So there’s that meme with the levels of enlightenment or whatever that you see everywhere. My question, (because my the density of my skull prevents me from absorbing it naturally) is how does this relate to the slate star codex crowd? Please and thank you.
The basic structure of the Expanding Brain meme is that it starts with a normal or correct idea or behavior, then escalates in progressively more bizarre/pretentious/esoteric/“hot take” ways. Obviously it doesn’t always follow that exact structure, but the basic idea that “galaxy brain = absurd position” holds.
When people say that some SSCer’s comment is a “galaxy brain take”, they mean that what that person said was something that a normal person would have had as one of the parody takes in an Expanding Brain meme.
As an example, if you had an Expanding Brain meme about female and minority representation in STEM, the smaller brains might be things like “society discourages women from pursuing interests in STEM fields” or “hiring processes often discriminate against minorities”. And then the galaxy brained take would be something like “women and minorities are too stupid to do STEM”. And whaddaya know, that’s exactly the answer SSC will give you if you ask them why tech is almost all white men.
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