November 27, 2024 • 35 mins
Does Eric Weinstein have an opinion about anything? What is Hegel's Dialectic? Good theory vs. bad theory? Let's discuss falsification, Max Weber, and why is there more bullshit than truth in the world? We end this episode by discussing why we need "Value-Free Research".
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(00:00):
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
Eric Weinstein, does this man have an opinion about anything?
What the heck is Hegel's dialectic? How do you discuss a good theory from a bad theory? Let's discuss falsification.
Max Weber, Max Weber, will we ever really know? And why is there more bullshit than truth in the world?
We end this episode trying to bully you into some proper social justice, but Real Talk, we just want more value-free research.
(00:31):
Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, right?
Weinstein, Weinstein.
Yeah, Eric Weinstein. He was on the Modern Wisdom podcast, and he's like, everyone gets so mad at me because I take on every side and it looks like I have no opinions.
But it's not that. It's actually I am synthesizing. I am trying to do the things that in academia we are supposed to be doing as an antithesis to the political science people who are just going to ideologically hold to a thesis.
(00:59):
Say you're working in like mathematics or physics. It's not like you learn every single mathematic evolution to that point to then develop it.
You know, and here we go. I'm blanking on the word, but you take those scientific assumptions that are agreed upon and then you take some things of interest and then you work upon it and then you build your theory.
Well, so this is like Hegel's dialectic, right? Taking a thesis.
(01:22):
And then antithesis.
Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, synthesizing.
Do you know something? I made this point in my class, right? So I'm surrounded by social workers. I'm in an MSW program. Everybody's left-leaning. Everybody's liberal bias. Everybody's a humanitarian bias.
It's totally out there. I brought something up and it wasn't even agreed upon. People were like kind of against this in a certain way.
(01:44):
Like I felt a little bit resistance in the small group that I was discussing it. And what I said was, is, OK, this is a complex world.
We can't we discuss complex things and we discuss complex theories and we discuss theories that aren't even accepted outside of it,
which is why a lot of certain social sciences are looked down upon because you have garbage theories, according to Popper's falsification, such as critical theory and intersectionality.
(02:11):
By falsification, those are garbage theories and people are still working on them as if they are.
Can you explain falsification again, just if people don't know that?
Falsification theory is essentially if you make a theory and it seems to explain everything, it is then a bad theory.
So what's the opposite of that?
So the opposite of that is essentially. So what do you mean opposite?
(02:33):
OK, so like in the scientific method, right, if I'm making a hypothesis, a true scientific hypothesis has to be something that either exists.
It's either on or it's off, right? It's a very binary system, right?
If I pick up my phone and drop it, then it will hit the ground.
That is a hypothesis that can be falsified, meaning if I drop my phone and it doesn't land on the ground, that hypothesis is then false.
(03:00):
So science is predicated on the fact that hypotheses have to have falsification built into them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you give me a faulty hypothesis that cannot be falsified?
OK, so here, let me explain it through intersectionality.
So intersectionality by Kimberle Crenshaw, she has this idea that there are power structures at play.
It's dogmatic. There are those that have power and those that do not.
(03:24):
There are the victors and the victims.
Exactly. It's actually oppressed and oppressors.
And where's the cutoff?
OK, that's so. So here's where intersectionality, there's some parts of intersectionality I agree with.
One of them is how she discusses that we all have different multiple identities, which is true.
But she doesn't really go about it from the psychological or sociological where you have prominence of identities.
(03:48):
It's not like when I'm working with my sister, I'm a brother, you know, when I'm at dinner with my family.
So what perspective is she taking on the identity thing?
So she takes on the identity thing almost in a political science perspective.
In regards to power?
In regards to power, into individuals and how they work within systems.
And it kind of builds on critical theory where everything is racist and everything's oppressive.
(04:11):
It's a bit more targeted, like it almost borrows from postmodernism.
It is in the school, but it's not as eloquent or as philosophical as like Foucault is.
It's more direct. These are the oppressors. These are the oppressed.
So it's almost like a theory of everything about social science.
Exactly. As far as oppression goes.
(04:31):
And how is that?
Unfalsifiable. So here you go.
She argues that intersectionality is the intersection of identities and that basically this is where it becomes unfalsifiable.
If you are oppressed, it might be because of one identity or another.
You are always oppressed because of one of your identities, essentially.
(04:52):
Now she created this focusing on the struggle that black women had with the women's movement.
That they had to overcome the idea of being black, so gaining rights before the civil rights movement.
And then also women's suffrage.
That the women's suffrage movement said, well, we can't take on anything.
And she essentially, from my understanding, took issue with this and created this way that said, okay, people such as black women, they're at the intersection of being oppressed from multiple angles.
(05:19):
Now you could take this even further and say somebody that was oppressed in one area could be in another.
But we're really talking about the intention behind the oppression and in intersectionality, the intention of the oppressor is because of racism, because of sexism.
Exactly. It's always about sexism, racism, gender.
(05:41):
Okay, so we have to bring in now co-variables, right?
Because if we're just reducing all of human behavior down to this paradigm of the oppressor is malevolent in its intention and the oppressor are the victims of this,
you have to bring in all these other co-variables that are producing human behavior that intersectionality is not even addressing.
(06:03):
That there are so many more variables to why people do the things that they do instead of just this clean cut paradigm.
And that's one reason why it's not taking a nuanced approach enough. It's too dogmatic.
Like I said, it ignores the prominence of identity.
Some people don't even think about identity, but then it claims you don't need to think about your identity.
You simply are oppressed because of your identity when that identity may not even be shown or may not even be known.
(06:29):
Now, I guess something such as skin color is quite obvious. Some people may notice that and some people do not.
You know, this sort of assumes – one thing I noticed about a lot of these theories within the very leftist social realm is that it assumes everybody's at the same level of existence.
(06:50):
And the funny thing is, because they always want to be about inclusion, this is so Western. This completely ignores Eastern ideologies.
Well, that's too complicated to think about.
Oh, God forbid we have complexity. And the irony is, every single one of my classes is we're taking a global perspective.
Now time to degrade the West. Do you know, I've looked over my course, not a single mention of the Arab slave trade.
(07:16):
We're only talking about Europe as bad. We're the only ones that are bad. Arabs, totally fine.
You bring up this point a lot, but I think this is where you have to be historically literate.
You do. You really do.
Which is a hard thing. But I think this is where the social sciences – there's an amazing autism researcher at Stony Brook who I had the blessing of being in his class and in his lab.
(07:37):
And he would always, throughout the whole course, he kept saying, we have to be very careful as scientists to not make our theories about the world and the data points we have in our research.
We cannot go past that data. We can't make assumptions about our research that's further than what our data is actually telling us.
