The Offense of Neil Shenvi
Why they hate him so...
Neil has been doing some really interesting stuff with Twitter followings lately. People forget he's a scientist not a theologian.
I've been chatting about emergent spiritual powers lately
@Freakoutery and followership, the some emergent spiritual powers express themselves through audience capture is a profoundly powerful force in this battleground.
Why do this sort of analysis? I think it's SUPER helpful actually, if we can be adult about it. There is currently MAJOR drama in the economic and religious marketplace we call "evangelicalism". On some levels it's a strange thing.
Why might a Roman Catholic see @jordanbpeterson as a hero and his own Pope as a traitor? Why might a member of the PCA think @timkellernyc is a traitor while loving @ConceptualJames ? By virtue of formal alignments this might seem irrational but it is in fact common.
Our usual surface ways of mapping the world don't often adequately account for it but the dynamic is really an expression of centered-set rather than bounded-set dynamics.
Mining the data to map these dynamics does us all a service. We, and our communities, especially in the midst of "spiritual warfare" could use better data.
Being pissed at @NeilShenvi for this is sort of like being angry at your therapist for serving up something you didn't like to see about yourself. Disregard his analysis if you like, but when he's serving up data, it's best to face it.
What people regularly fail to appreciate about him is that he's a scientist. He's not so much doing analysis the way a historian or theologian would do, he's code checking with words.
When he's trying to illuminate data like Twitter followership he's mapping NOT the formal bounded set tribal structures, but the centered-set emergent structures. This is VERY useful for watching an emergent, dynamic context. I follow his work.
I don't follow "evangelical Twitter" pretty much at all, but I have a theory as to the pushback to this kind of data collection-- it's that while Shenvi may be a good actor and approaching the data scientifically, there is and has been various instances of people using Twitter-follower information as a "guilt by association" as a way to discredit or condemn someone adjacent to someone else they don't like. This happened a few years back when (I can't remember who did it, Buzzfeed or one of those organizations) was trying to link Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan among others to unsavory rightwing/alt-right figures on Twitter based on some of these kinds of statistics, similar followers also following others. While the data may be valuable and useful, I think there is some rightful trepidation concerning this kind of inquiry. There have been many instances in the recent past where people have not been good-faith actors and pseudo-scientific with this kind of data.
I hope this isn't a stupid question, but how is your analysis of sense-making - which you present as a sort of third-person perspective - not also limited? In other words, how do you yourself rise above the limits of sense-making to see limits of sense-making? What you accuse modernity of doing, you are doing in this video, Paul. It seems inescapable.