It’s a puzzling thing, how often those who claim to think for themselves – to consider the facts and weigh different perspectives and thereby come to their own conclusions – hold views which just happen to be in lockstep conformity with the dominant narrative.
When the outcome of their intellectual labors is indistinguishable from a lazy regurgitation of the ‘official version’, it makes me wonder why they bothered.
— Silas Hudson
Tag: Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Futile Conversations
Never mind disagreement about the facts of the matter. You can’t hold a meaningful or productive discussion with someone who disagrees with your capacity – or your right – to hold a view different from their own.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on the Obsolescence of Technocracy
Technocratic managerialism conditioned its subjects to crave accurate and reliable guidance, while leaving that craving unfulfilled. Its experts were compromised by their biases, ambitions, and wishful thinking in ways that sim ints could not be – and could not be reliably programmed to replicate.
Sim ints quickly came to do a better job of providing accurate and viewpoint-neutral information than human experts. The itch technocracy had created found a superior scratch, one that made technocracy itself obsolete.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Shiny Utopian Futures
Perhaps the most effective persuasion against technocracy was its own literature, especially science fiction depicting futures of pure reason and socialist brotherhood. These bright imaginary utopias of endless scientific progress stood in embarrassing contrast to the drab and stultifying reality that emerged from every attempt to implement in the real world the means by which these new orders were to be established.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Thinking Outside the Box
There is often merit in ‘thinking outside the box’ for new and improved ideas and options. But when doing so is framed as ‘setting aside old perceptions and conventions’, or ‘moving beyond old ideas’, or ’embracing progress’ as ends in themselves – throwing away the old because it is old, in favor of the new because it is new – that is cause for caution.
It is often observable in such cases that what is presently known, though useful and effective otherwise, is ‘bad’ precisely because it doesn’t give those seeking to dispose of it the predetermined outcome that they desire, or merely fails to flatter their desired self-image as intelligent and insightful.
It’s a cheap shortcut to a self-interested paradigm shift. Denigrating the existing reality-congruent paradigm as backward, stagnant, or regressive opens the door to replacing it with their new, ego-flattering and ideologically-congruent paradigm without having to refute the old on its merits.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Independent Thinking
As children, we learn by imitation before we have our own knowledge base and life experience on which to base autonomous judgment. Those who fail to grow out of this phase grow into adults who continue to imitate the knowledge and judgment of others – certain that they are in fact the independent thinkers.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Management
It’s not just academia, either. High-functioning sociopaths end up in mid-level management positions far more often than you would feel comfortable knowing.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson on Intellectual Objectivity
The assertion of objectivity or neutrality is often an attempt to have it both ways, to split the difference between what one wants to be true versus what what one knows to be true. By taking a position in the middle, or not taking a position at all, one can at the same time avoid having to accept the latter and having to give up the former.
— Silas Hudson
Silas Hudson: The Perils of Being Expert
“A problem faced by many of those who aspire to being considered an ‘expert’ in this or that field is that not only can they never know as much as they think they do, the maintenance of prestige compels them to pretend to know even and ever more than that.”
Silas Hudson, “The Technocrat’s New Clothes”
Back to the Quote Mines
Holidays are over, family has gone home, and I’ve handed off the time-consuming part of my job to a new hire – time to pick up where I left off.
Easing back into things, I spent a half hour or so every day this past week extracting from my commonplace books anything that could serve as a Silas Hudson quote. The original idea was to publish it as a standalone piece akin to Heinlein’s Notebooks of Lazarus Long.*
Whether or not that happens, it will at least be a useful background resource. Much of the material ascribable to Hudson concerns technocracy, a personal hobbyhorse and one of the themes of Book 2 and especially Book 3.
The unexpected part of this side project is discovering that I have plenty of material to do the same for both Aaron Jacobsen and Martin Beech and the themes they represent. It’s an imposing amount of material to sift through: 30+ commonplace books and 1800+ index cards. And then there are all the books with margin notes…
* – Looking at the fulltext on the Baen website, I see I’m going to have to fisk it at some point. Long’s “wisdom” seemed a lot wiser when I was lot naiver.