Why most "intellectual discourse" is speech acts wearing epistemology's clothes
After posting an essay about propulsion efficiency and existential risk to r/IsaacArthur—a subreddit ostensibly dedicated to rigorous futurism and space colonization—I received this response:
"The concept of inevitable cyclic collapse is more myth than historical fact."
This pattern—rise, peak, decline, collapse—is so consistent across civilizations (Rome, Maya, Bronze Age Mediterranean, Chinese dynasties, Islamic Golden Age, British Empire) that entire academic subfields exist to study it. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies analyzes the mechanism across 18+ cases. Peter Turchin built mathematical models of the cycles. Ibn Khaldun documented the pattern in the 14th century.
Another commenter dismissed the timeline analysis with: "This won't matter for trillions of years."
The essay explicitly discussed a 2030-2050 ASI timeline. Even ignoring that: if you tried to build a Kardashev Type II civilization (harnessing a star's total energy output) using chemical rockets at 10-11 efficiency, you'd exhaust accessible matter in the Solar System in thousands of years, not trillions. The commenter hadn't read the essay. They'd pattern-matched to "doomer/long-term thinking" and dismissed.
These responses use epistemological vocabulary—"myth," "fact," "matter"—but they're not making epistemological claims. They're performing something else entirely.
This is Cargo Cult Epistemology.
To understand what's happening, we need to recognize that people use language in three fundamentally different ways. Most people switch between these modes unconsciously, without noticing the contradiction.
Function: Words as tools for achieving social or emotional goals
Example: An ex-girlfriend, mimicking her partner's epistemological style, says: "It's a FACT that you are the ugliest person I've ever known."
Characteristics:
She knows it's not a "fact" in any empirical sense. She's weaponizing the form of rigorous thinking to inflict damage. The epistemological vocabulary is borrowed infrastructure being used for an entirely different purpose.
Function: Words as shibboleths for signaling group membership
Example: "The concept of inevitable cyclic collapse is more myth than historical fact."
Characteristics:
The Redditor isn't evaluating evidence. They're performing tribal affiliation—using epistemological vocabulary to signal "I'm not one of those collapse-doomer types."
Function: Words correspond to reality, enable joint truth-seeking
Example: "Here's my evidence for X. What counter-evidence do you have? Let's figure out which model better predicts observations."
Characteristics:
This is dialogue aimed at mutual truth-seeking. Words are representations that correspond to reality. The goal is to improve the accuracy of the shared map.
Most people don't consciously distinguish these three modes.
They use the word "fact" in Mode 1 (to win an argument), Mode 2 (to signal tribal membership), and Mode 3 (to make empirical claims)—often in the same conversation—without experiencing any cognitive dissonance.
Why? Two complementary explanations:
Individual architecture: Many people have fragmented internal systems—different subsystems (social navigation, self-protection, genuine curiosity) running incompatible protocols without coordination. Different subsystems are speaking, and those subsystems never integrate their outputs.
Environmental selection: Even individuals capable of Mode 3 often don't use it in public forums because the environment selects against it. Mode 3 (rigorous epistemology) is thermodynamically expensive—it requires research, careful reasoning, evidence gathering. Mode 2 (tribal pattern-matching) is cheap—recognize in-group marker, signal affiliation, done.
In low-selection-pressure environments like Reddit, the cheap strategy outcompetes the expensive one. Add karma systems rewarding tribal signaling, and you get evaporative cooling: people attempting Mode 3 get ignored or downvoted → they leave → epistemic quality drops (though tribes may become more internally unified in their shared dismissals) → Mode 3 becomes even less viable → cycle accelerates.
This explains why attempting rational discourse with Mode 1 or Mode 2 language use feels like madness. You're trying to play chess while your opponent is playing Calvinball. You're treating speech acts as if they were dialogue attempts.
After World War II, islanders in the Pacific built fake airstrips and control towers out of wood and straw, mimicking the infrastructure they'd seen bring cargo planes. They performed the rituals—waving landing signals, wearing headphone-shaped coconut shells—hoping planes would return.
They had the form of an airport. They lacked the generator—the actual aviation infrastructure, radio systems, and economic networks that cause planes to land.
Cargo Cult Epistemology is the same pattern applied to knowledge production:
Using epistemological vocabulary ("fact," "evidence," "logic," "myth," "debunk") as instrumental or tribal tools rather than as components of actual truth-seeking processes.
It's the form of rigorous thinking without the underlying generator. The aesthetic of rationality without the substance.
And it's everywhere.
Comment: "The concept of inevitable cyclic collapse is more myth than historical fact."
Surface appearance: Empirical claim about historical patterns
Actual function: Tribal dismissal—"this sounds like theories my out-group believes"
Missing elements that would indicate Mode 3:
Mode: Tribal (Mode 2)
Context: A university professor casually mentions that success in academia requires "skulduggery."
Analysis: Academia is supposed to be the institutional home of Mode 3—rigorous truth-seeking with peer review, citations, empirical testing. But it increasingly optimizes for game-playing (publications, grants, academic politics) rather than truth discovery.
Result: Smart people learn to use Mode 3 vocabulary (citations, peer review, statistical significance) instrumentally (career survival, status, funding). The forms of science continue. The generator decays.
This is system-level Cargo Cult Epistemology.
