Verbal Rotators Aren't Wordcels

Why High Verbal skills does not mean you're a Wordcel.

[Epistemic status]: I’m having fun here and fleshing out the meme.

The Problem

Some blue checks have recently been tweeting that the wordcel rotator meme is simply a proxy for math and verbal skills. This is an insult to roon's intelligence, and misses his point. The wordcel concept is much deeper than simply repackaging an incel meme and pointing it around a nerd with a high SAT verbal who never learned how to code. What the term does is strike much deeper at the heart of human sense-making, and our civilizational attempts at crafting an epistemology we all participate in.

Humans are tasked with using words and symbols to observe and describe the world around us. A rotator regularizes his thoughts, and challenges himself to know if his descriptions have a structural relationship towards reality. The wordcel instead plays with word patterns, to construct the reality he finds more pleasing. This does not mean that everyone who uses words, and has a higher SAT verbal than math score, or who writes, is a wordcel.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about this dumb worcel/rotator thing but aren’t math and verbal ability pretty highly correlated in practice?

The claim that being a wordcel and a rotator are correlated misunderstands the distinction. We are born gravitating towards the wordcel understanding of the world, where we play with words to justify our feelings.  It's our base instinct, and we must train ourselves to rotate instead. We aren’t born with correlated wordcel and rotator inclinations. This is different than correlated SAT math and verbal skills.

I want to highlight notable verbally skilled people from history, and I’m going to explain why these people are rotators. Being a wordcel shouldn’t be defined by the fact that you scored better in English than Math, that’s not useful or interesting.

The Historical Epistemology.

What I want to do here, is decompose the shape rotators from the wordcels, among those who engage primarily in the writing and speaking of words. I want to force the point that a wordcel is not simply someone with a high verbal IQ that uses words as their profession.

Thucydides

Thucydides was an Athenian historian from 400 BC. His book The History of the Pelopennesian War, was the first recorded (attempted) objective and scientific pieces of history. In doing this, Thucydides invented one of the earliest forms of historiography. And, sure, at times he'd imagine what other people thought, and consider that a source. But it wasn't yet known that this wasn't how historiography should be conducted.

So was Thucydides a wordcel? Or a rotator? I think there is this bias to think "The guy wrote a book. He obviously had gifted verbal ability to write one of the first books on History. He's a wordcel." But if that's all we're doing here, this is an uninteresting taxonomy. 

What Thuycydides was doing was pushing himself to the limits of known human epistemic ability to ensure his words were correctly forming a map of the structure of reality. My friends, Thucydides was a verbally gifted rotator.

Tolstoy

I want to press this point, so let's consider Tolstoy, the Russian author of War and Peace – which is a book on the French invasion of Russia in 1812. You probably know where I'm going with this: Tolstoy was a phenomenal rotator. This man's verbal IQ is off the scale, and I have no reason to believe he was a good coder. But I want to explain to you what Tolstoy did with War and Peace, and why this makes him a rotator:

Following the Napoleonic wars, the theory of Napoleon that was most popular among historians was the "Great man" theory of history. To summarize, great men themselves moved the world forward, and Napoleon was a great man. Tolstoy thought this was fake -- but how do you disprove such a claim? Think through this yourself, How do you 'test' whether the great man theory works, or doesn't? 

Here is what Tolstoy did – he used his giga-brain to set up an agent based simulation of Russia prior to the Napoleonic invasions, where he defined a model of the world that he claimed sufficiently characterized reality. Each character was a complex person, playing their small role in the Napoleonic wars. Once the initial conditions were set, ee ran the experiment, which was him writing the rest of the novel.

What was the outcome? Tolstoy was able to point out a series of pivotal moments in his novel, whether from early on in a character's life, or arising due to randomness on the battlefield, that could be plausibly claimed to drive the outcome of the war. Events that couldn't possibly have been under the control of Napoleon, such as a chance encounter on a battlefield. So then the question he poses back to the reader: How can Napoleon alone drive forward the wheels of history, when all these random events, which did not actually happen, but clearly could have happened would have been pivotal?

In fact, it was the historians of the time who were taking the wordcel approach. Compare the approach by Thomas Carlyle on the great man theory of history:

Thus if the man Odin himself has vanished utterly, there is this vast Shadow of him which still projects itself over the whole History of his People. For this Odin once admitted to being God, we can understand well that the entire Scandinavian Scheme of Nature, or dim No-scheme, whatever it might before have been, would now begin to develop itself altogether differently, and grow thenceforth in a new manner. What this Odin saw into, and taught with his runes and his rhymes, the whole Teutonic People laid to heart and carried forward. His way of thought became their way of thinking:--such, under the new conditions, is the History of every great thinker still. In gigantic confused lineaments, like some enormous camera-obscura shadow thrown upwards from the dead deeps of the Past, and covering the whole Northern Heaven, is not that Scandinavian Mythology in some sort the Portraiture of this man Odin? The large image of his natural face, legible or not legible there, expanded and confused in that manner! Ah, Thought, I say, is always Thought. No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.

This is classic wordcellery. We're immediately struck by the beauty of the prose. It is a tapestry of mysticism, and ends with some proto-tweet-bangers, like "No great man lives in vain. The History of the world is but the Biography of great men". I mean it sounds great, right? Does it have any relationship to reality? This guy is making up an example from Odin, who wasn’t actually real, and using it to claim that history is nothing but the history of great men.

