BJ Campbell Transcript
00:00.30
cactus chu
All right, welcome to the show so you write a blog called ah hand waving freak outery. It should be linked in the show notes and usually I don't like bio questions but this one seems particularly Apt. So What is hand waving freakoutery? And why did you start? it.
00:16.95
BJ
Well um, the origins of the publication actually kind of go back to the gun discussion in 2018 in the United States gun policy. What I was I found myself in a lot of Facebook arguments with people who are. I am intelligent. But we're being misled by statistical manipulation within the anti gun media and I kept having to yeah, kept feeling obligated to step into these discussions and explain why the um graphs they're referring to are wrong and how they're being fooled. And that sort of thing and these discussions tended to be long and they tended to keep happening over and over again. So what I decided to do was instead of copy and pasting walls of text that nobody's going to read anyway. I tried to find some place I could host you know. Kind of clean it up and turn it into an article and then just drop the link into the argument instead. So I fished around and I found medium dot com and I cleaned up one of my ah one of my you know expose a pieces on trying to do that and made it you know tuned it into an article format. And I was really only doing it just for my own use to save me some time typing and then it went viral on Reddit and I ended up with about a quarter million hits on it and I made 5 or $ 600 so I was like a whole nut. So I should write a second 1 right? So um. So that turned into a series of 5 or 6 articles specifically related to gun policy in the United States and specifically focused on the mathematics and the data and appropriate data representation and how the media were, um, screwing with people by representing data improperly. And that sort of thing and I tried to keep it clean of any culture or stuff and I never even referenced the second amendment the first 5 or 6 article I don't even know if I've ever even brought the second amendment up in any article I've ever written which is a pretty impressive feat for somebody who's primarily a gun ah gun policy blogger right? That's where I've gotten almost all of my traction. In the gun space and along that route. Um, you know I kept referring to the media's behavior regarding guns as hand waving freak etery and so I figured that'd be a fun name for the for the piece and then the way the the publication. Pivot was towards the end after we'd gone through you know, however, many articles explaining how there isn't actually a gun homicide epidemic and all this kind of thing you know a lot of, a lot of statistical analysis and a lot of grass. You know the question comes well why is the media behaving this way?
03:04.95
BJ
And why are people behaving this way and then it pivoted over to more of a media criticism in general um publication and then also a publication that was seeking out answers to why? The culture war is propagating like it was right. And and 18 I feel like not a lot of people had realized how deep the culture war was and there wasn't a whole lot of people that were focusing on it like there are now um and a lot of the analysis that you know I put together in my publication ended up mirroring what a lot of much more prominent thinkers are saying now. So that was interesting and then after that we kind of pivoted more towards understanding what culture wars even are um, coming up with a language to describe them and then looking at how? ah. The technology of social media interacts with that and what you know that portends for the future that kind of thing so that's kind of where the publication sits right now. Um, and then occasionally we'll do some side stuff like you know little piece here and there about abortion or or environmentalism or things like that. But. It's um, it's mostly a cultural analysis publication that occasionally goes back to the well on guns and then any of the actual hard copy publications that I've been in you know usually goes back to gun related stuff like I've got a. Articles and recall magazines and I've done some work for them and that sort of thing. So um so I've got really I've got readers from 2 kinds of different groups. 1 group is the gun folks and then the other group is sort of like the I guess the cast-offs from the um. Brief flash in a pan that was the intellectual dark web those kids right? are they a game by people or or those kinds of things. So like those folks you know, thinking about societal problems in new frameworks and then yeah, we've got other people you know. Like the fact that you can put together a mathematical framework to explain why you're a you know gun prepper right? So that's kind of where my readers come from.
05:22.64
cactus chu
Yeah I feel like you may have turned off like two thirds of the audience but the one third that's left is really really excited, but let's try to Catch. Everyone's interested again. Um with this very specific metaphor that you use when thinking about the culture war. And that is the aregore. So First What is the aregore in kind of vlore and then and what is the aregore when applied to when applied to kind of real life or applied to social analysis.
05:52.90
BJ
I think there's kind of 3 layers instead of 2 um the arigores from a cult. They're kind of an o cult term and originally as I understand it the idea is you get a bunch of cultists together and they're all thinking the same thing and they're all doing the same thing. What they do is they. Effectively invoke um a demon, a spirit of some kind that then becomes manifest simply by their actions and then it would, you know, influence them, control them, dominate them. So it's like ah a way to you know? Um, you know it has to do with. Cult practices right? Um, and it's kind of the next layer up is and there's a lot of people that are throwing around this term and they have kind of different definitions for it and the broader modern definition for it is just a um you know a way to encapsulate the. Actions of groups and group behavior and everybody believes x y z and so then it becomes manifest and that is I think more prominent nowadays in the internet space because you know in the meta or whatever we want to call it. Um, you know postmodernism works. It's real. You know, like reality is a social construct there. It may not be out you know in the actual real world. But if people spend their entire life on the internet then anything they socially construct can become manifest and then you have that definition of the erigor and then. The extremely narrow definition that I like toying with um that I'd like to start trying to do some analysis on and and and like some rigorous kind of maybe ghetto science on is this? um. What we have right now in social media is we have a system where everybody's brains are wired together. Um, and what you do on all of your social media platforms as you're doom scrolling through spending your day you're looking at content and then you are choosing whether to amplify or not amplify that content. You like it or you share it. Your share is a big amplifier like a smaller amplifier that then allows the you know the algorithms to decide whether they want to share it and then that and that content can be anything from a picture of a cat to you know. Um, a communist manifesto right? You know it can be small things or big things or things in the middle videos. Whatever this is exactly the same procedure that a neuron undergoes in the brain. So a neuron has a nucleus.
08:40.82
BJ
And it has or has a cell body and off of it it has dendrites which are small little sticks of cell material that collect signals from other neurons. The combination of those signals goes into the axon. There's some generator function inside the axon that nobody's really sure how it works but it can. Tune itself and adjust over time and then it decides whether or not to fire down the axon to the dendrites of other neurons and then this procedure happens in that neuron and the next neuron and the next neuron and they're all tied together in a web. When computer scientists build artificial neural networks. They're basically building a small virtual model of these things in an artificial neural network. You'll have a box. Um, inside the box is some generator function which usually just kind of runs between zero and one and you feed it x number of inputs and then it processes those through a mathematical equation and it sends out an output and what you do and and ends is you build a network of these. They're all virtually live in the computer and each the answer of each box feeds the next box and such and you'll have rows of them that are connected in some way and you'll do something like input 100 years worth of college football scores into one side of it and then you have it. Um, or you input 1 college set of college football statistics on one side of it and have it spit out a score and the score is wrong, right? But each of these little equations has a knob where you can turn you know a variable inside of it or multiple variables that you can adjust inside each box and see it turn all the boxes a little bit and you. Try it again and if it gets closer then you keep turning the knobs and then you're kind of like playing Marco Polo with your answer right? And once you get it tuned to 1 score then you're like all right great now you stick in, you know some other historical score game and then you see if it gets it right? and it gets it wrong. So you tune the knobs or more and then you run both scores. Till it can get both of them both mostly right? and then because computers think fast you give it a hundred years worth of college football data and you tell it to sit there for a week and auto tune the knobs until it most closely approximates the answer and then you have taught your computer to predict football. Um, that's how an a and n works. But what we have in social media is we have effectively an a and n where instead of passing numbers. We're passing thoughts. Um and then they are being processed.
11:32.92
BJ
And pass through and the thoughts can be very complicated and um, over the past five to 10 years. Um, the rise of the image meme has allowed complicated thoughts to be compressed, those work like thought compression. So if you have um. And think of a good example. There was a great libertarian meme a while ago and it has a picture of a road. No, it's a dead cat on the side of the road and there was a um paint stripe that went down the road and it painted over the cat and it continued going. And the caption was without a government who would paint the dead cats. Okay now what that is is a tremendous amount of information compression because there is an entire argument between the authoritarians and libertarians about without government who would build the roads and. That entire argument is distilled down there with and yet the government is also doing these things like painting cats so that whole thing which is you know it's five days worth of arguing on Reddit is distilled into an image that can be easily processed. And a few seconds and then shared and it goes viral and it travels down the meme ways right? What we have now is a system where it is. We literally have an artificial neural network sum of thought now the the. Things to step sideways here are good if you get into a and n science and artificial intelligence science. There's some disagreement within the people who do that kind of stuff about whether or not any of these things can ever become truly intelligent and you have turing tests and you have all this philosophical argument. And the other but you basically have 2 camps some of them say it'll never happen the other say if you ever generate an a n that's complex enough. It will become sentient.
13:39.38
BJ
If that second group is true then the a n that is social media must at some point become sentient is if it reaches a level of complexity. It's doomed to happen. It's destined to happen sooner or later. And then the question is has it already happened because we wouldn't know because we are just cells in its brain and there's no way for it to be able to um, there's no way for it to talk to us there's no way for us to talk to it. It lives at the next level up. So. The question is, is this thing real? I don't know I don't think that anybody could say for sure but not yet anyway, but they're tooling around with Patrick Ryan and some other folks that are associated with my blog and we're scratching our heads trying to figure it out. There's a way to test it. So that would be the third definition kind of the you know the the third layer of aragorn speak when I talk about meme space egregore is my publication I'm talking about almost specifically that concept. The idea that cur kurzweil singularity has already happened and it lives. Social media uses our brain as a substrate and in that case you have um, it becomes much different than just general Eric Hoffer Bob mentality right? It's something that's much more reactive and much more capable of evolution on a faster scale. And an ordinary mob.
15:14.61
cactus chu
Yeah, so I'm sorry to like do a break this earlier in the podcast I'm gonna I'm gonna cut this out but I don't think this video thing is working because your ah your resolution is incredibly low to me and I don't think it's really like usable at all.
15:31.50
BJ
Yours is not really low to me too. So there must be something going on on the internet.
15:34.67
cactus chu
Okay, yeah, so I think it's just better to disable both and I'm actually going to go and close a window because there are some aggressive birds outside. Um, but I will be back and then I will. Ah.
15:50.70
BJ
Alright sounds good.
15:52.77
cactus chu
I will resume an interview.
16:08.35
cactus chu
Yes, can you disable your video as well because I'm worried that it's causing some of the audio quality problems as well or I think I can disable it for you. Maybe there we go all right? Yeah, all you are fine.
16:18.19
BJ
Okay, is the audio. Okay there.
16:31.29
cactus chu
Okay, so I will continue in 3 and I will talk for a bit as well. So you can have time to prepare.
16:41.99
cactus chu
So you might have accidentally won run oh my goodness so you might have accidentally run into the 1 podcast where you'll actually get very very specific pushback on this because I mean 2 episodes ago I talked with roon I talked. Ah, in a fair amount of detail about machine learning itself and this is also my background as well. So a lot of people. Yeah, a lot of people who do machine learning would be very skeptical that at least in their terms that you can have any kind of network formed with this because.
17:03.92
BJ
Perfect then great tear department.
17:19.56
cactus chu
1 there is no kind of explicit cost function and we can get to whether there's an implicit one later on and two that there's just incredible. Um, incredible amount of unspecificity right? Essentially, you can have these parameters that are being tuned but they're not. Being tuned in any kind of any kind of safe environment. Any kind of closed environment. They're incredibly prone to disruption by all sorts of other things. So there's going to be a lot of pushback, especially using these kinds of technical terms. There. But I do think it's. Actually very useful as a kind of metaphor you see this in biology a lot where of course you have a bunch of cells they combine to make up an organism and the organism has behaviors and we might say that the organism wants to do something when it's simply kind of responding to those types of stimuli. And you might also say that evolution itself wants to do something it wants to make some group of organisms or some specific genes pass on into the future and we could say evolution is doing x even if of course evolution is not really a kind of sentient being and. There is where I most see this kind of value of thinking about this as a kind of information aggregator or as a kind of aggregate as you said does that seem right to you.
18:42.63
BJ
Um, yeah, we could talk about it in those terms I mean I'm not convinced personally that you know this thing as I say has any kind of like legitimate intelligence or even if it does I don't know how we would even describe it right? I mean like that's the problem with you know you were talking to. You know if you want to jump over to the Ufos and alien species and whatever else like how would you know that they were intelligent if they you didn't have a shared language if you didn't have you know like I don't know think about dogs and cats we think dogs are more intelligent than cats but cats are smarter being a cat than a dog is so you know in some ways. Our judge of intelligence is how close they are to thinking like us and in that case, you know if this thing is thinking in a very foreign way then what it we even considered to be thinking these are philosophical questions right? Um, you know the cultural analysis layer I mean I think that there's a. I'm a strong believer in the concept of social darwinism and I think that culture war is the means by which social darwinism happens. Um, and.
19:54.92
cactus chu
Can we be a little bit specific on that because I think there's ah, there's a version of social darwinism that I think is a little bit silly which is the kind of like explicit um explicit kind of genetic version I think that that's like.
19:56.30
BJ
I mean I don't think it's.
20:13.84
cactus chu
That's just empirically false.. It's empirically false that you're kind of doing these social procedures in order to prune off the actual genetics. But there's this parallel idea or this real strongly related idea of mimetics right? Essentially that you have memes you have ideas that can propagate themselves that can mutate that can change. And that eventually are competing to survive themselves and I think that maybe um is more accurate like which exactly do you mean by social darwinism.
20:42.20
BJ
I do think there's some cross talk between genetic darwinism and so and ah social darwinism. But I'm mostly a meme darwinist right? I mean 1 of the easiest ways to kind of disprove the idea that human behavior is largely genetic or not. I mean in individual behavior I think you can make a stronger case with twin studies and stuff like that. But for um, you know societal behavior is I think obviously not very genetic and the easiest example to me really is you know it's right here North America I mean you go back 600 years in the Aztecs. Sacrificing millions of people on the top of pyramids and that the Aztecs didn't go away. You know it's just that they're today. they're catholic they well no I mean like their genetics didn't go away right? You know now they're driving pickup trucks and re-roofing my house and playing soccer with me on the weekends.
21:21.70
cactus chu
Well.
21:34.70
BJ
Right? Um, you know that's that's you know now it's I feel pretty strongly that if you trace the you know the you know genealogy back most of the folks in Mexico and Central America and that kind of thing you know can trace it more to aztecs and they can't. Spaniards and so obviously don't they don't have like you know human sacrifice propensities in their you know in in their their you know behavioral set. So I think it's very important that you have a very strong case that at a societal level people are enacting memes that we are. Mostly white space in our brains that gets infected by a meme and then the meme is a um as a social organizational tool and then culture wars.
22:19.74
cactus chu
Right? I think it's kind of mixed right because all of this just depends on what level of analysis You think is obvious or trivial because we might say well of course everyone is going to eat. But there's a reason why people are going to eat and it's not necessarily because people die off. Well, it's indirectly because people die off if they don't but um, of course you can. You can still have someone who by some predicament decides not to eat. But of course we have these kinds of not even necessarily genetic, but kind of um, kind of biological. Um, defaults to desire food to have hunger basically and so you do have a strong layer of biology and of course there's a blurry line between that and where you have a strong layer of obvious social effects and I think it's just depending on kind of where you shine the light. Of saying oh is more of humanity say biologically determined as opposed to ideologically determined but the point stands that you do have this kind of mutating changing process of competition of ideas I think I would agree with you there.
23:34.92
BJ
Yeah, no I think that's the idea that um I mean like you know every modern ah society that exists today has some flavor of the golden rule baked into it right? and the golden rule and every modern society that's successful has money.
23:51.71
cactus chu
Reciprocity.
23:54.87
BJ
Baked into it right? I mean money is a completely made up concept. The idea that you can exchange the shekels for grain was invented by Hamurabi so that people didn't have to carry around big pots of grain to barter with the right um. And that's ah, that's a consensual hallucination that we all buy and we all learn it when we're kids we have to teach it to our kids and then their kids are gonna teach it to their kids. It's a meme right? Um, but it's extremely successful. 1.
24:18.50
cactus chu
I Don't think that's necessarily true though because um, while you can say like what is invented what exists but you have a kind of inference process and whether you say that inference process where you. Take the past and you project it onto the future. Whether that's imaginative I think it's a bit stronger than that because let's take gold for example and of course we don't necessarily do all of the exchanges in Gold. We can get to that later. Um, I didn't think this would be a podcast where I'm talking about the gold standard and things like that. But essentially you had civilizations where this one commodity really rose to the top as a kind of currency and really what this occurred by is it occurred by a kind of propagation from the past into the future where you could observe that. Very frequently people would trade gold for things just because they liked gold not necessarily because there was some kind of agreement that we all got together and said this is our currency but then you propagate that forward and you say okay we know that in the past gold could be traded for many things. Maybe in the future goals can also be traded for many things and as it turns out those people who thought that were correct and then this created and created more and more adoption until really, all of the societies in the world were running on what's called the Gold Standard Well not literally all of them but most major ones there was. A strong value almost explicitly in basing essentially notes that were representations of gold that were by law saying that the government would exchange for Gold. Um, and also you had a strong value of gold in basically everywhere else you could still. Exchange it for quite a lot of things even if it wasn't say a quote unquote currency and of course you had various evolutions of government and laws passed that eventually changed that but for a very long time. This was not something that we made up on the spot. This was not some kind of collusion thing. Were people taking their insights and you could say Okay, yeah, these are insights about the social world but taking insights that I think are real and then just propagating them.
26:38.45
BJ
Well I mean I'll push back a little bit on that I mean gold in my mind was it was used for money because it was rare and it was easy to make coins out of right? And yes, people did also use it for jewelry and stuff like that. But um and you know jewelry has a social signaling. You know, the effect of that. Has value but you know it's it is evident now that um you know that gold is just used because it was if there was something else that was, you know, rare and easy to make coins out of them. They could have just as easily used that and they did and I mean they're going all the way back. You know you had. You know prior to any kind of gold exchange you had um you know people using seashells as Proxies. The important thing is that any society that used a barter proxy out competed a society that used barter and so that's where you so that's where you're your you know mimetic evolution thing comes in.
27:27.14
cactus chu
Right.
27:33.63
BJ
Okay, so the meme that a barter proxy the meme the and meme itself of a barter proxy is is deeply ingrained to all societies and when we pivoted away from gold standard we still had the barter proxy meme right? You can't pivot away from that right? Otherwise things get a lot more difficult. Exchange for chickens to have your tire rotated or whatever. Um, so that's an example of a means that sticks, the golden rule is also an example of a meme that sticks. So like if you have and you could go back. You know 5000 years and you probably had. Hundreds or thousands of religions across the world and now you've got I don't know four or 5 and at least 3 of them trace the roots back to the same thing and um and they but they all have similar properties right? And the reason you could say this is because god came down and gave them the. Direct instructions to run a society or you could say that well and you know all the other versions that didn't have those properties failed in a meme competition right? So um, the good memes outcompete the bad ones and they do that by you know, different modes. So um. 1 of the ways they do it is by hijacking older memes. This is like christianity spreading Europe by hiracking European paganism. Um, sometimes they do it at a sore point. Um, and ah sometimes they do it. You know I think it's rare. But um. Sometimes they do it by, you know, presenting a better way to live and people pivot over to it or whatnot. But I think it's usually not through competition. Usually it's for some kind of war and what happens with people is that um. Strongest memes that can infect somebody and infect their behavior affect their behavior are ones that cause that person to try and rub out a different meme like a culture that doesn't participate in culture war will get beaten by a culture that does persist. Participate in culture war and therefore what happens when people fill their whitespace in their brains with culture is that they want to argue about their culture being right and potentially pick up swords or guns because of it if the thing gets too unraveled right? and that's kind of that. That's the original connection back to the gun stuff that I was writing the prepper stuff right? So you know watching that culture war is very important to those kinds of folks because they're worried about when it's going to go hot and how would you know and what are the signs.
30:24.16
BJ
And in order to understand whether it's going hotter or not, you need to have a you know you have ah an analysis toolkit to be able to describe what's actually happening and this eregore concept at the soft level to kind of the level 2 level that you and I shaking hands on disregarding the ai content. Um. It is a very useful toolkit to be able to watch how many people are captured by a bundle of npc thought and where that bundle of npc thought is going and are there competing bundles. You know I would argue that in the United States there's definitely at least 2 the wokes and the magass and um, maybe more ah depending on how you want to slice it. But um, you know you know folks in my sphere you know they're they're watching it. They're all right.
31:17.41
cactus chu
Yeah I think going through some of those case by case examples would actually be very great for this because right now we've established maybe a kind of high up as I have 2 guests to go.
31:19.20
BJ
I need to buy many bullets today. You know.
