"Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes cover art

"Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes

"Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies" by Steven Byrnes

Listen for free

View show details
A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it's hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is:

  • “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus
  • “An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong.
You just can’t tell those apart from the outside—i.e. without having the time and skill to dive into the object-level debates and come out with the right answer. And most people don’t have that kind of time and skill.

…Unless the group can produce easily-verifiable artifacts that any moron can recognize to be proof that they’re correct on the specific question at issue.

(“So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it.”)

…And sometimes there is no such artifact to be found! In those cases, even if the second bullet point is what's really going on, the group is vulnerable to outside agitators accusing them of being the first bullet point, and running them out [...]

---

Outline:

(01:37) (1) The breaching of the string theory consensus in the 2000s.

(06:50) (2) The breaching of an analytic-philosophy consensus in 1979

(10:37) Afterword

(10:40) A related mental model

(12:12) ...And another mental model

(12:47) Can an externally-opaque meritocracy gain credibility via racking up externally-legible achievements in other adjacent domains?

(14:06) This post is secretly about superintelligent AI, isn't it?

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
August 29th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m8cP9KfkYMMCCQGrb/tales-of-rebellion-against-externally-opaque-meritocracies

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.