And most scientists can fall into this. They fall into philosophy, right, where they now are creating further explanations of their data that the data isn't really saying.
(08:06):
They're kind of stretching it. And so this is the importance of the philosophy of science.
Well, this is important in value-free research. I believe it was Max Weber, a sociologist.
Weber.
Max Weber, yes. W. Double V. Double V. You know the Germans.
Weber.
It's not BMW. It's BMV.
(08:27):
Dude, I swear my sociologist just called him Weber.
Weber? No, it's Weber.
Weber.
Okay, go ahead.
BMV.
Totally.
So Max Weber was – I'm pretty sure it was Weber.
Value-free research within sociology, this idea that you cannot put a bias on top of it.
(08:48):
You know, as I'm in social work, they mention this idea of social justice, right? My question is, what is social justice? Is it a moral thing?
That's a Jordan Peterson question. Well, what do you mean by social justice?
What do you mean by social justice?
What do you mean by justice?
I'm going to get deported with him now. You know what I mean?
No, but like –
You're out of the global island.
So here's the thing, I'm in graduate school, right? So in undergrad, when I was in my political science courses, I could not philosophically judge it because my professor wanted me to take a realist sort of perspective.
(09:18):
He told me, you know, this is for the philosophy department and so on. He's like, this is something you can do in graduate school.
Well, now I'm in graduate school and you can't philosophically judge these things because that brings up – and I've noticed this even with chat GBT, the bias of it is any questioning of it is met with this may lead to oppressive means.
You know, if I tried to claim, okay, so one of my thoughts was, what if you went about social justice as a moral route or from an actual global understanding route, you know, Kant's idea of treat people as an ends and not a means.
(09:52):
Because technically if everybody treats people as an ends and not a means, there would be no racism.
Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that, oh, it solves racism. It's just a completely different way of going around it. But to them, this idea ignores people's identities.
It's like there's something that they want and I don't understand what it is.
(10:15):
Well, it's either you do hard philosophy now, so you are prepared for when moral dilemmas strike your way or you are just philosophically ignorant. And then when you are as a normal human throughout their lifespan is put into moral dilemmas, they are not intellectually prepared to make wise decisions.
They didn't prime themselves, right? So like when a little kid is in a very sheltered home and their parents are afraid of drugs and sex and that kid, you know, goes to college and is now exposed to all this,
(10:43):
he is not going to be in a position to make a moral decision that is deeply confident and prepared.
He's going to be swayed by conformity and social pressures because he didn't do the cognitive work with his parents and in his family to actually talk about these things in a safe environment where there aren't those external pressures, right?
(11:04):
So I bring that to talk about when we are in ideologically charged spaces, the second that you try to be the philosopher, you know, of like, well, could we actually have clear definitions on these things?
I'm in full agreement with you. I want the world to be a more fair place, right? If that's what you mean by social justice, then that's my definition too.
But maybe we have different definitions and it's so important that we are aligned, morally aligned, right? Everyone's talking about AI alignment.
(11:31):
I think humans need to work on alignment with one of themselves as well.
Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, there's a clear point I want to make.
So like I'm really talking about this within the academic field because social workers have this obligation to forget everything and work with the individual at the level that they're at.
You know, Ram Dass said this thing, meet people where they're at. And that's really how you kind of create this synthesis, you know, and it's the same within actual practice.
(11:59):
Absolutely. But in the academic realm, my, is it a dumpster fire, you know?
But I wouldn't say it is a dumpster fire, right? Because there's really good academics, there's really good philosophers, even of their past, who have already figured out these problems and who have already written very succinctly and professionally and with deep intention.
(12:20):
We are kind of backsliding in certain fields where we're forgetting about the work that's already been done.
And we're overgeneralizing and, you know, we're afraid to discuss certain ideas that are even core to their belief.
You know, Marx is a huge voice in the leftist ideology.
Yet when I bring up Marx's industrial reserve army as a critique of immigration, it's people will look at me like I have two heads, like, wait a second, leftists critique immigration?
(12:50):
Where I thought we were all supposed to be on board with it. That's the humanitarian thing.
That's where people are projecting what their understanding of leftists and Democrat is.
Very true.
Literally, throughout all of history, freaking Abraham Lincoln was a radical Republican, would be considered a liberal today, right?
Yes.
And then, you know, FDR, it's switched.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would even say right now, we're now conservatives.
(13:13):
Literally, Republicans are the party of the working class now, which 20 years ago would be insane to think about.
It's ridiculous.
So politics and these terms are constantly flipping, and so that's why you have to have a long-term historical perspective when you're using these terms.
But you know what? I would also say that we have this idea of the left that it was once working class, but I would argue it's where the ideas have really shifted.
(13:37):
So the liberal left to me is that I think actually Malcolm X described them well.
They are the moderates, and they are sort of evil to this extent.
They are faux moral.
No, and you know what?
Ram Dass.
Explain more.
Ram Dass even describes this as well.
He said, let me explain it through Ram Dass's kind of view.
Ram Dass said, as a good Jewish boy, you know, going to school, college educated, he had to be accepting of other people and so on.
(14:05):
And he was publicly, to a certain extent.
He did not actually make any changes.
Okay, so there's like cognitive dissonance where their public and private beliefs are different.
Malcolm X criticized that they would do anything to maintain the status quo, but they'll sit there with you with flags, saying, oh, we support you, but we're not going to actually do anything to help you.
(14:29):
Let me give you a beautiful example of this going on right now.
Go for it.
So most liberals, when you pull them in the more liberal states, will say, we want affordable housing.
We want more low income affordable housing. And then the second that the local community tries to build or have plans to build a low income affordable housing community in a more, you know, middle class neighborhood, it is just right down.
(14:53):
Not in my backyard.
That's exactly what it is.
And so there are these public beliefs that we have and then our private beliefs are contradicting.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, I think this is an economics model too. There's been a lot of economists really argue against the use of, you know, property and homes sort of as this value because it is zero sum.
(15:15):
And it's kind of holding back other parts of the economy from growing because housing is now taking up so much.
I mean, this is why when we describe bad economic policies in Africa, there's this idea called rent seeking, and it's based off this because when you absorb so much money to just simply have a house to live in, even when you are by all means, you know, college educated graduate school, like it doesn't help.
(15:42):
And it screws over the middle class and even the poor class and even more like special groups like kids in foster care that if your state's lucky, they have vouchers to get housing.
But like you would think, okay, wouldn't everyone, Republican and Democrats, be like, hey, we need to save our children?
But no, they're not. Some of the leftists may say so, you know, and the Republicans may say, well, you know, if you look down in the South, they may turn, well, this is the church's sort of way to do it.
(16:11):
But like, there's just really a lot of talk and not a lot of action.