31:37.00
cactus chu
Would put it a kind of infrastructure astronaut type approach where we've talked about all of these hypotheticals and these ideas and these kind of systems and there's we haven't yet laid out a manifestation of them. So so let's talk about how this works in practice. You talked about the wokes and the magass I would say that there is at least like 3 or 4 because you do have a kind of I think you kind of have a center and even though my politics are more center I still think that this is still a thing where you do have have a kind of. Um, not necessarily woke but maybe a more neoliberal or maybe a more technocratic version as well. This is kind of the covid stuff as well of something that seems like an egregore. I would agree with you about Magga and its kind of culture.
32:27.78
BJ
They believe in science.
32:33.73
cactus chu
Left At this point is probably bigger than just woke I would agree that those are those are definitely agriorres on their own as well.
32:39.46
BJ
Yeah I think that well I mean I think that what you had with covid was um, you had the the belief science folks were like I mean they were afraid and so they latched onto um, an authority and they entrusted the authority to. Rescuing them from their fears and you know fear is a great control mechanism but like what I noticed um I mean I'm in Atlanta I know people work at the Cdc and I saw what was happening there is that like you know they were getting their marching orders socially. Not from the Cdc they were obtained from science. Anyway, they were getting it from the occupy democrats Facebook page because that's I mean the Cdc is a very monolithically blue progressive organization because of you know the recruitment tactics people don't go there to make money they go there so that somebody can carve their. Ah, sign on their gravestone. That said that they saved someone's life one day right? You know. Kind of people who go to work there, there is nothing wrong with that.
33:43.74
cactus chu
Right? I think there is a bias in government government positions in general. I don't remember if there's a yeah I wrote I referenced a few of these studies actually in ah in a previous article I wrote there is a. Stronger left-leaning bias in government institutions and this can be attributed to their hiring practices mainly they're kind of like neo-racist hiring practices. But if you control for those.
34:07.42
BJ
Well I think that's yeah I think that's true for all governments but it is I'll tell you it is especially true for the Cdc because of where it is. It is especially true for the Cdc because of where it is in town.
34:18.17
cactus chu
O.
34:24.74
BJ
Right Against. It's tied in with memory university which is an extremely liberal university. They were the ones that had like you know that had a um and twenty sixteen somebody wrote they were writing ah writing like Magga and Trump for president on the sidewalks and chalk one night and they shut the hole like.
34:27.88
cactus chu
I see.
34:44.19
BJ
University down for a day because they were so traumatized. It was a big deal. It was like in the national news that memory freaked out that much and they are deeply connected to the Cdc there's a pipeline there and um, you know I have some friends who are ah, not necessarily in that group that are privy to internal you know Cdc kind of.
34:44.98
cactus chu
This Ssis.
35:03.79
BJ
Communications and they tell me some stories that are just egregious. You know they have to hide the fact that they are either conservative or even just not particularly extremely liberal left to hide their views. Um, and it's ah you know it's It's Bad. It's very you know left-leaning but you know the. The important thing to take out of this though is that even the folks that had you know access to the science were still pushing the panic and the science you know nowadays you're finally seeing this sort of generalized Covid egg. Come to the conclusion that you know Covid is primarily a disease of old people and fat people and old fat people. Um, and that.
35:51.10
cactus chu
I Think like actual scientists knew that from the beginning but I think in the public consciousness. There's definitely a faction of the country that didn't realize this.
36:00.57
BJ
Well, you know yes and no, they also remember that the Cdc the the people at the Cdc view their job as as ah, um, as behavioral manipulation right? I mean you could go back to like a great example of this is like right.
36:14.56
cactus chu
Yeah, that's what public health means right? That's what public Health minus just kind of medical science means.
36:19.33
BJ
Public health means behavioral manipulation right? right? So like a good example for this is nicotine vaping right? um people who vape nicotine can't get cancer from their vapes. And all the science saying that vapes are bad is like really tortured. It's really kind of twisted. Um, and if someone were to take a public health approach, a raw scientific public health approach, what they should be doing is they should be saying that vapes are 95% safer than cigarettes and this is what they do and. The European public health agencies do right? But the Cdc conflates the 2 they call them both the same thing and they take huge ad buys to try and keep people from vaping and the reason they do that is because they're afraid that there's a pipeline from vapors to smokers that does not show up in the data. It does not show up in the science but they do it anyway because they're. They view their job as social manipulation so they have ah um, they have a mindset that that's.
37:16.69
cactus chu
Wait, the regulators in Europe don't do this and the regulators in the United States do do this. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't know anything about this before.
37:24.92
BJ
Correct correct. Um right? I mean? Yeah, yeah, so um, you know like you know there's a lot of people that just still flat out that smoking rate in Europe's way higher than you just United States um and folks in Europe wish people would switch over to vapes because they're a lot safer. Um, but. Ah, in the United States it's been this sort of you know there was a crusade against tobacco and that spilled over into crusade against nicotine one of the interesting things about nicotine. Another example of this is nicotine is one of the only proven amulets of drugs for Parkinson's disease.
38:01.56
cactus chu
Really.
38:03.41
BJ
It's about the only thing that you can treat parkinson's disease with this nicotine and the scientists that have found this out are like they can't get through the wall of you know the social wall to be able to present their papers at um, conferences and stuff. Because of the Cdc and because of the mindsets there. Um, because it's such and it's like good god if somebody's you know dying of Parkinson's disease who cares if they get lung cancer. You know, give them a pack of camels. But um, yeah, but that's you know it's nonsense but they don't want to. Anybody can think that nicotine is good in any way because they're worried more about social manipulation right? You know? Um so and.
38:50.70
cactus chu
I don't know, I think there's ah, there's a strange thing that happens here and maybe we're gonna get to this when we talk about the area of the maga or I guess maybe this is a fourth thing of the kind of reflexive contrarians because. Think about a lot of cases there. There are these statistical tools and tests that people use and they're not always right? They're kind of leaky but they're right more often than not and there are a lot of kinds of quack cures and stuff like that that people push that are not necessarily kind of. That fails these kinds of statistical tests and that maybe if you do more experiments. There are some like fluvoxam that mean you do more experiments and it turns out how this actually works and then there are others that you do more experiments and it turns out now. These don't work and you can give yourself that kind of cost-benefit analysis. You can say. All right? What is the expected benefit that I have from this and say okay maybe we should and we should be more bullish on these things because they might have a benefit and there's partial evidence and maybe we shouldn't be and that depends on your risk tolerance. But I don't know I wouldn't attribute these things completely to say. Ah, behavioral manipulation I think people can just be wrong in like a very plausible case.
40:08.58
BJ
Um, you mean yeah I mean you know, but you think about it like this is like let's take and I guess we can say the word Ira Metin That's cool down enough to her. Nobody's gonna get banned for saying it. Um, you know? Yeah, so ah if you take.
40:19.77
cactus chu
Yeah, yeah, this is podcast land anyway.
40:27.95
BJ
Like oh um, let's imagine something happened at the Cdc right? Let's set the scene. Okay, so somebody's in a sushi bar Decat Georgia and it's 2 people and one of them is ah you know the the kindest most ah you know, um, forthright Cdc researcher who? um. You know, only wants the good of the public and they're sitting across a table from this evil big pharma rep who like you know wants to make the most money ever right? and they both got this. They're both between them on the table beside their poke bowls is ah is ah a study that's a top secret study that the Cdc did with some scientists. So that Iver Metin is 15 % effective. It's not great. It's not bad and they've got this other secret study that says that the vaccines are actually 30% effective instead of 90% effective right? Okay, let's pretend that this. A scene where we're pretending the two things are those people who are opposite people. Okay, your evil phma rep and you're like super you know you want to do the public good. The 2 things they would agree on is to suppress ivermectin and promote. But you know too.
41:24.76
cactus chu
Okay.
41:42.12
BJ
To lie about ivermectin and to lie about um vaccination right? They would want to say vaccinations are 90% effective and they would want to say ivermectin is 0 and the reason they would want to say that is because if people believe that ivermectin works then they won't get vaccinated. So. There is a um, kind of ah a layer of the hippocratic oath where you know lying at the social levels justified right.
42:07.96
cactus chu
I don't know I don't really buy this because maybe I'm just getting a very distorted picture or of ah or no, maybe maybe there's a special kind of incentive distortion at the Cdc that makes them different from normal. Medical scientists or normal doctors or normal even like epidemics. Okay I mean epidemiologists, they buy into a lot of kinds of janky assumptions and I'm hopefully going to have Philippe Blumwen on the show to talk about that as well. Um, but I just. Don't think that that's too plausible or okay, let's let's go. Let's go a bit into detail about what I mean here: a lie 30% to 90% if we're being very specific about what we're lying about. Um.
42:47.37
BJ
I mean the same kind of things happened in the past to the United States like for instance, um, okay, good.
43:04.54
cactus chu
That can be disproven incredibly quickly and I don't think if the problem is like this is a hypothetical right? So we can't really say for sure. Um, but for example, like even we can run through the hypothetical and I would say that it could be verified incredibly quickly that this is not actually the case you can have as an independent. Study you can have these things happen and you'll have at least 1 kind of data set where this is just obviously false and it's actually pretty hard. Maybe it's possible to stop one of those data sets from coming out but it's. Let's face it. It's quite hard to stop all of the data sets from coming out because it's just actually very hard to coordinate your going to eventually have one person who is a kind of defector right? That's actually pretty likely I think that if they're conducting the study in the first place and they find these results and they're going to publish the results. And um, you have the system of confirmation of verification of applying statistical methods of actually controlling for various possible factors in each of these studies that can actually get to the truth and can actually resolve things if given enough time.
44:17.29
BJ
I don't. I'm much more pessimistic of you than that. Ah I'm much more pessimistic on you than that and there's and I'll give you 2 examples. One of them is the lab leak hypothesis.
44:19.37
cactus chu
And having like that big of a lie that's not going to. That's not going to pass.
44:31.84
BJ
I mean anybody who brought up most of the scientists who were looking at this at the time kind of knew that this thing would probably come from a lab and at this point in my opinion I mean like right now we know that Peter Dozzik of eco health you know up submitted. A. Ah, grant proposal to darpa in 182 to add a spike protein to the s one s 2 cleavage site of an existing source coronavirus virus to see if it was more transmissible in humans and to do that research at North University of North Carolina and the Wuhan Institute of virology and darpa turned him down. He has a grant proposal out there to build covid. And people still don't believe in the lab leak hypothesis and for all of Tony.
45:06.36
cactus chu
Was it WIV as well or was it just a I thought it was just the Redfield lab.
45:11.53
BJ
Know it was also when they were supposed to do it but it doesn't matter because Darpa turned it down right? But so it was not covid was not developed under that darpa grant because that Darpa Grant didn't exist but it stands to reason that eco health. Either turned around and shopped it straight to the chinese or shopped it to some other you know government black organization that hit it or the chinese just stole the idea and just did it themselves right? You know and then it leaked out that way but during 2020 no scientist came on record saying that they. It was that the lab leak hypothesis was real because they were afraid they would be branded as racist. Okay, that's.
45:51.50
cactus chu
I Don't think that's the reason and and once again, this might be kind of my own personal circle or my own bias of people who I know.
45:58.14
BJ
I can send you a link to my technology review that has quotes with scientists that said that they said that but they didn't want to say it because it was racist so at least some of them were thinking that.
46:05.80
cactus chu
Yeah, Okay I think there's at least some people who think that but in general like I think that people just got it wrong because as I said there's these kind of fundamental assumptions that you have going into each field and. I Mean we talked about taking the past and projecting it onto the future and I think that's just what happened here and in this case, it's something that was wrong. Um, or not necessarily guaranteed to be wrong Yet. We don't know that for sure. But at the very least much less certain than it was I think I would definitely give you that and say you're right on that. Because the hypothesis was essentially or the kind of mainstream hypothesis and I don't think I completely fault people for believing in this I think people believed it to as I said ah too high of a certainty but I think there was certainly a time when we knew less where it was more likely that this was true. Is that you just look at base rates? There have been a lot of natural pandemics throughout history and so you can have a high likelihood that there is a natural pandemic again. Of course you can say that we haven't been Doing. We haven't been doing any research on viruses for. Really all that long and we certainly have not done it with the techniques that we have now including gain of function which I think is the most controversial but you can say you can still look at that you can still look at the amount of pandemics that have come from a natural origin in the past. And you can say like okay this is more likely than not now do I think that you should keep your mind open and you should not censor debate and you should look for further evidence and you should conduct a full investigation I think that you should but do I think that people were kind of malicious. In believing this at the very beginning I don't really think so and eventually you you had this play out I Do think you have a social process you have this kind of aregore where people want to confirm form and be like quote unquote politically correct I think that that exists but I don't think you need some kind of like. You need some kind of over specific explanation where people are intentionally lying to create that. I think that while a lot of people have assumptions, a lot of people have assumptions that aren't preferential to the Lab Bleak hypothesis and they kind of acted based on those assumptions.
48:26.24
BJ
I I want to push back when you are there twice. Okay so one your base rate thing kind of falls apart once you realize that the thing came out you know ah was discovered a mile away from the Whan as due to virology and it was in right.
48:29.93
cactus chu
Okay.
48:40.18
cactus chu
Yeah I don't think that that's true in hindsight I'm saying that like at the very beginning like.
48:45.70
BJ
Right? But like you know at the very beginning you could say all right? Well it came from a wet market was the original thing right? and everybody said oh well these things come all the time and a wet market is a likely place for it to come from. Well if you know if you try and back figure how many wet markets are in the pacific rim there's like thousands. And I mean you could have a brand new pandemic that erupted every single year since the birth of Christ and you'd still only get one that came out of the one down the street from Wuhan so like the the. Base rate thing I don't think is a good argument at all. Once you let start looking at the geographic specificity where the thing came from. But if you made that case in 2020 to anybody captured by the dominant erigorre. They called you a racist and. Like I and I know this because I tried to make this exact case to 5 or 6 people one of which is a Cdc employee who called me a racist like ah this is you know I remembered the snapshot of what the argument looked like back then and um.
49:54.25
cactus chu
It's really funny too because I remember Matthew Iglesias had this tweet that was something like yes, it is the racist belief that this wasn't due to people being kind of like being quote unquote dirty eating at a wet market with bats.
50:06.63
BJ
Right? Yeah, right? exactly? Um, and so like you know, ah so the racist accusation doesn't even make sense on its face but you know the reason it caught was you know because I mean you also remember it at the time you know a lot of people were really swept up in the.
50:13.89
cactus chu
Yeah.
50:25.80
BJ
The Trump and Trump thing right? it there became a point. Um I mean like my I move I moved in October Twenty Twenty I moved out of Cobb County into Cherokee County in Georgia because Cobb County closed their schools and they closed their schools.
50:26.23
cactus chu
Yeah, for sure.
50:40.30
BJ
When you talk to the moms that were freaking out closer schools. It was almost specifically because Trump was president. They were like I just don't trust the leadership. I'm okay with opening the schools if we have different national leadership. It was the kind of thing they were saying, yeah and so that's and that's the same. It's the same bunch of people who are saying labaik is racist and the same bunch of people who are you know Um, you know the whole thing was the whole thing was it was a groupthink it was it 1 giant episode of groupthink and most of the people because it was. Groups think on the left and scientists tend to lean left. There was a group that was more influential over scientists.
51:21.84
cactus chu
Yeah I do think there is this kind of groupthink Phenomenon going on. That's where I definitely agree with you. I would say that what might be a white pill is that eventually we kind of overturn this right. And you can say that this was due to outsiders This was due to something like drastic which is ah I Forget what they stand for now. But it's something about essentially researching Lab Leak and and researching these kinds of ah these kinds of through fairly rigorous I think scientific methods researching. Lab Leak hypothesis and those kind of clues and eventually you did get more mainstream adoption right? You do you do get more of an open consideration in actually investigating this properly from the kind of scientific. Don't even want to say scientific Community I Know a lot of people say that not many scientists say that other than basically ironically because scientists don't really agree with each other that much they they agree on certain kind of axioms of course, but they don't really. On a result like this on kind of an endpoint result on the thing that we're trying to reason to that we're trying to actively investigate. Usually there's not too much investment and there's not too much absolute agreement and I would agree with you that this is kind of a groupthink Phenomenon especially at the very early stages. There was a. Very strong groupthink Phenomenon where people were basically just going along to get along and conforming with their social circle and that if you have institutions like Partisan media then that becomes much much worse.
53:05.66
BJ
And you know it's worth mentioning that this is not a United States specific thing, this is international. You know I mean the Philippines were starving their people in Lockdowns China is still starving their people in lockdowns because they you know? um.
53:13.64
cactus chu
Writes.
53:23.67
BJ
Yeah, think zy is probably just scared to lose face. They're just doubling and tripling down on the lockdown concept and the lockdown concept is tremendously damaging the food shortages we're going to experience this year are related to and the inflation are related to the lockdowns economically speaking. Can't just stop the economic engine and then start it back up and expect that there's going to be no ramifications right on me like I think.
53:46.37
cactus chu
Yeah I'm trying to have maybe this is just yet another kind of solicitation but I'm trying to get Ryan Peterson on the Ceo Flexport to talk about this as well. But the supply chain definitely likes the implications of these kinds of lockdowns. We're still not reckoning with that. We haven't reckoned that we can look at inflation. We can now look at shortages of tons of things like semiconductors, baby formula etc. Almost every facet of life going up basically for someone like me on the younger side that it's unprecedented in my lifetime. People didn't reckon with this.
54:25.18
BJ
Anyone's lifetime. No, there's that note nobody even considered this when they ran when the lockdowns which went from three weeks to flatten the curve to lock down to lakeque. Um, like that was that scope creek up. Of the erigmore of the covid thesis erigorre was so dramatic and so tremendous that it was and the people who were captured in it did not. They could not literally could not remember what they had said a month ago right that that was and that's one of the most important features about these errors is what.
54:54.90
cactus chu
Yes, yes, this is important.
55:01.24
BJ
What goes on you know in the modern flavor of them is so it's like Google maps. So if you've you know, read I think probably read that article but I'll outlay it for your listeners. Um, if I navigate somewhere in my car. Today I used Google maps. I use it for every single place I go and I don't remember the road names because there's no need for me to. I have outsourced that portion of my brain to my phone right? and I mean I used to have roadside Alices. It used to have all this stuff now. Ah, use Google Maps and Google Maps has got a lot of utility. It's got 2 layers of utility, one is I don't have to remember road names and I can figure out the most direct way to go but the other one is it gives me traffic updates unless we know what the cops are and if the roads change it changes so it has an update mechanic built into it. But you know we would be silly to say that mapping was the only thing that we're using our phones for and we're in a state now where but though more and more people outsource their thinking to their phones other certain you know base things that humans. Responsible for thinking about gautour too such as morality and when you outsource morality to your phone where are your go to outsource it to and what's going on within I would say both the woke and the maga aregorous is they're outsourcing them both to you know Twitter and gab right um. And so they're just believing whatever their feed says and so for feed says to forget? you know, forget that there's 37 genders and instead map over to infinite genders. Then that's what you do and you forget that you ever used to be saying there were 37 genders right? that kind of thing um and the same thing happened with lockdowns. It was locked down till. Lockdown to flatten the curve and the point of flattening the curve was to make sure that the hospitals weren't overwhelmed but as soon as the hospitals weren't overwhelmed and then the lockdown is supposed to come off according to the argument three weeks ago they've completely forgot that argument and they were like lock down into aure locked in until whatever lockdown until um, you know covid goes away. Which is never going to happen because you don't have the immunity yet. So whenever you come off the lockdown code's going to come back and spread again. But there were a lot of people who believed that you could cure it. You could completely eliminate covid just through lockdowns and still do and some of these people are really smart. You know I mean. That's what Yhan Wong was saying on his Facebook page and he's a smart high used to be the Ceo of Reddit. Um, but you know it's no, it's long, it codes in the deer population. The United States somebody's going to end up catching it and if you don't have repopulation level immunity then it's gonna spread again right um.
57:52.97
BJ
Lockdown was never a solution but they believed it was and you could make that argument to them because their phone told them that it was true. Right? So they're outsourcing sense making to the phone and the phone is basically a group think operator.
58:02.30
cactus chu
So yeah, something.
58:09.64
cactus chu
Something that I'm not sure how to process is that there's this blurry line between motivated reasoning and outsource thinking and just having different priors. I think this was very interesting. Paper and I think this might have been economics or game theory paper that was essentially saying that motivated reasoning is indistinguishable from differences in axioms or something like that and I think this might be the case where yeah there was.
58:38.92
BJ
Ah, okay, so can you expand on that.
