Listening to Episode 27 now (I'm catching up!) and really enjoying the discussion of developing a vocabulary for the kind of dispassionate analysis that is being slowly made firm in spite of "did you like it or not?"/"how faithful to the source material is it?" Melkor-like meddling.
(My facile candidate for an antonym of "anachronism" would be "synchronism", though "harmony" works nicely and has the benefit of being an actual word)
What it sounds like Corey and others keep orbiting around but never addressing directly is that this approach is basically science. It's an attempt to examine data, form a model to fit the data, and test the model against each new set of data that comes in, and improve or discard the model accordingly. Key to this scientific approach is the idea that nobody's model is presumed to be perfect or even correct, not even by the person who comes up with it; nobody's feelings should be hurt by their own model turning out to be wrong. In fact it's great when that happens! It means we've discovered something new! We've learned something!
Many people misunderstand science to be about scientists' egos or sunk costs or fat government grants or something like that—which is so antithetical to the very bedrock concept of science as to completely fail to grasp its basic definition. But it's obvious that Corey has a scientific background simply based on the fact that he's approaching this whole field with that kind of depersonalized, non-ego-driven set of motivations, where all we're trying to do here is learn how things work. It doesn't serve that purpose to lie to ourselves or to accept faulty premises or bend the facts to fit our narrative just because it's what we want to be true. Our goal is to find out what the truth is regardless of how it makes us feel.
I spent some years working at Bridgewater, which is broadly known as having a working environment akin to a cult. It was a bizarre experience to be sure, but I certainly took from it an appreciation at least for the motivation behind the "Principles" that underlie the company's operation: https://www.principles.com/ (haha, of course it's for pay now — it's not difficult to find a PDF though). The basic idea being that you should trust in truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be to hear it, or how much it might damage your ego. Depersonalize your failures, and don't flinch from them, but analyze what went wrong and what the root cause is in your thinking, because then you'll understand how to improve it. Learn what you're bad at, and make everyone aware of it as eagerly as you'd make them aware of what you're good at, because then they can design effective processes around your strengths and weaknesses, and other people's strengths and weaknesses, without regard to whose feelings are being hurt. That way you can achieve effective results without having wasted tons of time soothing each other's egos and giving people jobs they weren't equipped for but pretended otherwise, and everybody wins.
(This is all fine in theory but what I learned from working there is that a) you spend more than 50% of your time doing Principles tests and exercises so the alleged efficiency gains are a wash, and b) the company itself didn't do any better than the rest of the industry during my time there, so it's all pretty unclear what benefits you actually get in the real world. But that's neither here nor there)
The point is that ego is an obstacle to learning the truth, and attaching personal investment to one theory or another is likewise detrimental to finding the best model to fit scientific data. And that's what we're doing here, in analyzing Tolkien through hundreds and hundreds of hours of discussion. It's not about finding the "right" answer to anything specifically within any fictional universe; it's about developing a model for answering questions and having a productive discussion so that we can learn how the world of building fictional universes works.
What also occurs to me is that scientists often get a rap of being boring, emotionless, jargon-filled and completely impenetrable. Like, the whole reason some people shy away from science is the idea that something can be approached dispassionately. Superficially, it looks as though separating your ego and your personal tastes from the thing you're analyzing is to remove all the humanity from it, to experience the world like a beep-boop robot, and how can such a thing possibly be fun or fulfilling?
To which I would say: you only have to listen to five minutes of Corey getting deliriously excited about one arcane point or another to understand why I bring up Bridgewater: hearing Corey flipping out in joy over having discovered some new angle that throws his previous theories into a cocked hat is like hearing Ray Dalio talk about how exciting it is to find a "gem" in your own mind, a nugget of information you can use to improve your thinking or to develop a better way of doing something. Ultimately this is exactly what science is, and why scientists become scientists: we think it's insanely fun to learn things, just for the pure thrill of learning! It's no fun at all to blindly follow somebody's dogma by rote. And it's no fun for all problems to have been solved. To a scientist, the one thing more exciting than proving someone else's theory wrong (through their own published experimental methods and results and applying a new data set) is to prove your OWN theory wrong. Eureka!
