The phenomenology of dissensus: Zetetic rituals for a flat earth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reparative theory is a means of comprehending the allure of distortions through the fundamental needs they fulfill. Considering the ongoing collapse of consensus reality into a world fractured by multiple intersecting crises, our collective sense of truth is becoming unglued. Here, conspiritualities like flat-earth theory are emerging as praxes of sense-making. Filling the void left by the absence of a shared narrative, as coercive forms of authority prove inadequate to the task of either processing or suppressing our intensities, I argue that we are becoming disoriented and detached from our phenomenological senses. The phenomenological rituals of flat-earth theory return to the flatness of the earth to ground the senses in an immanent world, confronting the fragility of a consensus failing to redress its regular production of dissensus. As the pressures of social rupture tear apart the fabric of our existence, dissensus realities offer those on the margins a way to navigate their phenomenological differences—making sense of an incoherent world by radically reducing its complexity. Analyzing primary flat-earth texts, YouTube videos, blog posts, and maps, I explore how Zetetic Astronomy interrogates the epistemological foundations of our current reality with both destructive and liberatory potentials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".