And, you know, this is where I feel that, you know, outside of academics, like it needs to be actually discussed.
Like this is across the aisle, you know, foster care kids deserve a home.
I would say human beings deserve shelter.
Simple as that.
Human beings, absolutely, absolutely.
(16:34):
And we deserve an economy that enables you if you, you know, provide value to society that you should be able to, you know, in your 20s and 30s be able to afford.
And, you know, there's a lot of really shitty economic things going on in regards to that.
But can we go back to, okay, so like in moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, and he got his PhD in moral psychology.
(17:01):
He studied how people on the left actually sway more towards trade openness on the Big Five personality assessment.
And people who sway more conservative actually are higher in trade conscientiousness and lower in trade openness.
And so he argued that the psychology is pretty clear that, you know, it's not that left is right or right is right.
(17:24):
We actually have this opponent process relationship where people who are liberal view everything in regards to the system, right?
The outside institutions, the corruption out there, and the conservatives look at, well, are you a sinful human being or are you a person who's taking responsibility for your life?
Right. And they focus on the internal aspects of the individual and beliefs and about what is right.
(17:49):
And so we have this beautiful opponent processing relationship in theory, at least, of what, you know, a perfect American system would be where we kind of hold each other in balance of these things.
But I think, as you said, the second that an academic field becomes incredibly like 90% biased towards one side, they just focus, let's say, if it's to the left, just on the institutions, on the external things and forget about, you know, biology.
(18:14):
Forget about the actual internal workings of a person's psychology and individuals.
We're just looking at groups of people and systems. Or, you know, another field could be totally swayed towards the right.
So I will say in academics, like when you look at sociology and like cultural anthropology, it definitely does swing towards the left.
And I would argue that social work-
Which makes sense because I feel like to be good at that, you have to be high in trade openness.
(18:37):
Oh, yeah, you absolutely do. There's no way-
So there's really a selection bias.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's no way you can study tribes from on the other side of the world, you know.
Alan Watts used to argue that we should teach Chinese in school simply because it throws you so away from, you know, it's so different.
Or at least it once was. Now there's a lot more immigrants in the United States.
(18:58):
But back in the 1960s, it was so different.
Their way of thinking, their philosophies, you know, that's always why people sometimes say this is an Eastern idea.
This is a Western idea, you know, and that's why, you know, when we're taking a global perspective, they sometimes collide because Eastern ideas and Christianity don't always agree, you know.
Multiple gods scares the hell out of Catholics, you know.
(19:22):
So we have to create the Trinity, one God, three persons.
Yep, exactly.
But like-
Which goes against like Western rationality and mathematics.
Well, so going to mathematics, you know, I actually-
Oh, gosh.
My fear.
No, no, no. No, no, listen, it's my fear too, you know.
I hope someone out there is actually working on it.
In Hinduism originally, there's this god Indra and he has this thing called Indra's net.
(19:48):
Now I understand Indra's net better through Mahayana Buddhism.
And essentially what it is is it's this idea that your consciousness, your consciousness, your thought, you are simply the intersection of this net.
You are nothing more than just a part of this net that is the entirety of reality.
(20:13):
Sometimes it's described as jewels, but when you look at like Chan and Zen's kind of understanding of this, it's not even like describing the intersection as the jewels on the intersection is too much.
You are just the intersection of it.
That's the idea of oneness that we sort of all interact, the idea like when people have religious experience or psychedelic experience.
(20:35):
They lose their sense of self.
Exactly.
Or their sense of self kind of down-regulates.
This isn't even just an Eastern idea because when you look at Sufism and Islam, which I don't know if you'd argue is if Islam's way considered Western because it is part of the Old Testament, New Testament, and now the Quran.
But Sufism, the final step of it is you are Allah and so is everything else.
(21:01):
This goes back to the beginning.
And no, no, no, but Sufis, because of this, Sufis like Rumi wrote in cryptic because they were often killed and to this day Sufis are still some of the most persecuted people in the Middle East because of this idea.
Because in Islam you have to submit to Allah.
That is one of the core beliefs of the religion.
(21:22):
But within Sufism, and I should say there is no unifying thing within Sufism.
There's certain beliefs and it can very much easily get caught up in cults and sometimes it even becomes a political pillar.
Just, you know, in Turkey under the Ottoman Empire, there was the Sufi order, which actually was made illegal under Atatürk in the Republic.
(21:45):
And even with their current Islamic government under Erdogan, the Sufi orders are still illegal.
And this sect of Sufism has more Eastern philosophical points.
I think it's Western, but I would equate it to the East.
To me, what the East dominated in was the like phenomenology, the subjective experience of consciousness.
(22:10):
They really turned inward and was like, yo, what actually is the nature of reality from the subjective perspective as seeing that every sensation is but appearing in consciousness,
which Christianity doesn't even have a line to actually talk about that concept.
But at the same time, Christianity talks from like a neuroscience perspective of the Tasmod network of like dying to one's old self and being born again and like self-transcendence.
(22:39):
And we talk about this like, what are the characteristics of the old dead self and what are the characteristics of the new self?
I think those are incredibly valuable and it makes sense that that evolved then with the scientific revolution to then industrialization of like keep pushing to like the new, better, higher self and why America is so Christian based.
They're all really software systems and they all are advantageous in different environments.
(23:06):
And I think the cool thing now we're living in this globalized world is if we take, you know, an open approach to listen and try to make sense of these things and not just kind of brush them away,
I think we can actually find much utility in a lot of these perspectives and incorporate them into our life as needed.
Oh, absolutely. And I think academics would be so much better for it as well, like especially in these areas.
(23:30):
You have such a negative view of academics.
I know, you know something, I read Paul Firebend and it just ingrained in my head.
It's hatred.
No, it's not hatred.
I know, I know.
You know, because it's like, it's, you know what, it's the political administration system behind it.
Sure. It's the administrators.
The job is zero sum. You know, there's too many PhDs and not enough jobs.
(23:53):
You know, everybody wants to do some sort of research and you know what, it's so much work for so little money that I can't sit here.
I can sit here and say they're all nuts, but realistically it's probably one of the most difficult things you can do within that realm.
And it's easy to get caught in your own world because you're studying such a specific thing, you know.
So I should apologize to the academics, but at the same time, I'm going to criticize the hell out of you.
(24:19):
Well, let me try to offer a solution to you.
It seems like you are longing for more like interdisciplinary studies or more people that are just like bridge builders.
Like I wish we had like a new form of PhD where your whole task is to not specialize, but to converge diverse like disciplines and try to build some sort of synthesis.
(24:42):
Like that is literally your PhD route.
You know, that's, Aldous Huxley gave this talk, I believe it was at Santa Monica University.
