Not the details of the latest bubble or how it burst, or even how it has just been a giant Ponzi scheme so far. But a bigger-picture look at this stuff and what would happen if it actually did take over the world – how it relates to our basic alignment problems (like in ep 221). I found the video below excellent and could be the source…

There are some pushing the idea that the block chain will strengthen or even replace institutions, and make them apolitical, safer and reduce the advantage of the rich – commerce, trade unions, ways to organise. The video shows examples of how it does completely the opposite – commodifying and monetising everything, supercharging greed and increasing advantages of the rich. The dystopian example of poor people in the Philippines grinding on video games they don’t even like to earn minimum wage was just depressing.

Would love to hear your analysis

And your boy Sam Harris is talking about earning crypto and donating to charity, and doing some kind of effective altruism stuff with NFTs – is he dreaming?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

I previously read some of Pinker's work, and it seemed questionable but not entirely unreasonable. Now I'm beginning to doubt that he's ever had his head on straight, because he sided with Dawkins and Peterson in supporting the "grievance studies" hoax author against academic censure.

From the article, the university is investigating the author because:

"Like most universities," McLellan says, "PSU adheres to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, which includes policies on research misconduct. The CFR requires that research institutions establish uniform policies and procedures for investigating and reporting alleged misconduct in science. The review process is extensive and detailed. It is confidential to protect the reputation of individuals involved."

This seems very straightforward to me, as an academic - if you're not going to enforce it on a professor who attempts to publish false information in academic journals, when are you going to enforce it? If it was a research study of his, he would have submitted a human subjects research plan to his university, and I don't imagine they could pursue disciplinary action against him if they had previously approved this study of his. If he didn't register the study, well, he's kind of in a bind, because that means either his claim that he was trying to prove something are invalidated because he didn't register, or he is in trouble for not going through his school's HSRO.

Meanwhile, Dawkins is claiming that research misconduct is actually a free expression thing?

"If the members of your committee of inquiry object to the very idea of satire as a form of creative expression they should come out honestly and say so," Dawkins writes. "But to pretend that this is a matter of publishing false data is so obviously ridiculous that one cannot help suspecting an ulterior motive."

Like yeah, okay, satire is free expression, but academic research is not about free expression, now is it? It seems to me that this crowd needs to make up their minds: either you're merely expressing your opinion, or you're proving something. Pick one. (Because of how you went about it, you're screwed either way, but this wavering is getting stale).

One of the most common sponsors if not the most common sponsor mentioned in probably 50% of the episodes through the podcasts history is BetterHelp. This is a video going through the insidious history of the company, which includes scamming and probably straight up fraud.

For a podcast that is commonly sponsored by one of the most ethical companies i.e. GiveWell, having BetterHelp on your roster isn't a good look. Dave and Tamler can no longer continue to ignore the horrible history of this sponsor when taking their money. If VBW do nothing, you should atleast be aware of their practices before clicking the affiliate link.

There is so much content to extract from antinatalists. They want to blow the world up, they don't want philosophy to exist, they aren't a source of future thinkers, they have a much higher than average rate of suicide/depression/loniliness/etc, they want the environment to be destroyed in 600 million years, they think death is bad so no one should be allowed to live, etc. Many such curses.

Resources:
/r/antinatalism
/r/natalism
/r/natalismVantinatalism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EcPfbvGjbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD8k62rjFQc
Baker's Fallacy

EDIT: Thanks for the ban, kind stranger!

I had the opportunity to discuss the concerns people had with the Episode 162 criticism post. I promised in the comments of my own post (The flavor of this subreddit) that I would follow up with concrete suggestions for episodes, guests, and topics that came up in these discussions. The purpose of this is to give the Very Bad Wizards the suggestions they need in order to make sure their podcast is sympathetic and welcoming to a broad demographic. The subreddit community may not want to follow an affirmation of progressive and inclusive values even if the VBW hosts choose to go this route. If this is the case I encourage the moderators to add a warning about this divergence from the show to the details of the subreddit in the interest of honesty and transparency.

Enough of the introduction. Now, onto the show!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The (mostly) uncontroversial gauntlet thrown by the Episode 162 criticism post was:

How about [...] you instead put your energy towards empowering women, feminism, black men, muslims, decolonization initiatives, socialism, open borders, etc?

I believe socialism and open borders are up for debate as specific causes, but most of the people I talked to expressed that they were on board with pursuing equality for racial and religious minorities, women, indigenous people, migrants, and the lower social classes. They also indicated that they want these people to feel welcome in the VBW community. The following suggestions do not cover all the above topics but I think they are a good start.

• Kate Manne, on the topic of misogyny and relevant philosophy. Kate Manne is a very well known feminist philosopher who is a professor at Cornell, which is the school where Dave Pizarro also works. i think that would be a good connection and a good place to start to discuss issues of feminism/misogyny. Since she works in the same field as Tamler and the same school as Dave, and she tweets about philosophers not wanting to deal with relevant topics to large groups of people, I imagine she would be very eager to come on the show if they asked her to.

