What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?
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This is an amazing conversation. I'd never heard of this guy, Balaji Srinivisan. He's a general partner at Mark Andreesen's venture capital business. Actually they remind me of each other, listening to them. He's got fascinating things to say about so many things. Health care, the FDA, crypto and its applications and importance, the future and past of humanity, too many to remember after one listen. It's an over 7 hour conversation. Among other things, the guy is clearly tireless. It did convince me that I should probably get off my butt and invest in bitcoin.
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On the latest Dishcast, a very interesting conversation between Andrew Sullivan and Chris Stirewalt, who was fired from Fox News for “committing journalism” on election night of 2020 and calling AZ for Biden.
They barely mention that, though. It’s mostly a long and informed lament about the deterioration of US media over the last 25 years, left and right, and what the myriad causes have been.
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Haven't started this yet, but it looks interesting.
A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
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This guy, named Nathan Cofnas, a Philosophy professor at Cambridge, is especially strong in his deconstruction of wokeism. Strong in that he simplifies to what I would consider irrefutable and obvious, if one actually thinks about it. His claim is that the denial of genetic differences between races, or in other words the axiom that all groups are genetically equal cognitively, necessarily leads to wokeism. He goes as far as to claim that explanations around bad cultures are "silly", a claim which he never substantiates in the discussions I've listened to, but which he implies there is plenty of evidence for. Of course the evidence for an IQ difference between racial groups is overwhelming, and he makes the obvious point that anybody familiar with the data does not dispute it. They only pretend to, or they are morons. He takes issue with the Heterodox Academy, a group of academics founded ~10 years ago, with a charter to be able to think and discuss such things out loud. As it turns out, The Heterodox Academy still treats genetic IQ differences as third rail. He names names regarding primary offenders, among them famous free thinking public intellectuals like Jonathan Haidt and John McWhorter. He wrote this piece about it.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/35/4/four-reasons-why-heterodox-academy-failed
Heterodox Academy responded:
A couple podcast conversations with Cofnas:
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Link to videoThe only other legitimate academics this fearless in the face of the social death penalty around these issues are Amy Wax and Charles Murray. Not even Glenn Loury is willing to go as far, though he's willing to talk to these people, and respects their views.
But yes, there is a reason the genetic IQ thing is the ultimate taboo in western cultures. That taboo is the lynchpin of all the social power the left accumulates. If the real explanation is disallowed, any number of curated fake explanations, which just so happen to accumulate power to one political group, can be invented and forced onto the public via propaganda that nobody dares deny.
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@George-K said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Also, where does Peterson buy his clothes???
Gallifrey.
It all started 20 years ago, when somebody introduced Doctor Jordan Peterson, and everybody's response was 'Doctor Who?'
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Enjoyed this conversation with Mo Gawdat, an ex-Google executive and now author and speaker. He's been thinking about AI since before it was cool to think about AI. He goes so far as to recommend people not have kids for a couple years, if they're thinking about it. Just to see how things are going to turn out in the near term. I think that advice is probably over the line of sensible, myself. But the interview is pretty good.
Link to videoEducation is extremely important.
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Just finished listening to this:
"Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it for the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast, and trying to figure out where she's hiding."
The "currency" was/is called OneCoin. I had actually never heard of her or the currency. Came across her name when I saw that she is on the FBI Ten Most Wanted List. So, went down the internet rabbit hole to learn more about her and came across this BBC podcast.
Quite interesting and informative. But, as is the case many times in real life, it does not come to a neat conclusion.
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I've been listening to the 'You'll hear it' podcasts, covering jazz, mostly piano, which I don't play. I love the way these guys talk about music.
Here's one, but there's tons of them
Link to videoanother interesting one...
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Bret Weinstein has a fellow Ivermectin truther on his podcast today, for a three hour conversation about his guest's book, about how Ivermectin was unfairly judged by intentionally fraudulent science. This settles one question I had, about whether Brett had silently retreated from his Ivermectin support. Apparently not. His guest has a cadence one typically sees in salespeople, where he uses the other person's name constantly. "Bret" this and "Bret" that, before every declarative statement about how the big pharma fix is in.
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Good ol' "one of the smartest people in the world" Eric Weinstein, in a recent conversation. One claim he makes that resonated, is that AI which can do all our jobs, breaks capitalism. Which is sort of a big deal.
I do wish he wouldn't dye his hair. It's ridiculous.
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I listened to one of Jon's favorites, Advisory Opinions, about the recent court rulings. For context, the hosts are deep into the legal weeds, and are basically centrists, but almost certainly vote Democrat for POTUS in every election. At least they're adult enough not to outwardly hate the right.
