TAKING THE EPISTEMIC CLOSURE OLD SCHOOL--NAY, ANCIENT SCHOOL: The godfather of epistemic closure linked to this on twitter: Plato, "Gorgias" & 'epistemic closure.' Here's a Manzigate-relevant sample:

I don’t think that Mark Levin is a psychopath, or even that he’s lying, just that it’s beside the point if he is. His job isn’t truth- it’s persuasion. The problem is the cross-odds: the Expert uses debate as a means of arriving at truth, but the Orator uses debate to persuade others of their position, regardless of its truth. When political movements start to treat Orators as Experts- or really as their superiors since that they get ‘better numbers’- it’s because they see persuasion- that is, power- as being roughly interchangeable with truth. ‘Epistemic closure’, I think, is really this problem of scale- an inability to tell the higher from the lower.