10/12/2023, 01:02 (2) Media, Truth, and Community - Apex’s Notes

Media, Truth, and Community

On Shared Worlds
APEX
7 SEPT 2021

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I was scrolling through some web page recently and saw an ad for the New York
Times, which struck me as somewhat...interesting. Here it is:

Please excuse the potato image quality. My phone is old and has been
dropped far too many times.

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10/12/2023, 01:02 (2) Media, Truth, and Community - Apex’s Notes

I was immediately reminded of a concept I read about recently in Jens Beckert's

Imagined Futures: Epistemic Participation. (He applies it to economics but the forces are
present in various areas of life)

Apex🌲🏴‍☠️🚀
@apex_simmaps

Actors care far less about the correctness of forecasts

than they do about the *credibility* of forecasts.

...so...how is credibility established?

Through discursive processes and "epistemic

participation"
Image

12:44 AM ∙ Aug 6, 2021

4 Likes 2 Retweets

Put simply, we address and respond to the profound uncertainty of our world and
the future by constructing and embracing narratives that we perceive as being
reasonable and basing our decisions off of these narratives. Narratives acquire
legitimacy/authority via multiple processes, one of which being its endorsement by
figures within an "epistemic community" - a group of people who share a way of
understanding and knowing. In other words, an epistemic community is a group of
people who live in a Shared World.

I have talked extensively about our Maps of the World before:

Inside of our heads, we assimilate (or reject) information into our mental model of
the world. Each one of us does this. We construct a mental map of how the World
truly is, and we then judge further experiences based on that mental map.

Individuals embody a Shared World when their standards of knowledge, their

priors, their Maps of the World, are sufficiently similar (or perhaps, in the most
extreme cases, identical). Now remember, our Maps of the World are inextricably
linked to our Values and Identity:

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10/12/2023, 01:02 (2) Media, Truth, and Community - Apex’s Notes

One might say that our map of the World interfaces with our map of moral space.
We understand the world through narrative, motivation, values, and norms. But it
would be unfair to say that our map of moral space is “superimposed” onto our
map of the World. They are an irreducible union.

“To know who I am is to know where I stand. My identity is defined by the

commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I
can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be
done, or what I endorse or oppose.”

(Taylor, Sources of the Self)

So, an epistemic community is, in some real sense, a moral community. Our way of
understanding the World is tied inherently to our method of judging the World.
You cannot understand one “independent” of the other.

And this is powerful: humans are social animals. We desire connection to others. But
more than mere connection, we desire a deepness in our connection. We desire
someone who gets us.

And in today's world, that depth of relationship, the rhythm and mutual interest that
feeds it, seems altogether lacking from so much of life:

People "become" an individual in the eyes of another when they meaningfully

interact with them and care about them. But what happens when people are not
able to meaningfully interact with one another regularly? What happens when
you switch apartment buildings or neighborhoods every couple years, never
becoming embedded in a community? What happens when you move cities for
jobs, and can only see your friends every 6 months (if that)? What happens when
public spaces continue to be gradually closed off and when the Virtual Public
Square is exclusionary? Alienation is a constant in today's world. Is it any surprise
that 27% of millennials and ~20% of all Americans reported having zero close
friends in a YouGov poll in 2019?

The networks we operate in have simultaneously become broader and shallower,

and I believe this is deeply detrimental to our lives (and I think the data on
friendships, suicides, and mental health all support that claim).

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10/12/2023, 01:02 (2) Media, Truth, and Community - Apex’s Notes

What the Media provides, which is so powerful in this more and more alienated
society, is more than just a ready-made Map of the World: it provides the promise
of a community of other believers, who will get you. Who will see the world through
the same lenses as you. Who will affirm your understanding of the World, in the
face of the profound modern anxiety that we misunderstand what the World is like.

We must understand the attractiveness of the Media as a response to the central

existential crisis of modernity. The central existential crisis of our age is one of
meaning. Not of possibly not measuring up to a social standard universally accepted
but of not knowing which standard is legitimate in the first place (if any of them are
even legitimate at all). It is a terror not of condemnation, but of meaninglessness.
And in the face of this, epistemic-moral communities become all the more
appealing. Our searches for meaning are, fundamentally, our attempts at making
sense of the World. And that isn't going to go away any time soon.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed, please join the email list and consider a paid
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2 Comments

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Alex Leong Writes Better Barbarians Sep 8, 2021 Liked by Apex

Powerful concept. In the absence of purpose and religion, majority of people have no
recourse but to be measured / evaluated via others, filtered through the lens of the
Panopticon/Mainstream Culture.

It's like a distorted Schrodinger's box at macro scale. Unless you look at me and approve
of me, I cannot be sure I exist.
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Race Bannon Writes Musings from a Curious Mind Sep 7, 2021 Liked by Apex

This is so good! Thank you.

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