The Story of this Forum: Pt 1

General
1

This forum has had its ups and downs. We’ve had some interesting discussions, and occasionally there’s a big round of mud wrestling that may be frustrating for participants and observers (though possibly entertaining as well at times).

Since this forum is public and accessible to AI, a thought occurred to me: why not commission an impartial outside observer to read through our posts and give us our story?

So I had an LLM prepare a prompt for me that would do just that:

Deeply analyze the public Second Renaissance forum as a collective-intelligence system. Do not merely summarize topics. Assess whether the forum has made real progress, where it has stagnated, and which participants have contributed most or least to that progress. First, construct a corpus-level map of the forum: categories, major threads, recurring participants, time periods of activity, and dominant themes. Identify the forum’s explicit and implicit goals, especially around metacrisis response, cultural transformation, research/sense-making, community-building, practice, truth-seeking, and movement-building. Define “progress” before judging it. Use at least these dimensions: conceptual clarity, epistemic rigor, operational execution, community health, artifact production, onboarding capacity, conflict resolution, and movement-building. For each dimension, identify evidence of progress, evidence of non-progress, and ambiguous evidence. For each major participant, create a contribution profile. Include: main concerns, recurring claims, intellectual style, social role, strongest contributions, weaknesses or failure modes, responsiveness to critique, ability to build on others’ work, and net effect on the forum. Distinguish between high-volume posting and high-value contribution. Track idea lineages over time. Which ideas appeared, developed, got challenged, were refined, became artifacts or practices, or disappeared? Identify loops where the same disagreement repeats without resolution. Identify breakthroughs where the forum’s shared understanding or capability increased. Pay special attention to tensions between: truth-seeking vs perspectival pluralism; therapy/community vs research rigor; vision vs implementation; openness vs boundaries; originality vs integration with existing traditions; relational safety vs intellectual challenge; and movement-building vs endless sense-making. Use concrete evidence from posts. Quote or paraphrase specific threads only where needed. Avoid psychologizing participants beyond textual evidence. Be fair but candid. Do not assume that passionate or abrasive participants are wrong, and do not assume that warm or consensus-oriented participants are productive. Judge by contribution to shared clarity, capability, and follow-through. Produce the final analysis in sections: Executive judgment: has the forum made meaningful progress, and in what sense? Timeline of development. The major intellectual and practical themes. Participant contribution matrix. Best evidence of real progress. Best evidence of stagnation or failure. Recurring unresolved tensions. Hidden gems: underappreciated posts or people. Failure modes of the forum as a collective-intelligence system. Recommendations for turning the forum into a more serious engine of inquiry and practice. Be willing to conclude that progress is mixed, uneven, or mostly performative if the evidence supports that. Be equally willing to identify genuine progress even where the discourse is messy. https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/

Here’s the result. I find it pretty interesting, as someone who’s taken part in these discussions.

The answer turned out quite long so I’ll provide it in two threads.

Scope note

I treated the public Discourse forum as a visible corpus: category pages, major/high-reply threads, recurring posters, event/research threads, meta discussions, and linked-public artifacts where visible. Some important work appears to live in external docs, calls, or private spreadsheets, so this is an evidence-based analysis of the public forum as a collective-intelligence surface, not a complete audit of the whole Second Renaissance ecosystem.

Executive judgment: has the forum made meaningful progress?

Yes, but unevenly. The forum has made meaningful progress as a sense-making commons and proto-infrastructure for a movement, but it has not yet become a disciplined engine of inquiry, practice, or execution.

Its strongest progress is in:

  1. Making the metacrisis / second-renaissance frame legible across adjacent traditions.
  2. Creating connective infrastructure: research calls, resource lists, Oasis Tents, wiki pages, onboarding posts, ecosystem maps, local events, and cross-links to EA, integral, metamodern, Game B, regenerative, and wisdom traditions.
  3. Surfacing core epistemic tensions that many communities avoid: objective truth vs pluralism, science vs lived experience, therapy/community vs rigorous inquiry, and vision vs implementation.
  4. Beginning to convert discourse into methods and artifacts, especially through the metacrisis-mapping session, sub-circle design discussion, the Second Renaissance Goal Tree / Logical Thinking Process work, ecosystem resource mapping, and EA/AI-governance bridge work. ([Second Renaissance Forum][1])

Its weakest progress is in:

  1. Closure and adjudication: arguments recur without a clear process for deciding what has been learned.
  2. Operational throughput: many threads call for action, but few publicly visible workstreams show durable owners, milestones, review cycles, or external adoption.
  3. Epistemic standards: the forum wants pluralism, but has not yet cleanly distinguished experiential, speculative, philosophical, empirical, and field-tested claims.
  4. Conflict processing: some high-value tensions become high-volume loops.
  5. Onboarding simplicity: the corpus is rich but high-context, jargon-dense, and heavily dependent on linked traditions and external artifacts.