58:45.73
cactus chu
I Think what's happening is that there's a kind of path dependency where receiving ideas in a certain order leads you to process them in a way that biases you and I think that this is key to how the Aggregate functions. Which is that you have some kind of implicit assumptions about ah or not even Implicit. You can have explicit assumptions about the interaction of various processes. How Covid will interact with Society. How. Covid interacts with existing mechanisms of say vaccines or of other scientific products or drugs and a lot of the most. Crucial axioms a lot of the most crucial assumptions that you have about how those things interact you gain Intuitively. You don't necessarily gain them explicitly and because of that you can have this ghost assumption that you initially have. And I've seen this in myself as well. You can have this ghost assumption that you take and that you used to build an opinion on a topic and then eventually this ghost assumption moves from being a ghost assumption to something that is either explicitly confirmed or rejected like some. So something comes out. There's a paper that either proves or disproves. It not completely of course but that provides strong evidence that proves or disproves it in favor of proving or disproving it. Um, and then you move that ghost assumption away so you're believing the new thing Now. You're believing this thing that might might have been the opposite of what you assumed before but you didn't notice it and you didn't There's kind of a lack of update here where you don't go back and you don't go and reflect on reflect on what this might have caused you to believe otherwise Because. Didn't you didn't draw that argument explicitly right? and I think this is actually very key to how these egregores forms are that they have a very strong cultural control of what exactly those assumptions are.
01:01:09.72
BJ
Can you give me an example? Do you mean like okay, let me let me try. Well let me try an example like a very simple one. Um, okay so Vax anti vax. Um, you have a person who gets it.
01:01:12.58
cactus chu
So a very good example is the zero covid stuff.
01:01:28.35
BJ
They they give their kids all their vaccines. They know that vaccine vaccination ends smallpox vaccination. Vaccination works and is smart and is the thing smart people do. That's their beginning axiom and so then when the vaccine comes out they believe it works and then when. The new studies show that vaccination only really works like you know it hardly has a 30% efficacy to prevent infection versus the omron variant they're still standing by it right? and um and you know. Vaccinating their kids even though you know the fatality rate and infection fatality rate for children for covid is probably only about a third what it is for ordinary influenza you're still vaccinating their kids at age 5 or whatever and it's because of that original implicit and implicit assumption. And perlicit given I can't remember the word that she used but that that that is what's informing their behavior despite the fact that you know further information has come that could potentially unravel that is that what you're trying to say.
01:02:39.41
cactus chu
Yeah, So I think that that's that's an interesting example because it's a kind of example where at at least in my opinion you're you're getting to actually let's let's talk about like vaccine mandates instead. Maybe this is probably better because. My kind of position they had ah had an article about this as well is basically like there's an over there. There's a dramatization. There's ah as you say like a hand waving free ottery about child Covid cases. But there's also a hand waving freak outery about vaccine side effects I think both of those are overrated and.
01:03:13.15
BJ
No, I agree.
01:03:16.34
cactus chu
If you actually just compare the 2 like you're probably still benefiting your child like some small amount if they get vaccinated but like us that's the deal with vaccine mandates is that people just overrate how marginal this is and especially how marginal it is. Ah, for that person to influence other people like in general especially if people are as you said old or overweight or having other health conditions. Certainly this is beneficial to them. But in general like the amount of economic damage. And the amount of enforcement that you get that you have to invest into there's just no, there's no kind of cost-benefit analysis here. There's no kind of understanding of saying okay maybe we want Maybe it would be better if these people. Agreed to get vaccinated but what is the alternative here? What is the thing that we're actually doing? What is the cost that we are imposing both on them? But also upon ourselves and our kind of public law enforcement and our own public trust and it's just worse when you kind of come to making those actual. Actual computations. Ah so I think that yeah there's a thing here which is close to what I was talking about I don't think it's It's the same kind of it's the same mechanism but it's very similar. Where people flatten things people flatten things into binaries and such and okay, this is something that I don't.
01:04:55.80
BJ
I mean by biasing and thinking is hard right? You know that's not something that most people can do, most people can't think that way they want to, you know what? They want to know what's good. What's not good. You know what set of rules get me into heaven or the secular version of the same.
01:05:01.27
cactus chu
Yes, exactly? yeah I had a conversation about Oh yes, we are definitely going to talk about the religious metaphors that are just everywhere in this conversation. But
01:05:13.48
BJ
Right? That's how people like to think right.
01:05:19.57
cactus chu
Yeah, for sure I think that there is a situation here where people are and people are dealing with um people are dealing with these things that they want to be binaries and they're not necessarily. And even when there is just clear evidence of more nuance that actually best applies I think to the Lab Bleak hypothesis Even when there is an environment where there should be significantly more nuance introduced later. They're not really capable of undoing this.
01:05:55.47
BJ
I think people generally don't like admitting psychologically speaking people don't like admitting. They were wrong and it takes a lot of maturity to admit you are wrong about something. It's a very difficult thing to do. Adults just don't have this ability. They'll double down on something they're wrong about just because they don't have their they don't they don't lose face right? like China in the lockdowns right now. Yeah like and and.
01:06:18.57
cactus chu
Yeah, it's a highly social phenomenon. Hugo Mercier is consistently published about this. He argues that confirmation bias should be cast as my side bias because it's not only about me being right? It's about us being right? and there.
01:06:34.50
BJ
Ah, need.
01:06:37.40
cactus chu
The enforcement mechanisms are just all there.
01:06:39.44
BJ
Yeah I mean um, part of being you know so as this part of being ah a and a social species is um, you have to fit in to be able to be part of the community and so if the whole if. If The Community's wrong, You can't. It's difficult to be the person that stands out because you might get expunged from your community and you need to be able to work with your community to be able to, you know, hunt the wooly mammoth if we go back that far right? You know, um, you might starve to death by not going along with a group you know from a sort of a. Ah, evosy perspective. So Um, I mean that's probably the hardwired behavior I think I think a lot of it is.
01:07:29.13
cactus chu
Yeah I think oh yes for sure for sure.
01:07:31.15
BJ
I think culture works hardwired too. I mean you know I think that's absolutely hardwired because any Galle again will go evo psych for a little bit if any cave tribe that was not prepared for culture war got rubbed out by a cave tribe that was prepared for culture war. It's just kind of the game theory of the thing and so it stands to reason that brains wired for culture war are the ones that pass their genes down.
01:07:57.73
cactus chu
I Don't know maybe this is ironic, maybe this is part of this kind of tribal warfare thing but I am a little bit skeptical of the kind of Evo psych stuff somewhat because of the replication somewhat because of the replication crisis stuff but also because like.
01:08:08.50
BJ
The problem with you was like you can't prove it. Yeah you.
01:08:16.39
cactus chu
You see it is misused so much. It's kind of like it's exactly in the it's exactly in the kind of medium where it has plenty of applications some of which are correct I'm sure that there's a reasonable amount of there's a reasonable chance that that's correct but also that it's so kind of broad and miasmatic.
01:08:17.10
BJ
Yeah I agree.
01:08:35.71
cactus chu
That you can't really nail down. You can't really say that we have a high degree of certainty but actually like now that I think about it you can just verify these things right? I feel like they're well documented effects that are exactly like the ashkin form d test as I said before merciier's work on. Confirmation bias or what he calls my side bias is excellent, right? So you can just observe these things, they're just true. They're they're things that are true about humans today. Um.
01:09:01.89
BJ
Right? Evo psych works good when it is used to explain something that has been already independently proven. Um and then but once you start speculating about things using evo psych then you're. You don't get into the fuzzy stuff that's more head scratchy because one of the problems with Evo Psych is the same problem with evolution in general is that it's difficult to set up an experiment. In fact, you know you can set up an experiment and for evolution and and you know sort straight darwinism and you can show at least.
01:09:35.93
cactus chu
I'll just track back in two hundred years or maybe more.
01:09:36.29
BJ
You know you know, right? Yeah, but like with Evo psych. It's like it with Evo psych. It's like literally unethical to set up an experiment right? and it's from a problem with modern psychology is it. You can't, you can't do controlled experiments in it.
01:09:44.47
cactus chu
Oh yeah, certainly.
01:09:51.85
cactus chu
I mean yeah, there's this question about how you should answer these nebulous topics especially topics in social science or I mean at this point there is what's strange about the pandemic is that it's. Strange overlap where you can account for maybe twenty thirty forty percent of the cost function of how you make decisions based on really rigorous scientific trials and randomized controlled files but you can't account for you. You can't account for the entire pie. And I think the desire for people to account for the entire pie with these tools leads them to types of blind spots that can be incredibly destructive, especially when you have the state power of say China.
01:10:42.58
BJ
I mean you know the lockdown was global right? I mean every country did it even countries that really didn't need to do it nobody in Africa ever needed to lockdown ever because they don't have the, um, the vulnerable population right? Anybody who would. Would have died from covid already died from malaria and so they or starvation or things like that they don't have the overweight population. They don't have the old population. That's well okay, so if you've got it right? right? Um, when I say everyone I would say at a statistically average level right? You know.
01:11:08.14
cactus chu
I Think that's a little bit of an exaggeration but the point holds. I think the statistical point holds.
01:11:21.14
BJ
They don't, they're not disproportionately old. They're not disproportionately overweight. They um, have very common blood diseases malaria in particular that would knock off somebody who has a susceptibility to blood diseases and covidbi is an airborne blood disease right? So all across Africa there. Their death rates were very low even when they had good testing parts of you know, but they.
01:11:41.20
cactus chu
Yeah, here's why I think the distinction matters and I don't think I'm necessarily disagreeing with you in the kind of conclusion that we're drawing in the very end here's why I think the distinction matters is that there is this social process where those extreme cases are amplified. Where you have these deaths and they're sensationalized you have this in children even here in the west you have these deaths that are sensationalized especially if it's kind of a very relatable demographic and then you have these stories you have this. Using your term again this hand waving freak outdry converting anecdote into policy and here is why I think an absolute level compared to a statistical level actually matters and if you have a statistical level and an absolute level. The impact on what you have on policy shouldn't really be that large right? if it's just a very very minute percentage but the impact on the narrative can be gigantic and that's so maybe we agree on the policy and I think we do in this case at least.
01:12:44.14
BJ
Right.
01:12:53.70
cactus chu
But on the practicality of the politics of it. It's night and day.
01:12:56.69
BJ
Yeah, it is and that's I mean what again this is remember that the publication started as a gun publication and the exact thing that you're describing goes transpires every time there's a mass shooting right? I mean Mass shootings are incredibly rare and.
01:13:04.35
cactus chu
Oh yes, yes.
01:13:12.90
BJ
Astoundingly rare your chances of dying from a mass shooting are so minuscule that you could probably live you know ah tens of thousands of years and never bump into one but um, the ah but when they happen they get there. What gets the clicks so that goes back to. Um. You know, sort of the media analysis layer h wfo which is really why the publication was named it and has to do with viral traffic and attention economy issues right? So one of the I personally believe that had covid nineteen the exact disease. Happened in the 1980 s our response to it would have been incredibly different and the reason why was the reason why has to do with um the media made a lot of money off a covid fear. That's their job now is to push clicks.
01:13:52.85
cactus chu
Oh yeah, totally.
01:14:05.00
BJ
And so anything they can do to get outrage porn going or fear porn and then they are able to harvest more of the attention economy to make more money that flows through our phones. So um, that's one of the main drivers of the sense making crisis itself. Is that any kind of anything that is going to have an emotional impact on somebody gets elevated even if the data doesn't support it now that's not to say that that's never happened before I mean we had the satanic panic and we've had other kinds of things like that before. But again when those panics. And historically it happened. They were also being driven by the media. Um, they're just the incentive. The Incentives now are much higher and much more related to generating virility right? You know I mean we would have the same kind of social erosion.
01:14:44.31
cactus chu
Yes, very much. So.
01:14:58.35
BJ
There would be a tremendous amount of social erosion right now if we went back in time to the 1980 s and somebody invented a magic newspaper that every time you read an article the article would spill into your neighbors newspapers and then the articles started to be tuned into whatever. Would cause that magic spilling function to take place then we would have a similar level of socialersion back then right.
01:15:24.59
cactus chu
Yeah, there's a specific thing about virality or about this sharing mechanism, this basically evolutionary mechanism, this aregore that is very powerful and I think what you said earlier.
01:15:36.75
BJ
And you know that.
01:15:40.60
cactus chu
When you're talking about updates. This is very important. I think this is something that I concentrated on in my article as well as that essentially having this process which is antifragile to use a term from nassim Nicholas Teleleb which is resistant. Attempts to take it apart to combat it to reduce its power. This is something that's very important for the growth of these processes because if you have a static ideology. Let's say classical liberalism if you have a static ideology that has its precepts nailed down that has a rational self-consistency that has a way to be gamed then individuals can game it and eventually if enough coordination and enough. Kind of communication as we have now then groups can share and combine strategies to beat it and eventually um, eventually this succeeds and I think the same is true for essentially all institutions. That doesn't have this kind of feedback mechanism that institutions that are static or evolve very slowly. They can very easily be taken advantage of and the power that they wield can be wielded in favor of various. You can say ideologies, you can say erigores that are able to adapt that are able to create these incredibly fast cycles of adjusting to novel circumstances.
01:17:28.20
BJ
Yeah, I talked a little bit about this concept with Jim Rut and um and that was ah a strange conversation because he's a ded in the wool staunch atheist and um I'm kind of generally positive about religion in general I think religion is a generally. Good societal thing to get a whole bunch of people marching in this generally the same direction and and as long as it's teaching good stuff. It's a good impact but the problem with religion is that its update mechanic happens on the scale of hundreds of years um and as the environment is rapidly changing and the last fifty years you know the population and technology and the social environment. Um, Religion's fallen away. We're boiling into a kind of 1 of the first eras where being a religious is ah you know is even accepted. But. Not even that popular right? Um because the religions can't keep up. They don't have enough. They don't have an update mechanic; they can keep up with the times and what we've seen. Um, as people have fallen off, they're looking for a different kind of they're left for a different morality guide. And they have these phones so pull their phone out and then they latch onto whatever the morality feed is telling them which it is a you know, um, for different people. it's different for some folks. It's the maga echo chamber for some folks it's the woe echocko chamber and it gets updates quickly. And then the prior operating system within that accurate chamber gets memory old and they forget what they were saying was a core ethical moral behavior two years ago and now they're doing something different and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. To them right? So there's they've you know, latched on to really become addicted to you know an updating morality feed. Um, the problem is from a social darwinist. A meme darminist layer.
01:19:40.50
cactus chu
And I don't want I don't want to jump in with the but kind of like quote unquote language policing here but like let's be practical here. There are a lot of people who have assumptions about what that word means that I think ah is different from what social darwinism means that is different from what you mean by social darwinism.
01:19:40.78
BJ
Um, the good memes.
01:19:56.14
BJ
Okay, okay, all right, so mimetic. Yeah so mimetic darwinism or mimetic evolution. Okay, deep little use that tar. So um, the problem with mimetic evolution is that.
01:19:58.46
cactus chu
So like we can just we can just proceed with mimetics or something like that right or like meme space. Sure.
01:20:15.63
BJ
Historically your meme adjusts on the scale of either generations or at least decades or in some at some slow enough scale that you have a time to test to see whether or not the new meme is beneficial or harmful to society and then if it's harmful. It falls away and it gets beat out by another meme. That's not harmful or is better for society. The problem with the velocity of change of these modern mimetics is that you know meme space aregores or whatever you want to call them. Updating so rapidly, you don't get that test to see whether or not they're beneficial or harmful to society before they evolve into something else and then something else and then something else so that you know if we analogize that to genetic darwinism. Genetic evolution and we presume that funk one of the primary functions of genetic evolution has to do with testing mutations to see if they're good or bad um over a you know, hundred thousands of years timescale or longer. These things are not being tested. And if you have a bunch of mutations that aren't being tested and they just produce more mutations like that stops evolution and it starts being cancer.
01:21:32.53
cactus chu
Yeah, is it just that we've made everything in invasive species is that what this is.
01:21:38.48
BJ
Um, no I think it's. I think it's worse than that because even an invasive species has the ability. You know, invasive species Outcompete compete to local ones so they're you know, genetically better What we have is. Everything's just mutating all the time and you know. And the mutation is infectious so you know it can jump from plant to plant more like a disease and you don't know whether the disease is beneficial or harmful. It just spreads and then it gets replaced by another one and then it spreads and what wins in this economy. Um mimetics is not what is best, what wins in this economy is what spreads the quickest so it makes sense and that's dangerous.
01:22:28.92
cactus chu
Yes I think there's also a very important human aspect here right? and we call these people influencers we can call these people activists we can call them celebrities but essentially there's something that happens with people as Well. When they get put into the system. Not just changing their beliefs.. Although of course that happens as well. But really a kind of infusion with the ideology or infusion with the aregore I think that this can happen. Especially when someone's work or when someone's livelihood is tied up with believing this kind of thing believing this extremely all encompassing narrative I think. Was this quote I Forget who it's from at the moment but it's hard to convince a man. It's hard to tell a man something that his job depends on him not knowing.
01:23:35.12
BJ
Um, yeah. Yeah I mean well if your job is to fit In. You don't want to know things that might make you not fit in. I actually had that discussion with the lady I was dating briefly Bright bright as we called it off. At that same discussion I was like look if you hang around with me long enough. You're good.
01:23:45.65
cactus chu
Right? And I think here.
01:23:58.33
BJ
But 1 of the 2 things gonna happen either. You're gonna she was choosing a pretty pretty deep down the woke rabbit hole and um I was like 1 of 2 things is gonna happen if we date one either. You're going to get very frustrated with me that I'm not following the same ideological path that you're following or you're gonna start questioning your ideological path. And um, so one of those ends with you breaking up with me the other one ends up with you being very awkward with your friends and maybe losing some of your friends. So like this isn't going to work 1 way or another you know I told her that is weird.
01:24:31.51
cactus chu
Um, yeah I think that I don't know maybe you mean I'm I'm not going to judge your decision I think it's fine, but what are the ethics of kind of. The funny thing is there's this kind of conversation in the like old school religious sense right? It is what is the ethics of missionary dating essentially like dating in hopes of dating someone who is not of your religion and hopefully getting this person to. To convert and eventually in your view see the lights How what?? Ah, what are the ethics of doing that in this kind of Aregorra space?
01:25:09.94
BJ
Right. I don't know I mean like you know we could set the analogy aside and talk about like a militant atheist versus someone who's incredibly religious. They can either like you know draw a bright line in the relationship or they can try and influence each other and if they're trying to influence each other then what happens is that one of the 2 is. Going to end up having to deal with the social consequences of it right? And so if you know?? Um I think so um.
01:25:38.45
cactus chu
Is that true though I don't know at least maybe that's true now but in old school I know at least 2 couples who are atheists really just split and they're mostly fine with it.
01:25:52.50
BJ
Yeah I mean like you know that's that's fine, but like you know that's also probably not a militant atheist versus a militant religious person I seriously doubt that I seriously doubt that the the religious person the relationship you know, truly deeply believes that their spouse is going to go to hell.
01:25:59.95
cactus chu
Oh I see I see. Okay.
01:26:12.13
BJ
And I ah write and I seriously doubt that the um that the atheist in the relationship truly believes that their spouse is crazy right? or whatever the atheist states or whatnot I mean like I think that those people in those relationships probably have an understanding of that.
01:26:12.75
cactus chu
That's fair enough.
01:26:30.83
BJ
Both of them are approaching that question from a point of a standpoint of belief and they just choose to believe different things and that's fine, right? You know? So yeah, you could do that. But um, you know the thing about ah I think having a religion formalized makes that kind of thing a lot easier because it's like. You believe this and I believe that we can have different beliefs. Um, one of the things that makes the woke Egger gore so powerful and you know viral is that they don't believe they're in a religion. They just believed that. They're doing. You know they're just the rules for appropriate behavior right? and you know to ask them is like you know is it woke they're like this is this thing is woke I'm just not an asshole right? Sure, right? You know to a degree. Yeah, but they don't.
01:27:19.87
cactus chu
Um, but that kind of is every religion right? like maybe this is more of a statement about the futility of some of the modern religions.
01:27:28.87
BJ
No, that's not true I mean like or I don't every every christian says they're Christian every Christian says they're Christian every you know muslim says they're muslim woke people don't say they're woke they don't even believe it's a thing.
01:27:40.99
cactus chu
Or Okay I think I misunderstood you. But yeah, there is this kind of new age like tribe at least like proclaimed tribelessness. But I think like if you ask a Christian like what is the kind of objective moral way to live. The same thing with any anyone of any religion they're gonna say they're gonna say something close to basically their religion like if you just ask someone like what is like you even regardless of your religion and this is like a funny thing that happens even regardless of your religion if you are not the real religion that you are what is the best way to live. What is.
01:28:02.73
BJ
Um, yeah, no I agree I agree to that.
01:28:17.39
cactus chu
Being a good person looks like what being a good person looks like they're they're going to say that it's something similar to how their religion teaches them to be.
01:28:23.94
BJ
Right? right? No, that's totally true, but you know what my point was, that is that having it formalized and having it branded allows folks to understand where the boundaries are, you know, let's write socially and and ah and.
01:28:36.25
cactus chu
Oh yes, yes.
