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Link seems to be dead for me, but yeah I'm aware, hence my reluctance to outright dunk on him or declare him a lolcow. I appreciate that he still speaks his mind (if nothing else, he is a useful weathervane for a person disconnected from American politics) and do not shame him for being mentally ill, but I reserve my right to call out shoddy logic, Darkly Hinting and uh, generous epistemic leaps even if they're partly caused by said mental illness.
Galaxy-brained deflections are not exclusive to Freddie, although he is a fine example of it, so I think the patterns are still useful to nootice before consensus or "consensus" starts forming in earnest.
Yeah, the software mangled the URL and @FtttG supplied an unmangled version. Have submitted a bug report.
I'm all for noting that his use of chaos theory is specious and unhelpful, because it is. My point is strictly that "he actually believes that his invocation of chaos theory is super-deep and meaningful" is pretty plausible, where it wouldn't be for a normal person - "drawing wildly-different things into a nonsense Grand Theory" is a textbook psychotic delusion - and hence your apparent conclusion that he's deliberately blowing smoke there was suspect.
There are certainly people blowing smoke. I'm not even saying that Freddie never does it. But this particular thing doesn't smell like it to me.
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I think this is the relevant link: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/my-response-to-daniel-bergners-new
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