Episode
"Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes
- Published
- Aug 30, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 976
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Summary
A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is: “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus“An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong. You just can’t tell those apart from the outsid...