What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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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)
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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.
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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 videoEducation is extremely important.
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@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.
Please love yourself.
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@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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Coleman Hughes talked to Neil DeGrasse Tyson recently.
Link to videoI 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.
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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.
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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.
Education is extremely important.
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Sam interviewed Robin Hanson a few years back.
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How the hell do you two have the time to listen to all of this crap? There’s only so much time in the day…
Sleep 6
Work 10
Family time - 2-3
Wife time - 2-3
Chores - 1-2
TNCR - 1Where do have any time for this?
Me/rry/Christmas
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@LuFins-Dad said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
How the hell do you two have the time to listen to all of this crap? There’s only so much time in the day…
Sleep 6
Work 10
Family time - 2-3
Wife time - 2-3
Chores - 1-2
TNCR - 1Where do have any time for this?
Lots of tasks can be multitasked with audio only stuff.
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Just tell us you don’t listen to Jordan Peterson during “wife time”…
DON’T let them eat cake.
- RFK Jr -
Here's Mr Peterson and Andrew Huberman discussing human and mammal brain stuff.
Link to videoI think it's easy to lose sight of how lucky we all are to be privy to such conversations. When I was a kid, I thought there were ivory tower intellectuals who were so much smarter than me. But here they are, presenting themselves, intentionally, talking about the leading edge of their thoughts, and lo and behold they are people just like you.
Not just like you, if you're a progressive. So sad, too bad. But there are literally no public intellectual conversations on the 'progressive' side of the cultural conversation. You can have your Jon Stewarts. He's as close as you'll get.
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@Horace said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Here's Mr Peterson and Andrew Huberman discussing human and mammal brain stuff.
Here's your bit of medical trivia. This podcast, at least in the early parts, talks about anxiety and the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve (cranial nerve #10) is the farthest reaching nerve from the brainstem (the medulla). In fact, the etymology of the name, "vagus", has as its root, the same basis as "vagrant," or wanderer. Unique among the nerves exiting the brainstem, the vagus goes all the way down to the GI tract.