01:28:42.31
BJ
they they know if you're a Christian and you know you're a christian you know when you're evangelizing christianity and you know when you're not whereas somebody who's captured in the woke eregor does not realize when they're evangelizing wokeness because they think they're just talking about you know. What behavior is good behavior right? So that and I think that that's one of the things that helps wokeness spread. It's one of the main things that makes it strong. Um, and I'm not I don't profess to be anti woke necessarily? um I think that it's more and. Much more interesting to take your hands out of it, step out of the culture or entirely and then just provide a sort of an analysis of it and you know because there's gonna be more things that just woke up that come up. They're gonna be different. Ah they might have different core beliefs but whatever comes up in the twenty first century is gonna. Starting to dominate the moral landscape the marketplace of morality is going to end up having features that look like the features of weakness and so describing those features and describing which ways make it anti fragile I think is really important right? You know. And and this is what I was saying to Paul Vander klay I mean he's a you know he's a christian podcaster I was like you know so the twenty first century landscape of religion is going to be religions adopting at least some of the things that are making witness successful for in a inside the. Social media organism and right.
01:30:15.45
cactus chu
Yeah, is the future of christianity like your Facebook christian memes page.
01:30:19.69
BJ
Well, you know I think so I think that's the first step they've got to get they got to get a better meme game. Everybody's got to have a meme game nowadays. I mean like politics has a meme game now but it didn't have a meme game before 2016 when the 4 chains all showed up. It started memes for Trump right Um. So you've got ah that's that's 1 thing that then you know they're gonna have to have and not only that I mean you know once you get your meme game done then you have to figure out your update mechanic situation right? and that's touchy and that 's that.
01:30:52.41
cactus chu
Yeah, what? what? What exactly makes them? Oh yes.
01:30:57.24
BJ
Touchy in ah in a formalized religion because you've got a book and you can't go against a book right? You know the woakes don't have a book, their book is just whatever is going on on Tumblr today.
01:31:06.85
cactus chu
And I don't think this is just like the books as well, right? This is yeah oh yes, yeah, this is.
01:31:10.75
BJ
Oh no, it's the Maga Maga maga is whatever's in the next non drop right? You know or whatever like that's that the the things that you know make those things work is the fact there's an update feed and that's why they're viral. Um, and that's why they're. They're robust and that is why they're antifragile. I used to think the witness was fragile because its core concepts didn't really work very well together. But now I see what all they have to do is push out an update once a core mechanic starts to unravel on them like what happened to Rachel Dolezal right I mean she. Used to be you could identify as black and then one day you couldn't and then she got canceled and she didn't know why? um.
01:31:48.69
cactus chu
I want to I want to put a pin on this I want to pin put a pin on this like fragility argument because I think Richard Anania had a really good post on this as well. But I want to stop on the kind of maybe this isn't really a disagreement but a kind of different way of approaching it of talking about. This kind of update mechanism because here is where this is kind of my writing right is where you can really formalize some of the ideas of this aggregor of how this aggregate functions. I'm not sure how you want to refer to this kind of. Way of thought eregorre theory maybe um, but oh man like a lot of the kind of antithesis people and or like the anti-establishment gbar are going to pile on to me on this but like this is something that I've been trying to do for a very long time is to convince these people that network science actually has like a very very big. Contribution to make here because this is actually how I kind of started out. This is like very ah this is very unfortunate but I kind of started out as a kind of like as a kind of like never trumper. This is how I first started off involved in politics and because I have a computer science background and especially a graph theory background. Um, which is kind of the mathematics of this stuff. Um I looked a lot into like the mainstream network science of how how do you like these conspiracy theories actually function how does social media work and like the the 2 biggest the 2 biggest results which are like virality and I think criticality. Um, ah from network science are basically like are basically like eregors and then like the current thing which is really funny because all of the disinformation people hate the current thing meme. But it's like the most it's like the most robust result in their in their in their field. Um. But essentially for the audience. The current meme is essentially this idea that a lot of people of a given political drive are of the same egregiousness. They have a current thing that they're all focusing on and which is a combination of I think 2 results number 1 is number 1 is virality. This is. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at social media this is kind of obvious if you just like look at the retweet button or like look at the number of retweets but you have this pareto distribution. You have things that go viral and become the thing that entire communities are talking about for a very long time and the other thing is this thing called network criticality. Which is basically that you usually in these networks. You usually have like a small group of hyperactive people who are essentially stringing everything together. So in the kind of woke case you might have you might actually like wonder to yourself. Why do the people who care about like if you just never been to the United States before it's just like.
01:34:39.62
cactus chu
Why do people who care about abortion also really care about giving everyone health care actually those 2 are kind of related. let's pick two ah let's pick 2 other things. Why do the people who who like really care about like gay marriage or that's like not the right culture war. At this point, why do people really care ?
01:34:46.73
BJ
Ukraine.
01:35:00.37
cactus chu
Transgender people Also really care about like socialism that that doesn't really make any sense. Um, but you have turned out what happens in these social Media Networks is that you have people who are hyperactive and those people who are hyperactive tend to be kind of like activists types who are posting about all of these things and.
01:35:03.58
BJ
Right.
01:35:18.41
cactus chu
They're stringing together all of these different topics and they're bundling them together and this forms like this forms like a network of these people who are bundling all of these things together and then those bundles interact and so on and so forth and if you there's this kind of economic effect I'm just coming up with this now. This is not necessarily directly related. But this actually reminds me of this economic effect where if you have like more competitors over the same thing that you have a lot of fast food restaurants in the same place this draws more people I think the same thing is happening here with this empirical result where you have network criticality where you have a lot of people who are really like talking about like the current thing. Um, and.
01:35:52.54
BJ
Yeah I mean like.
01:35:55.30
cactus chu
So you do have this update mechanism and it's actually quite rigorous in the results.
01:35:58.14
BJ
Right? I mean like all of the media right now is maximizing towards that it is a common topic in the writer communities. You write an article and then you hand it to the publication and then the publication changes the title and the reason they change the title is because they have people who are sitting around who figured out what isn't isn't viral.
01:36:05.36
cactus chu
Oh yes. Since this is.
01:36:17.71
BJ
And the title often has nothing to do with it's in the article or it's just only marginally related and what they're doing is they figure out a title to try and kite clicks that they can attach to the thing because it's all about virility. Um, and then you know your influencers, your influencer nodes. Um, be whoever they are. Are going to grab onto whatever's the most viral and push it and within their echo chamber within their connection group. So that's why you have you know? ah transgender and ukraine bleeding together right? and it's also why the antithesis Eri Gore who was like the anti-vax folks. Initially like, are you sure there's not a reason that Russia could justify the Ukraine invasion right? like they kind of went that direction with some of them. Not all of them. But
01:37:00.13
cactus chu
Tears. Are you sure there are Nazi Vile labs.
01:37:09.28
BJ
Yeah, sure nazi bio labs it turns out they're definitely nazis I mean like you know from an objective perspective like like the you know um I would not say you know when you do when you dig into it. Ukraine is definitely not a nazi country at all, but they are more more permissive of nazis than pretty much any other.
01:37:12.71
cactus chu
No yeah.
01:37:23.33
cactus chu
Of course, not yeah.
01:37:29.25
BJ
Country in their region or possibly the world. Um, so that there's more nazis there than anywhere else. So if you're going to rank all of the countries by nazis and Ukraine still the top but it's still probably a very very low ratio of nazis and there's a lot of people in Ukraine I know I know one guy who's ah. You know on his way out through leviv right now. Um, he was in khariv for a while when he's out. He's sneaking out with his family. Um, there's a lot of people who are aware of the nazi issues in Ukraine and are very anti-nazi and very much do not like those Azov kids at all. Um, in fact, there. There's some you know, ah according to him. There's some speculation that some of the mass graves that Azov had exposed and we're trying to blame when the Russians might have been folks that Azop folks killed. Um, you know like they rounded up a bunch of sympathizers or whatever who knows you know.
01:38:16.60
cactus chu
Oh my yeah I'm not sure I'm not sure there would be like more just like numerically nazis in Ukraine than in say like Germany but maybe in terms of permissibility. That's right, um I can't really think of anything off the top of my head.
01:38:28.35
BJ
I think there probably are like well you know by ratio I think Ukraine probably has Germany beat because Germany is like the german government is really really focused on making sure that nazis just do not exist in other boundaries.
01:38:34.48
cactus chu
King.
01:38:41.41
cactus chu
Yeah, but like you know, hereditary loyalties are like I don't think I don't know I don't know this for sure. Um, I'm just a little skeptical of it. But yeah I don't know I guess it could be believable. We can just put a pin on this.
01:38:48.97
BJ
It's hard to say it's hard to say I mean I but you know I don't I don't think they're nazis. But then you know it's the other thing too. It's like you know, um, if the state. Georgia in the United States was invaded by Russia and the You know Army was half smashed and a whole bunch of people are all trying to get together there you know their resistance spider movements and I had to choose between what antifa and. So nazi organization in North Georgia and I'd probably choose the nazis because they're probably better doing that stuff right? So there's ah, really curious. You probably get your podcast ranked but you know technically and in the middle of a war There's a little bit of utility for you know. Those kinds of beliefs.
01:39:41.58
cactus chu
I don't think there's utility in the beliefs but there's utility in just like the bodies right? like having like you would rather have like a bigger army than a smaller army and and and maybe or like probably they have some shared interest in not being invaded by Russia as well.
01:39:44.20
BJ
Well, right? Well where there's utility in the.
01:39:55.32
BJ
Right? They have shared interests and also I mean like if you know you'd rather have someone who's ultra nationalist than ultra nonnationalist in that case right? I mean like National nationalism is a game theoretical positive thing during a war.
01:40:05.57
cactus chu
Yeah, especially like I don't.
01:40:12.34
BJ
It's one of the reasons why we have nationalism.
01:40:13.00
cactus chu
Yeah, especially compared to maybe some group that might be more sympathetic to Russia that's not that's probably not your best choice.
01:40:20.45
BJ
Or who just or who you know I wouldn't want to team up with anybody who's been burning an American flag knows they're not likely to stick around in the foxhole with me. You know? So that's you know on the scale of nationalist First anti-nationalist you know.
01:40:29.56
cactus chu
Right? right.
01:40:38.85
BJ
During wartime you want the nationalists. Um, so you know.
01:40:42.36
cactus chu
Yeah, this is kind of. I think this is like a very positive lesson that Ukraine might have taught us. I just went through reading Yasha Monk's book. Um, oh my goodness and I'm blanking on the title right now but he basically talks about this kind of um, really beneficial. Beneficial type of ah pop or patriotism or maybe even nationalism as you see and as you see in Ukraine where um, you didn't have a kind of Afghanistan situation right? You didn't have a situation where the leaders or the government just fled. You have. And you can argue over how much of this is just a brave face and how much of this is pure dedication but zelinsky is staying there. He is fighting and the military is fighting like and they're doing much better of a job than we expected. So like I think maybe one of the narratives that kind of got. But under here because of this kind of culture war thing is how much these types of old coordination mechanisms do really help.
01:41:46.41
BJ
Yeah I mean like I there's an interesting anecdote that um eron shared on the h wfo slack form. She was talking about ah because she went over to levie and gave a. Transmitted a bunch of medical supplies and stuff like that she snuck in from like Warsaw and like set up a go fund me to buy a bunch of medical supplies flew them over to warsaw came into levive had a connection there stayed in levie for 3 or 4 days during the first two or 3 weeks to war then snug back out. And one of the stories that she told was about um you know, just the ordinary people right? There's the ordinary people who are very nationalist and in Ukraine or like which ones weren't nationalist are nationalist now. That's one great way to become more nationalist if someone invades your country.
01:42:32.80
cactus chu
Yes.
01:42:38.20
BJ
So this was the story. It was like these two Russian tanks. There's yeah, it's 2 russian tanks that go into this town. This story was told to her by the um by the priest there in Leviv and one of the tanks runs out of gas as Russia right? So then everybody from one tank climbs into the other tank and they'll hit you. And drive off and try and get gas and so they drove out of the town and they asked some farmer on the edge of town where where the gas station is or whatever and the farmer points in the wrong direction and so then the the town's got this empty russian tank that has no fuel in it and they're like what do we do with this and so what they did is you know because the ukrainian. Army and the Russian army all use the same gear they painted over the z and they hung out like a ukrainian flag on the tank and painted it up to look like a ukrainian tank and then when the first russian tank finally came back to town. They saw the Ukrainian tank from a distance and they blew it up. Killed their own tank. Um, so like there's a lot of people you know on the ground in Ukraine that are like you know it's not just the army doing. Well it's the farmers with tractors and it's all the other stuff. It's a nationalist unit right? And yeah, this is the problem with. I mean I was raised a quaker. We were conscientious objectors to war and I am still a conscientious objector to war but a lot of my family are army military brass. So like my extended family. Not the you know like my little my you know my brother my parents were quakers and everybody else was like. Collecting a large pentagon paycheck and you know what I struggle with is you know how you are going to end war. The problem with war is that it's Nash equilibrium. It's like if you're a pacifist country next door to a foremongering country the pacifist country goes away. And becomes part of the warmongery country right? So war is necessary as long as there's such a thing as a nation state and just for math. You can't get around it or at least ah you know you have to make you have to italy' very minimum prepare for war and part of preparing for war is to have at least enough nationalism in your country to be able to operate an army that can defend your country so the modern progressive. You know the anti-nationalist mindset of a lot of modern people.
01:45:01.96
cactus chu
Writes.
01:45:11.26
BJ
Fails mathematically speaking and that sucks is up for a conscientious objector to say right? like I object to war categorically but the math just sucks.
01:45:11.40
cactus chu
Yeah, and I.
01:45:22.10
cactus chu
Yeah, and I like how you change that to liberal later on because I don't think and even though I probably say I'm liberal or center left I Do think there is a very strong belief that there is no value in nationalism but there is no value in group.
01:45:36.96
BJ
Right on.
01:45:41.95
cactus chu
Group and of course some of the heterodox people will have some disdain for this as well. But I think there is some value in group identity and the kind of classical liberal assertion that there isn't I think is just false because I mean just look at our ability to really do things I mean.
01:45:53.92
BJ
Right? I mean.
01:46:00.65
cactus chu
Libertarians kind of win this one when it's like a question of space because Elon's doing this now but like you're not always going to have an elon right? like who is who is like Belgium's Elon right? who is like and yeah you are going to occasionally have some genius. And you don't want to stop that genius and you want that genius to be able to like get money through the market but also having some kind of group group mechanism group identity that allows us to do something like the space program that allows us to do something like. Um, like really put together a kind of ah railway network highway network as we did. Um I think there has to be some kind of chlorination mechanism on that and maybe the erigore is. It is going to have some types of benefits. Do you think there are.
01:47:00.12
BJ
Yeah, well, um, you know it's from a again from a if we're going to play the nation-state game. You got to have nationalism because it's what makes the Nations state game work. Um, and if you don't play the nation state game and then somebody else decides to play the nation state game then they're going to beat you unless you also.
01:47:23.86
cactus chu
Right? But even if you didn't have that situation right? Even if we somehow could guarantee that we wouldn't have war, we would still have a big upside in just facing some kind of natural challenges. Natural challenges of coordination.
01:48:14.30
cactus chu
I Think what's happening here is that a lot of what's Important. We've kind of unlearned a lot of what's important about coordination and about. Orientations of countries, societies and of localities have been forgotten and what's very unfortunate for someone like me is that you have to rely on a kind of. Religious metaphor to uncover this you have to rely on some kind of narrative because it is some kind of either unmeasurable or um, unmeasurable in general or unmeasurable with the tools we have. We don't really Know. We can't really say it is like a randomized control trial of getting a country of 300000000 people to work Together. We don't have one. We don't have that many shots at this thing.
00:02.70
BJ
Okay, are you all right? Yeah I don't know what happened, that's the first time I've ever seen my laptop blue screen. It's a relatively new laptop too. I have no idea what happened.
01:49:40.48
cactus chu
Oh I see okay because I was just confused so I went on a long monologue and then and then I had no response.
00:17.26
BJ
Ah, text and flat. Yeah, great. Yeah that Well if you did a monologue to fill the gap Then then we can plug back in later I'll just I don't you got to kind of tell me what you were talking about. Yeah and it's no so no.
01:49:59.94
cactus chu
We're gonna edit this out no matter what don't worry.
00:34.71
BJ
No worries. But yeah, that was weird. I've never had that happen before and anyway it's beautiful.
00:44.88
BJ
All right? So how do you want to restart? Why don't you talk? You tack something onto your monologue and then I'll respond to that from there.
01:50:17.42
cactus chu
Awesome! Um, so.
01:50:27.95
cactus chu
Yeah, sure the trouble that we run into I think is that reasoning about these things, reasoning about how we use nationalism to accomplish things, how we use these kinds of coronation mechanisms or what good is to come. Possibly from an erigorre. The statistical methods that exist even for the results that we do know about erigorres or that we do know about other things it just doesn't necessarily apply and we might turn to say religious metaphor or to some kind of traditional wisdom. Or basically just to our intuitions and our reason and our and whatever we can advocate for whatever narratives we can put together and that's very tricky because those things can be wrong and those things can be wrong. Ah, for reasons that we know ahead of time and we don't really know how to work with that. How to act with the kind of trust that I think people need in order to have this group coordination mechanism in the first place.
02:09.53
BJ
Yeah, um, from a I mean just kind of like from ah a religion layer I mean we're talking about war the only way that you could get ah around war is war is a coordination problem right? Um, in some ways. It's a lot like. You know, over harvesting the oceans like if you get everybody to agree to not overharvest the oceans that's fine. But if 1 person decides they're going to overharvest the oceans. So at one point Japan decides they're gonna hold the whales and think it gives you a problem right? You know, um, and so you have coordination problems. Can occur at 2 different layers. You can either solve them through an authority like the government or you can solve them societally right? You know like ah you had plenty of small. Under the dunbar limit settlements during you know, ah the United States expansion that didn't really have a government necessarily everybody just worked together and nobody murdered each other and if anybody did then everyone else would know it so you could coordinate that way and then the also with the way these. Places coordinated by all having the same religion right? You know everybody in that town is Lutheran and in that town is Baptist so you have um, behavioral indoctrination layers that if everybody is indoctrinated with the same behavior. Then you can coordinate that way so map that over to war. You can't end war with an authority figure because there's no one world government and you probably don't want a one world government because. Couldn't trust it. Um, you could maybe end war by having the ufos come down and take over right Um, because they would be an authority figure that would be outside the realm of human narcissism. But um. The only thing you could do. The only thing you could do I think is come up with a new viral religion that was built in such a way that it would piggyback on top of existing world religions without replacing them like as ah like an install pack or something like that. And you could model it after um woak virility dynamics and if it was done properly. You could spread it all over the world and end war that way right? So that might be a way that like eregorre mechanics could be beneficial but you gotta figure that out.
05:03.29
BJ
And then the but the dangerous thing i'm always about building a religion is or something like it is if there's any kind of hierarchy in it. It's called turn into a sex cult one way or another so you gotta to make sure that you got to you gotta avoid that right? and you have to figure out a way to do it.
01:54:44.71
cactus chu
Oh no.
05:23.18
BJ
Get that out and so you know these are these dangerous toys to play with right? Um, but I think that what's going to happen in the twenty-first century is that more people start understanding agregor dynamics as we're framing it. People are going to start messing with it and seeing where it goes. I mean you know to a degree the advertising industry and everyone benays and all of that kind of stuff has been messing around with this stuff for a long time in terms of manipulating human behavior into. You know, creating desires for products that we didn't actually need people can make money. Um, but I think that the new social media virility element to it is I think it's relatively new. Um, and. I don't think they've got it figured out yet Patrick Ryan disagrees with me he thinks they've got it figured out I don't think they got it figured out yet I don't think anybody's got it figured out. Um, but I mean could people who've really figured it out well twisted into something that could be really positive for humanity. Maybe. Um, but who do you trust to do that? I don't even know if I trust myself.
01:56:13.98
cactus chu
Yeah, so something that I've put forward and that I'm working on formalizing right now. Um, this is actually the firehose of bullshit part 5 right now we're up to part 2 and I like everything laid out and I'm just working on it slowly because I do want it to be very very rigorous.
06:57.90
BJ
I geez right? I loved part 1 and 2 by the way.
01:56:33.55
cactus chu
Ah, thank you is that um, it is what I call ah cactuses cactuses limit theorem which is basically for every what I call self-inducing s self adu inducing effect.
07:15.89
BJ
Okay.