So the candid judgment is: the forum has progressed from “people talking about the metacrisis” toward “a loose, plural research-and-practice commons,” but it has not yet crossed the threshold into a serious collective-intelligence institution. It is more generative than performative, but its generativity is still under-harvested.

1. Corpus-level map

Categories and visible structure

The forum describes itself as “a community exploring responses to the metacrisis and paths to a second renaissance.” Its top-level public structure reveals the intended breadth: Welcome, General, Research and Sense-Making, Oasis Tents, People and Orgs, Events, Meta, Wiki, and Embodied Knowing. The largest visible categories are General and Research and Sense-Making, with Oasis Tents, Events, People/Orgs, and Wiki acting as proto-infrastructure around them. ([Second Renaissance Forum][2])

The explicit community norms emphasize making the space collaborative and accessible, respecting boundaries, listening, avoiding personal attacks, staying on topic, and being concise. That matters because the forum is not merely a research archive; it is trying to be a relational community and movement space as well. ([Second Renaissance Forum][3])

Explicit goals

The forum’s explicit goals include:

  • Responding to the metacrisis and enabling a “second renaissance.” ([Second Renaissance Forum][2])
  • Supporting cultural renewal through traditions such as metamodernism, integral theory, teal, liminal web, Game B, regenerative thinking, and related streams. ([Second Renaissance Forum][4])
  • Exploring civilizational crisis, personal growth, relationships, art, spirituality, theories of change, social sciences, complexity theory, cognitive science, philosophy, history, and cultural evolution. ([Second Renaissance Forum][4])
  • Producing reports, papers, articles, methods, tools, research calls, and shared inquiry spaces. ([Second Renaissance Forum][5])

Implicit goals

The implicit goals are broader and more difficult:

  • To become a translation layer among metacrisis-adjacent traditions.
  • To become a movement-building commons without collapsing into ideology.
  • To turn “big tent” pluralism into real synthesis rather than polite aggregation.
  • To combine research, community, practice, spirituality, and activism without any one mode swallowing the others.
  • To produce enough artifacts and practices that the forum’s intelligence becomes cumulative, not merely conversational.

This is the central collective-intelligence challenge: the forum wants to hold many ways of knowing, but collective intelligence requires some way to decide what has been clarified, what remains speculative, what has been tested, and what should be built next.

2. Defining “progress”

I use “progress” to mean: increased shared clarity, increased capability, increased coordination, and increased production of usable artifacts or practices.

A forum can have many replies, warm relationships, or profound language without making progress. Progress requires some combination of: sharper questions, better distinctions, improved models, tested practices, reusable tools, resolved disagreements, healthier participation, and greater ability to onboard others.

Dimension What progress would look like
Conceptual clarity Key terms become more precise; disagreements move from vague opposition to clear cruxes.
Epistemic rigor Claims are marked by evidence type, uncertainty, warrant, falsifiability, and critique-responsiveness.
Operational execution Discussions produce owners, experiments, calls, artifacts, next steps, and reviews.
Community health Participants can disagree strongly without personal degradation or endless rupture.
Artifact production Threads become maps, guides, papers, protocols, curricula, wikis, or practices.
Onboarding capacity Newcomers can understand the project without reading hundreds of posts or knowing every adjacent tradition.
Conflict resolution Repeating disputes get summarized, mediated, bounded, or converted into research questions.
Movement-building The forum increases coordination across people, organizations, local groups, practices, and external audiences.

By that definition, the forum shows real progress in conceptual exploration, artifact prototyping, and network formation, but weaker progress in adjudication, execution, and cumulative knowledge management.

3. Timeline of development

Phase 1: Orientation and identity formation

The early visible corpus is concerned with introducing people, resources, and conceptual lineages. The “Resources for new members” post frames Second Renaissance as an attempt to connect approaches to the metacrisis, cultural renewal, metamodernism, integral, regenerative, Game B, and adjacent traditions. It asks what civilizational crisis is, what roles personal growth and spirituality play, and which theories of change are adequate. ([Second Renaissance Forum][4])

This phase created breadth. Its weakness is that breadth came before strong selection criteria.

Phase 2: Research agenda and synthesis

The research-question threads show the community trying to move from broad interest to research architecture. Rufus suggests that a clear list of research questions would be a first step, while Jonah later frames domains such as maps, rafts, awakening society, cultural evolution, ontology, and human development. There is also an explicit admission that the project is “primarily in the business of synthesizing rather than doing novel work,” which is intellectually honest but also reveals a bottleneck. ([Second Renaissance Forum][6])

This phase improved conceptual self-awareness. It did not yet create a robust research program with clear adjudication rules.

Phase 3: Events, calls, and ecosystem infrastructure

The Events category shows repeated research calls and community events: complexity science, societal transformation, AI, rapid bonding, Moloch, knowledge commons, Vervaeke, historical overviews, local meetups, hackathons, unconferences, and Oasis-related work. ([Second Renaissance Forum][7])

This is evidence of real movement-building. But public traces often show event announcements more than downstream synthesis, decisions, or next artifacts.