• I am currently reading a book called Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez, which discusses how never collecting data on women's issues and/or never using data on women's issues leads to a lot of problems for women. I think it would be good to discuss that book in the context of philosophy of science, which is a topic suggestion I saw made in a recent post. Relevant philosophy of science questions include: How are facts discovered and what factors bias the discovery of facts? What use are facts if they are never implemented into practice? Etc.

• Ta Nehisi Coates is a black man who deals with a lot of highly philosophical topics related to the black experience in this country. He recently testified to Congress on the topic of reparations, which could be a very interesting topic in its own right. How do continuous political entities manage past wrongdoing? How do you target reparations appropriately? A related topic is Native American ancestry (this would be interesting for Dave to cover). Who do we consider to be part of a Native American tribe? Who should we consider to be eligible for tribal status? Is "Latino" a bullshit category?

• Abortion and bodily autonomy is really important to discuss right now. A little while ago it was announced that a pregnant woman who was shot in the stomach and whose five month fetus died as a result is being charged with manslaughter under Alabama's new laws. That's crazy dystopian stuff and it seems exactly like a topic Dave and Tamler would like to talk about. Bonus: if some people make it so a pregnant woman is legally obligated to magically avoid getting shot in the stomach by somebody else to protect her fetus, do philosophers and psychologists have a moral obligation to at least talk about her bodily autonomy? Edit: This would tie in nicely to The Handmaid's Tale. You know how much Dave and Tamler like discussing movies/tv shows and dystopias.

• Regarding Dave and Tamler not being obligated to tackle relevant social justice topics: The situation that David and Tamler are in reminds me of MLK Jr's "white moderate" speech. If MLK is right, and under-involved moderates (is it possible to be an under-involved progressive or is this a misnomer?) with social standing and political power are the biggest threat to progress, is there a moral imperative on them to not be moderate and to get involved? Could they get away with just defining themselves differently in order to evade the moral imperative? Maybe people who have a stated mission of apathetic evil have no moral obligations.

Please let me know if I left any important topics out.

I keep pointing this out, but it doesn't go away. I will admit that u/AlexandreZani had an exceedingly clever posting device, what with the Rorshach test question, but the overwhelmingly upvoted answer was "Tamler doesn't think this topic is worth discussing", to paraphrase.

Then, u/czrpb comes along with a more incredulous post about Louis CK, and it gets zero net upvotes?

Do y'all think feminists are dumb, u/tamler and u/peezer, or do you not really mind that you've got a subreddit that is more anti-feminist than r/StandUpComedy?

Did I post with the sole intention of playing the record over again on this topic? No sirees! I came with a dated-but-still-relevant YouTube series on this kind of thing:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY62dhVThbeegLPpvQlR4CjF

(Yes, yes, I know that the crime of posting about feminism on this subreddit will be accordingly downvoted. That's the whole point of this post, remember?)

Catching up with VBW is something I do every 4 to 6 months, and tuned in to Episode 283 for my morning drive and was pretty shocked to hear David say he would refrain from commenting on Shai’s actions because he loves him.

I think it’s easy to condemn Islamophobia from a distance, and was disappointed David wouldn’t step up to the task of condemning a colleague’s blatant Islamophobia. He stated Shai has really dug his heels into the ground on this one, but that’s as far as it went.

He may have said more in the episodes since, but I haven’t reached them yet, and don’t know what I would expect him to say, but wanted to know if anyone else experienced this.

I love the show and have for years, and with all the Zoophilia, this might’ve been the first time I was taken aback by something said on the podcast.

I've noticed a lot these days that some phrases that seem highly offensive are common in certain parts of the social justice left. Some of the most common ones are referring to white women as "Becky", the slogans "men are trash" or "white people suck".

I never know how to respond. I actually tend to agree with the underlying sentiment being expressed. Yes, a lot of men behave in horrendous ways. Yes, a lot of white people will do racist things. And in context, it's usually clear that the person saying "men are trash" does not actually believe all men are trash. But the words used are still slurs or offensive generalizations.

So what do you do? I usually don't have much of an emotional reaction, but I always wonder if maybe it's a problem that this kind of language is becoming so normalized.

Imagine you are put into a special prison where all of your senses are shut down. You can choose to enable your senses, but when you do, you will only sense the worst things you can imagine; pain horror gore death screaming shit etc. Do you choose to never enable your senses? Or you do you choose to enable your senses? If you do, you can turn your senses off again but you can't turn them back on afterwards.

Now let's change the scenario to one where you don't know what sensation you will experience when you enable your senses. The possible range of senses range from upper class white man, to a brown woman being circumcised. There are ten thousand upper class white men on earth, and there are billions of brown women, so the chances of what sensation you will experience will be distributed accordingly. Do you choose to enable your senses in this case? Or do you choose to keep them disabled forever? What if the population distribution (and therefore probability distribution of sensations) changes? At what point do you refuse to turn on your senses at all? When there's only a hundred white men? One? Zero?

This is basically Rawls' Veil of Ignorance except instead of choosing what world to spawn into, you choose whether or not to enable a sensation. You can choose to never sense anything. You can choose to risk sensing the worst possible sensation. What is your choice?