01:56:53.67
cactus chu
Basically something that can wield power in order to accumulate power ah power based on people who are people who are within it within the network. There is some degree of connectivity times population at. Such that this gains influential power over the entire society in other words for anything. Basically every every kind of ideology has a tradeoff which is how appealing you are to the outside and how good you are at using Social power. To um to manipulate the outs both the inside and the outside and the mechanism that we've had beforehand with dealing with these kinds of groups with these kinds of cults is essentially that. They become pretty unconvincing pretty quickly. I think that the old school version of the wokes. Let's say in like I don't know like the fifteen hundreds and of course you had religious Wars then but I think with wokeness in particular with it's kind of like it's It's kind of attempt to stigmatize the majority population like that's. That that's not going to work in a situation where you just don't have high density of information and so the people who would have those kind of ideas or who would be most opposed to those ideas wouldn't be able to gather and therefore wouldn't have the social power in order to make that ability to wield power really count.
08:59.18
BJ
Um, I'm not sure that um I mean like I I think a counterexample to what you're saying might be like Marxism Marxism was obviously against the native order of the day in a very severe way but it spread very quickly and it spread very well and you.
01:58:44.18
cactus chu
Was it obviously against the majority population I'm I'm not sure maybe like you can argue that it was like in reality that it was in hindsight that it was but I don't think that was obvious. Um yeah, but the main point is that.
09:18.10
BJ
Now I was able to oh yeah, okay, are you now you're right? You're right? You're right? Yeah right, right? right? No, I think you're correct. You're correct, I'll retract that.
01:59:03.76
cactus chu
As you have an increasing essentially machiavellianism within an ideology that um, its ability to succeed and of course I'm I'm saying here that on the efficient frontier of Ideology. Oh man, I'm already feeling very confused here. Obviously if you have an ideology that's. More apt at using social power and more convincing and within that convincing bundle I say it's also closer to the truth. Let's say that that's part of the heuristic. I think that if that's the case then it's going to be more effective Either way, right? Because it's both. Better at using kind of social mechanisms and using or like using kind of social pressure and it's also better at just either being accurate with some kind of composition of being accurate and being convincing. But if you have a tradeoff between the 2 once you get to. Once you get to the most efficient ideologies you have a tradeoff between the two then there is some point at the hyper connectivity level and the population level where that ideology that is better at wielding social pressure takes over.
10:47.56
BJ
Yeah, um I think that there's a couple of thoughts on that I mean I think one? ah whether or not something in ideology works has an efficacy societal label ah efficacy in the real world.
02:00:34.66
cactus chu
Yes, certainly.
11:05.84
BJ
Is becoming less important as everybody translates over into the virtual world. Um, and the other thing is that you got to remember I mean as we discussed before wokeness is kind of like that. The. It's anchored around its ability to update itself and so the idea that wokeness will eventually fail because it's attacking a majority. It's going to have an update right? and it's going to slowly update into where it's attacking a minority. That's it because attacking minorities has always worked in human History. So.
02:01:06.73
cactus chu
Is that.
11:37.52
BJ
It's going to figure out a minority to attack and it is and then you know that's I mean that's that's the way they always work right? You know? So um I mean I anticipate that.
02:01:16.10
cactus chu
Okay, I'm kind of skeptical of that too. I feel like they'll never, I mean maybe in terms of like a minority in terms of like scapegoats right? You can already say that they're kind of like attacking conservatives and that's like maybe a slight minority. Or like a minority in general if you count independents as like not necessarily half of them being right-leaning Um, but I don't think they're going to like to stop being racist towards white and Asians for a long time. And maybe this is a point of agreement. It's like a kind of slow evolution right? They get a tiny bit more towards being just like traditionally racist with each step and in like 20 years in 20 years. It's shifted the entire way. But I'm kind of dubious that it's actually going to Change. There are some things that I think can change but I do think there is some kind of permanence to their most fundamental assumptions about the world.
12:48.94
BJ
Um, yeah I think ah I agree but guy also got to remember I mean it's It's the woke prediction markets are difficult if anybody could totally predict it. They'd know they'd make a lot of money. Um, but the.
02:02:30.74
cactus chu
Writes.
13:06.18
BJ
Generally speaking I mean like ah the weather. The reason why I originally thought that witness was a temporary fad and was going to go away was because of the totem pull of oppression mechanics right? So you use intersectionality and yeah.
02:02:47.47
cactus chu
Can you elaborate on that for the audience.
13:23.26
BJ
Absolutely okay so intersectionality begins a chart the intersectional matrix of oppression whereby everyone is categorized by different things. Their religion, their skin color, their gender, their age, their whatever and you assign people either ah either into the privileged bucket or the marginalized bucket. And then um, you can be double or triple or quadruple marginalized or you can be incredibly privileged or whatnot and then like that's supposedly you know it so set that aside that's supposedly just supposed to be an awareness piece. But then what they do on the ground level is that um they reward. Ah. Virtue and shame based on your location inside that matrix to be able to try and overcome for either perceived systemic racism or to overcome for um, historical. Ah. Effects of marginalization right? So if you are a um, you know, black lesbian ah female. You've got 3 boxes checked and you were rewarded more virtue within the overall woke system than a Cis white male right? Um, and then. So then you create this totem pole where the people at the bottom are like you know they've got 8 marginalization checks and the people at the top have none and then you attack the one at the top right? You know, like you attack this is white males.
02:04:22.32
cactus chu
That's very funny. That's a very funny way of visualizing it because I think intuitively you visualize it as exactly the opposite. The people you assign that demerits to are at the bottom. But yeah, that's very funny. That's a very funny thing they do.
14:58.88
BJ
Right? Well well well you know the idea is they're marginal ah like you roll the analogy a little bit further because it makes sense. Okay, so you've got a totem pole of privilege right? and the top of the privilege is the most privileged and the bottom the privilege is the least privileged and your goal is to.
02:04:36.83
cactus chu
Yeah.
15:17.99
BJ
Um, reduce the privilege by chopping the top off the totem pole right? So bang. Okay, we get rid of Cis white men or we marginalize them or we we come up with some way to punish them for their privilege right? Okay, so then this is the reason why I used to think it was going to fall apart and I don't believe this anymore.
02:04:55.13
cactus chu
Yeah, we create institutions to attack them. Yeah.
15:37.90
BJ
That article says that eventually Going A will erode and here's why but I don't believe it but I'm gonna lay the argument out. Well the problem is na of a shorter total pole but you have Cis white women at the top so you're gonna chop them off right? and then who's left and then who's at the top I don't know clearly like.
02:05:23.40
cactus chu
I Think it's gay men now. Yeah.
15:56.99
BJ
Jews or whatever right? and you cut them off and or the Asians right? The Asians are next and so you're seeing some of this dynamic right now like you know with the sort of Anti-asian stuff that the two are rolling out. Um and so for a while I mean like the problem is that eventually you've chopped all of the totem poles up and Then. Theory is that once you've chopped it all up then everybody's going to be the same level all down there at the bottom and then everything's fair or everything's equitable or however it goes exactly. It's like this, right? Um, you know it's but yeah, Okay, so.
02:05:48.90
cactus chu
Yeah, and then the Hispanic vote flips and you never win another election again. Demographics are destiny but not the way you think.
16:34.81
BJ
That theory was why I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart eventually their coalition gets smaller and smaller to shorten the totem pogots but I don't necessarily believe that anymore and the reason why is because they can update their ideology and they could do it very quickly. And they'll update around anything they have ah that they perceive as a flaw Now. There are certain fundamentals to it. I don't know if they can get rid of Intersectionality. Um, but ah, you know and then you know the fact that you know some of the intersectional theory doesn't match up with the. Evidence is going to cause them. You know strain like for instance, um, you know like let's grab the body of an indoctrinated beliefs of wokeism from 2018 you had um, you didn't earn that. You know, whatever money you made was because of your relative location on the privileged matrix and not necessarily by your effort. Um, don't believe that you know it is meritocracy at all. Um, they don't believe in I Q Genetics right? Um, believe everybody's a blank slate. And then once you have all those beliefs in place and what you can do is you can say well you know you didn't earn that we have to take that from you blah but but well okay, right.
02:07:23.61
cactus chu
Yeah, you? it's the principle of explosion you believe in like a crazy conspiracy theory. You can deduce anything from that.
18:01.70
BJ
So once you have those beliefs in place though and then so then the theory is that your relative outcomes are based on your privilege. Well the problem with that theory is that the relative outcomes in the country are not do not match up with the intersectionality matrix exactly.
02:07:46.47
cactus chu
Oh yeah I see.
18:21.28
BJ
Right? Okay, the relative outcomes in the country are jews first asian second whites Third right? So in order to either.
02:07:58.83
cactus chu
Yeah, and on the Median level women are doing better at least in the most recent generation women are doing better than men. So.
18:36.30
BJ
It depends on how you look at it right? So like ah I mean I yeah I un unraveled the specifics of that with a multivariate analysis on H Wfo two months ago. Um you might want want to dig into that those are 2008 um
02:08:12.25
cactus chu
Who?
18:51.22
BJ
Study done by the Obama department of labor that teased out did a multivariate analysis on the ¢22 on the dollar wage gap they controlled for um profession choice. They controlled for where they have kids or not.
02:08:39.82
cactus chu
Interesting.
19:08.87
BJ
Controlled for whether or not, you're taking care of an old person they controlled for um, ah marriage whether you're married or not once they control all of those then um, the ¢22 on the dollar shrunk to about I think it was. Um, we're calling ¢7 on the dollar. Um, the biggest 1 being you know the choice of profession because a lot of women choose professions that they know they can work with as they raise kids. It all has to do with raising Kids right? like culturally women raise kids more than men do and I'm a single father widower. Raising two elementary school kits. So like I'm doing what a lot of women are doing in the country right now and it's not easy I get it I couldn't go into an office and work 50 hours a week there's no way I could do it? Um, so that's one of the main reasons for this wage gap thing. And then haver much has to do with gender discrimination is hidden inside that I think it was 4 to six seven percent something like that but also personality types lack of aggressive negotiation. Um, you know, ah the.
02:09:45.94
cactus chu
Yeah, there's another. There's another kind of breakdown of this.
20:21.17
BJ
There's a lot of other stuff too right? All of the James Demore stuff also lives inside that 7% right you know so um so like you know what.
02:09:55.72
cactus chu
I Mean at this point I'm not sure because you can just group it by you. There's a simpson's paradox if you just group it by hours worked if you just group it by hours worked you get a situation where because a lot of men work more hours. But. Women who work more hours. The average woman who works more hours makes more um than in terms of I believe this was on salaried employees. Um, you get the Simpson's paradox which is actually the same thing that the anti-vaxxers do right? where they say like ah people who are more vaccinated. People who are vaccinated are more likely to get covid because a lot of old people are vaccinated and even though old people who are vaccinated are less likely to get covid than old people who aren't vaccinated because so many of them are old people who already have weak Immune systems. It's biased towards that and you get this result then you get this counterintuitive result.
21:08.45
BJ
Right.
21:16.30
BJ
Right.
02:10:51.70
cactus chu
Ah, you get the same thing here where in each kind of Hours worked demo. Um I'll see if I can link the thing in the show notes in each kind of hours worked demo women women make more in these salary jobs.
21:34.83
BJ
Right? right? So um, so like rolling back and circling back into it.
02:11:11.42
cactus chu
Yeah, how is wokeness going to run into contradictions.
21:45.83
BJ
so the contradiction there is that you know? Okay so jews are at the top asians or second whites are third and so what they should. You know what 1 thing they could do is they could go back and say okay maybe you did earn that. 1 thing they could do is they could say well there are connections between iq and earnings. Um, and 1 thing they could do is they could say well you know Jews and Asians in particular have tremendously different cultures that install different work ethics and that meritocracy is a thing but if they buy what I'm seeing them do since I and.
02:11:46.20
cactus chu
Oh I see where this is coy. Oh.
22:21.23
BJ
What I'm seeing them do instead is they're starting to reclassify Asians and Jews as privileged instead of marginalized on the intersectionality matrix so that their theory still works. Yeah, right? Okay, so so.
02:11:57.34
cactus chu
Yeah, that is I mean I've long said that this is kind of like ah a sad mockery of blood libel or of the protocols of the elders of zion that kind of stuff that there's a cabal at keeping you down. But maybe it's going to turn from a sad mockery of it to just the original thing.
22:43.31
BJ
Yeah, right. Yeah, Well I mean the funny thing is once you just reverse engineer the whole thing so that the um group identities who have the you just rank all of them by outcome and then call it call that. Your privilege or your marginalization then all you're really doing is just having a ah racist layer on Marxism right? Then it just kind of boils down to classic Marxism which is, you know, weird. But anyway setting All that aside, um, those were some of the reasons why I thought the things going eventually Unravel and you know the wokes would eventually.
02:12:37.87
cactus chu
Yeah.
23:22.51
BJ
Would end up just you know, um, poisoning too many of their allies to be able to have a big tent coalition to be able to do anything um, but on the flip side whatness has updates right? So they could pivot instead of trying to do this kind of thing they could just find a scapegoat and they could. For instance, just say all right? What we're actually all about is just going after the Cis white men buck those guys. They're a minority right? They could do that and that so that might work for them. Um, or they could push out some other kind of update I don't know you know it's it's hard to it's hard to know I mean the. The only major like you know large scale prediction I made about wholeness that I went on record for was that they would abandon latin x as a term and it looked like that was starting to transpire for a while but then the erigor stopped thinking about it. So I don't know whether or not they're gonna come back to trying to abandon it or um. Might after the midterms if the hispanic vote still starts to shift more red then they might start scratching their heads about why that happened and there might be political pressures to abandon the term. Um and then you're they're going to have to sort of the general democratic the general liberal ah organism is going to have to decide whether or not. Really, they're gonna have to choose between the latinas or the transgenders and then what do they do right? You know that'll be weird to see. I think that there's gonna be some heavy discussions about that sometime in December of this year um after the midterm results are in but who knows right? You know it's hard to say.
02:14:28.50
cactus chu
I'm not quite sure about that I think if you just look at the history of the democratic party specifically the the kind of post Clinton Democratic party. There's not a lot of reflection on why they lost their just.
25:13.32
BJ
Well, that's true I don't. Well I mean you know you.
02:14:44.49
cactus chu
They're they're just empirically isn't and maybe you can say that this is due to esoteric things like okay they had a Russia narrative. Okay, and this second one is actually legitimate. Okay, the 2000 election was close and the one after that there was nine eleven but I don't know it seems like there's always some reason.
25:34.29
BJ
Yeah, well I mean you know but to be you know, fair to both sides. The republicans aren't particularly good at self reflection either and when they have put together a ah you know? Ah, ah ah when they've tried to put it together. Ah ah, a sensible look forward.
02:15:10.13
cactus chu
Oh yeah, yeah yeah.
25:51.37
BJ
Looking at demographics and looking at this kind of thing. You know what a lot of them are. Ah kind of latched onto to is like oh wow man the hispanics are culturally very republican. You know they play baseball and drive pickup trucks and work in construction and this and that and the other like you know we gotta get these guys on our side. Right? And then like you know, a lot of the Cuban immigrants are naturally true or republican anyway. But then they made their attempt. You know that was kind of their approach during Romney and they lost and then Trump came along and you know, um and they won so.
02:15:51.28
cactus chu
Yeah, and post Romney. They thought maybe we should do a path to citizenship that that was the quote unquote the um what they call it again. The ah.
26:24.32
BJ
I Don't know if they've had enough self-refle. Yeah, who knows yeah exactly.
02:16:07.33
cactus chu
The Post-mortem yeah.
26:37.34
BJ
I don't remember I remember but you know so they're not good as yeah, they're They're not good at reflection either I don't guess and um or at least for set. Yeah, you know somebody's gotta do it.
02:16:12.65
cactus chu
Yeah, because these things are hard, winning elections is hard.
26:53.55
BJ
You know in the end. It's kind of like you know who fails the least wins I'm I'm a I'm a political nihilist I don't care I don't think it matters who wins any of these things Anyway, personally I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of into the the.
02:16:28.69
cactus chu
Yes, it is a question of judgment here. Let's.
27:10.48
BJ
Yarvin side of that. Not all I'm not full Yarvin but I'm enough yarvin to think that maybe even Yarvin's got it wrong? Oh now I'm working on ah so Curtis yarvin a say mentioned aka menus mulbug he's you know, kind of the.
02:16:43.70
cactus chu
Um, well for the audience. What's the yarvin side of that?
27:29.00
BJ
1 of the thought leaders for the new alt right? or not all right? Maybe deep right? is what he's calling it whatever that you know those guys new right.
02:17:03.40
cactus chu
I thought they called themselves new right? That's the funny thing with these terms. They all mean this. There's like every every like 20 years there's There's a new term that literally means exactly the same thing like on paper means the exact same thing. Yeah.
27:45.29
BJ
Well Yarvin was Yarvin was saying that recently he was like I don't like new right I think it's a dumb term right? I'm gonna call it the deep right? and I have coined the term deep right? plants his flag on the hill right? So um.
02:17:21.34
cactus chu
Okay.
28:01.11
BJ
But he has ah he has a perception that the true power in the United States is in ah, several layers. It is the bureaucracy the universities, the corporations and the military and that those all interact to create. Policy and that the politicians are basically just um, dummy figureheads like who are chosen through a reality Tv show and their only actual job is to just take um, take the fall when the actions of the true power centers. Fail so he calls them the show right? And then you know that democracies are a sham. The only reason you're doing this is to restore your illusion of choice every four years etc. And. Then of court and so then he goes off the deep end where where I think he goes I think that's probably relatively accurate. Um I think where he goes off the off the rails in my opinion is it's sort of a therefore in order to have a appropriate government. We need to elect it a monarch right? We need you know. Maybe democracy was a bad idea at the beginning and I think that some of his um some of his analysis is overlaps a lot with what kind of like the antfa people say like our voices aren't heard democracy doesn't work. Everything's just fascists. Well you know that group. We kind of laid out there. The universities, the corporations the military and the bureaucracy it kind of looks like fascists from their point of view. So I think that they're kind of saying the same thing and they're also very frustrated that they don't have a voice and my counter position to this that i'm. I've been trying to Matt write this article for like six months I can't just get it I can't get to write my head is it what this is describing is kind of a proto fascist state to begin with it's you know one of the elements of Mussolini style fascism um was a very deep connection between business and national interests right? that. And what we have right now is an extremely deep connection between big business and national interest that flows through the lobbying pipeline and the royalvolvinging door and also that this kind of element has erupted in I think most of western democracies where you know. Person who gets elected turns money into votes and the money they get is from the corporations and you know my uncle's a defense lobbyist. I know all the dirty details about how that stuff works. It's pretty disgusting and um my point.
30:50.12
BJ
Yarvin would be maybe that's the best system. I don't know that it's not the best system. It seems like all of the modern western democracies are going towards this or all the big ones are the most competitive ones. It also looks a little bit like what China is running. Deep connection between heavy industry and a 1 ne-party government and an oligarchy you know that it brings to light here's the thing. The greatest feature of democracy may not be that the people have a choice in their leaders.
02:20:41.96
cactus chu
Yeah I would say that okay.
31:26.21
BJ
Greatest choice in Democracy might be that the people think they have a choice on their leaders because if they think they have a choice in their leaders then they don't revolt revolutions are really messy and they destroy a lot of stuff and they kill a lot of people. It's a huge economic drag to have a revolution.
02:20:58.39
cactus chu
So the show is good.
31:46.20
BJ
And if you can make sure that you're um, make sure that you don't have a revolution and also make sure that the people of the oligarchy are just scared enough of the people that they don't know, totally you know boot them into the ground then. Maybe the oligarchy just gives the people enough to make them happy and continues to do its thing and become a productive economy and then the rising tide rides all ships even though the people down in the bottom don't actually have a say in what's going on.
32:19.23
BJ
There's an argument to be made that while that is very intellectually disgusting to people who've been raised to believe in democracy that it might not be a bad system conceptually speaking and that's the article that I've been tooling around in my head. And call it Indefensive proto-fascism and it's going to lose me all of my subscribers and I will have and I will completely fail as a writer by writing it. But there's an argument to be made that that might actually be the best system I don't know.
02:22:10.10
cactus chu
Yeah, there's this.
02:22:20.20
cactus chu
There's this, there's this kind of tendency on the right I think to call everything that is statist either fascist or communist. Basically it's weird because it's kind of like they've been vibrating the propaganda of.
33:00.16
BJ
Right. Well they call it all communists and the and if a kid I'll call it all fascist right.
02:22:36.20
cactus chu
Basically, if the right wing does something with the government if the right wing is anything other than libertarian. Then it's fascist and and I don't think that's right I think it's like conservative governance. But it's like saying that ubi is communism. Right? Like Andrew Yang's style, ubi is communism. It's like no um, the difference in degree matters here right? The fact that this is like 1% conservative conservative policy that uses government is very different from being like 100 % government policy in this style. Or in this vein.
33:41.25
BJ
I mean it flies in the face of facts. The closest thing we've had to Ubi in the United States to be honest is the earned income tax credit now was a republican idea right? So you know I mean it doesn't in the end this stuff like I say i.