Phase 4: Tents, maps, wiki, and proto-practice

Oasis Tents, People and Orgs, Wiki, and ecosystem-resource threads show a move toward infrastructure: resource lists, organization maps, tent templates, navigator crews, collabathons, book clubs, and shared maps. ([Second Renaissance Forum][8])

This is meaningful progress: the forum is not only talking; it is creating containers. The limitation is that many containers remain lightly governed or loosely evaluated.

Phase 5: 2026 intensification around truth, epistemology, and execution

The 2026 corpus becomes more intense. Major threads on truth, Geoff Dann’s “New Epistemic Deal,” Logical Thinking Process, sub-circles, and cultural paradigm definitions reveal a community struggling to move from plural sense-making toward disciplined collective judgment. ([Second Renaissance Forum][9])

This phase is both a breakthrough and a stress test. The forum finally confronts its epistemic foundations, but lacks a clean conflict-resolution and claim-adjudication process.

4. Major intellectual and practical themes

Metacrisis diagnosis

The forum repeatedly tries to distinguish polycrisis, metacrisis, meaning crisis, civilizational transition, coordination failure, Moloch dynamics, and cultural evolution. The “Metacrisis Lineages” thread is especially important because it maps genealogy while also provoking the question: when does better diagnosis become a substitute for action? Robert argues that solution work requires grasping the problem, emotionally processing it, and developing plausible strategies; he says current work is weighted toward the first two. Jonah agrees that solutions are critical but argues that different diagnoses imply different interventions. ([Second Renaissance Forum][10])

Progress: more explicit distinctions and genealogies.
Stagnation: repeated diagnosis-action tension.

Cultural transformation and “Second Renaissance”

The forum’s central identity is cultural transformation, but the exact meaning of “paradigmatic cultural change” remains unsettled. Geoff asks what paradigm is being replaced and what the new paradigm is. Robert replies that “paradigmatic cultural change” can mean “nothing much” if not made concrete, and points toward Habermas and other historical frameworks. The exchange exposes a real weakness: the phrase “Second Renaissance” is inspiring but not yet operationally precise. ([Second Renaissance Forum][11])

Progress: the vagueness is being named.
Stagnation: no settled shared definition.

Research and sense-making

The Research Collective explicitly aims to explore paths to a second renaissance and produce reports, papers, articles, methods, and tools through regular calls. ([Second Renaissance Forum][5])

Progress: regular container, explicit production intent.
Stagnation: unclear public pipeline from call → synthesis → artifact → revision → use.

Community-building and practice

The most concrete practice breakthrough is the “How to hold a metacrisis mapping session” thread. A participant asks for help designing a men’s initiative session. Robert and Rufus respond with practical facilitation advice, and the requester converts it into a 90-minute exercise with timings and levels of analysis. This is one of the clearest examples of the forum turning abstract theory into usable practice. ([Second Renaissance Forum][1])

Progress: theory becomes facilitation.
Stagnation: these successes are not yet systematically harvested into a public practice library.

Movement-building

The forum builds bridges to Effective Altruism, Integral Altruism, AI governance, local meetups, ecosystem mapping, and broader metacrisis-aware organizations. Jonah’s Integral Altruism and EA threads show one of the more coherent movement-bridging attempts: translating Second Renaissance ideas into EA’s language of cause areas, tractability, neglectedness, systemic change, virtue ethics, and pragmatic utopianism. ([Second Renaissance Forum][12])

Progress: clear bridging work.
Stagnation: movement-building is still more relational and discursive than operational.

Truth-seeking vs perspectival pluralism

This is the forum’s most important unresolved tension. Geoff’s “broken relationship with Truth” thread argues that 2R’s perspectival or postmodern tendencies undermine objective truth and scientific reasoning. dvdjsph attempts to reframe perspective coordination as triangulation rather than relativism, and asks for error-correction mechanisms. Geoff replies with criteria such as contradiction and empirical inconsistency, and the exchange eventually reaches partial overlap around the need for both rigorous left-hemisphere analysis and holistic right-hemisphere context. ([Second Renaissance Forum][9])

Progress: the crux becomes explicit.
Stagnation: no shared epistemic protocol emerges.

