Episode 221: Granite Cocks vs Robot Overlords

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist, David Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:32] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, the philosopher Peter Bogosian, has resigned from Portland State because of the retaliation he faced while standing up to illiberal ideologies. If I remember correctly, you were pretty hard on the conceptual penis hoax.

[00:01:32] Do you want to take this moment to apologize? Dear James Lindsay and Peter Bogosian and Helen Plocke-Rose, yeah okay I saw this, and I've seen, you've probably seen a few times where somebody has pointed to our interview

[00:01:52] with James Lindsay as the sort of turning point in his career where he just became, so you know I take a little responsibility for that. But this is not James Lindsay, this is Peter Bogosian. This is not James Lindsay, this is Peter Bogosian.

[00:02:10] No okay, he resigned and then did you see his tweets asking why no liberal journalists are looking to interview him? No, but that doesn't surprise me in the least. He actually copied at CNN and he's like I'm here you know?

[00:02:30] All these conservatives want to interview me but I don't know why. I mean I posted on Barry Weiss' sub-stack just this horror story of how I was treated at Portland State for just standing up for a free speech. Can you imagine doing at CNN asking for an interview?

[00:02:49] Like somebody who's going to see that and be like oh shit he's right, we've dropped the ball like some intern manning the look. Who does he imagine is going to enter like Nick Kristoff or something? Like is he going to interview him back from Somalia?

[00:03:05] Especially he's like an Oregon guy too, it's shocking. It's shocking. It really is. Just more proof that he's right. We really are descending into totalitarian. It's like didn't Barry Weiss also resign? There is this sort of I'm resigning and then let me call out the victim card because…

[00:03:25] Right, it's like I wanted you to fire me like I've waited to be fired but you guys won't fire me so now I'm going to resign so I can be the martyr. Yeah maybe there's this hope that in memory it will change and people will be like

[00:03:38] Peter Bogosi was unfairly ousted from his position. No I mean it's already happened like you know for the people who are on board with this like the Andrew Sullivan they essentially treat like Peter Bogosi and as if he was fired.

[00:03:51] It's like he put up with like the harassment as long as he could but then finally he had to step down. You know he was a non-tenure track professor at Portland State and my guess is you make

[00:04:06] a lot more money being you know the free speech martyr being the I'm standing up to like critical race theory and like stopping the tsunami of illiberal ideologies from sweeping the land than you do just kind of teaching a few courses a year.

[00:04:23] Absolutely I mean this like this is a failure of the market to adequately compensate non-tenure track faculty but I don't know if he was trying to get into the tenure track or if he was gonna I don't know what was going on but

[00:04:37] you know that the reason that he was disciplined was for not having cleared his research through human subjects that that quote-unquote research where they sent out fake journal articles because technically they were involving editors in an experiment and they you know they they think that this is the

[00:04:59] stupidest most unfair bias treatment because who would think that that's human subject human subjects research but that shit happens in fact it happened to Elizabeth Loftus at University of Washington where she was disciplined by her own university at least not supported by her on university because

[00:05:18] she did some some research there was you know she studies false memory and there was a person who was claiming that they had evidence that their patient had actually experienced memory recovery like this false memory

[00:05:30] recovery and they had published this article like a case study and the case study was like I had this young girl who was traumatized by this incident and then years later it's like the claim was that they had videotape evidence of

[00:05:41] her spontaneous recovering memory so Elizabeth Loftus and her co-author went and did some like journalistic investigation to try to find out who this patient was so that they could like write an article like whatever defending themselves well they uncovered who it was and that woman sued

[00:06:00] Elizabeth Loftus for having whatever investigated her and like sacrificing her anonymity and then University of Washington said you never cleared this through human subjects and Elizabeth Loftus was like no I mean this was just a journalistic thing like I was just literally

[00:06:19] investigating the claims of this person and she even says they told me as much but basically she got sued the school didn't defend her they didn't give her the money for a defense lawyer and they disciplined her for not having cleared

[00:06:33] that even that little thing as a human subjects violation so it's not like this is just being human like ethics committees are serious and you can't just like even if you think that this might not count you have to get it

[00:06:48] cleared through your universities yeah so I mean of course nobody liked him there it's a liberal university like I'm not even saying that that's not true I'm sure he had a he was he had a hard time at Portland State and they

[00:07:01] probably wouldn't have pressed like a charge like that or whatever title nine charge which they ultimately like found in his favor but that's what happens when you go like when you devote your entire career to just antagonizing

[00:07:16] like a big group of people you have to expect some pushback yeah yeah the fickleness of the of the the people who who push and are surprised at the push back is just it's like that's the non-eating part of yeah and it's