02:23:22.40
cactus chu
So yeah, what I'm saying is don't call it indef defense of protofascism just say like in indefensive like mild state. Its um, yes, that's really what you're defending. You're defending mild statism.
33:58.87
BJ
Ah.
34:05.51
BJ
Ah, now I'm um, I'm talking about literally defending a rule by Oligarchy rule by corporate oligarchy and um, which is awful like you know in deensive, you not having a vote is really what this is talking About. Um. And ah, but see you there the problem here's the thing and I've talked about this a couple of times in my publication is that once people start to realize that their vote doesn't matter.. That's when you start to get revolutions. So this is what you know. At the very minimum. The facade has to stay up otherwise the system doesn't work. This is why the last couple of elections have been so dangerous because neither side has conceded the fact that they lost right? And if that becomes the norm.
02:24:20.21
cactus chu
Oh yeah, this is just.
34:58.94
BJ
We're on a short clock for this whole place to cook off. It's gonna be bad that it can't become the norm.
02:24:31.60
cactus chu
Yeah I Want to put a pin on this and get right back to it. But um, there is a thing about the yarvin the courtesy of an ideology I think he calls it the clear pill that I do have a bit of a contention with and I do want to actually I want to eventually litigate this with him. Ah, personally because I'm not sure if I'm just making a misinterpretation. It might be but I think it from my perception which might be wrong. It greatly underestimates just the sheer amount of noise he has this idea that saying contributing to conservative politics is just beneficial to. The dominant the dominant regime and I don't think this is the case like I don't think I don't think actually doing the abortion stuff for example and this is ruling out Morality This is like not commenting on Morality right now just like doing the abortion stuff is like objectively good for conservatism as a whole in the long term and it's.. It's not.. It's not actually beneficial to them, it's not beneficial to the regime and they did it through engaging in conservative politics. But I think what happens is he speaks in like generalities and contradictions in a way that makes it pretty difficult to pin these things down and interpret them. So I'll just leave it there because I don't think it's actually fully possible to litigate unless I actually have him on Um, that's true. That's true.
36:15.71
BJ
Yeah. Yeah, no I think that's true when you do have money you're still gonna have a hard time pinning them down on uncle clear terminology right? You know that's kind of how he operates it's You know he's an interesting person to pay attention to and some of his ideas make me think and some of the times I think he's right about some stuff right? You know. And which is ah you know the fact that he's interesting makes him worth paying more attention to than you know Ben Shapiro but um, yeah, it is ah his ideas are at least you know, generally unique and intriguing. But I don't think I'm not a. I am not necessarily a fanboy of his. I do read some of his stuff though and some of it's some of it's interesting stuff.
02:26:28.71
cactus chu
Yeah, but on the kind of collapse idea on the kind of collapse of social trust really not just trust in institutions but trust in each other I think that is a big deal and I think that. What we're seeing here is that we used to say that I don't remember who said this. I think it was some conservatives that said that the nation is the largest group of people we can call us or the country is the largest group of people we can call us or we can Call. We. I Think that was the quote and now that doesn't seem to be the case. It might be the case that it's smaller. It might be the case that it's actually bigger because some of these are international but the role of that. Largest Possible. We seem to have fallen to the eregor.
37:54.37
BJ
Well I mean you know yes and no like it could be that you're that that's that Politician whoever he was his perceptions of things weren't universal, right? I mean like I hang out with you know I've got a couple of friends who are black activists and um, they might push back and say. Was never a we that involved us and now is that true I don't know but I believe that at least some of them believe that and so that that perspective needs to be understood too right? You know it could be that like we're just now becoming more aware that there was never a we.
02:27:45.52
cactus chu
Writes.
38:33.72
BJ
Or it could be that we are falling apart. Um and or it could be that modern times we need them more than we did before you know what? I mean? Um, so.
02:28:07.60
cactus chu
I think I'm litigating a slightly different point. Yeah I think a point that I'm litigating is that the role of the ultimate unifier whether it was fulfilled or not was the nation was this kind of. Central thing of politics and whatever you say about black Activism they did politics and they kind of won or they kind of at least got concessions. They got advancement and and rightfully so.
39:12.51
BJ
Do they? yeah they won some I would not say that they necessarily won.
02:28:48.27
cactus chu
Yeah,, that's fair and sorry I lost my okay I got back on my train of thought and the scary thing about the egregore is that it's a power attractor that does not settle things. That is kind of a power tractor that is even more powerful than say or not necessarily more powerful objectively like controlling the military or anything but more powerful in terms of more being more alluring being being the top thing that people go to now to to settle things. Is to try to settle things through their arigore and when people in the same country are on different egregores. This is an extremely threatening thing.
40:07.38
BJ
Right? I mean it's stock culture war stuff right? A culture's job at Chuck Culture's job at its root level is to rub out other cultures any culture that did not have the objective of rubbing out other cultures would have lost to a culture that did in a.
02:29:51.21
cactus chu
But we've had these states that have kind of settled them right? They are so in a big way. They kind of exist to stop religious Wars but they don't see Well they've still stopped any hot Wars for sure. But I think they've.
40:24.83
BJ
Nash Equilibrium kind of way.
02:30:10.23
cactus chu
Um, they've gotten worse or maybe their opponents have gotten better. Maybe theregors have gotten better. I think they have circumvented them.
40:47.10
BJ
What's happened now is that all of this the animus that would have fallen out into violence instead is just being redirected into Twitter as like a containment zone and like if you look at like the level of political violence. We see political violence on Tv and we're like oh my god it's horrible. But that.
02:30:33.55
cactus chu
Yeah, it's nothing.
41:05.45
BJ
Look at base rates right? like the level of it's nothing compared to the 70 s the 1970 s and I talked to like you know my father's wife before she died in 2018 about this concept. Um. She was like I was like you, you live through the 70 s you think it's worse now she's like absolutely it's worse now. It's so much worse now. But if you look at the numbers I mean you know the weather underground bombed like a thousand buildings in the 70 s and and now it's like 1 person burns a police station down and and it's huge like we are very lucky as a country. Wasn't any mass shootings starting any of the 2020 Floyd protests right? There was not a single one and you had boogaloos out there with rifles. You know there was not. You know the and the only real major thing was just you know written house and that was just a you know that was a self-defense thing. Was like nobody got out there. Bullet hose protesters. Once you know that's great I thought that that was gonna happen. Yeah I was really worried that the whole thing was gonna go completely cook off and it didn't happen now. No no, no well there was um.
02:31:27.79
cactus chu
Um, yeah, that's actually quite shocking to me.
02:31:35.71
cactus chu
Do we know if there were attempts to make the Fbi just do their job?
42:16.22
BJ
Got I've got to go ah wrap this up because my kids are about to get off the bus um actually or we can pause it and then we can come back and I can I just have to make sure I get him in the door and then I can come back and do a little bit more. Um, um, ah if ah.
02:31:47.80
cactus chu
Oh my apologies.
02:31:55.62
cactus chu
Sure how much time you have.
02:32:03.95
cactus chu
Oh my goodness.
42:34.29
BJ
Be off the bus around two forty seven to 48 and then after that I can restart it like maybe 3 or something like that. That kind of thing puts me off a lot of work. I'm gonna have to work late tonight but this is a fascinating conversation. Want to keep going so we can edit out this bit. Let me let me pause and then let me get back to you on slack.
02:32:23.11
cactus chu
Yeah, sounds good. Best of luck.
42:53.42
BJ
When I can come back here and keep going, is that work cool? All right, all right, be right back in a bit.
57:03.68
BJ
I'm back. Are you here?
02:46:46.00
cactus chu
So hey there, welcome back. Awesome! Do you want to finish this relatively quickly then?
57:19.65
BJ
They.
57:28.10
BJ
Ah, give me 10 seconds, hold on a second. Yeah Bobby what's up.
57:40.10
BJ
So kids ask when Nintendo will apologize about that. So um, um now I've got you know I've got some more time to talk. We can end it when it feels right to end it so where were we? Um, so yeah, so.
02:47:24.32
cactus chu
All right, cool.
57:59.17
BJ
So I mean you think about the state of the United States. You've got 350000000 guns in the country before 2020 and every single month of 2020 set a monthly record for gun purchases as soon as covid hit first. It was. People want to defend their toilet paper hoard right? and then it was people are scared of the cops because of floyd and then people are scared of defunding the police because of the riots and then people are scared that Trump might win and people are scared that you know, um Biden might win.
02:48:02.36
cactus chu
I Mean like how much rioting was there really like this one of those like this one of.
58:39.85
BJ
But I think there was quite a bit when I I went and looked at the damage class. The overall rioting of 2020 was somewhere between a category one and category two hurricane. So that's not insignificant right? There's quite a bit.
02:48:17.69
cactus chu
Oh my goodness.
02:48:26.32
cactus chu
Okay I didn't. I didn't actually know that I thought it was one of those freak out or E things but maybe not.
58:56.39
BJ
Um, it was you know the thing it was just just it was distributed nationally right? So yeah there is quite a bit there and there was quite a bit of property damage but you know, um, we're pushing 400000000 guns in the country and most of the people who bought them in 2020 are new owners too. And normally when you have a gun spike. It's because a bunch of guys who own 7 guns buying their ain't gun because they're afraid somebody will get banned and this was different. Um, the run on guns is so crazy that people are just buying any gun they can find, not even necessarily the gun that they might need or want for themselves. Use and even given so we're pushing 400000000 guns in the country right now probably close if not over that and none of the protests cooked off. You know? So I think that the idea that Twitter is um, social media is. Ah, a containment zone for violence might be very legitimate because you know before you had that if you wanted to engage in combat you have to leave the door right now you can do it from your couch. It's much easier if people are lazier, fat or older.
02:49:40.90
cactus chu
Citizen assistant.
01:00:10.97
BJ
You know a lazy fat old population is not a revolutionary population. Typically you know like usually a lot of times you can predict um a good indicator of when you're gonna have a revolution is how many young unmarried unemployed men are in a country. And that was really worrying about that with Covid because unemployment skyrocketed right? but um and you know people are getting married later and that kind of thing so that one of the revolutionary indicators was there on the board. But instead you know the combat was contained so it could be that this.
02:50:02.60
cactus chu
Oh yes.
01:00:47.65
BJ
You know these eregor cultures where things are um in redirecting the war into virtual space. They're making the meat space safer. Maybe it's an interesting perspective to think about right? you know.
02:50:31.91
cactus chu
Yeah I made the point before that um cancel culture isn't so bad because Beforehand if you have this type of religious war. You would be dead or you'd be in the gulags. You'd have a lot.
01:01:05.88
BJ
Um.
01:01:16.10
BJ
Right? right? right? Yeah, um so it's like you know should people be banned from Twitter for what they think you know maybe maybe not maybe yeah think that there's an art there. There's an argument that all war is bad and that you.
02:50:48.60
cactus chu
Harsher punishment than being banned from Twitter.
02:50:56.56
cactus chu
Yeah, this isn't defending that. But
01:01:33.84
BJ
War in virtual spaces is bad by virtue of the fact that it's war but the fact that it's nonviolent right.
02:51:04.85
cactus chu
I wouldn't wouldn't want to conflate the 2. I think that this is definitely preferable. This is like a categorical difference in terms of being less bad.
01:01:46.85
BJ
Yeah, right? No I mean you know that's that's what it seems like to me and it's so a lot of people are you know, taking a you know they're waving their hands and freaking out about the culture Wars in in virtual spaces but it could very well be that.
02:51:27.26
cactus chu
Yeah.
01:02:05.58
BJ
If we did not have that virtual space in which to stage our war. We would have staged it in a physical space already right? Um, so that's ah, it's something that's worth thinking about you know I mean like the most traffic I ever got and and. Anything It's been that articles got me on rebel news in Canada and retweeted by Thomas Massey and all this kind of stuff was um, the surprisingly solid mathematical case of the 10 full hat gun prepper I don't know if you've read that one it well? Okay, so I'm not a.
02:52:04.73
cactus chu
I Mean it sounds funny but let's let's hear it. Let's hear it.
01:02:45.23
BJ
And a writer by trade I'm a stormwater hydrologist and one of the things that I do is I map floodplains so in order to map a floodplain the first thing you need to know is how much water is flowed down a river so you could do the hydraulics on it and in order to turbine the water you gotta to pick a you pick a storm. Like the hundred year storm just the worst storm to happen in 100 years statistically speaking figure out how much rainfall that gives you you convert that to runoff. There's a lot of math and there's statistics that begin the math that have to do with historical rainfall data. So you don't. Your bank won't give you a mortgage to buy a house and a floodplain on the flood map because it's got a 1 % chance per year of flooding. Well 1 % chance is not that much but over the 30 year term of the mortgage. You could do the math or math guy. It's. 1 % chance of flooding is a nine ninety nine percent chance and not flooding and then in order to tar and the chance that it doesn't flood over 30 years you have point nine nine times itself 39 you know 30 times point nine nine to the thirtieth power is I don't like point 7 two or something like that right? It's like going. I can't remember exactly what the numbers pull out a calculator and figure it out real quick but then it's you know, coming up on a you know over a 20% chance of flooding and then they don't want to give you your mortgage right? or at least they make you buy flood insurance. Can do the same kind of thing for revolutionary war and since the average date of colonization. We've had 2 nationwide violent revolutions against the ruling government in the area of land we call the United States currently one of them was a revolutionary war the other was civil war you have two instances. And 400 years that's but a 5 % chance per year and then if you map that over to the chance of experiencing a nationwide violent revolution in your lifetime. That's point nine nine 5 to the. Seventy Eighth power right? which ends up being a higher chance that you're going to experience a revolution in your lifetime than your house will flood if you build it in the floodplain. Makes sense.
02:54:43.87
cactus chu
Yeah I mean.
01:05:16.95
BJ
So the people who are you know, buying their a or fifteen s were worried about civil war. There's a mathematical case that here you might bump into one of these things you got about a 1 in 3 chance of getting stuck in 1 some point and um it seemed a lot to me. Like we were approaching that point going into 2020 and then when Twenty Twenty happened I was just like oh boy, get ready then the question is did social media save us from that I don't know.
02:55:12.66
cactus chu
Yeah, this is one of those cases where it is. It is one of these tail risks right? It's similar to existential risk in that it's. Incredibly multifactorial I think there's a naive reading of this which is just like oh you really think we're just as likely to be in and to be in a civil war as in like 19 or like 1810 or something like that and I don't think that's that's the case. But
01:06:19.62
BJ
It's not necessarily true. But if you go and look at comps, look at how many times other countries have gone through Civil Wars Violent revolutions inside that same timeframe and most of the rest of the countries of the world have done it more than us.
02:55:54.10
cactus chu
Yeah, the kind of critique of that critique is that even if the things are more multifactorial. It becomes so complex that you have to have some kind of baseline right? You have to have some kind of baseline to make a guess. And I think that's where this really becomes critical because how do you deal with that tail risk if you're someone like me who's reasonably high income like right now I'm living in Canada. But for example, I'm planning to move back to the states quite soon. It's not like that. Hundred or even like a thousand dollars to and to get a gun is probably not a huge It's not a huge cost and in the event of this kind of tail event. Of course this depends on what exactly you peg the probability to be right. Or or let's say we have like shanghai style lockdowns. How much food. Do I want to have stored and like you can say that's also unlikely, but well um, that that small amount of food isn't going to cost me that much or like large even large amounts of food isn't going to cost me that much relative. So I think like this. There is a very reasonable way to approach this. It.
01:07:40.35
BJ
Oh yeah, that's I mean now you're thinking like a prepper and um it because that's how they think right now to be fair. There are some people who are peers who are literally just coming up with a justification for their overall hoarding psychosis. Okay, um, but then there are other people who are. Basically doing all right? Well I'm gonna prepare for these 4 things and it's very unlikely that they're gonna happen. But if they do happen I'm ready right? You know and um, and that's kind of what they do and if it's part of your overall Lifestyle anyway, like you know I mean if you hunt then you're gonna have guns in the house. Anyway, maybe.
02:57:34.11
cactus chu
Yeah.
01:08:17.60
BJ
Just buy a different gun that has you know feed the same caliber or something on it with you know and and then maybe you're also probably got a big freezer full of deer meat. Also that's gonna and then what do you need to know round your prep off. Well you need you know, probably solar panels on a battery. Keep the tearer meat frozen. You know so. There's you know that's the kind of thinking that goes along with that. But I mean there's a reasonable mathematical case that a lot of these things could happen and then what do you do? Um I mean you know, it seems like step 1 is like don't live in a city to me because that's where things are gonna get ugly folks out in the country. You know. I'm gonna be to You're probably relatively safe in the country if you're in Ukraine right? Now you know I mean like compared to living in the city. You know I mean.
02:58:30.59
cactus chu
I I don't think that's necessarily true like if you're in it compared to you like Marie Ipo or something like that. Yeah I think like for example, levive is pretty well defended right. Like not necessarily defended but like it's just far away from Russia. Um.
01:09:19.93
BJ
Far away from it. Yeah, they had a couple of them I think I think they got a couple of either airstrikes or missile strikes on some of their industry there the past couple of weeks um but they haven't had any true presence there that I'm aware of and you know Levieve is a.
02:58:56.10
cactus chu
O m.
02:59:07.40
cactus chu
Yeah.
01:09:37.51
BJ
Le view is the transfer point to Warsaw right? So that's a lot of people moving through there right now and that kind of thing. It's a you know refugee transport zone.
02:59:19.11
cactus chu
I guess one 1 possible problem here I think and this might be wrong, but I feel like there is a kind of tail risk intuitively at least.
01:09:50.92
BJ
But yeah I don't know.
02:59:37.19
cactus chu
There's at least an intuitive tail risk of having a very large population That's armed to the teeth. I think it's easier for a population That's armed to the teeth to really start a serious war as opposed to one that is just. Going about like sticks and stones.
01:10:26.69
BJ
Um, maybe maybe not I think you can get a serious war with a very small amount of the population being armed like if you look at Syria at the peak of the syrian civil war the absolute when it was the absolute worst and everybody's screaming about aleppo and all that stuff. Um I think ah, yeah, 2% of the country were combatants and then includes combatants on all sides including all different revolutionary groups and the army in isis 2%. That's what it took to turn Syria into a.
03:00:32.40
cactus chu
Yeah, 2% that are armed and willing right.
01:11:03.44
BJ
You know, shithole right? Um, yeah, 2% armed and willing so the fact that we have 40% gun ownership in the United States does it is significantly different than 30% I don't think so the question is the willing.
03:00:48.58
cactus chu
I Think so, right? like no because yeah.
01:11:23.14
BJ
Ah, you know once you want the question is how many people are willing. It doesn't have to do with like you know it's like ah it's like stometry right? You know if you've got baking soda and vinegar and you pour it into a cup and it evaporates and all your baking soda boils off in the reaction and you. Pour more vinegar in the Cup. You're not going to get any more Reactions. You can only have as much reaction as the baking soda right? So if the baking soda is people willing to Revolt. The vinegar is guns then pouring more vinegar into it doesn't make the revolt any worse right.
03:01:28.70
cactus chu
Yeah, the question is yeah.
01:12:02.13
BJ
Just a question is how many people are willing to do it like we're in a gun-saturated area in the United States like and this is the same way where people talk about gun buybacks to reduce violence. It doesn't work. You end up having done the math on that you need to buy a lot of packs, something like $80000000 worth of guns, to avert one homicide.
03:01:46.11
cactus chu
And the idea that they're like that they're that they're linearly correlated I Also think it's just very silly. It seems to me very just like an obvious truth that the people least likely to accept your gun buybacks are the same people.
01:12:19.49
BJ
Because we have so many guns here.
03:02:05.10
cactus chu
Or are at least highly correlated with the people who are using their guns to do illicit things right? like.
01:12:41.84
BJ
Right? The easy way to describe that to somebody who just doesn't want to dive into linear correlation in mathematics. Let's just say look any criminal United States right now get 10 guns if they want if you were to magically evaporate half the guns in the country. Any criminal United States could get 5 guns if they want and they only need one gun to commit a crime right.
03:02:25.44
cactus chu
2
01:13:01.29
BJ
So ah, the idea that I mean if we if we already started with 1% of the guns we already have then seizing the rest of them might be able to make an impact on crime but you've got to see so many. Um that to get down to where under the saturation limit.
03:02:49.58
cactus chu
Right? I think you've.
01:13:19.66
BJ
Under that stto geometry equation right? Um, that 's it's thoroughly impractical. I mean you, there's no way you could do it so people just need to stop talking about it right? and I think that nowadays I pay a lot of attention to the gun policy argumentation space because this is how I got started. Nowadays I think the left has pretty well abandoned that idea. Um they're running it in a couple of small areas and a few municipalities just to get brownie points but they've abandoned the idea that they never get rid of guns because because I know they know they can't there's just too many of them so we have to approach that in the United States from a different angle. We have to approach it by saying.