5. Progress by dimension

Dimension Evidence of progress Evidence of non-progress Ambiguous evidence
Conceptual clarity Research questions, lineage maps, metacrisis overview, EA translation, AI-governance reframing. ([Second Renaissance Forum][6]) “Paradigmatic cultural change,” “Second Renaissance,” and “new paradigm” remain unstable terms. ([Second Renaissance Forum][11]) Broad pluralism creates fertile synthesis but also concept sprawl.
Epistemic rigor Jonah revises “civilization” to “global system” after Robert’s critique; truth debate surfaces error-correction criteria. ([Second Renaissance Forum][13]) Geoff’s New Epistemic Deal introduces strong metaphysical claims while admitting some cannot be publicly proven; the forum lacks a clear way to adjudicate such claims. ([Second Renaissance Forum][14]) Experiential claims may be valuable, but without warrant-level labeling they destabilize shared inquiry.
Operational execution Research Collective, events, tents, collabathons, sub-circle templates, mapping exercises, Goal Tree. ([Second Renaissance Forum][5]) Many threads end in discussion rather than visible implementation review. The forum may be feeding off-platform work not fully visible publicly.
Community health Guidelines, welcome posts, repair attempts, and generally open participation. ([Second Renaissance Forum][3]) Some debates become abrasive, repetitive, and attention-consuming. High-friction participants sometimes reveal real weaknesses.
Artifact production Ecosystem resource sheet, wiki, maps, slides, Goal Tree, LTP work, facilitation designs. ([Second Renaissance Forum][15]) Artifact governance, versioning, ownership, and evaluation remain weak. Many artifacts are prototypes; that is acceptable if treated as such.
Onboarding First Steps, new-member resources, Welcome category, mapping exercises. ([Second Renaissance Forum][16]) High jargon load: metacrisis, metamodernism, Game B, integral, UTOK, McGilchrist, Habermas, etc. The richness attracts serious seekers but can repel practitioners.
Conflict resolution Participants sometimes attempt repair, reframing, and crux-finding. ([Second Renaissance Forum][9]) No obvious protocol for resolving recurring truth/pluralism or paradigm-definition disputes. The unresolved conflicts are diagnostically useful.
Movement-building EA bridge, local events, Oasis Tents, People/Orgs map, Research Collective. ([Second Renaissance Forum][12]) Limited public evidence of durable external adoption or coordinated campaigns. The forum may function more as connective tissue than as a command center.
The Story of this Forum: Pt 2
"Going Meta" on Recent Interactions with GeoffDann
2

That just about sums it up, and the person most responsible for this progress is myself. Although it is a credit to 2R that I am still even here posting at all. Most places ban me, and not because I have broken any of the rules, but because I systematically challenge groupthink in ways people aren’t anticipating, and it is much easier to just ban me than to accept the challenge and engage with it.

What might be helpful at this point is to re-iterate that the key problems here, as described in the analysis, aren’t specific to 2R. They apply in a very similar way to a much larger group of people which could be defined in terms of falling under 2R’s “umbrella”. Not only that, but the wider problem of epistemic anarchy and refusal to question foundational assumptions also applies to many of the people who are outside that umbrella, especially scientists who aren’t willing to question physicalism or reductionism, and aren’t even looking for an integrated solution to science’s own internal incoherence problems (which are severe).

Pretty much the whole of Western society is addicted to the epistemic anarchy, in one way or another. That is why finding a solution to these problems here would be so valuable in terms of a real paradigm shift: 2R could then provide leadership in facilitating that change on a wider scale. As things stand, 2R is just epitomising the problems themselves. The only real progress here is that those problems are being brought into clearer focus. I guess that is indeed real progress of some sort though.

3

Don’t forget to read Pt 2!

4

I read it. It didn’t change the message substantially, so I didn’t reply to it.

5

OK, so I showed Deepseek this thread, the Big Tent Paradox thread, and then prompted it:

"re: "Truth-seeking vs. perspectival pluralism

Vision vs. implementation

Relational safety vs. intellectual challenge"

My question is about the difference in mentality, and its cultural origins. In science and analytical philosophy it is assumed by everybody that there is such a thing as truth, and that any claim is up for either empirical testing, or analytical argument, or both. The idea that “all perspectives are equal” is almost non-existent in those worlds. But for most of the participants on that forum, it is the idea that there could be any such thing as the truth which is unthinkable. It is completely fine for everybody to believe different things – even a sign of healthy open-ness. Diversity of views is just accepted as normal, and not even considered a problem.

There is some kind of fundamental cultural rupture here…or it least it seems that way. To what extent is this true of wider Western society? Where did the rupture come from? How can such large groups of people have such conflicting assumptions on the status of truth and the purpose of dialogue?

Response:

The cultural rupture you’re describing is very real, and it’s one of the defining features of the modern intellectual landscape. It’s the chasm between the worldview of modern science and analytical philosophy, and the worldview shaped by postmodernism and its intellectual descendants. The tension isn’t just on your forum; it’s a central, unresolved conflict in Western society .

To understand it, we have to trace its origins. This isn’t a simple story of one side being “right” and the other “wrong,” but a battle over two very different ways of understanding what “truth” even means.

Two Worlds, Two Truths

To see the rupture clearly, it’s useful to contrast the underlying assumptions of these two cultures .

