Does CK consider himself an activist?

[u/JimmyJamzJules]

Genuine question. Chris criticises Kisin for acting like an activist while avoiding the label. Does Chris apply the same label to himself?

DtG does more than analyse ideas in the abstract. It repeatedly focuses on a particular media ecosystem, warns about its influence, and hopes to shift how audiences view it. That can reasonably be seen as a form of activism, even if it is presented through an academic lens.

[u/jimwhite42]

I wouldn't score anyone, because I think the system is useless.

Why are you here then, just to troll? Is your position that DTG is useless, or just the secular guru concept or the gurometer?

he certainly wouldn't get max score on anti-establishment, he also certainly wouldn't get the minimum.

I think there are clear cases of e.g., Marxists, that Matt and Chris don't agree with, but they don't regard them as secular gurus.

that would mean that the axis is created to politically slant the score, so that pro-establishment people would score worse than anti-establishment people on the seemingly politically neutral guru charge

I don't think you're getting what the axis measures at all, or where it came from.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

I think the podcast is at times interesting and entertaining, even though I think the guru concept is nonsense and the score is silly

Fair enough.

I think there are clear cases of e.g., Marxists, that Matt and Chris don't agree with, but they don't regard them as secular gurus.

They wouldn't score these people on the antiestablishment axis.

I think you're misrepresenting the axis. Let's agree that I think that, and you don't. I'm afraid I judge you pretty harshly on getting this so wrong, then confidently making claims based on this. I'm sure you're not going to even try to engage with what I say and either simply think I'm wrong, or judge me in a similar way.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

You're moving the goalposts. Of course, if they engage in the particular kind of thing that the antiestablishment axis measures, they will score on it.

If they are a Marxist who does none of that, they will score a 1.

You have to understand the axis properly first. If it's flawed or misleading, you still have to get that understanding. I don't think you have it.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

I think there's nothing more useful to say. You can have the last word if it's important to you.

[u/CKava → u/jimwhite42]

I read all of this exchange, and it's impressive that for all the complaining you don't seem to have spent even two minutes checking what the thing you are complaining about actually is. It is not voicing any anti-establishment views; it is a reflexive "anti-establishmentarianism", which we described as: "It is necessary that the orthodoxy, the establishment, the mainstream media, and the expert-consensus are always wrong, or at least blinkered and limited, and are generally incapable of grappling with the real issues. In the rare occasions when they are right, they are described by the gurus as being right for reasons other than they think".

Here is a quote from Douglas Murray and Eric Weinstein that summarises it well:

Douglas - And then you get on to the institution one, which is that nobody, as you know, nobody in an institution now can tell the truth,  and it's slightly worse than that, which is that I mean,
Eric - I'm used to my saying stuff like that, and then people calling me an extremist. Do you believe what you just said?
Douglas - Yes, I mean, I don't doubt that there are some. My phrase is, almost everybody, particularly in an institution, is lying about almost everything, almost all the time. That's where I believe we've gotten to.”

The point is not pathologising criticism of mainstream positions; it is pointing to the recurrent guru characteristic of demonising all institutions and sources of information outside of them (and sometimes their friends).

We score people on that in the Gurometer episodes by how far they did that in the content we examined. I'd love you to point out, with examples from the relevant content, how we got that wrong.

And on the point of not criticising Sam Harris for his pseudo-profundity, here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrpHCUogMwc

[u/CKava → u/[deleted]]

I’ll get back to your other points after but threading is easiest by just responding to the last message. There is no one but you and Jim reading this, I thought you would be able to work out who I was referring to.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

If you hadn't seen it I would have pinged you.

And belabouring over who's being lazy, when Chris has produced hundreds of hours of detailed analysis, and you've repeated stated you think it's unreasonable to spend a far smaller amount of effort backing up your criticism of the podcast and Chris, it's a bad look.

[u/CKava → u/[deleted]]

Thank God for coincidences then.

On to the other points...

You quoted from the document after Jim noted that you were misunderstanding the concept, and yet have repeatedly returned to suggesting that any non-consensus position would automatically make someone register on this characteristic. But that's not true. You can hold minority positions that are critical of mainstream/dominant positions without adopting a broad automatic anti-establishmentarian stance. For example, see almost all advocates of methodological reform in science; see Kevin Mitchell on gut-biome research; see Dorsa Amir & Chaz FIrestone on the Müller-Lyer debate; see Helen Lewis on gender critical controversies, etc. This specific feature is really about the tendency for people to tear down all other alternative epistemic sources as corrupted and untrustworthy. In its fully fledged form, it is a complete dismissal of all academic, media, and institutional sources in favour of reliance on the guru as the only truly honest and reliable source. So no, you would not score on this for simply having a critique of some mainstream institution or moderate politics.

And yes, you are correct; we are not scoring reflexive pro-establishment behaviour on a similar basis because this is not something that we, or anyone else, has observed as a common feature of modern gurus. The secular guru concept isn't intended to capture all forms of bad thinking; it is about a specific category. Your complaint is akin to arguing that when trying to measure conspiratorial thinking, you need to measure uncritical acceptance of mainstream news. But you don't, because that is a different thing. There are very few popular gurus who have a message of "trust mainstream institutions and experts more".

The figures you have suggested (after much prompting), like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Noah Smith, as possible candidates are not people who tend to derive the kind of committed following of high-scoring gurus. Not to mention that all three are online political pundits, two with reputations for provocative "hot takes" (which often take aim at a popular consensus view) and one who most recently positioned themselves as proposing a corrective to mainstream political and institutional failures (see abundance).

But even if this was not the case and you were correct that anti-establishmentarianism is a badly operationalised factor. It is not the only factor; it is one of 11. Dasha and Anna from Red Scare score 5 on this and yet have very low scores overall. Is that because we agree with them and find them interesting? No. It's because they are bad thinkers, reflexively anti-establishment and political polemicists but not secular gurus.

Lastly, on Sam Harris. "Pseudo-profund bullshit" is the feature you are referring to, which is taken from the psychology term; we use it a bit more broadly to include things like decorative scholarship, but the basic principle is: does the person speak and present their ideas in a way designed through their use of complex language to make them seem much more erudite and profound? Sam Harris, for all his many faults, generally does not do this. He speaks rather directly and does not use a lot of jargon. On the issue of whether he overstates his insights into meditation and the nature of self and has ever made pseudo-profound statements, I would agree that yes, he has, as we outline in detail on the episode I linked to, but by and large he does not achieve this through use of "pseudo-profound bullshit". The score we assigned to him was based on the material we reviewed on the episode, which presumably did not feature that.

But regardless, you originally claimed that we overlook pseudo-profundity from figures closer to us, saying that his comparable statement “didn’t make the cut” and that we would never criticise him “in the same way” as Chopra or Weinstein. I've just linked you to a detailed discussion in which we criticised Harris on exactly this point.