03:03:15.80
cactus chu
Yeah, wait a minute.
01:13:58.21
BJ
Let's try and create a country where people don't want to do crime or let's try and manage our country in such a way that nobody wants to revolt right? And um.
03:03:37.24
cactus chu
It's very interesting because I don't remember when the last time the Democrats were talking about guns was 2020 . I think Biden did mention it a bit. I think Eric Adams talked about it.
01:14:18.59
BJ
Um, they will. But
03:03:51.28
cactus chu
Eric Adams definitely talked about it but that was just New York
01:14:24.50
BJ
2018 was the big put the the arigore was focusing on guns in 2018 right but then um and then a little bit in 2019 there's a couple of mass shootings in 2019 where they cooked it up. But as soon as covid hit.
03:03:58.88
cactus chu
Really, but.
01:14:41.62
BJ
They didn't talk about it at all and they started to realize I think some of them on the ground have realized that it's a losing issue for them because so many liberals bought guns in 2020 and because like the fastest growing gun organization in the.
03:04:18.80
cactus chu
2 of them.
01:14:57.41
BJ
Country right now is Naga and again the National African American Gun association and a majority of their members are women. Yeah, so like the idea that you know the trope that guns are only owned by you know, white male rednecks is ah.
03:04:31.85
cactus chu
Interesting.
01:15:17.13
BJ
Is out the window like that trope doesn't work anymore. So it doesn't play in their their echo chamber their media echo chamber anymore and gun ownership went up by something like 10 percent 2020 like I think it was like I think it's five or ten percent so like somewhere between one out of 20 and one out of 10 gun owners in the United States bought their first gun that year and most of them are liberals. So um, you know like and then if you look at the state of law. Over the court year or the state of public policy of polling. Um, there are a few places where gun ownership is getting a little bit more restrictive. Those are the blue silos California New York maybe Oregon I don't know and everywhere else in the country is. Uncons constitutional carry right? like you don't even have to have a carry permit to carry concealed and up ice growing portions of the United States which is you know that's remember when um when the Brady campaign first started the Brady campaign's policy was they were going to try. Ban handguns that was their stated goal and that was in the 1980's and now like I'm not even sure that they have an objective that they think they can achieve right? You know, in a very real way. Then you know. Gun culture war is like done and a lot of it's just that some people don't realize it. So um, you know and that's what the funny thing about that is that like the right doesn't realize it either because um, you know like. Okay, so like for this with the abortion debate I saw a lot of memes come out and they were like oh well, you know guess what? and I know exactly what's going to happen. This is just going to be a group reason for the democrats to send me a bunch of spam about donating to their campaigns. Well that's almost literally the entire function of the and Nra is to send spam to gun owners.
03:06:52.90
cactus chu
The.
01:17:28.38
BJ
Convince them to pay money to the Nra which then they just literally turn around and piss up the chain to get republicans reelected. It's a republican funding scheme and a lot of gun owners really dislike the and nra like ah there's a lot of gun owners I've talked to that are just like. When the state of New York went after the and nra they're just smiling and popping popcorn because they want the nra to go away so some other organization can jump in and fill a gap that they like better right? Um, so like you know that's it's a. But what the Nra wants you to know is they want you to be scared of losing your rights so that he'll send them money and so they don't want to advertise the fact that guns basically won that culture war and um. The Brady campaign doesn't let you know they want you to think the war is active because all these organizations are farming their money by conveying. Ah, you know the view that it hasn't been decided yet. They. Pretty much has been outside of a couple of you know a couple of states. It's much like the way. It's much like abortion. You know you've got a basically a national opinion on abortion that if you go look at but the polls most americans the a plurality of americans are. Think that abortion should be legal up to twelve weeks and then it should be illegal except for health exceptions right? which is almost exactly what this is almost exactly what every country in europe has to but then there's no state in the country that has that law. They either have.
03:08:38.77
cactus chu
Yeah, it's mostly kind of like Clinton. Yeah.
03:08:50.14
cactus chu
Um, they're 15 though right.
01:19:23.59
BJ
24 week law or yeah there's like 1 or 2 that have 15 and then there's a bunch that have a 20 or 24 and then there's four that have a forty week law like a full term law and then there's a bunch that have trigger laws that can drop it to 0 once Rowie wade gets overturned so the fact that that general. Body of the United States wants the law to look like 1 thing and the states are running opposite directions from that midpoint. You know it just has to do with the you know the power of lobbying and first past the post voting systems and right the organized minority gets what they want? Yep yep.
03:09:21.95
cactus chu
Yeah, it's how politics works. The organized minority beats the disorganized majority . I think a point that you covered that I really want to dive into is that idea of creating a society where you don't want war right. Or at the very least we don't want physical war. Um, and we talked about how the aregor maybe helps do that. But let's dive in more.. How do we do it? How do you do it?
01:20:22.93
BJ
I don't know I mean like ah in some ways the medium is the message right? and the mediums we have for communication now all happen on the phone right? I mean people can't even like that's considered a social faupata like you know. A man walked up to a woman and asked her out now. You got to meet on a phone instead. You know, um, and so all of our interactions are migrating into these spaces where you know, um, egregious Knockdown arguments can occur. But you know. Nobody, you can't punch your phone just because it's too expensive. So ah, it may already be happening just because of the medium of communication that we've chosen and that may be erigor independent right? So what. I expect to maybe have to see what happens as the next couple of decades unfolds. I think these erigores are going to become more rapidly up updatedable. They're going to become more connected. They're going to become the information silos are going to become deeper I think that the people in. Are captured by an eriggore's view of the world is going to be more and more isolated from each other. Um I think that's going to cause a lot of people to just believe that everyone outside of their echo chamber must be insane. Because that's kind of the definition of insanity right? Um I mean there's an interesting thought experiment like imagine you have a ah time machine and you go back to aztec times for my aztecs earlier and you see all these sacrificing millions of people and. Cutting their organs out while they're still alive on the top of pyramids and you're like that's insane. We have to stop doing that. But if you tried to stop them from doing that they would think you were insane for trying to prevent the sun from coming up and then if you grabbed one of the aztecs you went through your time machine and dropped them off in downtown l a. Maybe run around all night trying to find somebody's sacrifice to make sure the sun comes up because he thinks you're insane. So um, one definition of insanity is you know how far off the cultural norm your understanding the world is well if we've got these echo chambers. And erigorre lives at the bottom of the echo chamber and the echo chamber creates an information silo that says something like masks work or whatever it is um, you know everybody who believes what that Eregorre says is going to think everybody who.
01:23:10.85
BJ
Outside of that echo chamber is insane. So I think that those things are going to continue. I think they're going to get um more exacerbated and our perceptions of reality itself are going to continue to diverge. Um, then as long as the wars between the rigorous stay online I think that we're likely to continue to see the lack of you know, major violent outbreak right. I mean like it seems to me like the best way to do it. It could be that the best way to make sure that we don't end up in a hot war is to make sure Elon lets everybody fight it out on Twitter you know.
03:13:32.79
cactus chu
Yeah, this is probably what I see as the biggest danger of the Maga side or the anti-establishment side. Whatever it is, it's kind of going back to what you are talking about Darwinism is that the show exists.
01:24:06.54
BJ
Um.
03:13:50.53
cactus chu
And it's kind of good as bad as an outrage like online war is . It's not ah, it's not a physical war and at least the extreme ends of maga I think are more interested in that not being the case. Let's just say like you. Ah, you just look at you just look at stuff like January Sixth and and you can say there are kind of e equivalent values on the quote unquote work side too. But like this is a concentrated attempt of using physical force to influence political power and political succession. And even if it's just 1%. That's an incredibly dangerous 1 %
01:25:02.95
BJ
Well, you know like I think what happened with January Six was basically ah I learned it from watching you dad moment. Um I think that the people who were there had been watching a steady feed of similar stuff out of Minneapolis and. You know Portland and Seattle and whatnot in their social feeds and so you know the bar for what was and wasn't appropriate. Behavior had shifted and so they were just doing the same thing. Everybody else had been doing it. Um, that's my opinion of January Sixth and I know that a lot of people don't agree with that but ah, my. When I have expressed that opinion to other people I could be will tell whether or not they agree with it has a lot to do with how much faith how much faith they have in the in the federal government as a as a you know, Non-core Corrupt organization right? You know? um.
03:15:13.52
cactus chu
But like okay okay.
03:15:20.46
cactus chu
I Don't even think that's true. Like most people who distrust the federal government I would say I'm someone who distrusts the federal government but like you you don't look at someone like rioting and think maybe I should Riot like that. That's not a thing that occurs to most people.
01:26:06.87
BJ
Well, you know I mean well if you want to go and do the math on that I mean there were in two is it maybe 400 people raidd the capital and out of something like 60000 people at the protest or whatever you know by.
03:15:53.36
cactus chu
Was it really only 400 oh my goodness like.
01:26:23.84
BJ
2020 standards that weren't mostly peaceful protests and what it was. It wasn't that it wasn't that many, it wasn't that many that rated it and um.
03:16:00.57
cactus chu
Yeah, that's actually terrifying on its own the idea that like 400 people who really care can like I mean they could have killed basically like every politician right? and or like most politicians, most federal politicians. That's actually terrifying on its own.
01:26:42.76
BJ
Right? You know they weren't murderers right? They're neared larpers there they were larpers they're trying to get their selfies right? Just like they just like the antifu thing they're like you The lot of conservatives are scared of Antifa like I know they're lar to. They're just like you know they're blowing off steam now.
03:16:19.40
cactus chu
Yeah.
01:27:01.92
BJ
They did a case, they did burn a police station down and they did burn some other stuff down but like they're not organized. You know army or anything the kids doing stupid shit for fun. Um, and ah.
03:16:42.57
cactus chu
I mean okay I'm not I've heard some reasonable critiques of this. But I think the anocracy line of argument is actually true though. It just seems true intuitive. Oh sorry I should explain this for the audience as well. There's people who have looked at it.
01:27:25.48
BJ
Anocracy. Yes.
03:17:02.30
cactus chu
I'm forgetting the book right now, but it's a book on essentially civil wars and people have basically just tried to do a regression on these things and there are some reasonable critiques of what is included and what isn't included as a factor. But um, one of the strongest factors either 1 or 2 is anocracy which is essentially. Um, a government that is in a period of transition or a period of uncertainty and I think Las can create that uncertainty even if they aren't real right? I think that even if a law does not overturn the rule of log. The larp is. Correlated with eventually overturning the rule of law.
01:28:11.16
BJ
Um, perhaps you know, perhaps um I think that in general I'm your fear of the extreme right and fear of the extreme left should balance. And I think that if you go back and look at anecdotes you. You probably catch it I mean the last time anybody tried to kill any Congressman it was at the republican baseball practice where the dude showed up with ah Sks and and he was like a there was a bernie bro and he believed in the rhetoric that um the republicans are going to literally kill people by. Ah, returning obamacare right? That was why he did it? Um, and so yeah, you're gonna get Looney's um but ah, it seems to me that even and you you get Looney's on the other side too right? There's you know cases and. Like.
03:18:36.41
cactus chu
Yeah, maybe this is just a kind of pro pro centralization argument because I think you do have a kind of woke end of it but the woke is also pretty. They're also kind of conspiratorial , right? They're just conspiratorial in the exact opposite direction. Um.
01:29:10.28
BJ
But it is right.
03:18:55.42
cactus chu
Kind of like this and this is why I generally separate the woke out with the kind of establishment liberals or kind of Covid people. Even though there's some overlap, I don't think a lot of people are going to riot for vaccine mandates. Right? Or riots for like and and this isn't to say that lockdowns aren't destructive and can cause like an equivalent or greater amount of damage. But I think there's actually less of an autocracy risk there. But there's less of an anocracy risk there and maybe that's actually still preferable.
01:30:02.72
BJ
Yeah I mean like you know the thing about a vaccine mandate the way it was implemented in the United States is that anybody who wanted to go through the procedure could fake a vaccine card and a lot of kinds and and a lot of yeah, it's.
03:19:42.93
cactus chu
Could you really? I mean I guess but.
01:30:20.47
BJ
Relatively simple I mean I got my vaccines and you know I could absolutely take that card and scan it. Why couldn't you do it? It's not like anybody's checking. You know it's not like there is a centralized database of that shit. Nobody's like you know. Referencing it when you go to your sports event. You know, like it. It would be a relatively easy thing to go around. So um, you know in some ways a vaccine mandate is kind of like weed being illegal what he's gonna riot over weed being illegal. They're just gonna buy it illegally. Um, now you know in some other countries that are being a lot more rigorous about that then they might have a tougher time with it right? I mean like you know it seems to me as if based on my reading the protests against vaccine mandates were a lot more egregious in France they were.
03:20:45.99
cactus chu
I don't think that's particularly surprising. I think France just has a stronger protest culture.
01:31:15.65
BJ
And we're here. Um.
01:31:23.66
BJ
They do have a very strong protest culture I mean they were they were protesting the Floyd murder and it's like you're in France like what do you have to do with it to get.
03:21:01.26
cactus chu
Yeah, and both of them pale in comparison to the fuel tax right? The yellow vests they're protecting are protesting the fuel tax.
01:31:38.60
BJ
Oh yeah, yeah, those protests were epic. I saw 1 word they had ah I think it was a guy that ran like ah a septic tank cleanout company and he drove his tank full of sewage and he sprayed it on congress that she drove by.
03:21:22.53
cactus chu
Oh he could.
01:31:56.92
BJ
That you would get Google that is somewhere on Youtube is dudes in a yellow vest oh like like like like that's a step above canadian truckers to me I don't know. But um, you know it's you know, getting back to it.
03:21:30.46
cactus chu
Yeah, it does seem like friends.
03:21:38.94
cactus chu
Yeah, yeah. There are a few more things that I want to talk about on the side of this way of thinking about power that maybe is a bit closer to um I don't want to say an establishment view but a kind of like a kind of like.
01:32:16.50
BJ
Ah, the The. Ah, go for it. Yeah.
03:22:03.15
cactus chu
Rigorous view. Um is that when I'm looking at when I'm looking at information spread I'm looking a lot at centralized institutions because this is actually like another, like exceptionally strong result from network science that people really don't like talking about because a. They've only done it on like a partisan framing I think but b it's also like very very bad for like the kind of current the current thing which is that like the vast majority of social media or like social media stories are driven like post post. Um. Mainstream news coverage and this includes Fox in the mainstream so you have all these conservative things you have these kind of like maga aggregates they they they like organize after the centralized institution. Actually it's not separate and of course they feed back into Fox News as well and of course you see the same thing on the left wing as well. And. My kind of institutional analysis here is that the the primary function that these eregores serve in terms of coordinating in the group way is that it gives a kind of collective narcissism it gives a narcissism of the tenants that um and if you think of what that means like normally you have someone who who maybe rises up the ranks because they're narcissistic. They have an image of grandeur. They talk about their own interests in a very compelling and charismatic way. They. Obviously want to accrue resources to themselves and accrue status to themselves and this well gets them status and they end up gaining influence through this essentially repeated exchange and similar to this kind of um to this kind of ah. Ah, domination of the powerful minority or the organized minority or the vocal minority whichever frame you want to have and the way this translates to an egregore is that it allows the same type of dynamic while providing 2 things 1 strength and numbers and 2 while avoiding at least the kind of surface level critique of oh you're just a narcissist because this is a kind of group phenomenon right? It's not just you who believes in this. It's this kind of mass effect and this is the type of amplification that creates. Ah, stronger influence back from the social media side back to the side of bureaucracies, corporations, etc.
01:35:13.35
BJ
I think um 1 thing that you need to consider when you're looking at this is that um in my breadth of talking to people about this topic a lot of them seem to think that these group dynamics are being. Organized or driven by a central cabal and I think that's exactly wrong. Um I think what's going on is that the main influencers are at the center at the nexus nodes inside this inside. Ah you know an aregorre are they are not.
03:25:22.45
cactus chu
Yes.
01:35:51.97
BJ
Influencing it. They're being influenced by it and I will take it like this. For instance, you zero q and on right I mean you know what we know of qanoon right now is that they're dudes who it's run by 2 or 3 guys and you know sweaty night beards in their mom's basement or something like that.
03:25:27.56
cactus chu
Yeah.
01:36:11.24
BJ
Presume That's true. Um, they don't get to control what Qanon looks like. What they think is that they're creating content that matches what the Qanoon followers want to hear.
03:25:55.90
cactus chu
Right? right? So you're saying you're saying all this time like the account is saying all this time and that's how it grew the audience that there's this cult of pedophiles that includes like all of these democratic politicians and if it starts saying like oh maybe Hillary Clinton is a good person. maybe maybe um
01:36:30.40
BJ
They are not the originators of it.
03:26:15.90
cactus chu
Obama or whoever else is involved in this conspiracy theory. Maybe they're all good people then this doesn't actually make all of the qanoon followers change directions. It makes that there is this kind of bigger effect here where they'll interpret that as oh it's a secret message or oh this person. This person's been captured or whatnot right.
01:37:05.23
BJ
Right? right? right? and or you know further I mean if they continue to do that kind of thing. They just like they would lose control of the thing and then the thing would find something else that was feeding it with the thing wanted to hear and in an era where media is paid by the click. Job in order to put food on your table is to figure out what the thing wants to hear and then say that thing So The tail is wagging the dog and the tail is this group they can entity. Um, and. Then when you have an information silo around it. Whatever the group thinks Entity decides is real becomes reality and you have to keep pushing that reality Even if you didn't believe it . If you didn't believe it you couldn't go against it because then you'd be out of a job.
03:27:26.93
cactus chu
It's not even just that it's that you can go against it and it will just change nothing. It will just have no effect on the bigger thing.
01:38:02.16
BJ
Yeah, right? What will happen is that you won't get the traffic and the other guy that was next to you who pushed what the ereg wanted to here will get the traffic and what matters is the traffic.
03:27:39.80
cactus chu
Yeah, so like you can be Liz Cheney or you can be like um who is a kind of leftwing equivalent. You can be. You can be like these kinds of dissenters. They just won't have an effect on the original audience like. You and I'm not saying that there aren't personal consequences too. There. There are in many of these cases but it's not just an incentive problem right? like we can have cancellation insurance we can make it so that these people can speak out and maybe that will get more people on your team who already believe it. But it won't necessarily.
01:38:25.59
BJ
Right.
03:28:15.84
cactus chu
Convince these people who were originally already like fully bought in even if the people who they used to trust are kind of speaking out against it now.
01:38:56.40
BJ
Right? I mean Glenn Greenwald publishes an article that says trust the democrats guess what? he just doesn't get as much traffic on that article right? Um, and then it then the article it is as if the article was never published.
03:28:32.33
cactus chu
Right? right.
03:28:40.17
cactus chu
Yes, this is yeah this is very this is very important I think is that there is this new kind of there's this new kind of amplification where. Where salience becomes the way of measurement right? and instead of measuring things by how frequent they are people measure things by how frequently it's broadcast I have this line. About why people believe in conspiracy theories that if you're waking up day and night and every single day you log onto your Facebook account and you see a video or you see a news story of a child being kidnapped then you do start to think. Because all you're seeing is child kidnappings, if you're seeing a child kidnapping in front of you every single day that would be terrifying and you would have actual reason to suspect that there's this kind of ring of child kidnappers. But because that's not reflective of reality because that's kind of aggregated this hell that's. Spread out across a country of 300000000 people all onto 1 single person's Facebook feed this creates this demonic world which has no reflection on reality and you can see the same thing with police shootings. You can see the same thing with mass killings you can see the same thing with. Covid deaths in children. You can see the same thing with vaccine reactions and so on and so forth. It's just everywhere.
01:40:50.45
BJ
Yeah, we um in the H Wfo group. We call this I've been calling it nut picking. It's like going through a turd and picking the nut out of it. You know, um it.
03:30:25.00
cactus chu
Yes, but it's not quite that it's emergent I mean I'm sure there are some accounts like there. They're like libs of tiktok. Whatever, who are literally just doing this right? who are literally just posting the most extreme. Crazy people. But I think this is also something that circulates naturally right I think that I don't think that you need to have a I'm not sure if this was the case of whether there was either a russian or a kind of democratic leaning operative who who found the George Floyd um video and wanted to want it to make it go viral I think something like that goes viral no matter what.
01:41:37.50
BJ
Yeah, no I agree and I mean you if you watched it. You're like oh my god First thing you do is you call up your buddy and say have you seen this thing. Holy shit right? It was awful and I mean like you know was it any more awful than you know flander castile. You know I don't think so. I think it was less awful than the Flanders Castile shooting but that didn't really cause anybody to bat an eye because of when it happened and the way in which it happened um and you know, ah and it was.
03:31:45.94
cactus chu
Do you want to explain that to the audience?