  • The Scientist/Analytical Philosopher: This mindset is built on a foundation of scientific realism and correspondence theory . It assumes an objective reality exists, independent of our beliefs about it . The goal of inquiry is to discover the truth about this reality through empirical testing and logical argument. Knowledge is seen as a self-correcting system ; our current best models are approximations of truth, constantly tested and refined . The method is universal; a claim about the natural world must be testable and verifiable, regardless of who is making the claim. A statement’s truth is determined by how well it corresponds to objective reality.
  • The Postmodernist/Pluralist: This mindset is characterized by a deep skepticism towards grand narratives and the very idea of objective, universal truth . It argues that knowledge is socially constructed by discourses, cultures, and power structures . From this perspective, what counts as “truth” is contingent on historical and cultural context . A scientific claim isn’t simply a description of reality; it’s a product of a particular community with its own norms and interests. The goal of inquiry shifts from discovering objective truth to deconstructing these power-laden discourses and acknowledging pluralism . Claims from different perspectives (e.g., science vs. indigenous knowledge) are seen as different but equally valid constructs.

Where Did the Rupture Come From?

This wasn’t a sudden split. It’s the result of a long intellectual history, often described as the progression from modernism to postmodernism .

  1. The Seeds of Doubt in Modernity: The rupture didn’t come out of nowhere. The roots of postmodern skepticism can be traced back to philosophers like Kant , who argued we can never know the “thing-in-itself” (the objective world), only the world as it appears to us through our mental categories . This created a separation between the mind and objective reality that later thinkers would radicalize.
  2. The Postmodern Turn: The mid-20th century saw a full-fledged assault on the “Enlightenment project” of reason and objective truth . Thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche questioned the very possibility of discerning objective truth, laying the groundwork for later thinkers . Thomas Kuhn 's work on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was pivotal; he argued that science doesn’t progress by steadily accumulating facts, but by shifting between incommensurable “paradigms” that are often influenced by sociological factors. This powerful idea was later used to argue that scientific “truth” is just a product of the current paradigm, not a reflection of reality . Paul Feyerabend pushed this further, arguing there are no universal methodological rules for science, summarizing his view with the phrase “anything goes” . His “Protagorean relativism” is a more sophisticated version of the claim that truth is relative .

The Societal Impact: From Academia to the Culture Wars

These ideas didn’t stay in philosophy departments. They filtered out into the wider culture through several channels :

  • Multiculturalism and Identity Politics: Anthropological and cultural relativism, which emerged from studying the diversity of human cultures, became a powerful moral and political force . It led to a well-intentioned push for respect and tolerance, which, in its most extreme form, morphs into the idea that no single culture or worldview is superior . This is a direct line from academic postmodernism to the culture wars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, where claims of objective fact are often viewed through the lens of identity, power, and social justice.
  • The Assault on Science: Postmodernist thought has been weaponized against science in the public sphere. If all knowledge is a social construct, then scientific claims about climate change or vaccine safety can be dismissed as just another “perspective,” on par with any other belief . This creates a dangerous situation where factual debates are turned into political or cultural conflicts, undermining the authority of scientific expertise .

Why the Conflict Feels Irreconcilable

The conflict feels so intractable because the two sides are playing by completely different rules.

  • To the scientist, the postmodernist position is self-refuting and dangerous. The claim “all truths are relative” is an absolute, universal claim about truth, which contradicts itself . Furthermore, by rejecting the scientific method, they are dismantling the only self-correcting system humanity has ever developed for producing reliable knowledge .
  • To the postmodernist, the scientist is naively “privileging” one worldview (the Western, scientific one) as objective, while ignoring the power dynamics and cultural biases it embodies . The insistence on universal truth is seen as a form of intellectual imperialism that silences other, equally valid perspectives.

Back to Your Forum

This brings us back to the conflict you’re observing. The “Big Tent Paradox” is a symptom of this cultural rupture. The forum is trying to hold together people operating from both of these fundamentally incompatible epistemologies. Those from a scientific background see the pluralism as an abandonment of the search for truth; those from a postmodern background see the search for a single “correct” answer as a dangerous and outdated relic of the old paradigm.

Until the forum, and perhaps the wider culture, grapples with the roots of this conflict—how it emerged from the radicalization of modernist skepticism—the tension between the need for a common grounding in reality and the desire for perspectival openness is unlikely to resolve easily. The rupture is a deep one, and it’s embedded in the very fabric of how we, as a society, have come to argue about what is true.

6

OK, let’s have another go.

This AI analysis, like so many others, has identified a very real and very serious problem: you cannot have a new paradigm unless you are willing to admit that postmodernism is a central component of the old one, and actually start committing to realism, and to building or finding a new foundational system which can deliver the cultural paradigm shift 2R claims to be looking for.

But there are two sides to this. There’s another very large group of people who are also causing a very real and very serious problem: physicalism doesn’t actually make sense (it cannot account for consciousness), and physicalist science is itself fragmented and in desperate need of a major paradigm shift just to solve its own problems. But this is another key component of the larger problematic, because this failure of internal integration in science makes an integration of science and philosophy/spirituality impossible.