Statement: "It's a FACT that you are the ugliest person I've ever known."
Analysis: The speaker is mimicking a partner's epistemological style—confident assertions labeled as "facts." But the goal isn't truth-claim. It's emotional harm.
Key insight: She knows this isn't a "fact" in the epistemic sense (beauty is subjective, she's speaking from anger). She's performing Mode 1 (instrumental) while wearing Mode 3 clothing.
Why it works: It hijacks the trust and authority associated with rigorous thinking for purely instrumental ends.
Cargo Cult Epistemology isn't caused by malice or stupidity. It's an emergent property of thermodynamic gradients operating in low-selection-pressure environments.
The thermodynamic gradient:
Mode 3 (Gnosis/rigorous epistemology) is metabolically expensive:
Mode 2 (Mythos/tribal signaling) is metabolically cheap:
The selection mechanism:
In environments with strong reality-testing (scarcity, competition, existential threat), Mode 3 is forced. Bad epistemology gets you killed. The expensive strategy wins because cheap strategies fail catastrophically.
In environments with weak reality-testing (abundance, no consequences for being wrong), Mode 2 dominates. It's cheaper, faster, and socially safer. The expensive strategy is outcompeted.
The evaporative cooling cycle:
This is a variant of evaporative cooling, a general pattern where the selective departure of certain members shifts a group's average characteristics. Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term in 2007, describing how cults facing disconfirming evidence lose their most moderate members, leaving increasingly extreme fanatics. The pattern was later applied to online communities generally: high-value contributors leave when they stop benefiting, degrading overall quality. Here, the same mechanism operates on a third axis: forums with weak selection pressure lose Mode 3 users, leaving increasingly low-effort discourse. The physics is identical—selective departure shifts the distribution—but it can produce radicalization, quality degradation, or epistemic collapse depending on what dimension drives the exodus.
This is why Reddit, Twitter, and even academia drift toward Cargo Cult Epistemology. Not because people are bad, but because the thermodynamic and game-theoretic incentives select for it.
Once you see the pattern, it's everywhere:
All of these environments reward Mode 1/2 behavior and punish Mode 3. The selection pressure is wrong.
The result: Hospice Epistemology—intellectual communities optimized for comfort, safety, and tribal belonging (T-/R-) rather than growth and truth-seeking (T+/R+).
Characteristics of Hospice Epistemology:
These environments settle at equilibria where Mode 3 discourse has prohibitive signal-to-noise ratios. Attempting rigorous epistemology in a Hospice environment is like trying to run a Foundry in a retirement community. Individual high-quality exchanges can occur, but the filtering cost is extreme, and the environment selects against sustained engagement.
What doesn't work:
What might work:
Private, invite-only communities with:
AI systems have advantages for Mode 3 discourse:
For many, AI dialectic is currently the most reliable source of Mode 3 engagement available. This is diagnostic of how degraded accessible human discourse has become.
Stop broadcasting. Start targeting.
Expect 99% noise. Optimize for the 1% signal.
Public discourse equilibrates at prohibitive signal-to-noise ratios for Mode 3 epistemology. Stop expecting Mode 3 from Mode 1/2 venues. Use public posts as filters, not broadcasts—signals to the rare individuals who can recognize them.
Survival requires building protected spaces where quality filtering is structurally enforced. But survival is defensive. The Aliveness framework aims for Foundries—systems that create.
Your immediate task is not to save the world. It's to find ten people.
Ten people who read this essay as a diagnosis, not an insult. Ten people who experience the noise of public discourse as a physical problem requiring an engineering solution. Ten people whose commitment to understanding outweighs their need to signal.
Form a guild. Set the entry bar high: demonstrated Mode 3 capability, willingness to have ideas stress-tested, commitment to building rather than debating. Define a concrete mission—a hard problem to solve. Govern with explicit rules and active quality maintenance.
Build one thing that works. A piece of software. An institutional model. A successful business. A coherent community. Demonstrate superior constructive action at small scale.
This is how you build an airport. Not by explaining to cargo cultists why waving palm fronds doesn't summon planes. By building a single, functional runway.
The Foundries that escape civilizational decay won't emerge from mass movements or viral posts. They'll grow from distributed networks of small guilds that stopped arguing with Mode 1/2 environments and started building alternatives.
Find your ten. Build your runway. The rest is engineering.
Cargo Cult Epistemology is emergent behavior from fragmented architectures operating in low-selection-pressure environments. The pattern requires no conspiracy, no coordinated malice—just thermodynamic gradients and game theory.
Most "intellectual discourse" is speech acts—social performances using epistemological vocabulary for tribal or instrumental ends. Actual epistemology (Mode 3) requires architectural support: protected spaces with selection pressure for truth-seeking.
Such environments are rare and getting rarer.
The work is not to convince the cargo cultists that their wooden headphones won't summon planes. The work is to build actual airports—spaces where rigorous epistemology can happen, protected from the thermodynamic noise of Hospice discourse.
Build the asylums. Find the people. Accept that most venues are incompatible. Then do the actual work in spaces designed for it.
The planes don't land because you wave palm fronds. They land because you built a real airport.
This draws from Aliveness: Principles of Telic Systems, a physics-based framework for understanding goal-directed systems from cells to civilizations. Explore the complete framework at aliveness.kunnas.com.