And he was discussing academics in this sense where he was saying that people such as him that dig little holes everywhere, that understand a lot of things, are becoming useless in the academic world.
And much of the critiques of it back in the 60s have kind of only gotten worse.
(25:06):
And you're right, interdisciplinary academics, I think, is very much needed.
And, you know, but it's also the administrative system that prevents it because departments are on opposite sides of the campus.
Nobody knows each other and they don't want to talk to each other.
But this is where like podcasts, I think, are now an amazing new novel space.
(25:27):
Oh, absolutely.
Where I think we're seeing much more synthesis.
I think also just like physicists, in my opinion, I think that the mathematicians and the physicists are the smartest people in the world.
Maybe I'm wrong, but to me, it just seems like they're the ones with like the 160 plus IQs.
Because you kind of have to have the working memory capacity to have a theorem that's, you know, 10 billion chalkboards long and be able to hold all that information.
(25:50):
But to me, when they go on podcasts, I usually feel like it's like a breath of fresh air because they are not entrenched in a specific social science.
They can look at it from this like third person perspective and look at all the different fields and they seem to synthesize a lot of this stuff in a more nuanced approach that I don't know, I think is very edifying compared to people that are just very ideologically captured in their set field.
(26:20):
No, I agree with you.
I mean, although I disagree with Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, whatever it is, Weinstein, Weinstein.
The Harvard mathematician that goes on everybody's podcast.
Geometric unity guy.
Although I disagree with him on some stuff, like that's exactly the feeling I have when I listen to him.
Why do we, I feel like it pisses me off that everyone, whenever they bring up someone in conversation who could be controversial, they say, well, I don't agree with them on every point.
(26:49):
And I disagree with them on some points, but I don't know why we are like socially pressured to use this like hedging language about people.
I remember like watching Jordan Peterson at Stony Brook and like being afraid of like people were to like walk by to look at my laptop.
I'm like, first off, the majority of people probably don't even know this guy.
Like I think that he's more big than he probably is.
And then two, why do I even give a shit?
(27:10):
Excuse my French.
You're right.
Because just because I'm listening to them and like I listen to such diverse voices of people that I'm like, I totally disagree with you.
I try my best.
And once again, this is my side bias, definitely confirmation bias too.
But for the most part, I try to like select videos on my YouTube algorithm here and there randomly that are just totally the opposite of videos that I would watch or like thinkers that I would want to listen to.
(27:35):
And the second that I listen to is I want like on a podcast that I do listen to.
And they're just saying some like crazy stuff that like I'm like, I've never heard of this.
I'm immediately just going to their page or watching other stuff by them because I want I want my YouTube algorithm to be is this incredible place that just makes me confused about the world.
No, no, no.
I mean, but that's that's fair.
You know, I feel like I get that with you.
(27:56):
And I don't want to be ashamed about like if there's a banned book, I'm buying that book.
I think I'm just I don't it really it really scares me living in a world where we are afraid to talk about certain people's beliefs and thoughts.
I am I want it all out.
I want it all out on the table.
So, OK, Eric's a little bit more difficult to, I guess, pull apart with like some ideas.
(28:25):
Maybe it's this.
It's like screw personalities.
I care about ideas.
OK, so most people are afraid of people's personalities and their attention.
Me, I'm like not too concerned about that.
I care about the actual idea because Eric's going to die.
His ideas are going to live on.
Yes.
And maybe I'm like maybe that's like nihilistic of me or like I don't know.
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's well, that's it's realist.
(28:46):
It's a realist perspective.
It doesn't have to be a nihilistic perspective that someone's going to die.
There's your there's your Christian upbringing.
You're going to die. That's nihilistic.
No, that's that's a realist perspective.
So like when I critique like certain academics like Sam Harris, for example, he is brilliant in his field and I love listening to him.
And he opens my eyes to certain to things I never would have stumbled upon.
(29:08):
However, this is what firebanned talks about with experts.
Sometimes experts are so ingrained in their fields, they forget that they aren't experts on anything else.
In fact, because they're experts, they are disadvantaged in other fields.
You know, not that they're and I'm not saying, oh, Sam Harris isn't a philosophical person.
(29:29):
He can't come to this.
But he does he does say often like I don't think I'm qualified to have that conversation.
No, no, no, you're right. When when when he says that, absolutely.
You know, you're definitely spot on. But I think it's sort of the the the the tyranny of the expert.
Sure. But I do think that there is so much bullshit in the world.
Like there's a really great philosopher.
I forgot his name, but he literally started the philosophy of bullshit to understand because there's this Italian mathematician or this Italian computer scientist.
(29:57):
And he came up with this like asymmetry bullshit principle.
I forgot the actual term of it.
But it's basically where it takes much less energy to create bullshit and it takes much more energy to correct bullshit and like state real facts with data.
So then therefore, because that it takes more energy to create order, there is naturally going to be more disorder and more bullshit in the world than there actually is facts.
(30:20):
And so this is where Sam Harris always argues that we need more really smart people to get up off their, you know,
ivory towers and their unique, you know, subspecialties and actually talk about things in a nuanced approach and really try to cut down on bullshit.
And so I'm with you. I think that the expert can go too far.
But we do need really smart people to start making sense out of things and kind of help us all when we are blind sheep.
(30:46):
Well, you know what it is. So think about it sort of as like a bureaucracy to I guess to wrap this up and like explain it through like a political science perspective.
When you're a president, like you are going to stick the people in the field that they belong in.
You know what I mean? You don't put a Ph.D. in, you know, English literature in charge of NASA.
(31:08):
Sure. And I think that sort of...
Qualifications, credibility.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that needs to be kind of applied outside.
But, you know, if you kind of understand what I'm saying.
And there are some jobs where it's hard to kind of figure out who would be the best candidate.
Absolutely. You know, yeah. It discrediting people is difficult.
I feel like this is hard to wrap up right here.
(31:29):
You know what I mean?
Falsification.
Falsification. You know what? Social justice is good.
OK, we believe that the world should be a more fair place. We believe that racism is real.
We believe that institutions and systems can perpetuate oppression.
We also believe that individuals should take on personal responsibility.
We believe... What do we believe that?
We believe to stop using bad theories and understand the intention behind the theory,
(31:56):
but develop them better to really combat the issues.
And we believe that it's OK to bully theories and ideas, and we're not bullying people.
Absolutely.
Because, hey, science is all about ideas and falsification.
I'm all for bullying Karl Marx, though, I'll tell you that.
And apparently Jordan Peterson, I guess.
Every episode is just kicking Jordan Peterson off the global island.
(32:19):
Canceled.
Alright.
(32:50):
Thanks for watching.
(33:20):
Bye.
(33:50):
Bye.
(34:20):
Bye.