01:42:15.56
BJ
Because it didn't hit that series Scissor Jes like ah well you know like Floyd did yeah okay so um, I'm trying to figure out how I want to tell a story all right I know how I'm to tell it? Okay, so there was a programmer and he sent a story to me. Got alexander at slate star codex was very alarming and he wanted Scott to publish it says Scott published it Halloween 2019 I think got published goes like this programmer is working with the artificial neural networks and also trying to study virility and they've got a company and they're putting together this thing that's gonna try and generate the most the most viral headline right. And because they're a marketing company right? They want to be able to test these things so they um had a um so they had this thing and they were going to train it on Reddit posts and um. Training the headlines to like you know the most popular rota post kind of boring like the ai spit out something that said like Donald Trump is no longer the president. All transgenders are the president. It's not very interesting. And then if you train it to be like the least popular, the most downvoted stuff then it would be like some sentence about penis. But. And um, if you trained it against but you could train it against the most controversial stuff. Well they were testing their AI against their own internal like slack server and the programmer who was working doing the heavy lifting on it was an entry level and made it. Named Sheri so Sheri can't get it to work and okay, call this meeting and they're going off of the thing and into his say well say look this is what it when I do it against my internal slacks server. This is what it says. You know? And there's just like you know and and she can't figure out why it's not controversial and so they get into this discussion about the thing that got pulled and it was.
01:44:32.25
BJ
Some statement some innocuous programming statement that was obviously the worst possible way to write a piece of code it was just obviously wrong and the narrator says it took them 10 minutes in the meeting before they realized that half the people in the meeting so that that was obviously. True and best way to write that piece of code and the whole room got into such an egregious argument over how awful or perfect this statement was that they ended up shouting and screaming each other and throwing stuff and 2 of the people ended up fired including including Sheri and it was only a couple hours later when they. Dawned on the remaining people in the office that holy shit it did work that generated the most controversial statement possible. So they're like oh my god we have a super weapon they call up Darpa I talked to some general they' like we could destabilize anything with this. You know ai like I was like I want to want a demonstration like okay what do i demonstrate it on. He says mozambique. Like three weeks later Mozam Pca goes through a revolution and eventually the company goes under because it was like a cat love profitful termination suit and all this kind of stuff that emerged from the thing and so sherry's scissor they called it died. And the terminology they used was scissor statements. They said that a scissor statement was a statement that was so controversial it was guaranteed to terity social group apart. So this guy who's writing to Scott Alexander he's like I don't you know I just moved on. You know it was a couple of years ago and then something pegged in the news and I was like oh no and he went back and he rebuilt the code and he ran it and he realized that one of the top 50 scissors statements that they generated from their Reddit comb was um. Republican supreme court nominee accused of sexual harassment is a teenager and so he says I don't know who has the scissor but somebody has it and you need to unplug from social media and run is about to be awful. Maybe the Chinese have it, I don't know. Now this story is completely fictional, totally made up of total bullshit eight You know, artificial neural networks don't really work that way. They would need to understand what they're doing and you couldn't just train it based on titles but the concept there is that.
01:47:06.80
BJ
The most controversial stuff gets the most traffic and the wider concept is that if we were to try and generate this series shirry scissor program in my opinion. What we've generated on Twitter. And Facebook is that with each of us acting as an artificial neural network node inside that program as it was described in the fictional Halloween story. So. When you have this outrage engine and you have everybody tuning their stuff to try and generate outrage to get clicks and then everybody's sharing the outrage stuff that's a nested system, the connection between media and social media and the like and share mechanics within social media are. Naturally gravitate towards finding the thing that is maximally controversial that we have the closest to a fifty fifty split on and elevating that thing which is why politics is always about.
03:37:50.23
cactus chu
Yes.
01:48:19.73
BJ
Not the most important issue but the most controversial one and is also why the popular vote in the United States is almost entire. You know home is almost always in the last ten fifteen twenty years a 3 or 4% break right. You don't get 60 no no teams ever gonna get 60% because of this because what they're arguing about is intentionally maximally controversial which means it's as close to a fifty fifty as they can get because they need people to argue about it makes sense.
03:38:21.62
cactus chu
Yeah, 1 more metaphor I think is crucial here is that what is most controversial seems most obvious that you don't die for something that you yourself understand to be controversial. Or in fact, spend like 4 hours arguing about it on Twitter if you think okay there are a lot of perspectives on this and it's and it's quite chaotic. You just sit yourself down and you say okay I'm not going to bother to convince this person if you think it is the only truth if you think it is. It is a mark of evil and it is an obvious moral sign for you to believe in something that's when it truly becomes controversial and that and there's that kind of paradox there.
01:49:44.61
BJ
Yeah, had I've done a relatively relatively good job in the past year and a half of building my friends lift and not interacting with folks that I would end up in those kind of knockdown dragouts with but I ended up in a pm exchange with somebody two weeks ago where they told me that the world be better off if I died because I shared a. Mask efficica he studied with him and he was like a 0 covid guy and um I was just like wow geez you folks are still out. There aren't you um, but that's a scissor right? And the reason it's a scissor is because for several reasons I mean 1 um.
03:39:43.62
cactus chu
Um, yeah.
01:50:22.83
BJ
People have a different understanding of the reality of the efficacy of Max fan of mask mandates for Covid Um, people have a differing understanding of how deadly Covid truly is and then. The thing that makes it The scissor is the Morality play right? You value your freedom over my life a bit. That's what makes it.. That's what would key people off right? or the reverse, right? You know what it's like.
03:40:14.18
cactus chu
Mm.
01:50:58.57
BJ
You are killing me by not wearing a mask was the way where things got really sticky in 2020 and there are some people still hanging their hat on that right? you know that's a hard thing once you've hung your hat on that hat rag hook it's hard to unhang it because. You know you don't want to admit, you were wrong or whatever and that's you build your worldview around that and you're gonna end up. That's not something that's easy to admit that you're wrong about particularly if you've behaved in such a way over the last year or like if you canceled Christmas because of covid. You don't want to go back and think that you can't like Christmas was the wrong thing to do right? So um, that makes it hard for people to change their minds about it. They can't they can't believe they could have been wrong about something so big as that right? you know.
03:41:08.49
cactus chu
Yeah.
03:41:17.57
cactus chu
Yeah, and as we talked about before one of the biggest empirical results is others this group effect. Yeah what you make of people who swing from one end of the pendulum to the other like people who. Who fell out of one one eregore who managed to dissent and then not too long later. They're they're on the other they're on the other side. Yeah.
01:52:18.21
BJ
They're unlike ah, the other extreme religion. I think it's similar to when people like he used to be a devout to one religion and flip over to being devout to another religion and think they just need something to believe in. You know, that's that there's a there's a fundamental um need in. Most human brains to have some kind of guiding force that is not you that you trust will tell you the right thing to do because trying to think about what the right thing to do is is hard thinking in general is hard and so even intelligent people a lot of times just they just want to outsource that. To Outsource What is appropriate behavior to a book or to a feed or to a something because it's less to think about so they can focus on thinking about talking about other things and so if you get you know disenfranchised by you know, mormonism. Maybe you adopt wokeism as your replacement or reverse. Of that right? you know,? whatever? Um, and so when people flip It's usually I think it's usually just an.. It's not an indicator of not being intelligent I don't think I think it's just an indicator of someone who seeks. Um, you know. Seeks a behavioral guidance outsourcing right? and like Okay, what do you got.
03:43:04.69
cactus chu
Um, I actually see it as something different. I think that the reason why these changes happen is that there's something I called a minimum change Heuristic. What is the revolutionary ideology? Offers the minimum change in what I need to believe from what is current. What I currently believe and the funny thing with these kinds of conspiratorial ideologies is that everything is kind of Hidden. Everything is moving in the background.
01:53:59.91
BJ
Okay.
03:43:41.41
cactus chu
There aren't any fundamental assumptions about human nature per se that are baked in and so you can reasonably argue that it's easier for someone who believes in the tenets of liberalism to go blank. Not just to woke but also to Maga or to also to Qanon instead of believing that there are actually extreme differences in individual intelligence that people are extremely incompetent that coordination is quite difficult and really a miracle if it happens at all. Um, there are all these kind of counterintuitive facts that are buried even in most people's normal worldviews and because of that it's harder to. Get them towards a kind of statistical understanding or a probabilistic understanding or an emergent understanding of all of these phenomenon than it is to get them to believe in a conspiracy theory because there's just less that you need to learn and less that you need to verify unless that you need to understand in order to get there. And I think this is especially true if you look at the the more recent movements The more recent erics that have arisen that are really kind of forks of old things forks of protestantism forks of liberalism and so on and so forth.
01:55:37.79
BJ
Um, I think that what you're saying I think there's definitely some truth to it like for instance that that's 1 potentially one of the reasons why um modern woke volkism has been largely mapped over. You know, calvinist christianity. You know there's a lot of extremely close parallels to it and it's because it's easy to eat or not and then all right.
03:45:28.53
cactus chu
Yeah, or or Gnosticism I think that's the flip right? That's the flip where you allow people to to take a one eighty is the gnostic is the gnostic flip. If you go from having a world where you have all these assumptions to a world where your moral alignment is still true. But the assumptions are subverted by this conspiracy and by the secret knowledge I think that's something that's very deep.
01:56:21.63
BJ
Right? I mean i. Okay now the the pushback I'll give to you on that is if you go back and you reread Eric Hoffer true believer and that kind of thing like 1 of the things that he references in there is that some of the famous nazis were saying. I can't make a nazi out of a skeptic but I can make a nazi out of a communist and I can make a nazi out of a fascist because those kinds of people from a personality perspective are seeking something to believe in and so like that when you know when the kids could Germany you know pre-war Germany was kind of a. Soup of 3 different competing movements. You had your communists and your nazis and your fascists right? and what they were saying was that they you know from a psychological perspective. It was easier to turn a a died in the wolf fascist or a died and wo communist into a nazi even though they wereosing factions because what they were looking for was the. Personality um, the personality proclivity to be dyed in the wool about something right? Um, so I think that there's something to be said for that too when for the flippers somebody flips from 1 thing to another. It's probably just.
03:47:06.62
cactus chu
Yeah, um, sorry why is that a pushback. Um.
01:57:36.90
BJ
It's at least partially due to personality proof. Highly.
01:57:42.63
BJ
Oh I Just um, it seemed ah like I don't know that it's necessarily the case that um, any one of those ideologies in that example have much of an overlap. Maybe they do Maybe they don't but the important thing for them was not whether or not they were. And ideology that was close that had a lot of overlapping underlying tendencies. It was just whether or not the person was like a true believer right.
03:47:37.76
cactus chu
Yeah, so here's the thing about the minimum change heuristic and especially what I call the gnostic fliff. I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with that terminology because you can have big changes by taking basically one assumption. And that assumption in the case of the gnostic flip is um, the world you were ordered to see or the world. The parent world in front of you is like a secret constructed by some kind of secret cabal and you just need to invert it. Right? It's like talking like it only this is kind of like a metaphor but like it only takes 1 bit to take a number and make it negative right? It's basically the same. That's the metaphor for what's happening here is that you can actually do an entire like inversion of.
01:58:58.12
BJ
Um, right.
03:48:35.24
cactus chu
Ideology is like communism and nazism and maintains a lot of that desire for order or a lot of that desire for control and top-down narrative that exists. So I think the example of communism and nazism is.
01:59:18.23
BJ
Right? right? and you can do the same.
03:48:54.48
cactus chu
And affirmation of this point not a disconfirmation.
01:59:26.20
BJ
Right? right? I mean like you know what? what you're describing is like very easily seen in the conspiracy theory community where you can be like no wait. It's not the Ufos. It's the lizard people right? or whatever. Um, so you know that's kind of thing I mean like the thing about.
03:49:03.62
cactus chu
Exactly today.
01:59:45.66
BJ
And don't want to dirt on the conspiracy community though because I'm kind of conspiracy adjacent to be honest, you know, um, there's a lot of things that are in the conspiracy community that like come out true and when they come out true that you know allows qan on the the fire it needs to work. You know like. There is no way that you're gonna be able to convince me that Epstein killed himself for 1 okay and for 2 like you know you know ufos are real now too right? I mean like the fact that they published the you know all the ufo stuff in 2020 was just ah I think I feel like they were just waiting for it.
03:49:39.27
cactus chu
Yeah, so the problem here isn't necessarily like.
02:00:24.35
BJ
Time when everybody was freaking out so bad that they wouldn't notice the ufos and they were like oh yeah, Alien Spacecraft Us airspace. It's cool. Don't worry about it falling off the radar.
03:49:58.97
cactus chu
Yeah, the problem isn't like the discrediting of the conspiracy theorists right? It's a disproportionate use of that label right? It's kind of inapprop. It's the wider stigmatization and this kind of like It's actually like do you know what? it is. It's the same thing that the antithesis people do um but just apply to conspiracy theorists right? So you had all the people who are saying like oh this Epstein stuff. It's a conspiracy theory. Oh this is kind of like lab leak stuff. It's a conspiracy theory. It's like no. You guys have no understanding of what a conspiracy theory actually is like there. There are you can you can make it like make up like anything is a conspiracy theory right? You can say that there's like a global cabal behind basically everything but sometimes like people just do things right? like sometimes people just abduct. Abducting children on a kind of individual level that there's not some super complex like worldwide operation here or I guess it might be worldwide because of all his jets but there's not some. There's no super secret like mass coordination going on here. It's just Epstein and like a few other people like doing their like. Delirious or like doing their kind of terrible things and.
02:01:50.59
BJ
Right? I mean like there could have been some more conspiracy to the Epstein thing. I think it's possible that in you know, foreign intelligence agencies or domestic ones were working with him but there's no way we're ever going to prove that and so it's kind of like not almost not worth talking about. Um, one of the things that um that you're seeing. But I'm seeing now with the conspiracy folks and the eregorre conversation is that a distributed action by an erigore would look like a coordinated action by a cabal to a conspiracy theorist. So like if you go back and look at them.
03:51:59.51
cactus chu
Yeah I don't think that's like a very surprising thing to say though because most things look like conspiracy theories to conspiracy theorists.
02:02:29.84
BJ
Maajid Nawaz Podcast with Joe Rogan
02:02:38.70
BJ
Right? But like you know if you go and listen to him like he he came in very equipped to defend his idea that a lot of the modern covid policy was world I think world economic forum you know, cabal stuff and he had a lot of information that pointed that direction. But. You know I can tell you know that people with no centralized cabal claimed that Joe Rogan was taking horse dewormer. That was an egregious decision to elevate that because it was viral. And was viral for many reasons one of the reasons was that that agreere doesn't like Joe Rogan and 1 of the reasons was that aricorre was down on ivermectin and 1 of the reasons was the opposing aregorre was high on ivermectin and 1 of the reasons was nobody wanted to even think about the fact that Joe took like 10 drugs and rever meg is only one of them. And 1 of the reasons was the Cdc doesn't want a bunch of people to take it because they'd rather more people take vaccines and 1 of them. What you know all of these sorts of things all col out and collided into the Joe Rogan horse trimmer meme and um. And he took it on the chin from the eregorre eor went after him really heavily for that and it looked coordinated but it wasn't it was just viral right? You know if the Fda the Fda yeah was tweeting about horse dewormer they were doing at the end I we're doing at the beginning I wasn't part of a cabal to push that.
03:53:26.86
cactus chu
Mmm.
02:04:11.90
BJ
Just trying to get clicks so you know like that's like so that's an example of these regions themselves are going to take actions and they're going to seem as if they're coordinated when they're not or they are coordinated in a.
03:53:54.40
cactus chu
Yeah, even the language is kind of like it's kind of difficult because you're basically using the biological metaphor right? you're saying like okay there are these processes that do things and they're not necessarily like they're not necessarily like a agenttic but they're.
02:04:29.50
BJ
Mindspace way.
03:54:12.93
cactus chu
Using them as a metaphor almost obscures this right because I don't know if there is a better way to say this there. There's no way to say that that doesn't seem either too passive or like almost assigning too much agency to it. So I Guess this metaphor is the best that we have but like. Yeah, it. It kind of reflects that I think this is actually like I don't know. I think this type of line of argumentation can be misused and I wouldn't mind if people disagreed with it. But I think this is a case where it's actually true that the lack of language to describe this kind of immersion. Coordination is an indicator that it's ah it's like historically a Rarer problem.
02:05:28.60
BJ
Yeah, I think this is relatively new like that. Um you know, ah emergent mimetic coordination in a short time frame that is reactive to current events um is. It's it. It's completely new Now we can argue about whether or not that shows that the eregore has agency but in order to do that. Really we would just mire ourselves down in the semantics of how we define the word agency it does or it does or it doesn't depending on how you define agency.
03:55:30.71
cactus chu
That's fair as well.
02:06:06.25
BJ
So and it's not you know this is a I will say that this in my mind is a level up from you know a virus wants to spread that doesn't mean the virus has agency I think this has got more agency than that whether or not this thing is thinking deeply is a different question but it seems to me that this is.
03:55:46.72
cactus chu
Ok.
02:06:26.34
BJ
Definitely a level up from you know, ah money wants to be free or whatever that kind of thing right? You know I think it's definitely you know it definitely has more agency than those kinds of um, those kinds of phrases and sayings in my opinion. Um, how much does it have? Can it be kited? Can it be redirected to whoever's figuring out how to redirect it? How rich are they and how rich are they about to be I don't know right? You know I mean like China is certainly trying.
03:56:23.80
cactus chu
Yeah I think we're oh yes, oh yes.
02:06:59.63
BJ
China has decided that the way to do it is to put up a giant wall and control all internet information and then run that way but at the same time you know I don't know that I don't know that the China's leadership is as smart as we think I think they might have been captured by their own. Might have been drinking their own kool-aid with this lockdown. I think Putin was drinking his own kool-aid with this Ukraine invasion. I think both of those are world agents. You know both of those powers were so information siloed about themselves that they weren't thinking about what it would mean to try and get. Country of China to 0 covid or whether or not they literally legitimately had the military power to to run a shock at all campaign against a country full of Cossacks. You know, um right I mean like they.
03:57:16.60
cactus chu
Yeah, it's been a very bad year for autocracy.
02:07:54.80
BJ
Not that I mean they're making poor decisions and you're trying to figure out from the outset why you guys? Why are you guys making these poor decisions and you know the I mean the easy answer the h wfo answer is it there in an echo chamber 2 right? They see the world differently because.
03:57:37.79
cactus chu
I Think that's a pretty but pretty widespread answer. Yeah.
02:08:14.14
BJ
Right? You know like there and you know it's like everyone's in an echo chamber everyone's making decisions based on the worldview that they have that is increasingly siloed as that we continue into the future years from these you know. These echo chambers are gonna become more and more siloed and there's gonna be more and more people that make increasingly confusing decisions from the outside because those decisions look right to them. So I think 20 you know the twenty first century could be a century of weirder and weirder shit happening.
03:58:22.71
cactus chu
Oh yeah, it's been 4 hours and we're incredibly black pilled. So I think it's time for the final question. What is something that is too much order and needs more chaos.
02:08:56.92
BJ
Yeah, ah, all right, go for it.
03:58:38.38
cactus chu
Or something that is too much chaos and needs more order that you haven't talked about yet.
02:09:14.67
BJ
Oh my god I don't know the first thing I could think of was you know like putting on my discordian hat and just say in full chaos and go for it right? um.
03:58:51.96
cactus chu
No one has said the Meta answer of everything needs more chaos yet. That's a new answer.
02:09:30.10
BJ
Ah, um, you know, ah well okay, do I believe everything needs more chaos and no could I make a case for it. Maybe um, if I were to make that case I would say that the best. Let's walk through this a little bit further. So um, we've postulated that the echo chambers are going to continue to tighten and that they are going to and the bubbles are going to continue to shrink and that more and more people are going to see the people outside their bubble. Is insane to them. Um, the more ordered answer is to encapsulate everybody in the same bubble right would be to make it so that we all have one shared reality and the more chaos answer is well. We could just. Egg the thing onto its race to the bottom so it finally hits rock bottom and forces people to go outside again and in that case, what you're doing is you're trying to funnel every echo chamber down until it's an echo chamber of one so that would be your. Full chaos solution to the problem right? Which of those is easier to achieve um because it might be achieved at both ends of the horse youe um, I'm not sure I trust any organization to try and pull all of our sense making into 1 bubble anymore. Um, so maybe the full chaos is the answer and then by the time we get all the way down to there. Things are a little bit hairier but it also forces people to have the kind of personal social interactions. They need to have to be able to form their own communities again. As the internet has destroyed the old ones. So there's your case for full chaos which you want.
04:00:53.70
cactus chu
All right? That's ah, that's a great way. It's not necessarily a way That's even more optimistic but it is a great way to end the show.
02:11:35.93
BJ
Good deal I've had a lot of fun with this thanks for having me on.
04:01:07.43
cactus chu
Yeah, thanks, thanks for coming on.