A good essay on framing, reading, and thinking

The essay A Framework for Reclaiming Reality is a great example of good reading on the Internet today.

The author, Jonathan Revusky, skewers a good deal of what passes for thought and analysis in modern society. Whether you agree with every point he makes, his case is a strong one and surely mostly correct.

A lot of the fun of articles like Revusky’s comes in the comments section. For essays like this, I usually read most of the first comments plus all of the author’s replies, but skip a good deal of the back-and-forth between commenters.

Revusky is concerned with macro-societal-and-history-level BS and he nails a lot of it. A good deal of what he describes is the same as what I often describe as “public semiotics,” political positions (and others) which function more as social signals than real thought and that often are dead wrong.

If you can see Revusky’s point on the macro scale, you should be able to also see that we all do a lot of that sort of thing on the micro and meso scales of interpersonal communication and belief.

I have categorized this post under “Buddhism” because I believe a good deal of what the Buddha meant by delusion is falling for BS public (and private) semiotics.