(34:50):
Bye.
(35:20):
Bye.
TGI, the global island.
(00:03):
Eric Weinstein, does this man have an opinion about anything?
What the heck is Hegel's dialectic? How do you discuss a good theory from a bad theory? Let's discuss falsification.
Max Weber, Max Weber, will we ever really know? And why is there more bullshit than truth in the world?
We end this episode trying to bully you into some proper social justice, but Real Talk, we just want more value-free research.
(00:31):
Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, right?
Weinstein, Weinstein.
Yeah, Eric Weinstein. He was on the Modern Wisdom podcast, and he's like, everyone gets so mad at me because I take on every side and it looks like I have no opinions.
But it's not that. It's actually I am synthesizing. I am trying to do the things that in academia we are supposed to be doing as an antithesis to the political science people who are just going to ideologically hold to a thesis.
(00:59):
Say you're working in like mathematics or physics. It's not like you learn every single mathematic evolution to that point to then develop it.
You know, and here we go. I'm blanking on the word, but you take those scientific assumptions that are agreed upon and then you take some things of interest and then you work upon it and then you build your theory.
Well, so this is like Hegel's dialectic, right? Taking a thesis.
(01:22):
And then antithesis.
Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, synthesizing.
Do you know something? I made this point in my class, right? So I'm surrounded by social workers. I'm in an MSW program. Everybody's left-leaning. Everybody's liberal bias. Everybody's a humanitarian bias.
It's totally out there. I brought something up and it wasn't even agreed upon. People were like kind of against this in a certain way.
(01:44):
Like I felt a little bit resistance in the small group that I was discussing it. And what I said was, is, OK, this is a complex world.
We can't we discuss complex things and we discuss complex theories and we discuss theories that aren't even accepted outside of it,
which is why a lot of certain social sciences are looked down upon because you have garbage theories, according to Popper's falsification, such as critical theory and intersectionality.
(02:11):
By falsification, those are garbage theories and people are still working on them as if they are.
Can you explain falsification again, just if people don't know that?
Falsification theory is essentially if you make a theory and it seems to explain everything, it is then a bad theory.
So what's the opposite of that?
So the opposite of that is essentially. So what do you mean opposite?
(02:33):
OK, so like in the scientific method, right, if I'm making a hypothesis, a true scientific hypothesis has to be something that either exists.
It's either on or it's off, right? It's a very binary system, right?
If I pick up my phone and drop it, then it will hit the ground.
That is a hypothesis that can be falsified, meaning if I drop my phone and it doesn't land on the ground, that hypothesis is then false.
(03:00):
So science is predicated on the fact that hypotheses have to have falsification built into them.
Yeah, absolutely.
Can you give me a faulty hypothesis that cannot be falsified?
OK, so here, let me explain it through intersectionality.
So intersectionality by Kimberle Crenshaw, she has this idea that there are power structures at play.
It's dogmatic. There are those that have power and those that do not.
(03:24):
There are the victors and the victims.
Exactly. It's actually oppressed and oppressors.
And where's the cutoff?
OK, that's so. So here's where intersectionality, there's some parts of intersectionality I agree with.
One of them is how she discusses that we all have different multiple identities, which is true.
But she doesn't really go about it from the psychological or sociological where you have prominence of identities.
(03:48):
It's not like when I'm working with my sister, I'm a brother, you know, when I'm at dinner with my family.
So what perspective is she taking on the identity thing?
So she takes on the identity thing almost in a political science perspective.
In regards to power?
In regards to power, into individuals and how they work within systems.
And it kind of builds on critical theory where everything is racist and everything's oppressive.
(04:11):
It's a bit more targeted, like it almost borrows from postmodernism.
It is in the school, but it's not as eloquent or as philosophical as like Foucault is.
It's more direct. These are the oppressors. These are the oppressed.
So it's almost like a theory of everything about social science.
Exactly. As far as oppression goes.
(04:31):
And how is that?
Unfalsifiable. So here you go.
She argues that intersectionality is the intersection of identities and that basically this is where it becomes unfalsifiable.
If you are oppressed, it might be because of one identity or another.
You are always oppressed because of one of your identities, essentially.
(04:52):
Now she created this focusing on the struggle that black women had with the women's movement.
That they had to overcome the idea of being black, so gaining rights before the civil rights movement.
And then also women's suffrage.
That the women's suffrage movement said, well, we can't take on anything.
And she essentially, from my understanding, took issue with this and created this way that said, okay, people such as black women, they're at the intersection of being oppressed from multiple angles.
(05:19):
Now you could take this even further and say somebody that was oppressed in one area could be in another.
But we're really talking about the intention behind the oppression and in intersectionality, the intention of the oppressor is because of racism, because of sexism.
Exactly. It's always about sexism, racism, gender.
(05:41):
Okay, so we have to bring in now co-variables, right?
Because if we're just reducing all of human behavior down to this paradigm of the oppressor is malevolent in its intention and the oppressor are the victims of this,
you have to bring in all these other co-variables that are producing human behavior that intersectionality is not even addressing.
(06:03):
That there are so many more variables to why people do the things that they do instead of just this clean cut paradigm.
And that's one reason why it's not taking a nuanced approach enough. It's too dogmatic.
Like I said, it ignores the prominence of identity.
Some people don't even think about identity, but then it claims you don't need to think about your identity.
You simply are oppressed because of your identity when that identity may not even be shown or may not even be known.
(06:29):
Now, I guess something such as skin color is quite obvious. Some people may notice that and some people do not.
You know, this sort of assumes – one thing I noticed about a lot of these theories within the very leftist social realm is that it assumes everybody's at the same level of existence.
(06:50):
And the funny thing is, because they always want to be about inclusion, this is so Western. This completely ignores Eastern ideologies.
Well, that's too complicated to think about.
Oh, God forbid we have complexity. And the irony is, every single one of my classes is we're taking a global perspective.
Now time to degrade the West. Do you know, I've looked over my course, not a single mention of the Arab slave trade.
(07:16):
We're only talking about Europe as bad. We're the only ones that are bad. Arabs, totally fine.
You bring up this point a lot, but I think this is where you have to be historically literate.
You do. You really do.
Which is a hard thing. But I think this is where the social sciences – there's an amazing autism researcher at Stony Brook who I had the blessing of being in his class and in his lab.
(07:37):
And he would always, throughout the whole course, he kept saying, we have to be very careful as scientists to not make our theories about the world and the data points we have in our research.
We cannot go past that data. We can't make assumptions about our research that's further than what our data is actually telling us.
And most scientists can fall into this. They fall into philosophy, right, where they now are creating further explanations of their data that the data isn't really saying.
(08:06):
They're kind of stretching it. And so this is the importance of the philosophy of science.
