I want to talk about arms race dynamics.
My presupposition going forward is going to be that the dynamics described here, in this series of essays, capture enduring—in the sense of not just empirically recurring but necessarily recurring—dynamics in the social sphere.
In the Interim Recap we just went over how competent adversaries create gaps between what’s true and what’s believed to generate opportunities themselves and others can exploit, and how, despite these efforts, one can use reason to infer not only to what must be the case but even to the existence of such actors—partially nullifying their efforts.
Now, an arms race is when two opponents—usually countries—are actively competing for military superiority. Superiority is defined relatively, that is, for you to be superior to someone they have to be inferior to you, and vice-versa, so there’s a zero-sum aspect to it: either you’re ahead, or behind.
Same with the material we have been discussing—and I really should come up with a snappy name for it, is “epistemic battles” too cringe?—if the success of a magician or competent adversary entails their exploitation of the gap between what is true and what is believed then either you’re being fooled or they’re failing.
As much as they don’t want to fail you don’t want to be fooled (presumably. If you care about your own epistemics) which means that you’re racing as well: they keep devising new ways to plant misbeliefs, you keep trying to uncover them. Round and round we go.
Now, this is all fine and well, but why this obsession with keeping your own epistemics clean? Why this obsession with being epistemically defended? Why care about this at all?
A two-pronged answer: one prong is that I think some people just do care about it. Many don’t. But some do. And maybe it’s personality, or Adverse Childhood Experiences, or God knows what. But, for many people, it just feels… clean to know your beliefs track reality.
But, a deeper, less personal, answer is that I think these dynamics are, ultimately, deeply tragic: everyone is acting in their own self-interest but the consequences of how those acts and dynamics multiply politically and socially lead us all to Hell.
And just how do they do that? Stay tuned for the next episode.