Carlyle wrote beautiful prose, flowing from his intuition alone. It sounded magnificent, and I can’t see any argument why it should be true. Whereas Tolstoy set up a model of the world. If you want to disagree with Tolstoy, you know where to begin. What if you want to disagree with Carlyle? Do you talk about how Odin wasn’t that great or something?

(Tolstoy wasn't completely correct in the end -- but he set up a coherent agent based model that disproved the wordcels of the time.)

Rhetorical Wordcels

This beauty of prose and rhetoric can be a tell of wordcellery. Consider the syllogisms of the Greeks. The beauty of these is that the language of formal logic was constructed, and then observed within the words themselves. The mistake was that the Greeks truly believed that if the rhetoric followed a logically consistent pattern, than what they were saying was actually true. The logical fallacies were a form of weak evidence, not themselves perfectly associated with truthiness.

Late night political hosts continue to use these same rhetorical tools to make their point. They will give a monologue that has some epic takedown of their political outgroup, and the logical structure of the monologue will probably be coherent and rhetorically persuasive. Do you feel that dopamine rush when Tucker Carlson tells you why your cause is Good and True? Do you get excited when John Oliver’s exposes your political opponent as a fool? But why should this indicate it’s correlated with reality?

Do you think it is only people high in the verbal skill who are duped here, and the coders and mathematicians are not? Of course not. It is the highest ideal of the rotator, even if they agree with the talking heads, to recognize that their basis of constructing reality through political quips does not constitute meaningful knowledge. And the truth is, most of us fail at this.

shakoist @cauchyfriend

@alexandrosM It's amazing that the primary epistemic model most people still use (including our leaders), are these rhetorical syllogisms where they just find the one that supports their feelings, then map it to the problem at hand. And they don't even realize this is wrong.

The Modern Wordcel

I want to end with the most anti-wordcel philosopher I know of, David Stove, who wrote an excellent piece called “What is Wrong with our Thoughts? A Neo-Positivist Credo” (which is worth reading).

From an Enlightenment or Positivist point of view, which is Hume's point of view, and mine, there is simply no avoiding the conclusion that the human race is mad. There are scarcely any human beings who do not have some lunatic beliefs or other to which they attach great importance. People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx.

If the wordcel’s brain is too powerful, they can conduct incredible feats, and write tombs of beautiful nonsense. Stove shares this except from Hegel to make his point:

In the indifferences of light, the aether has scattered its absolute indifference into a multiplicity; in the blooms of the solar system it has borne its inner Reason and totality out into expansion. But the individualizations of light are dispersed in multiplicity [i.e. the fixed stars], while those which form the orbiting petals of the solar system must behave towards them with rigid individuality [i.e. they have their fixed orbits]. And so the unity of the stars lacks the form of universality, while that of the solar system lacks pure unity, and neither carries in itself the absolute Concept 

Hegel literally just made up what he thought reality was, and expressed it in page after page of eerily incandescent prose. Why should Hegel believe his musings on reality are real at all? It’s because he was incapable of recognizing that complex and well formed words that sound true don’t have to be true at all.

After all, what is wordcel epistimology but someone who mistakes their thoughts — their words — with what is actually true? The structure we paint with our words can be more seductive than the reality we actually inhabit.

You can be a Rotator

The ancient Greeks associated physical excellence with moral superiority. The modern wordcel also considers themselves to be morally superior. They believe their fitness in manipulating words in order to win sparring contests indicates a natural superiority and intelligence. Roon points out that “The shape rotators have been a minor force until very recent history” – which is true. Even the 20th century rotators who pushed humanity to its greatest ascension through technological brilliance, mostly had little access to capital, cultural power, or influence. 

Even if you don’t code, you can be a shape rotator. Use your strangely evolved ability to manipulate symbols and words to scan for the shapes that bind us to one another, and the shapes that form the fabric of our space. Then rotate them to improve our lives as part of a positive-sum game.

The hard sciences won’t let you cheat as easily. Your code won’t run if it doesn’t capture the underlying structure. You can cheat in the social sciences, or as a writer, or a leader, or politician, but you don’t have to.

But what about the Wordchad?

Marc Andreessen @pmarca

Therefore the wordchad.

Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowski

Silly thing about this whole shape rotator vs wordcel meme is that in the limit, they’re equivalent. Deep wordplay requires semantic geometry, as elegant shape rotation requires geometric semantics. But hey, I guess now we have another thing to fight about, so that’s something.

In the above piece, I’ve painted the wordcel purely negatively. But that’s not quite right. Wordchad epistimology can be very useful at imagining and constructing a fake world, that could someday be true. Elizabeth Holmes is a wordcel. Her fake world was not possible. Elon Musk is a wordchad and a rotator. His imagined world can be bridged to from our current world, because he can forecast the abilities of shape rotators to get there.

Jordan Peterson is a wordchad with zero rotation skills, as he offers an imagined future, for your own life, and how it could be better, if you cleaned your room.

Ultimately I leave these questions of the wordchad to future researchers, but do ask that they respect the verbal rotator, and not toss them into the wordcel or wordchad category simply because they use words.