Intellectual Dark Web versus Edge.org

Intellectual Dark Web, or IDW, is probably the most important phenomenon on the media landscape of 2018 and I want to contrast it with probably the smartest place on the internet for the last 20 years — The Edge.org web page founded by John Brockman, who thus organized a club of prominent scientists and engaged them in public discussions.
Intellectual Dark Web is a term half-jokingly coined by Erick Weinstein, a mathematician working for Thiel Capital. He and his brother Bret Weinstein were also active on the Edge.org platform. So I see IDW as an attempt and continuation of what John Brockman called the Third Culture — uniting humanities and science that are often at odds with each other, and providing a new level of discussion and a new crop of public intellectuals who think “from the first principles”, who use moral intuitions but also scientific concepts and mental models with ease, and can provide lengthy and solid arguments.
Erick Weinstein thinks of IDW as a new development in sense-making and contrasts it with mainstream media, that are gradually losing this ability and as a result people get a lot of noise, tribalism and virtue signaling instead of some discussions that would make a better sense of the fast changing world.
The Edge.org used to publish one-hour video interviews with scientists and one page replies to an annual question — like what is the most important scientific idea that everyone should know. This provided a window into the private thinking of scientists and an avenue to understanding various very useful concepts. For example, I found very interesting facts like currently more people die from air pollution or traffic accidents annually, that the total number of people who lived on earth some tens of thousands years ago. Or that terrorists from 9/11 killed more people as a result of secondary effects — people started travel less by air and more by cars immediately after the attacks — than in the directs attacks.
The Intellectual Dark Web reaps the rewards of technological progress — and is strongly focused on video and podcasts and long-form discussions that can last even 2 or 3 hours and can be continued over many parts online and during offline events. Erick Weinstein contrasts this to soundbites or 5-minute interviews that one gets in the mainstream media. This new long-form format and especially podcasts allow people to e.g. work, drive or exercise while listening to their favorite authors on demand and whenever they want. This increases attention spans and time people can spend educating themselves.
The long-form format allows for more sophisticated arguments and for steelmanning the arguments of your opponents as opposed to strawmanning their arguments — finding the week caricature of those arguments and attacking that one instead of a proper argument.
Julia Galef has a related concept to steelmanning — a scout mindset versus a soldier mindset. With the soldier mindset you want to hold your party line and win the argument. With scout mindset you are willing to grant some credence to your opponent and listen carefully to their argument, because you actively want to find out something new about the world.
So there is a positive potential for projects like IDW, because they can reverse the race to the bottom that happens currently on social media like twitter or facebook. Where it seems that people try to shout past each other and get the last bits of attention from anyone by creating and maintaining constant moral panic.
But there is also a danger to projects like IDW, because of a certain path-dependency. The IDW started as a rather odd collection of popular podcast hosts like Joe Rogan, famous center-right or conservative intellectuals like Douglas Murray or Ben Shapiro, and some center left leaning scientists like Sam Harris, and Bret and Erick Weinstein brothers.
The danger is twofold:
- I have the intuition that IDW is more partisan than Edge.org, and probably too partisan, and is and probably too focused on bashing political correctness — a general problem of old orthodoxies that needs to be separated from other ideas, like identity politics and collectivism on political extremes. The Edge.org project was also somehow explicit of their critique of public intellectuals who lack fluency of scientific concepts or write too obscurely, like some French intellectuals. But there are various public intellectuals who are fluent in both worlds — like Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who can write in technical and mathematical language, engages in practical work for the French government e.g. around climate change and nuclear safety, but also has personal connection to counter-culture figures like Ivan Illich who coined concepts like deschooling or counter-productivity. [We interviewed Dupuy here in English] Interestingly Jean Pierre Dupuy is somewhat an inspiration for some of the more sophisticated arguments of the leftist pop philosopher Slavoj Zizek that border on quantum mechanics and indeterminacy.
2. The IDW is not diverse enough in terms of ideas, ideologies, intuitions and first moral principles. For example, it would be interesting to hear strong arguments and discussions around greater equity. Demonstrably in Sweden there are more billionaires per capita, than in the US, allegedly because of free education and strong social system that allows people to take risks. And also because the average cost of doing business in Sweden is cheaper, because there are caps on excessive management pay, not just higher minimal wages that protect workers. The idea here is not that one of the conflict between workers and management alone, but the idea that mutual trust and the ability to make compromises is needed as well. In the US I see two people who engage in similar discussions — the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer who lobbies for a living wage and wrote a book titled Gardens of Democracy with Eric Liu. It is a plea for a more complex and less mechanical view of the world and society.
So there is at least a strong argument for the social state that produces strong businesses, and that is often cheaper and better value for money that e.g. US health care importantly operates in the paradigms of rights versus charity — Health care and social security are considered to be rights, and generally accepted and people are more free as a result to pursue risky careers — e.g. becoming musicians or entrepreneurs. And then you get more of them per capita in Scandinavia then in the US. I would like to see more arguments around Pareto distribution, extreme “black swan” events and related strategies (Besides Taleb’s Antifragile, this is another research that demonstrates why equity in funding e.g. research or startups is the best strategy, YCombinator’s track record would be a third case). I would like to see also a more practical discussion about solutions to poverty that are more nuanced than just the right — left divide of “change the culture” versus “increase funding”. Again going back to the notion of complexity and non-linearity presented e.g. in the books by Nick Hanauer or Nassim Taleb.
I hope that more and similar networks like IDW will provide a competition and thus accelerate “the race to the top” in terms of “steelmanning” arguments of opponents, and keeping a good faith and open discussion also around difficult topics.
I see people like Yuval Harari who can skillfully navigate dangerous waters and who could be added to the mix. I see also Nassim Taleb who is sadly a bully in his public behavior, but has some great observations. I mentioned Jean-Pierre Dupuy as one such candidate and I hope there are more and younger such thinkers who could enrich similar projects like IDW, but maybe with a more egalitarian or leftist perspectives.
What the Third Culture should mean is the greater focus on reconciliation not just humanities and sciences, but on strengthening sisterhood and brotherhood of people, versus just the focus on liberty or equality. So in the triad of liberty-fraternity-equality, the middle one, fraternity was neglected for long and people engaged in a more and more partisan debates and tribalism.
I hope new media phenomena like long-form discussions and projects like Intellectual Dark Web will help to change that. One place where similar discussions happen is the Effective Altruism community and I hope for more such communities to arise — combining moral philosophy, science and economics with open and honest public discussions.
