Leaving cults: I've heard some accounts. One particular dynamic is that leaving a cult you're born into is profoundly different from leaving a cult you joined. In the former case, you made a committment to it, and were converted. In the latter, the cult is all you've ever known, and it is normality. On the other hand, looking outside of it, you may find specific discrepencies.

The tendency for new adherents and converts to just about anything to become more Catholic than the Pope, as they say, is fairly strong.

The process of leaving plays into another Dreddit essay I've had in mind for a while, on the concept of Enlightenment, Revelation, and Catastrophe, all three words which have a common base meaning: of a thing having light shone upon it, being revealed, uncloaked, or overturned. There's a modern mystic who's got a brief quote about enlightenment not being pleasant: "Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true."

Of course, another option is to replace one mythical system with another....

The Dreddit: I think "philosophical work in process" is truer than I'd care. On the positive side, I've got a sense of the size of the canvas. On the negative side, it's rather large for any one person to work. Explaining to those close to me what it's about and where it's leading is increasingly problematic.... On the practical side, it's been difficult to hash out a proper working environment for writing complex bits. At the same time, I've been exploring a large scope of literature that illuminates various parts of the puzzle in interesting ways. There has been much enlightenment going on (and frustration with conventional understanding). I'm finding to a very large extent that the ideas I'm having are not novel, merely not widely accepted. Frequently they're widely attacked.

Governance: Government is inherently a system for ajudicating differences of opinion, so it's often going to be contradictory. Human society is a complex system, and the needs of any one part are often at conflict with those of another, though the system as a whole should be benefited by some balance of interests. A modern kitchen has spigots, drains, a refrigerator, and a stove. This doesn't mean that sources or sinks or cold or hot are good or bad. It's that each has an appropriate place.

People's interests are frequently rivalrous. Government helps balance those interests.

Mind all that, getting some sense of what is or isn't in the ultimate common interest is a really good thing to have, and I don't think we've got that. A tremendous number of my questions come down to "what's good, what's bad", which then requires some basis for determining what is good or bad. In AI there's concern over numerous aspects, one of which is the Paperclip Maximiser scenario: even an otherwise benign AI whose only directive is to maximise creation of paperclips is ultimately an existential threat. Our social goal measures -- GDP, profit, etc., seem problematic. There are other measures of net function, White's Law (total energy throughput) comes to mind. Balancing present and future flows is another.

Complexity of legislation and legal matters is yet another element, though of course, that complexity feeds on itself as it keeps the lawyers in pay.

Assessing narratives: It's not enough to have internal consistency, you also need to have accurate anchors to reality. What drives me most nuts is conspiracy theory crud that's got some foundational basis. There's an example, "It's all a Rich Man's Game", a ~3h 40m YouTube video which connects the 2007/8 financial crisis, 9/11, the Bushes, JFK, WWII, Hitler, etc., etc., into one continuous narrative. There are parts that are actually quite unambiguously true (corporate America's involvement and collaboration with Nazi Germany: IBM, GM, Ford, AT&T, Coca-Cola, and more) for example. But there are also parts that are utterly fabricated (or at least for which I could find no documentation) and others for which either false connections were drawn or very selective quotation was used (JFK's "Secret Society" speech -- about the USSR, not some dark Skull and Bones society plot). I didn't find any known-to-me contradictions until about 20 minutes in, but then they started popping up all over, and there may well be earlier ones. I'll look up vargas's posts....

There's also a reason I feel reputation has to be part of any widespread assessment system. If you've got a source who's known to propogate bullshit, then you do not trust them by default. If someone you do trust says "actually, this looks like it has merits", you might change your mind. The question of who you do trust is an interesting one, as trust can be (and will be) betrayed. But in general it's food for a while. Admissions of error are another crucial element (a chief reason I refuse to engage at length with those who cannot do so).

There's also the question of story relevance. To pluck from current headlines, I turned away from the BBC a day or so back when they insisted on spending 10+ minutes discussing the "clown scare". I don't find that to be worth however many millions of global ears the BBC might claim, and there are other stories worth covering.

On Matrix & cross-validation: I actually think diving in to minutiae is the wrong approach. It's attractive, and sometimes yields benefits, but also seems to be a common trait of the crackpot. Instead, get multiple accounts from multiple witnesses and compare them. To take a Biblical instance, there's the story of Susanna from the Book of Daniel: a bathing wife is accused by lecherous voyeurs of adultry after refusing sex with them. She is about to be put to death when Daniel insists on questioning the accusers, separately. They proceed to identify different (and very-different sized) trees under which she met her supposed lover. Susanna is set free and the accusers executed.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susanna_(Book_of_Daniel)

I've had my own similar experiences in examining stories from others, sometimes multiple people, sometimes the same.

Podesta emails: Another interesting situation. Here you've got the subtle conspiracist's dream: a vast trove of documents from which either slight alteration or selective quotation can prove highly destructive. It's a primary reason why I'm leary of having an extensive online trove of billions of people's mundane activities. The size of the trove itself makes ready assessment difficult (the Panama Papers and other similar leaks have much the same problem), unless you can find a specific narrative thread OR a specific critical moment or element within the documents to make your case.

Some years ago I found myself part to a legal proceeding in which the opposing party was accusing my side of specific actions, though with little other than testimonial evidence. What the other side didn't realise was that my team had access (and evidentiary claim) to a large document archive which established motive and lack of credibility. From a set of many thousands of documents, defending counsel presented three documents. Witness for the plaintif first established that the documents were theirs (credibility). The next two presented the crucial evidence necessary to utterly demolish the case. The key I took from this was that if you can get to the very heart of the matter, that's often all you need.

In the Podesta case, I've seen one instance where a published opinion piece (not written by Podesta) was claimed by Wikileaks and Trump supporters to have been Podesta's own words. They quite manifestly weren't (fully independent verification trivially possible), which impugns the credibility of Trump's team (hardly necessary) and Wikileaks (a massive blunder and mis-step on their part) tremendously.

A particular risk of mass document dumps is the Gish Gallop. In my courtroom case, courtroom discipline itself imposed harsh limits on testimony: you've only a few brief hours in many instances, and going beyond this with exhaustive documentation frequently isn't possible. There are exceptions to this rule, but those are very well-funded trials (and quite expensive). The ability of a disinterested third party to impose that discipline is crucial.

Good thoughts again.