What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?

taiwan_girl

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/listen-a-death-in-cryptoland-1.6035764

"Gerald Cotten was the founder of Quadriga CX, which launched in 2013, a cryptocurrency company and money exchange platform.

He unfortunately died in India recently while trying to open an orphanage for kids. What's doubly unfortunate is he was the only one who knew the password that holds $190 million of customer money locked in cryptocurrency."

Questions over whether he really died, etc. Interesting.

Horace

Ooh, the latest Ezra Klein show is titled “A Powerful Theory About Why the Far Right is Thriving Across the Globe”. This should be good.

Ezra’s podcast is the top shelf attempt, across all of America, to intellectualize the tribal left viewpoint. There are no more intelligent or reasonable lefties in the country than the ones who participate in these conversations. I’m excited to once again get a gauge of righteous tribalists, out to help the world be better through an attempt at understanding the opposition. That’s the left’s Achilles heel. Empathy for the political enemy. Most of them just call us evil with a shrug and be done with it, but these people expect more of themselves. I love it when they reach for this impossibly high intellectual bar of humanizing members of the opposition tribe.

But “far right” might be a convenient escape hatch. Maybe they’ll just talk about the evil people in the other tribe. Not that they’re all evil. That would be boring. We will see.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

@Horace I'm disappointed that Klein didn't use scare quotes.

Actually, I'm not, because the scare quotes would have made it look fringey. Keeping it the way he did it "normalizes" the "far right" and makes it look like it's, if not mainstream, at least something to worry about and contend with.

Well done, Mr Klein.

Horace

@George-K said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:

@Horace I'm disappointed that Klein didn't use scare quotes.

Actually, I'm not, because the scare quotes would have made it look fringey. Keeping it the way he did it "normalizes" the "far right" and makes it look like it's, if not mainstream, at least something to worry about and contend with.

Well done, Mr Klein.

The podcast was a big disappointment. He was talking to Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, whose powerful theory about why the far right is thriving is, wait for it, because they hate immigrants and people who don't look like them. Exactly what Ezra's crowd has been saying forever. Shocking. Ezra's one piece of data in this nearly entirely hand-waved discussion was that BLM support was so predictive of party affiliation. Republicans don't support BLM, Democrats do. To Ezra, that seals the deal that Republicans are racist. This is, seriously, the best of the best thinking in the intellectual leftist community. I'm not making up how dumb these people are. They overtly politicize BLM and make it about, eh, everything but a true concern about black lives, and then they call anybody not on board with their politicized nonsense, a racist.

One interesting thing I notice in these conversations is the use of the word "populist". I think it was used 100 times in this one. Inevitably, the far right mobs they are afraid of, are informed with populist ideas. So let's go back to the definition of populism.

relating to or characteristic of a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

Fair enough, that describes Trump, if not standard conservativism before him or hopefully after him.

But let's compare that definition to the foundational idea of the progressive left, which is the race narrative. Of course, the race narrative, where disadvantaged people must be protected against established elite white supremacy, is by definition a populist ideology. Which is what I've been saying forever, but you will rarely hear progressive politics described as "populist". Because "populist", in common parlance, is a word dumb people use, to describe ideas they hate, held by large numbers of people they hate. The word "populist" is, in practice, only a signal to self-identify one's tribal affiliation.

George K · "Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08

@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:

Republicans don't support BLM, Democrats do

Horace

Sam Harris spoke today about Sam Bankman-Fried, who's been on his podcast. Apparently word on the street is that the bankruptcy of FTX was due to fraud. I had thought it was just a consequence of the crypto facemelt that happened recently.

Then I googled and found a transcript of a chat SBF had with a Vox reporter. SBF doesn't admit to anything fraudulent but does admit that his 'altruistic' persona was a front to maximize his social reputation. Not sure why he'd go around admitting that. Also he says that one of his co-founders with FTX took the ethics very seriously, has left the company, and (my inference) may currently be a suicide risk.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy

jon-nyc

Two recommendations:

For fans of Glenn Loury - he was on Andrew Sullivan’s podcast Jan 13. They talked a lot about his very interesting past and his intellectual journey. I had gleaned much of it from listening to him many years but still learned a lot and found it interesting.