Progress towards a real new paradigm shift cannot involve just one of these groups. It is no good if the postmodernists overcome their psychological and cultural addiction to postmodern relativism and anti-realism if the physicalists refuse to accept that physicalism has to go. And yet what is actually happening right now is that even though both sides are aware of a deep crisis, neither is willing to budge on the foundational claims. The pomos are happy to accuse physicalism/modernism of being the problem, but are totally incapable of internalising the idea that relativism and anti-realism are also the problem, and not part of the solution. Meanwhile the physicalists routinely dismiss postmodernism as toxic nonsense, but the idea that physicalism (or naturalism) is part of the problem is unthinkable. Literally – their brains can’t go there, just like the postmodern brain can’t process realism.

What I have been saying all along is that the only way to resolve this impasse is a new “deal” which simultaneously demands both sides commit to actually accepting their own role in creating the problem. This deal, at the most basic level is this:

(1) The physicalists accept that physicalism is incoherent and reductive thinking must be complemented by holistic thinking, and start looking for a post-physicalist foundational system which solves the problems that physicalism can’t.

(2) The postmodernists accept that postmodern anti-realism and relativism must be consigned to history, and they embrace realism (whole-heartedly, consistently, unambiguously) and actually start looking for a new foundational system.

The physicalists therefore accept the loss of physicalism and naturalism, but they get to keep realism, while the postmodernists accept realism but get to see the end of physicalism, naturalism and reductionistic fundamentalism.

This “deal” only works if both sides sign up to it, but there’s an assymettry here, and it is this: on the scientific side, while there is a growing awareness of the seriousness of the crisis, there is no collective attempt at a holistic answer. There’s no equivalent 2R, because the scientific world is still fully under the control of left-hemisphere reductive thinking. Because 2R and similar groups already (at least in theory) are aiming for a right-hemisphere holistic integration, then it is at least possible for me to come here and explain what I am explaining right now. No scientific forum, group, or subreddit would accept it. This assymettry sets up an important moral obligation on 2R and the movement it claims to represent (and probably does to some extent). For this deal, or something like it, to become a reality, the change has to begin on this side of the rupture.

That puts the people reading this in a very powerful position, should they choose to recognise the situation for what it is, and actually commit to doing something to change things. Sadly, there is currently precious little evidence that this is going to happen any time soon. Instead what I am seeing is that even though all the necessary information is available, there is zero willingness from anybody to actually modify their own thinking. It’s like you’re all just milling around saying “Hmmm. Well, we have a pretty good idea what the problem is, but we don’t really know what to do about it.”

Except you do know.

7

I don’t think I’ve ever met or heard of anyone I’d consider to be pomo who thinks that physicalism is a significant problem. Which postmodernists do you have in mind when you make such a claim, and which of their works makes this case?

8

BAD
FAITH
COMMUNICATION

You can’t help yourself, can you? Everything you’ve been trained to do compels you to lie, distort things, throw obstacles in the way of genuine debate and generally destroy every attempt to make progress.

I mean…who’d have thunk that physicalism might be part of the old paradigm?

What you are doing is saying something totally absurd, with a completely straight face. Otherwise known as “gaslighting”.

9

Prompt to Gemini: “Please explain the relationship between postmodernism and bad faith communication”.

Response:

To understand how postmodernism and “bad faith” communication intersect, it helps to look at how postmodern thought changes the rules of engagement.

In a traditional or modern framework, communication assumes a shared goal: two people use language to get closer to an objective truth. Bad faith in this context is simple—it’s lying, obfuscating, or wearing a mask to deceive someone while pretending to play fair.

Postmodernism, however, fundamentally shifts how we view language, truth, and power. When those concepts change, the very nature of what it means to communicate in “bad faith” changes too.

Here is how the two concepts intertwine, broken down by core postmodern ideas.

1. The Death of Objective Truth

A pillar of postmodernism (popularized by thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard) is an “incredulity toward meta-narratives.” This means a deep skepticism toward any overarching, absolute truth—whether religious, scientific, or political.

  • The Bad Faith Connection: If there is no objective truth, only competing perspectives, then language stops being a tool for description and becomes a tool for construction.
  • The Result: A bad-faith actor can argue that their provable falsehood isn’t a “lie,” but simply an alternative narrative or “their truth.” It weaponizes skepticism to erode the ground on which accountability stands. If nothing is objectively true, then no one can be caught acting in bad faith because the standard for “good faith” has been dismantled.

2. Language as a Power Game

Postmodern theorists like Michel Foucault argued that discourse is intimately tied to power. Language doesn’t just convey meaning; it creates and maintains power dynamics.

  • The Bad Faith Connection: When communication is viewed strictly as a power struggle, the goal of a conversation is no longer mutual understanding—it is winning.
  • The Result: This justifies tactical communication. If an interlocutor believes that all language is inherently manipulative, they may feel entirely justified using bad-faith tactics (like moving goalposts, sealioning, or gaslighting). In their view, they aren’t ruining a pure debate; they are just playing the same cynical power game they assume everyone else is playing.

