Knowledge as the Only Modern Value

Source, though really it’s just John 8:32

This is a commentary on Lou Keep’s piece on HyperNormalisation.


HyperNormalisation – Now in Technicolor


The Obvious






The Is/Ought Problem



A specific example:













Educated people are more susceptible to manipulation by the media




Some Comments





These didn’t really fit in anywhere above:




2 thoughts on “Knowledge as the Only Modern Value

  1. Hi – sorry for coming late to comment on this. It’s quite a good summary, and I really appreciate the engagement.

    I don’t have anything to argue with in the summary, so let’s address the points of disagreement (?). That’s much more interesting for a conversation, anyway.

    1. You’re right, of course, to replace “truth” with “facts” – about 90% of my decision to do that was simply because I wanted to dodge definitions of truth. It’s not that the conversation is uninteresting (it’s fascinating), but… well, as you picked up on, my argument could easily be reframed as “we replaced ‘truth’ in a broader sense with ‘facts’ as though these are the same thing’. I was worried that I’d then have to write two separate arguments: first, why truth and facts are not quite the same; second, why facts fail to cause behavior. I opted to make the second first, not because it’s logically prior (it isn’t), but because it somewhat shows *why* such a conflation is harmful.

    2. To address:


    Very broadly – the question of college teaching critical thinking seems relevant, but the majority of studies I know are quite pessimistic. Of course, education correlates with cognitive traits that might influence manipulability, but I’m quite skeptical of this. So far as I know, elites display similar and occasionally *worse* bias when it comes to interpretation of politically sensitive subjects. My favorite study (N=1111) is here, but I can provide others if you’d like:
    Numeracy is close enough to proxy for IQ here. One might quibble that IQ isn’t the trait related to being manipulated, but it’s certainly the one many people seem to be thinking of regarding education and manipulabiltiy. From the abstract:

    >As expected, subjects highest in numeracy—a measure of the ability and disposition to make use of quantitative information—did substantially better than less numerate ones when the data were presented as results from a study of a new skin-rash treatment. Also as expected, subjects’ responses became politically polarized—and even less accurate—when the same data were presented as results from the study of a gun-control ban. But contrary to the prediction of SCT (Science Comprehension Thesis), such polarization did not abate among subjects highest in numeracy; instead, it increased. This outcome supported ICT (Identity protective Cognition Thesis), which predicted that more Numerate subjects would use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.

    Still, this is all hypothetical, because (as you point out) I don’t really believe in media being sketchy propaganda. I’m more concerned about identity and narcissism.

    3. As for nihilism: I’m mostly using Nietzsche’s definition (which is, admittedly, not a definition so much as what I can gather from the use all across his works), where it’s not the lack of *all* values, but something more like the process of losing higher values. Ultimately, for him, this leads to a renunciation of the meaning of the world. Nietzsche’s essay the title of mine refers to has some clarification there, at least.

    Here,”truth” is still a value (In a footnote, I do point out that belief in efficacy of truth is the one thing keeping us from really extreme nihilism), but it being defined as “facts” is very much a loss of higher forms, or belief that there *could* be any of those higher forms. This is, perhaps, a personal prejudice, and I worry it will require some argumentation over what “truth” is, when this has already been a rather long comment. Alternately: I suspect that creation is a kind of lying, inasmuch as art is often exaggerating or distorting “facts”, and I may take art>”truth”.

    Either way, the “facts” definiition leads into more extreme variants of nihilism: imagine that people continue to assume the efficacy of facts, and continue running into the issue of them not doing all that much. At a certain point, two things may happen: a) they give up and repudiate the value in “truth” at all (after all, facts aren’t doing anything), and thus we’ve lost that final sense of meaning (not actually the final, but the last really big one); b) they assume the conspiracy must be *so totalizing* that it’s meaningless to fight, and thus nothing is worth doing; c) they don’t care, which is… well, actually may be the best of the options.

    I hope that’s… vaguely satisfying: There’s more to say about nihilism, but I’d like to try and approach it from a different angle this time. I’ve given a rather cursory definition there (not to mention: it’s quite absent why it’s even a *bad* thing). The series I’m writing now is trying to do that from a more epistemological angle, and ideally it should provide a more compelling definition. I don’t mean, “Obviously you’d understand if you read everything I’ve written! Do so now!” both because it’s not in anything I’ve written and also that’s awful. I mean more of a swipe against myself: I’m slowly trying to whittle down a quick, easy definition, but I’m afraid I’m just not clever enough to do so before accidentally writing my way to it. I suspect you know how that is: we can sort of see it adumbrated, and produce long bits of writing that work around an idea, but it takes a ridiculous amount of time to get to the proper, concise version of it (assuming one exists). Here, for instance, I probably could have pointed more towards politics as a value of ours (albeit in a very vague, weird way), but I simply hadn’t thought it through well enough before writing the damn thing.

    Either way: thanks for the essay and the thoughts! I think you’re quite right that I should’ve been more careful about truth/facts and getting into nihilism, and I’m somewhat chiding myself for it now. If you have any more questions let me know, and I’m quite interested to hear whether the stuff in (2) addresses your worry!


    1. Matty Wacksen

      My sincere apologies for the late reply.

      1. That makes sense.
      2. I only read the abstract of the linked paper, but it seems to measure ability to understand scientific arguments, which to me is something very different to “ability to resist/notice manipulation”. The idea that education is necessary/sufficient for democracy because it leads to more competent and aware people has been repeated almost ad nauseam in many contexts. I included a reference to this idea in my summary mainly for the sake of completeness, not because I know whether it is true or not.
      3. I didn’t realize you were referencing Niezsche’s essay, which I’ve now read. What Niezsche calls “truth” (being a kind of shared illusion a people group has) is more or less related to what you call “values”? If you define nihilism as loss of higher (and also shared?) values that makes sense.
      3.1 (Your paragraph beginning with “Either way…”) Yes this entire paragraph makes a lot of sense. There’s also option (d), which is that they modify their definition of “facts” to include more values, or don’t explicitly say that actually they have more values than just “facts”. This is kind of what I think the “your truth is different from mine” crowd is trying to do.
      3.2 (Your paragraph beginning with “I hope that’s..:”). Yes that makes sense. I’ve read some of your other blog posts, and especially what you’ve written about politics as a value complements your “Truth and Lies in a HyperNormal sense” essay nicely.


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