For those interested in the national debt in general, and the coming debt ceiling fight - Jonah Goldberg’s ‘The Remnant’ podcast from last Thursday has Brian Riedl, a former aid to Senator Portman and now at the Manhattan Institute, and has made something of a career out of proselytizing about the debt. He has a lot to say about the recent history of the debt and the efforts, or lack thereof, to tame it. Very interesting and informative. (The episode is called ‘The Broccoli Wars’ after the idea that politicians haven’t been very diligent about eating their broccoli before going straight to fiscal dessert)

Horace

I listened to young black public intellectual Coleman Hughes discuss the trans moral panic, which got his guest fired from her professorship, after she expressed some views similar to JK Rowling's.

They touched on the faddish trend of transgenderism in young kids, and how the trend is obviously not entirely about a "gendered soul", independent from biology. It's obviously an absorbed trend, appealing to kids, and even parents, who want to be cool. From that perspective, I think it's interesting that something as dramatic as gender dysphoria can be absorbed from the prevailing culture, while the activists deny that a person's experiences could fix that dysphoria. I think, if a person can be convinced it's cool to feel like you're gender dysphoric, they could also be convinced that they are not gender dysphoric. Just by living life as the gender they look like. It seems like a normal person, if they were treated as a woman, and looked like a woman, would end up feeling like a woman, regardless of this mystical soul gender they think they have when they are young.

The guest mentioned a new term of shame floating around the community, "sexual racism". It's when a lesbian refuses to date a transgendered woman. That's a fun turn of phrase. The obvious phrase would be sexual bigotry, like racism is skin color bigotry. but 'racism' is such a useful cudgel to use, they just shoehorn it in wherever they can. The guest also notes that the people doing most of the shaming over these things, are straight progressive women.

The guest, who is a self-described butch lesbian, wants nothing to do with the opportunists appropriating the labels she feels like she earned. After getting fired from her university, she began working with an organization started by Bari Weiss. Some institution of higher learning comprised of refugees from the dominant academic culture.

Horace

Listening to this conversation between Coleman Hughes and Roland Fryer, Macarthur genius economics professor at Harvard. Roland had what you might call a stereotypically bad black childhood, and one of the first things they touch on, was what allowed him to excel? Shrugs all around, who could possibly know one way or another? Nothing jumps out. He just sort of decided to go to school, and succeeded. Mentioned in passing was that he scored in the 99th percentile in a math standardized test when he was young. Which they never told him about because school wasn't a thing. Both Coleman and Roland know what his advantage is. But they still won't say it out loud. I guess IQ will remain a taboo subject forever. Maybe there's a good reason for that.

Link to video

Aqua Letifer

@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:

Both Coleman and Roland know what his advantage is. But they still won't say it out loud.

I don't think it's actually that important. It's a lot like money: there are some folks who don't have enough and struggle because of it, a rare few who have so much they might as well be from Mars in terms of how to relate to them, and then the vast majority of us who are in the middle. Many of whom consider money a big issue but really isn't.

At least with the kind of crap I do for a living, a baseline IQ is required but after you reach that, it no longer serves you all that much. Most definitely it's not the trait you need to advance further.

Horace

@Aqua-Letifer said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:

@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:

Both Coleman and Roland know what his advantage is. But they still won't say it out loud.

I don't think it's actually that important. It's a lot like money: there are some folks who don't have enough and struggle because of it, a rare few who have so much they might as well be from Mars in terms of how to relate to them, and then the vast majority of us who are in the middle. Many of whom consider money a big issue but really isn't.

At least with the kind of crap I do for a living, a baseline IQ is required but after you reach that, it no longer serves you all that much. Most definitely it's not the trait you need to advance further.