[00:07:31] especially with like this kind of person who thinks who thinks that like society is getting wussified so I'm gonna like you show like how dumb everybody is and then when they get pushed back they're just what's

[00:07:43] yeah they go on Barry Wies and sub-stack and like why not about it no I mean that's the thing that like this is the thing that absolutely drives me crazy but this is like people wonder why I care so much like why I react so

[00:07:56] strongly against a lot of these people when at times I agree with the things that it is because they on the one hand want to just like loudly and constantly mock and attack this large segment of the population and then

[00:08:14] when that segment of the population pushes back they cry they cry about it like just don't cry about it like that's you're in that game yeah yeah it's the crying about it that drives me insane and it's in marked contrast to a to somebody who was legitimately cancelled

[00:08:33] um norm mcdonald after he there's the segue there's I promise you a segue here norm mcdonald who was cancelled by saturday night live like he was doing weekend update he was very popular cancelled by saturday night live like not not like he was compelled to resign

[00:08:53] but was just fired um by saturday night live because they asked him to stop doing so many oj jokes and on weekend update and he didn't he just kept piling them on like to the point where it's

[00:09:05] only it was almost absurd like the whole joke was oj has nothing to do with this but like he's guilty and so he was fired and like unlike the peter begozians of the world the berry wisest of the

[00:09:18] world the people who just resign and claim that you know this is just an intolerable climate right now he was just like they were totally like within their rights to fire me

[00:09:26] they asked me to do something I didn't want to do it um it maybe it wasn't funny and so they fired me I have no problem with that and he's he's that's one of the things that I like I respect

[00:09:38] so much about like about him and I guess we're going to talk a little bit about him right now yeah let's talk but yeah before we get away from this though it's we we know people who have been unceremoniously let go like will wilkinson friend of the podcast

[00:09:54] I had that was bad that was bad right uh like I'm he didn't turn it into his career to complain about this like not at all yeah you know like like norm he was just like look they they want I understand why that happened right yeah um

[00:10:10] and not you know not everybody obviously like on the opposite side of the these culture wars or or or like that like I think I don't know maybe there's a topic for another time I don't

[00:10:20] like I think Jordan Peterson isn't that kind of nickel yeah like I agree he's a different like he's a different animal when it comes to this kind of stuff you know and I think like right but norm

[00:10:32] so pure sad just sad that he had a kind of integrity like his weird kind of absurdist integrity that was just like unbreakable like just unflinching and you know he was

[00:10:47] just so naturally funny that I think he was always going to have an audience so long as he kept doing work so I guess he's lucky in that sense but uh you know he took risks that like very

[00:11:02] few people are willing to take with his with his work um and just refuse to compromise his kind of vision which is a very unique vision uh about like what comedy ought to be

[00:11:15] did you hear about this he was on a sitcom it was supposed to be like like based on Newhart you know like he was an innkeeper and it was just going to be a sitcom like exactly like Newhart

[00:11:26] for the first four episodes which is all they aired before they were canceled of just like their innkeeper is in Vermont and the crazy characters and then in the fifth like the

[00:11:36] way this was planned was in the fifth episode his wife his wife was going to be murdered and then the show would turn into like a matlock thing where he's like trying to like solve

[00:11:51] murders to like make up for like not having like saved his wife or something like that but because it never got to like I like I heard this from like a long time kind of writing partner of his

[00:12:03] but because like the fifth episode never aired they know but if it had aired wait but his wife just would have been murdered but it did so I just wikipedia and there were two full seasons

[00:12:14] so this is a different sitcom that oh so it's not the norm show yeah um okay I would have loved that show through yeah so he died and like it was weird I don't get worked up by

[00:12:29] celebrity you know when Michael K Williams died from the wire like I was really sad what's more iconic than Omar from the wire and a bunch of other stuff that he did that's really good

[00:12:40] but you know it's like I didn't know him and I don't know like I was sad but I was sad in the way that I'm sad where a lot of other celebrities that I love died yeah but then norm there was

[00:12:51] weirdly I wouldn't have necessarily predicted this it was weirdly different there was something I know I like I was shocked but again you like you say with Michael K Williams like it's not like I wasn't shocked about that I think like my sort of personal relationship

[00:13:10] to norm like my the way that I consumed him was through every podcast that he ever put out and I think that that like gave some intimacy to you know you feel like you know somebody a

[00:13:25] little bit more um and the way you know I remember reading his whatever his autobiography whatever you want to call it his memoirs did you ever read that I did yeah no man it's you

[00:13:36] can't tell whether he's lying or telling the truth there's some sincere moments in there but there was something that was sincere about him that like drew me in and also this like very post-moderny like like it's completely unclear when he's being sincere and when he's