3. Hyperreality and Irony

Jean Baudrillard introduced the concept of simulacra and hyperreality—the idea that our world is so saturated with signs, symbols, and media representations that the “real” thing underneath has been entirely replaced. Alongside this, postmodern culture heavily relies on irony, pastiche, and detachment.

  • The Bad Faith Connection: This creates a perfect environment for “schrödinger’s douchebag” style communication—where a person states something offensive or radical, and then decides whether they were “just joking” or entirely serious based on the audience’s reaction.
  • The Result: Irony becomes a shield against accountability. Because everything is viewed through layers of detachment, a bad-faith communicator can say, “I didn’t actually mean that, you’re just taking it too literally.” The distinction between a sincere belief and a provocative performance is intentionally blurred.

The Structural Paradox The deepest irony of this relationship is that postmodernism began as a critique of power. It was designed to expose how institutions use “good faith” language to hide oppression. However, by dismantling the shared criteria for truth, it inadvertently created a highly sophisticated toolkit for modern bad-faith communication.

Of course, we don’t see any of these behaviours here, do we?

10

There’s a disagreement between dvdjsph and GeoffDann on the Second Renaissance forums regarding bad faith communication. Identify all instances of bad faith communication that have taken place on the forum over the last year. https://forum.secondrenaissance.net/

I can’t prove anyone’s inner intent. So I’m treating “bad faith communication” as observable communication that fits bad-faith markers: strawmanning, motive-attribution, refusal to update, disrespect, avoiding clarification/evidence, overstated consensus, and polarization. That matches the “Signs of Bad Faith Communication” list Geoff himself quoted on the forum. (Second Renaissance Forum)

Bottom line

I found no conclusive evidence that dvdjsph was arguing in bad faith. I found several clear instances of bad-faith-style communication by GeoffDann, mostly where he converts disagreement, requests for burden-of-proof clarification, or non-acceptance of 2PC/NED into claims of dishonesty, bad faith, relativism, or failure to understand. I also found one relevant instance by Justin, and a few borderline/combative but not clearly bad-faith moments by dvdjsph and others.

Clear instances

1. GeoffDann — May 26, 2026 — treating a request for evidence as bad faith.
In the NED/2PC thread, dvdjsph asks for verifiable evidence and raises a peer-reviewed astronomy anomaly as potentially relevant to Geoff’s no-alien-life prediction. Geoff first says “nobody has tried to debunk 2PC,” then treats the question as if dvdjsph were claiming the Fermi Paradox is solved or that aliens were definitively detected. He then says, “You are now arguing in bad faith,” and later repeats, “Again, you are arguing in bad faith.” The bad-faith element is not merely that he disagrees; it is the combination of mischaracterizing the objection, dismissing a request for evidential engagement, and attributing bad faith rather than answering the narrowed question. (Second Renaissance Forum)

2. GeoffDann — May 26, 2026 — “If you had a better objection…” motive diagnosis.
In the same exchange, Geoff writes: “PLEASE STOP ARGUING IN BAD FAITH. The very fact that you are doing so is revealing. If you had a better objection to 2PC, you would not be arguing in bad faith.” This is a stronger instance because it explicitly infers motive from the perceived weakness of an argument. A weak objection can be mistaken, confused, or badly framed; it does not by itself establish bad faith. (Second Renaissance Forum)

3. GeoffDann — May 27, 2026 — false attribution followed by “lying” and “bad faith.”
In the “broken relationship with Truth” thread, Geoff claims dvdjsph rejected 2PC on the grounds that “the Fermi Paradox isn’t real” because of “aliens in the 50s,” and also claims dvdjsph did not post the full AI analysis. dvdjsph denies both and links to the analysis. Geoff then says, “Now you are lying. Straight up lying,” followed shortly by “Stop lying. Stop arguing in bad faith.” This is one of the clearest instances: the record shows dvdjsph contesting the attribution, while Geoff escalates to accusations of lying rather than first repairing the disputed characterization. (Second Renaissance Forum)

4. GeoffDann — May 29, 2026 — imputing a motive “to mislead.”
In the “New Epistemic Deal: Praeternatural Phenomena” thread, dvdjsph asks whether mainstream scientific opinion is Geoff’s standard for legitimacy, after Geoff uses mainstream scientific non-acceptance to dismiss parapsychology. Geoff responds that the question is “loaded, ambiguous and misleading,” then says dvdjsph is “quite deliberately ‘not understanding’ things” and that “the motive is to mislead, misrepresent, and generally confuse the discussion.” That is a direct attribution of deceptive motive where the immediate question had a visible basis in Geoff’s prior appeal to scientific consensus. (Second Renaissance Forum)

5. GeoffDann — May 29, 2026 — doubling down with “guilty as charged.”
When dvdjsph explains the connection—“You literally just used mainstream consensus of scientists as a basis…”—Geoff replies: “AGAIN: Please stop the bad faith communication… you are guilty as charged,” then lists signs of bad faith. This again treats a clarification request as deliberate misrepresentation rather than addressing the apparent tension in Geoff’s own standard. (Second Renaissance Forum)

