and finding out by this who's credulous enough to be used for their own purposes. And that's what I get from the 'going off the rails at the end'. The point of the article is to hook the truly credulous, and the writer may or may not be in on that. |