I didn't hear any mention of the newest justice's opinions. I guess nobody really wants to publicly confront the depth of stupidity and disingenuousness Biden has selected onto the court. They were more comfortable taking on Kagain, where they couldn't make any sense of Kagan's claim that "scotus has, for the first time, given constitutional protection for the denial of service to protected classes". Given her strong history of advocacy for free speech, the about face on that issue in her dissent was transparently political.
They made no mention of any political disingenuousness on the part of any "conservative" judge. My take is, that "conservative", when describing supreme court justices, only means "committed to the constitution, and legal precedent". Which is literally their job. It's no wonder that they are less likely to need to twist into knots in the process of doing their jobs.
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To cleanse my palate of relative reason from Advisory Opinions, I listened to another supreme court commentary podcast, called Strict Scrutiny. I think it's the more popular one. It's hosted by three progressive female law professors. The episode I listened to was called "Loan Forgiveness Bad, Bigotry Good". I didn't find the conversation to be fair and balanced. Three angry women. I guess it's cool to be angry, as long as you're not a conservative white male. One of them was having difficulty concentrating because she was about to go to a Taylor Swift concert. These girls were straight out of central casting.
No attempt made to understand or relate to the majority opinions on any of these rulings. Just an outraged conversation about how evil the conservative justices are, and how difficult it is to live in the country they totally control.
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Horace - Sarah Isgur was president of FedSoc at Harvard Law, worked for Romney campaign and then Fiorona. She joined the Trump administration as Spokesperson for Attorney General Sessions. She knows TF out of DoJ and their practices. She’s married to the former Solicitor General of Texas who took the job right after Ted Cruz.
David French is a former president of FIRE, spent years litigating campus free speech issues and working for national pro life and religious freedom organizations as an attorney. He was at National Review for years before co-founding Dispatch Media.
Neither like Trump.
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@Jon said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
Horace - Sarah Isgur was president of FedSoc at Harvard Law, worked for Romney campaign and then Fiorona. She joined the Trump administration as Spokesperson for Attorney General Sessions. She knows TF out of DoJ and their practices. She’s married to the former Solicitor General of Texas who took the job right after Ted Cruz.
David French is a former president of FIRE, spent years litigating campus free speech issues and working for national pro life and religious freedom organizations as an attorney. He was at National Review for years before co-founding Dispatch Media.
Neither like Trump.
Thanks for that surgical refutation of the least meaningful part of my post. Say jon, how about your thoughts on the liberal members of the court and their dissents? You follow this stuff and you're very smart, I would have thought maybe you'd have a thought or two. You seem eager to giggle at Clarence Thomas when he hangs with rich people, but you've been silent about these rulings. Still collecting your thoughts?
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It’s like 250 pages that came out the day before I went on vacation.
I am curious about Kagan and Sotomayor’s dissents (if Kagan wrote one) on Harvard for a variety of reasons. I’m curious if they even acknowledged the invidious discrimination against Asians and if so what they said about it.
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Finished a BBC podcast called "The Lazarus Heist"
"In 2016 North Korean hackers planned a $1bn raid on Bangladesh's national bank and came within an inch of success - it was only by a fluke that all but $81m of the transfers were halted, report Geoff White and Jean H Lee. But how did one of the world's poorest and most isolated countries train a team of elite cyber-criminals?"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads
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Lex Fridman spoke to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the smash hit book Sapiens. This one was 2:44 in length.
Link to videoLex positioned this one right after an interview with Netanyahu, to hear from the opposition. Harari's opposition is mostly about slippery slopes into a religious dictatorship.
Harari believes in the power of stories to shape humanity. His main example was fiat currency, which he claims is meaningless except for the story we are told that it's valuable. Which is a stupid point. Fiat currency is valuable by agreement, enforced by the credible threat of violence from the government that prints it. Stories have nothing to do with it. Harari needs to find a better example of the power of stories.
They also discussed 'public intellectual' mainstays about artificial intelligence and consciousness. They both admitted that consciousness cannot be determined anyway, and only has to be assumed to exist in others. Yuval claimed we don't believe livestock are conscious. Another stupid point. I guess almost everybody assumes livestock has some consciousness. Harari is preoccupied with suffering, and minimizing it. He thinks that if an AI can suffer, it's definitely conscious. He appeared to think that made a meaningful point. Which it doesn't. It only begs the question of consciousness. You can no more determine true suffering than you can determine true consciousness.
Anyway, it's good to get the other side of the Israel thing, even if there wasn't that much to chew on.
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I take it you prefer bibi?
I think he could outpoll trump and desantis if he was running for President.
But me, I’ve known him thirty years. I’ve had enough
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@bachophile said in What are you listening to - Podcast Edition?:
I take it you prefer bibi?
I think he could outpoll trump and desantis if he was running for President.
But me, I’ve known him thirty years. I’ve had enough
I prefer neither. Just watching from a distance and trying to make sense of both sides.
