I read this piece by @TheAnnaGat on the #InterIntellect/@whatstheii and have thoughts & feelings on the subject, that I want to share!
Why naming that community "inter-intellect" worries me
21 tweets · May 2019 · 115 likes · 2 retweets · read on Twitter
Summary: Anna has identified a cluster of people constellating online around some similar themes, broadly: - weird, curious & openminded - kind & postpartisan - self-directed doers - well-rounded - non-judgmental - big picture thinkers - age-agnostic - want connection & community
She calls it the "inter-intellect". Here's another take:
I am definitely in this cluster! And I've been noticing the cluster as it's been appearing, from my perspective. A small part of me feels excited that this is being pointed at more clearly, so that people can connect around it! twitter.com/ManuelDAnda/st…
And... a lot of me feels sad/scared. Took me a bit of introspection and poking around more to figure out why! There are a few subtle reasons related to confusion around why the article was constructed how it was, particularly things about the polls, and that's part of it.
The deeper thing for me with this #InterIntellect thing is that I think the name that has been chosen is likely to create a rallying flag that sooner or later becomes an attractor that's not what we want! 😨
I've written about how when naming nuanced things, it's important to chose terms that people won't think they already understand, and that won't distort attempts to further clarify the concept. malcolmocean.com/2016/02/sparkl…
And my sense is that the associations with the term "intellect" are sufficiently far from the central core engine of what connects these people, that it'll lead us astray if we try to rally around it. Might take a few years, but this sort of thing happens—by default, not rarely.
I shared these pages earlier today, which begin "This is not to say that there is no place for intellect — it is a valuable capacity ... the problem with intellect is that we use it to distract ourselves from direct experience ... to judge perception as good, bad, or indifferent"
The context I shared that in earlier is in a thread about the right & left hemispheres, as understood through Iain McGilchrist's new model. Anna's blog post about inter-intellect mentions integrating both hemispheres, but the term "intellect" maps very directly onto the left🧠
(If you haven't seen my earlier tweets on this, I'm not talking about the hypey personality-typey hemispheres models from 60s split-brain experiments. McGilchrist has done a ton of research and has a new model based on how each hemisphere attends.) Intro: metalearn.net/podcasts/ml41-…
^ that podcast is a fantastic intro to the topic in under 45 minutes. I'm planning to do some sort of write-up of it, but that hasn't happened yet. When I do it'll be here:
Anyway, while Anna and others might not mean so narrow a thing by "intellect", my concern is the connotation might be strong enough that it creates an attractor for the (many!) ppl who are committed to an intellect-only mode-of-being, even if initial #InterIntellect folks aren't!
So those are some thoughts on the semantic aspects of why the term "inter-intellect" feels off to me. (The "inter" part is great. Everything is deeply intertwingled.) As I thought about this more I noticed there are also syntactical reasons I find the term weird.
Anna uses the term as... a singular noun > "Why you probably belong to an inter-intellect and why this matters" This suggests that I.I. is the name for the community, not someone in it... who is, I guess, an "inter-intellectual"? 🤨
Yet indefinite article "an" suggests that there could be dozens or hundreds of inter-intellects out there. As if it means "a group of people who connect on the internet out of shared (meta)interests." But then "The I.I." (eg @whatstheii) uses "the", implying there's just one!
@yashkaf's comment on the original post illustrates this very confusion: (And probably we need terms for both of these things! The rationality community represents a relatively successful precursor to what Anna & other ii folks are trying to do here!) medium.com/@yashkaf/my-li…
Whew, feels good to write that all out. Again, I love the *referent* that Anna is pointing at here. It's me! It's my people! 🥰 (I'm not at the middle of this cluster but I am in it) I wrote this whole tweetstorm because I'm hoping for a different signifier.
...and I don't have an alternate name idea.🙃 In my head, I've been thinking of this cluster as being kind of meta-rational / meta-modern, but I'm guessing that those terms are somehow simultaneously too broad & too narrow for what Anna's pointing at (in different dimensions)
Might as well collect some information from everyone who's reading this. This is obviously going to be oversimplified but go with your gut answer to both: Are you in this #InterIntellect cluster & what's your sense of that name?
And of course reply and lmk what your thoughts are on the name, on the cluster, the relationship between them, alternatives, meta-commentary...