Well, this is important in value-free research. I believe it was Max Weber, a sociologist.
Weber.
Max Weber, yes. W. Double V. Double V. You know the Germans.
Weber.
It's not BMW. It's BMV.
(08:27):
Dude, I swear my sociologist just called him Weber.
Weber? No, it's Weber.
Weber.
Okay, go ahead.
BMV.
Totally.
So Max Weber was – I'm pretty sure it was Weber.
Value-free research within sociology, this idea that you cannot put a bias on top of it.
(08:48):
You know, as I'm in social work, they mention this idea of social justice, right? My question is, what is social justice? Is it a moral thing?
That's a Jordan Peterson question. Well, what do you mean by social justice?
What do you mean by social justice?
What do you mean by justice?
I'm going to get deported with him now. You know what I mean?
No, but like –
You're out of the global island.
So here's the thing, I'm in graduate school, right? So in undergrad, when I was in my political science courses, I could not philosophically judge it because my professor wanted me to take a realist sort of perspective.
(09:18):
He told me, you know, this is for the philosophy department and so on. He's like, this is something you can do in graduate school.
Well, now I'm in graduate school and you can't philosophically judge these things because that brings up – and I've noticed this even with chat GBT, the bias of it is any questioning of it is met with this may lead to oppressive means.
You know, if I tried to claim, okay, so one of my thoughts was, what if you went about social justice as a moral route or from an actual global understanding route, you know, Kant's idea of treat people as an ends and not a means.
(09:52):
Because technically if everybody treats people as an ends and not a means, there would be no racism.
Yeah.
And it doesn't mean that, oh, it solves racism. It's just a completely different way of going around it. But to them, this idea ignores people's identities.
It's like there's something that they want and I don't understand what it is.
(10:15):
Well, it's either you do hard philosophy now, so you are prepared for when moral dilemmas strike your way or you are just philosophically ignorant. And then when you are as a normal human throughout their lifespan is put into moral dilemmas, they are not intellectually prepared to make wise decisions.
They didn't prime themselves, right? So like when a little kid is in a very sheltered home and their parents are afraid of drugs and sex and that kid, you know, goes to college and is now exposed to all this,
(10:43):
he is not going to be in a position to make a moral decision that is deeply confident and prepared.
He's going to be swayed by conformity and social pressures because he didn't do the cognitive work with his parents and in his family to actually talk about these things in a safe environment where there aren't those external pressures, right?
(11:04):
So I bring that to talk about when we are in ideologically charged spaces, the second that you try to be the philosopher, you know, of like, well, could we actually have clear definitions on these things?
I'm in full agreement with you. I want the world to be a more fair place, right? If that's what you mean by social justice, then that's my definition too.
But maybe we have different definitions and it's so important that we are aligned, morally aligned, right? Everyone's talking about AI alignment.
(11:31):
I think humans need to work on alignment with one of themselves as well.
Oh, no, absolutely. I mean, there's a clear point I want to make.
So like I'm really talking about this within the academic field because social workers have this obligation to forget everything and work with the individual at the level that they're at.
You know, Ram Dass said this thing, meet people where they're at. And that's really how you kind of create this synthesis, you know, and it's the same within actual practice.
(11:59):
Absolutely. But in the academic realm, my, is it a dumpster fire, you know?
But I wouldn't say it is a dumpster fire, right? Because there's really good academics, there's really good philosophers, even of their past, who have already figured out these problems and who have already written very succinctly and professionally and with deep intention.
(12:20):
We are kind of backsliding in certain fields where we're forgetting about the work that's already been done.
And we're overgeneralizing and, you know, we're afraid to discuss certain ideas that are even core to their belief.
You know, Marx is a huge voice in the leftist ideology.
Yet when I bring up Marx's industrial reserve army as a critique of immigration, it's people will look at me like I have two heads, like, wait a second, leftists critique immigration?
(12:50):
Where I thought we were all supposed to be on board with it. That's the humanitarian thing.
That's where people are projecting what their understanding of leftists and Democrat is.
Very true.
Literally, throughout all of history, freaking Abraham Lincoln was a radical Republican, would be considered a liberal today, right?
Yes.
And then, you know, FDR, it's switched.
Yeah, absolutely.
I would even say right now, we're now conservatives.
(13:13):
Literally, Republicans are the party of the working class now, which 20 years ago would be insane to think about.
It's ridiculous.
So politics and these terms are constantly flipping, and so that's why you have to have a long-term historical perspective when you're using these terms.
But you know what? I would also say that we have this idea of the left that it was once working class, but I would argue it's where the ideas have really shifted.
(13:37):
So the liberal left to me is that I think actually Malcolm X described them well.
They are the moderates, and they are sort of evil to this extent.
They are faux moral.
No, and you know what?
Ram Dass.
Explain more.
Ram Dass even describes this as well.
He said, let me explain it through Ram Dass's kind of view.
Ram Dass said, as a good Jewish boy, you know, going to school, college educated, he had to be accepting of other people and so on.
(14:05):
And he was publicly, to a certain extent.
He did not actually make any changes.
Okay, so there's like cognitive dissonance where their public and private beliefs are different.
Malcolm X criticized that they would do anything to maintain the status quo, but they'll sit there with you with flags, saying, oh, we support you, but we're not going to actually do anything to help you.
(14:29):
Let me give you a beautiful example of this going on right now.
Go for it.
So most liberals, when you pull them in the more liberal states, will say, we want affordable housing.
We want more low income affordable housing. And then the second that the local community tries to build or have plans to build a low income affordable housing community in a more, you know, middle class neighborhood, it is just right down.
(14:53):
Not in my backyard.
That's exactly what it is.
And so there are these public beliefs that we have and then our private beliefs are contradicting.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, I think this is an economics model too. There's been a lot of economists really argue against the use of, you know, property and homes sort of as this value because it is zero sum.
(15:15):
And it's kind of holding back other parts of the economy from growing because housing is now taking up so much.
I mean, this is why when we describe bad economic policies in Africa, there's this idea called rent seeking, and it's based off this because when you absorb so much money to just simply have a house to live in, even when you are by all means, you know, college educated graduate school, like it doesn't help.
(15:42):
And it screws over the middle class and even the poor class and even more like special groups like kids in foster care that if your state's lucky, they have vouchers to get housing.
But like you would think, okay, wouldn't everyone, Republican and Democrats, be like, hey, we need to save our children?
But no, they're not. Some of the leftists may say so, you know, and the Republicans may say, well, you know, if you look down in the South, they may turn, well, this is the church's sort of way to do it.
(16:11):
But like, there's just really a lot of talk and not a lot of action.
And, you know, this is where I feel that, you know, outside of academics, like it needs to be actually discussed.