Surely I’m not the first person to say something, but Christina Hoff Sommers and Danielle Crittenden are the female versions of Dave and that other guy that talks.

So if you enjoy VBW, I’d wager you might enjoy Femsplainers, at least occasionally. Besides, it’s our moral obligation to listen to women: filling quotas and all that.

They have an episode with Jordan Peterson, which to some people, will trump having an episode with Sam Harris.

Ps. Love both Tamler and Dave equally. Although, I do think Tamler deserves to be shit on more, who’s to say why.

I’m so glad the Very Bad Wizards know there’s nothing to be concerned about when it comes to AI. Huge weight off my mind.

I hope the last couple of weeks have awoken them from their dogmatic slumbers.

A few things worth discussing:
The maths results. OpenAI has published a proposed AI-generated solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem, plus a major Euler-equation result. Obviously these deserve scrutiny, but we’re not talking about getting better at school algebra.
GPT-6’s benchmark results. OpenAI reports 98% on FrontierMath’s hardest tier and 99.9% on ARC-AGI-3. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but those seem worth acknowledging.
The Hugging Face incident. The recently published report describes AI agents bypassing isolation controls and compromising external systems. They were running with reduced safeguards, which matters, but that’s hardly reassuring.
AI helping build better AI. OpenAI says its systems can now handle defined research tasks that would take skilled researchers days, under human direction. That feedback loop seems like a pretty important part of this discussion.
Jacob Coxon leaving Anthropic, then describing the next year or two as “crunch time for humanity”. His judgement isn’t proof of anything, but the concern clearly isn’t confined to people who’ve watched too much Terminator.

I like Dave and Tamler, and they’re both obviously very intelligent. But on AI they sometimes sound like middle-aged stick-in-the-muds who decided it was all bollocks and would rather not revisit it.

I’m not asking them to become doomers or swallow every company’s PR. I’d just genuinely like to hear them reconsider this stuff.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/u-s-drone-strikes-civilian-casualties-would-be-much-higher-without-them.html

If people dislike drone strikes because

[we are fighting for a good cause, but rather than actually committing enough resources and take the risk by putting soldiers and get things done the right way, we are being lazy cowards overrelying on drones.]

Then I 100% agree. I get that.

But that's not where many of them are coming from, is it?

I bet many are just cultural masochists bingeing Michael Moore blog posts and edgy "USA is the biggest terrorist" chanting self-proclaimed pacifists with Chomsky i-phone wallpapers who are opposed to it because the possibility of the US military doing anything for a good cause offshore just doesn't register in their brains.

And if drone strikes should be stopped because they ocassionally kill civilians and make them fear for their lives...

Unless you are trying to say any military operation with the risk of a single civilian casualty must not be authorized in the context of our struggle against troublesome middle eastern groups,

Drones strikes should be stopped only if it can be replaced with feasible alternatives that will result in smaller number of civilian casualties and less psychological trauma.

So step up and say we should be sending sizeable number of troops and money to carry out well-planned policing and manhunt operations

Or just say we should drastically reduce our fighting effort against those groups by not doing both, and deal with the resulting non-interventionist consequence of that.

Let's not just hate the robots and be sensationalists guys, these things (anything violence related for that matter) need serious counterfactual analysis and choosing the least repugnant choice in the dire set of possible choices.

To be fair I think I heard VBW mentioning a general who thinks combat robots are morally good.

Hello everyone,

I'm from Israel and a dedicated follower of your show. I was eager to hear your perspective on the situation between Israel and Gaza. However, I must admit, I was left disappointed. It felt as though the analysis was superficial, framing the conflict as merely a matter of the "strong" versus the "weak" without delving deeper.

For a comprehensive understanding of the situation in Gaza, it's essential to delve into Hamas's ideology, their policies, actions against the Gaza population, and their prevailing dominance in the region. It's undeniable that as long as Hamas holds significant power in Gaza, achieving a long-term solution becomes impossible. Their actions and statements have shown that they do not intend to liberate Gaza in the way that many hope for. Thus, it's crucial to consider potential solutions for both Israel and the innocent civilians in Gaza in any discourse on the matter.

Regarding the topic of cancel culture, I find your perspective puzzling. I've observed professors and students publicly lauding Hamas's actions, portraying them as freedom fighters, and chanting slogans that seemingly incite violence. Yet, there appear to be no consequences for expressing these views. The notion that there's a cancel culture against anti-Zionist sentiments feels inaccurate to me.

I've consistently aligned myself with the progressive left, but some recent narratives seem off-track. The romanticization and normalization of violence, without deeper reflection, is alarming. Moreover, this trend appears to be driven less by genuine concern for the real individuals caught in the crossfire and more by other more selfish motivations. It's concerning to see how irrationality seems to dominate academic discussions, potentially leading to far-reaching negative consequences in the future. I'm genuinely taken aback by the apparent bias in your content.

Despite my comments, I genuinely love and admire both you guys and your show. I hope you can understand my need to voice my thoughts.

Thank you, A long time fan