I mean for a research economics professor. I know it's not a huge thing for all paths.

Horace

Roland Fryer is the guy who studied police violence, and came to the conclusion that lethal force is not disproportionately applied to black people. He did find a 25% increase in non-lethal force during police interactions with black people. He's not the only academic to have studied this, of course, but he's the only one to publish the results about the lack of bias in lethal police confrontations. Other academics found these same results, but buried them in appendices, rather than present them as real findings. He called those academics cowards. I wonder if he would have been as courageous as he was, to publish those findings, if he didn't have the intellectual freedom which comes from his skin color. It can safely be said that a white academic has more to lose by publishing those findings, than a black academic does. But that's not to say he doesn't have some courage to publish them, just the same.

He talked to Obama about his findings, and proposed certain measures America could use in its police forces to track interactions, so we could have data about where the problems lie. Nothing came of it, and it deeply frustrated Dr Fryer. As always, the left has no intention of fixing anything having to do with race. They are perfectly content to await the next lethal police interaction involving the appropriate skin colors, and have their culture-wide orgasm over it. They wouldn't trade that for anything.

jon-nyc

Latest Sam Harris is an interview of Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, authors of *Viral: The Search for the Origins of Covid” talking about just that.

Horace

Ezra Klein had a decent enough monologue podcast this morning about the implications of AI. Some things he mentioned:

Google's CEO, a few years ago, described AI as a more significant technological advancement than fire or the printing press.

When pressed to define their motivations, people creating these AIs often say that they believe this form if intelligence deserves to live. In other words, they argue from the perspective of the AI. (Personally I don't think people need clear eyed, fundamental motivations to attempt to create things like this. It's probably better to say that they understand the potential risks, but they'd rather attempt to do it anyway, because they think it's fun and interesting.)

AIs can reach escape velocity when they begin to write themselves, and advancements could happen very, very quickly.

Societies are completely unprepared.

Nothing new in what he said, but it was a decent enough 15 minute synthesis.

Horace

Coleman Hughes talked to Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently.

Link to video

I don't suggest listening to it, as Neil is an overbearing douche and not particularly thoughtful about anything other than his scientific discipline.

The most interesting thing to me was when Neil attempted to substantiate his experiences with racism over his life as a black academic. Keep in mind Neil is a pop cultural darling, and is invested in maintaining those narratives. He relates two stories where he was assumed to be stupid by a rando.

Once at a restaurant where he and a companion, who ordered identical things, got a bill with an odd number of cents. He decided this was impossible, and went to the register to ask them to provide separate bills, which he guessed would come out to one cent less in total. A customer behind him muttered that he must not understand the distributive property of math. (This was a college town where there are probably random math geeks at random diners.)

His other story was at a funeral where he was discussing popcorn and terminal velocity if it was dropped out of a plane. Someone overhears and presumes to correct him, but actually Neil was right all along.

So a few observations about these stories:

None of those stories sniff of something that only a black person might experience.
If a white male presented those stories as formative and important life experiences, they would be laughed at, and rightly so. It is infantile to consider those experiences as important. Only through the lens of the race narrative could they be taken remotely seriously.
Neil has no compelling stories of racism, accumulated over his 64 years.

jon-nyc

The latest Sam Harris guest is Tim Urban, the guy behind “Wait But Why”. He wrote a book that touches on why our politics are broken. Definitely worth the 90m.

Horace

Listening to a lot of Lex Fridman podcasts recently. He's a young AI researcher who is like a more intelligent and science-oriented version of Joe Rogan. Same open mindedness and gift for interesting questions. Longest conversations in the podcast game, with the longest I've seen over eight hours. Most are over three. First time I've ever heard Robin Hanson interviewed, so that was a treat. He's talked to almost everybody in the public intellectual game, many several times. Just got done with his conversation with Jordan Peterson, 3.5 hours long. Jordan made himself cry twice. Good stuff.