Like this is across the aisle, you know, foster care kids deserve a home.
I would say human beings deserve shelter.
Simple as that.
Human beings, absolutely, absolutely.
(16:34):
And we deserve an economy that enables you if you, you know, provide value to society that you should be able to, you know, in your 20s and 30s be able to afford.
And, you know, there's a lot of really shitty economic things going on in regards to that.
But can we go back to, okay, so like in moral psychology, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, and he got his PhD in moral psychology.
(17:01):
He studied how people on the left actually sway more towards trade openness on the Big Five personality assessment.
And people who sway more conservative actually are higher in trade conscientiousness and lower in trade openness.
And so he argued that the psychology is pretty clear that, you know, it's not that left is right or right is right.
(17:24):
We actually have this opponent process relationship where people who are liberal view everything in regards to the system, right?
The outside institutions, the corruption out there, and the conservatives look at, well, are you a sinful human being or are you a person who's taking responsibility for your life?
Right. And they focus on the internal aspects of the individual and beliefs and about what is right.
(17:49):
And so we have this beautiful opponent processing relationship in theory, at least, of what, you know, a perfect American system would be where we kind of hold each other in balance of these things.
But I think, as you said, the second that an academic field becomes incredibly like 90% biased towards one side, they just focus, let's say, if it's to the left, just on the institutions, on the external things and forget about, you know, biology.
(18:14):
Forget about the actual internal workings of a person's psychology and individuals.
We're just looking at groups of people and systems. Or, you know, another field could be totally swayed towards the right.
So I will say in academics, like when you look at sociology and like cultural anthropology, it definitely does swing towards the left.
And I would argue that social work-
Which makes sense because I feel like to be good at that, you have to be high in trade openness.
(18:37):
Oh, yeah, you absolutely do. There's no way-
So there's really a selection bias.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, there's no way you can study tribes from on the other side of the world, you know.
Alan Watts used to argue that we should teach Chinese in school simply because it throws you so away from, you know, it's so different.
Or at least it once was. Now there's a lot more immigrants in the United States.
(18:58):
But back in the 1960s, it was so different.
Their way of thinking, their philosophies, you know, that's always why people sometimes say this is an Eastern idea.
This is a Western idea, you know, and that's why, you know, when we're taking a global perspective, they sometimes collide because Eastern ideas and Christianity don't always agree, you know.
Multiple gods scares the hell out of Catholics, you know.
(19:22):
So we have to create the Trinity, one God, three persons.
Yep, exactly.
But like-
Which goes against like Western rationality and mathematics.
Well, so going to mathematics, you know, I actually-
Oh, gosh.
My fear.
No, no, no. No, no, listen, it's my fear too, you know.
I hope someone out there is actually working on it.
In Hinduism originally, there's this god Indra and he has this thing called Indra's net.
(19:48):
Now I understand Indra's net better through Mahayana Buddhism.
And essentially what it is is it's this idea that your consciousness, your consciousness, your thought, you are simply the intersection of this net.
You are nothing more than just a part of this net that is the entirety of reality.
(20:13):
Sometimes it's described as jewels, but when you look at like Chan and Zen's kind of understanding of this, it's not even like describing the intersection as the jewels on the intersection is too much.
You are just the intersection of it.
That's the idea of oneness that we sort of all interact, the idea like when people have religious experience or psychedelic experience.
(20:35):
They lose their sense of self.
Exactly.
Or their sense of self kind of down-regulates.
This isn't even just an Eastern idea because when you look at Sufism and Islam, which I don't know if you'd argue is if Islam's way considered Western because it is part of the Old Testament, New Testament, and now the Quran.
But Sufism, the final step of it is you are Allah and so is everything else.
(21:01):
This goes back to the beginning.
And no, no, no, but Sufis, because of this, Sufis like Rumi wrote in cryptic because they were often killed and to this day Sufis are still some of the most persecuted people in the Middle East because of this idea.
Because in Islam you have to submit to Allah.
That is one of the core beliefs of the religion.
(21:22):
But within Sufism, and I should say there is no unifying thing within Sufism.
There's certain beliefs and it can very much easily get caught up in cults and sometimes it even becomes a political pillar.
Just, you know, in Turkey under the Ottoman Empire, there was the Sufi order, which actually was made illegal under Atatürk in the Republic.
(21:45):
And even with their current Islamic government under Erdogan, the Sufi orders are still illegal.
And this sect of Sufism has more Eastern philosophical points.
I think it's Western, but I would equate it to the East.
To me, what the East dominated in was the like phenomenology, the subjective experience of consciousness.
(22:10):
They really turned inward and was like, yo, what actually is the nature of reality from the subjective perspective as seeing that every sensation is but appearing in consciousness,
which Christianity doesn't even have a line to actually talk about that concept.
But at the same time, Christianity talks from like a neuroscience perspective of the Tasmod network of like dying to one's old self and being born again and like self-transcendence.
(22:39):
And we talk about this like, what are the characteristics of the old dead self and what are the characteristics of the new self?
I think those are incredibly valuable and it makes sense that that evolved then with the scientific revolution to then industrialization of like keep pushing to like the new, better, higher self and why America is so Christian based.
They're all really software systems and they all are advantageous in different environments.
(23:06):
And I think the cool thing now we're living in this globalized world is if we take, you know, an open approach to listen and try to make sense of these things and not just kind of brush them away,
I think we can actually find much utility in a lot of these perspectives and incorporate them into our life as needed.
Oh, absolutely. And I think academics would be so much better for it as well, like especially in these areas.
(23:30):
You have such a negative view of academics.
I know, you know something, I read Paul Firebend and it just ingrained in my head.
It's hatred.
No, it's not hatred.
I know, I know.
You know, because it's like, it's, you know what, it's the political administration system behind it.
Sure. It's the administrators.
The job is zero sum. You know, there's too many PhDs and not enough jobs.
(23:53):
You know, everybody wants to do some sort of research and you know what, it's so much work for so little money that I can't sit here.
I can sit here and say they're all nuts, but realistically it's probably one of the most difficult things you can do within that realm.
And it's easy to get caught in your own world because you're studying such a specific thing, you know.
So I should apologize to the academics, but at the same time, I'm going to criticize the hell out of you.
(24:19):
Well, let me try to offer a solution to you.
It seems like you are longing for more like interdisciplinary studies or more people that are just like bridge builders.
Like I wish we had like a new form of PhD where your whole task is to not specialize, but to converge diverse like disciplines and try to build some sort of synthesis.
(24:42):
Like that is literally your PhD route.
You know, that's, Aldous Huxley gave this talk, I believe it was at Santa Monica University.
And he was discussing academics in this sense where he was saying that people such as him that dig little holes everywhere, that understand a lot of things, are becoming useless in the academic world.