My point is that if Corey has ever used scientific phrasing to describe what he's doing in this analytical framework, I must have missed it. But it sure strikes me that that's exactly what is going on.
(My facile candidate for an antonym of "anachronism" would be "synchronism", though "harmony" works nicely and has the benefit of being an actual word)
What it sounds like Corey and others keep orbiting around but never addressing directly is that this approach is basically science. It's an attempt to examine data, form a model to fit the data, and test the model against each new set of data that comes in, and improve or discard the model accordingly. Key to this scientific approach is the idea that nobody's model is presumed to be perfect or even correct, not even by the person who comes up with it; nobody's feelings should be hurt by their own model turning out to be wrong. In fact it's great when that happens! It means we've discovered something new! We've learned something!
Many people misunderstand science to be about scientists' egos or sunk costs or fat government grants or something like that—which is so antithetical to the very bedrock concept of science as to completely fail to grasp its basic definition. But it's obvious that Corey has a scientific background simply based on the fact that he's approaching this whole field with that kind of depersonalized, non-ego-driven set of motivations, where all we're trying to do here is learn how things work. It doesn't serve that purpose to lie to ourselves or to accept faulty premises or bend the facts to fit our narrative just because it's what we want to be true. Our goal is to find out what the truth is regardless of how it makes us feel.
I spent some years working at Bridgewater, which is broadly known as having a working environment akin to a cult. It was a bizarre experience to be sure, but I certainly took from it an appreciation at least for the motivation behind the "Principles" that underlie the company's operation: https://www.principles.com/ (haha, of course it's for pay now — it's not difficult to find a PDF though). The basic idea being that you should trust in truth, no matter how uncomfortable it might be to hear it, or how much it might damage your ego. Depersonalize your failures, and don't flinch from them, but analyze what went wrong and what the root cause is in your thinking, because then you'll understand how to improve it. Learn what you're bad at, and make everyone aware of it as eagerly as you'd make them aware of what you're good at, because then they can design effective processes around your strengths and weaknesses, and other people's strengths and weaknesses, without regard to whose feelings are being hurt. That way you can achieve effective results without having wasted tons of time soothing each other's egos and giving people jobs they weren't equipped for but pretended otherwise, and everybody wins.
(This is all fine in theory but what I learned from working there is that a) you spend more than 50% of your time doing Principles tests and exercises so the alleged efficiency gains are a wash, and b) the company itself didn't do any better than the rest of the industry during my time there, so it's all pretty unclear what benefits you actually get in the real world. But that's neither here nor there)
The point is that ego is an obstacle to learning the truth, and attaching personal investment to one theory or another is likewise detrimental to finding the best model to fit scientific data. And that's what we're doing here, in analyzing Tolkien through hundreds and hundreds of hours of discussion. It's not about finding the "right" answer to anything specifically within any fictional universe; it's about developing a model for answering questions and having a productive discussion so that we can learn how the world of building fictional universes works.
What also occurs to me is that scientists often get a rap of being boring, emotionless, jargon-filled and completely impenetrable. Like, the whole reason some people shy away from science is the idea that something can be approached dispassionately. Superficially, it looks as though separating your ego and your personal tastes from the thing you're analyzing is to remove all the humanity from it, to experience the world like a beep-boop robot, and how can such a thing possibly be fun or fulfilling?
To which I would say: you only have to listen to five minutes of Corey getting deliriously excited about one arcane point or another to understand why I bring up Bridgewater: hearing Corey flipping out in joy over having discovered some new angle that throws his previous theories into a cocked hat is like hearing Ray Dalio talk about how exciting it is to find a "gem" in your own mind, a nugget of information you can use to improve your thinking or to develop a better way of doing something. Ultimately this is exactly what science is, and why scientists become scientists: we think it's insanely fun to learn things, just for the pure thrill of learning! It's no fun at all to blindly follow somebody's dogma by rote. And it's no fun for all problems to have been solved. To a scientist, the one thing more exciting than proving someone else's theory wrong (through their own published experimental methods and results and applying a new data set) is to prove your OWN theory wrong. Eureka!
My point is that if Corey has ever used scientific phrasing to describe what he's doing in this analytical framework, I must have missed it. But it sure strikes me that that's exactly what is going on.