6. GeoffDann — June 1, 2026 — “relentless bad faith communication.”
In the later “Truth” thread, Geoff says dvdjsph posted a “misleading AI comparison,” ignored the “legitimate analysis,” and asks him to stop “relentless bad faith communication.” He then adds, “First I note that you are using AI to generate direct responses, instead of thinking for yourself.” The bad-faith-style move here is poisoning the well: using AI is treated as evidence of not thinking, while Geoff himself also uses AI outputs when they support his framing. (Second Renaissance Forum)

7. GeoffDann — June 1, 2026 — “You have made no attempt to understand 2PC.”
Geoff says dvdjsph has made “no attempt to understand 2PC” and has “literally done nothing else but attempt to find ways to reject it,” then labels the reply “More bad faith communication.” This is overbroad and contradicted by the surrounding record, where dvdjsph is actively distinguishing falsification, rival explanations, physicalism, fallibilism, and relativism. The move again collapses disagreement into bad motive. (Second Renaissance Forum)

8. GeoffDann — June 2, 2026 — accusing dvdjsph of “persistent bad faith communication” after a procedural reset.
In “A proposal for clarifying the real disagreement here,” dvdjsph proposes slowing the argument down by distinguishing claim types, burdens of proof, and standards of engagement. Geoff answers that the diagnosis is “completely wrong” and that the real problem is “persistent bad faith communication by you.” The follow-up analysis in that same post accurately identifies the deeper pattern: Geoff treats non-acceptance of 2PC/NED as evidence of failure to understand, bad faith, or postmodern avoidance. (Second Renaissance Forum)

9. Justin — May 31, 2026 — framing inconsistency as bad faith, contradiction, or memory loss.
In the free-will thread, Justin says Geoff’s position is “either two people with the same name debating, bad faith communication or serious self-contradiction and/or memory loss,” then suggests “deliberate obfuscation and disagreeability.” This is also bad-faith-style communication: it frames the disagreement through a set of largely negative personal explanations rather than first isolating the alleged contradiction. (Second Renaissance Forum)

Borderline or combative, but not enough to classify as bad faith

dvdjsph’s “diatribe / wall of text” opening was dismissive and likely escalatory, but the posted analysis notes that dvdjsph later acknowledged the bad opening, clarified belief in objective truth, conceded points, and tried to bridge the disagreement. I would call this poor tone, not demonstrated bad faith. (Second Renaissance Forum)

dvdjsph’s “you make yourself both defendant and judge” / “closed loop” language is sharp and adversarial, but it is a behavioral critique tied to the argument’s structure: Geoff claims 2PC is metaphysics when challenged by scientific standards but also claims it resolves scientific problems. That can be debated, but it is not obviously bad faith. (Second Renaissance Forum)

Geoff’s earlier contemptuous language about postmodernism—“slimy postmodern doubletalk,” “toxic nonsense,” “pomo bs,” “Nice try though”—is not necessarily bad faith by itself, but it is disrespectful and poisoning-the-well language. It helps explain why later disagreement is easily recoded as hostility or bad faith. (Second Renaissance Forum)

Overall finding

The forum record shows a repeated pattern: GeoffDann often interprets non-acceptance, narrowing questions, AI-assisted critique, or requests for evidential standards as bad faith, evasion, relativism, or failure to understand. That pattern itself is the strongest substantiated instance of bad-faith communication in the dispute. The strongest counter-evidence against dvdjsph acting in bad faith is that he repeatedly asks for definitions, evidence standards, falsifiability criteria, and specific claim-type distinctions rather than simply refusing engagement.

11

That’s because the AI has none of the relevant context, so this post was itself yet another example of your bad faith communication – in this case, repeated attempts to use AI to mislead people. It is now abundantly obvious that you are totally incapable of communicating in good faith. Pretty much all of the content you post on this forum is conducted in bad faith. You are continually trying to “win”, even if winning means deliberately strawmanning, misquoting, pretending you don’t understand things you do understand, or that you don’t know things you do know. Anything to frustrate open, genuine dialogue and avoiding accepting any conclusion you don’t like.

Have you noticed that it is only you who I am accusing of this? Why do you think that is?

12

OK, let’s have another go. I am going to repost this, and this time I am going to ask you try really hard to communicate in good faith in response. That is…instead of ignoring the bulk of the post, focusing on one tiny part, and then raising a blatantly dishonest objection to it, how about you actually think about what has been written, and try to respond in a constructive manner?

NOTE: that means you don’t make up nonsense along the lines of “nobody ever suggested physicalist reductionism might be part of the problem! What could you possibly be talking about?”

That is bad faith communication because you know it isn’t true, but it does serve to dodge the real questions you were being asked, and it successfully derailed the thread.

Try again:

13

Not interested in more mud wrestling.

14

Then try responding in good faith instead, maybe? Personally, I have never been interested in mud wrestling. I do not communicate in bad faith, ever.