And much of the critiques of it back in the 60s have kind of only gotten worse.
(25:06):
And you're right, interdisciplinary academics, I think, is very much needed.
And, you know, but it's also the administrative system that prevents it because departments are on opposite sides of the campus.
Nobody knows each other and they don't want to talk to each other.
But this is where like podcasts, I think, are now an amazing new novel space.
(25:27):
Oh, absolutely.
Where I think we're seeing much more synthesis.
I think also just like physicists, in my opinion, I think that the mathematicians and the physicists are the smartest people in the world.
Maybe I'm wrong, but to me, it just seems like they're the ones with like the 160 plus IQs.
Because you kind of have to have the working memory capacity to have a theorem that's, you know, 10 billion chalkboards long and be able to hold all that information.
(25:50):
But to me, when they go on podcasts, I usually feel like it's like a breath of fresh air because they are not entrenched in a specific social science.
They can look at it from this like third person perspective and look at all the different fields and they seem to synthesize a lot of this stuff in a more nuanced approach that I don't know, I think is very edifying compared to people that are just very ideologically captured in their set field.
(26:20):
No, I agree with you.
I mean, although I disagree with Eric Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, whatever it is, Weinstein, Weinstein.
The Harvard mathematician that goes on everybody's podcast.
Geometric unity guy.
Although I disagree with him on some stuff, like that's exactly the feeling I have when I listen to him.
Why do we, I feel like it pisses me off that everyone, whenever they bring up someone in conversation who could be controversial, they say, well, I don't agree with them on every point.
(26:49):
And I disagree with them on some points, but I don't know why we are like socially pressured to use this like hedging language about people.
I remember like watching Jordan Peterson at Stony Brook and like being afraid of like people were to like walk by to look at my laptop.
I'm like, first off, the majority of people probably don't even know this guy.
Like I think that he's more big than he probably is.
And then two, why do I even give a shit?
(27:10):
Excuse my French.
You're right.
Because just because I'm listening to them and like I listen to such diverse voices of people that I'm like, I totally disagree with you.
I try my best.
And once again, this is my side bias, definitely confirmation bias too.
But for the most part, I try to like select videos on my YouTube algorithm here and there randomly that are just totally the opposite of videos that I would watch or like thinkers that I would want to listen to.
(27:35):
And the second that I listen to is I want like on a podcast that I do listen to.
And they're just saying some like crazy stuff that like I'm like, I've never heard of this.
I'm immediately just going to their page or watching other stuff by them because I want I want my YouTube algorithm to be is this incredible place that just makes me confused about the world.
No, no, no.
I mean, but that's that's fair.
You know, I feel like I get that with you.
(27:56):
And I don't want to be ashamed about like if there's a banned book, I'm buying that book.
I think I'm just I don't it really it really scares me living in a world where we are afraid to talk about certain people's beliefs and thoughts.
I am I want it all out.
I want it all out on the table.
So, OK, Eric's a little bit more difficult to, I guess, pull apart with like some ideas.
(28:25):
Maybe it's this.
It's like screw personalities.
I care about ideas.
OK, so most people are afraid of people's personalities and their attention.
Me, I'm like not too concerned about that.
I care about the actual idea because Eric's going to die.
His ideas are going to live on.
Yes.
And maybe I'm like maybe that's like nihilistic of me or like I don't know.
No, no, no, no, no, no. That's well, that's it's realist.
(28:46):
It's a realist perspective.
It doesn't have to be a nihilistic perspective that someone's going to die.
There's your there's your Christian upbringing.
You're going to die. That's nihilistic.
No, that's that's a realist perspective.
So like when I critique like certain academics like Sam Harris, for example, he is brilliant in his field and I love listening to him.
And he opens my eyes to certain to things I never would have stumbled upon.
(29:08):
However, this is what firebanned talks about with experts.
Sometimes experts are so ingrained in their fields, they forget that they aren't experts on anything else.
In fact, because they're experts, they are disadvantaged in other fields.
You know, not that they're and I'm not saying, oh, Sam Harris isn't a philosophical person.
(29:29):
He can't come to this.
But he does he does say often like I don't think I'm qualified to have that conversation.
No, no, no, you're right. When when when he says that, absolutely.
You know, you're definitely spot on. But I think it's sort of the the the the tyranny of the expert.
Sure. But I do think that there is so much bullshit in the world.
Like there's a really great philosopher.
I forgot his name, but he literally started the philosophy of bullshit to understand because there's this Italian mathematician or this Italian computer scientist.
(29:57):
And he came up with this like asymmetry bullshit principle.
I forgot the actual term of it.
But it's basically where it takes much less energy to create bullshit and it takes much more energy to correct bullshit and like state real facts with data.
So then therefore, because that it takes more energy to create order, there is naturally going to be more disorder and more bullshit in the world than there actually is facts.
(30:20):
And so this is where Sam Harris always argues that we need more really smart people to get up off their, you know,
ivory towers and their unique, you know, subspecialties and actually talk about things in a nuanced approach and really try to cut down on bullshit.
And so I'm with you. I think that the expert can go too far.
But we do need really smart people to start making sense out of things and kind of help us all when we are blind sheep.
(30:46):
Well, you know what it is. So think about it sort of as like a bureaucracy to I guess to wrap this up and like explain it through like a political science perspective.
When you're a president, like you are going to stick the people in the field that they belong in.
You know what I mean? You don't put a Ph.D. in, you know, English literature in charge of NASA.
(31:08):
Sure. And I think that sort of...
Qualifications, credibility.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that needs to be kind of applied outside.
But, you know, if you kind of understand what I'm saying.
And there are some jobs where it's hard to kind of figure out who would be the best candidate.
Absolutely. You know, yeah. It discrediting people is difficult.
I feel like this is hard to wrap up right here.
(31:29):
You know what I mean?
Falsification.
Falsification. You know what? Social justice is good.
OK, we believe that the world should be a more fair place. We believe that racism is real.
We believe that institutions and systems can perpetuate oppression.
We also believe that individuals should take on personal responsibility.
We believe... What do we believe that?
We believe to stop using bad theories and understand the intention behind the theory,
(31:56):
but develop them better to really combat the issues.
And we believe that it's OK to bully theories and ideas, and we're not bullying people.
Absolutely.
Because, hey, science is all about ideas and falsification.
I'm all for bullying Karl Marx, though, I'll tell you that.
And apparently Jordan Peterson, I guess.
Every episode is just kicking Jordan Peterson off the global island.
(32:19):
Canceled.
Alright.
(32:50):
Thanks for watching.
(33:20):
Bye.
(33:50):
Bye.
(34:20):
Bye.
(34:50):
Bye.
(35:20):
Bye.
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