[00:13:51] just flat out lying it's almost like like he was like Gen Z before that existed yeah his level of is absurd yeah the absurdity yeah which is why I think he's so universally beloved is like he

[00:14:06] he checks like a lot of the boxes of like what you would find funny yeah although in a weird way like I remember watching him as the anchor the anchor on SNL and I think a lot of people

[00:14:20] didn't like him I think that in in retrospect we recognize him as a genius but he had this deadpan delivery and a lot of his jokes would bomb and you know he wasn't going for the least

[00:14:32] common denominator jokes and the more the joke bombed the happier you could see him like smirking like he just had a real yeah yeah he had he definitely didn't measure like the joke by

[00:14:46] the outcome like I think he he really just like if he thought it was a good joke like I'm sure he might have shaped the jokes over the course of like you know like and worked on them based on

[00:14:57] people's reactions but like if he thought it was a good joke he couldn't give a fuck whether people laughed at it or not well this this is so like I think the quid essential norm mcdonald bit

[00:15:08] is what I talked to you really briefly before we started recording to make sure that you'd seen it but it's in the roast of bob saggett yeah when he gets up there and gives like a five

[00:15:16] minute set that's hard to describe because it's like cringe like that he turns into comedic gold but basically he just he he makes these jokes that are like they sound like 1940s zingers you know

[00:15:33] yeah it's uh so like wrote it's a roast and and like the whole point of a roast is to just like push the boundaries there's no line at a roast and you're supposed to cross it and

[00:15:44] you're supposed to be really mean and horrible to the people that you're like not not just the like the roasting target like bob saggett but everybody else there you're just supposed to like insult them forever and then here he's saying like no there are times when bob has

[00:16:00] something on his mind when he wears a hat but no thoughts at all just a hat and bob is not very worldly he thinks the english channel is a british tv station and not a body of water separating

[00:16:24] england and france just like stuff like that yeah so he's just totally deconstructing it right the right and and you know i don't know i don't know how many people in the world could pull that off

[00:16:42] but there is a whole like there's a hilarious amount of tension and discomfort even amongst the stand-up comedian audience because at first they're just not sure what's going on they're not sure

[00:16:52] what he's doing yeah i wasn't sure no like is this building up to something right it's not even like my favorite thing of his because it's a little one note like the thing that he does but i have nothing

[00:17:04] like i will defend to the death is right to do it like i love that he did it that yeah it's a quint it's like quintessential norm mcdonald move i agree it's not it's also not my favorite

[00:17:14] of his bits like i mean i think his netflix stand-up special is is peace norm too i do too and that's what's so like i'm so like i don't know like people don't know this and haven't been like diving

[00:17:25] into this but apparently he had cancer for nine years and practically told no one including close friends and family and then clearly when he did that netflix special he was just like you know

[00:17:36] he was in the middle of dying and just and and it's so good like i urge all of our listeners to watch it it's so good and and i think so so back to that um bob sagat roast there's a moment at the end

[00:17:54] when he stops doing the shtick yeah and he just says some really nice things about bob sagat yeah and you can see bob sagat like about to cry yeah because if norm goes out of his way to say

[00:18:09] something that nice and sincere then it means a lot and even norm looks like he's he's choking a little bit um choking up a little bit and there is this beautiful tension between the like the odd absurdist

[00:18:24] sincerity in which he's telling giving these zingers and then his switch to just being absolutely 100 sincere yeah um that i don't know what it causes in me but it's very different from like

[00:18:35] it was almost like here's my tribute to bob sagat i'm gonna do like this like tight five of like weird clean jokes in a way that no totally and i think the reason is like i was listening to him like an

[00:18:46] interview that mark maren reposted with him like he genuinely liked bob sagat i don't think he likes that many people no and so when he really likes him like if you're really liked by norm

[00:18:58] mcdonald that's a huge honor but it's funny you say like you feel like you have this connection with him um because maybe i wanted he wants me wanted so much i think like i don't know but like it's

[00:19:10] very hard to like know him you know like it's like unlike a lot of the other comedians that i like where it feels like they're bearing their souls to you it never feels like that with norm mcdonald

[00:19:21] it's very hard to kind of know who he is like deep down and what he is deep down like you know yeah i sent you a little clip um earlier today that's sort of heartbreaking because he's talking about

[00:19:34] cancer directly in an interview um but the the interviewer asks him you know do you talk about yourself like your your stuff like he had a gambling addiction problem yeah during your stand-up

[00:19:47] he says no no like i never talk about myself he's like i talk about the universal me um which is you know like i say that i'm scared of death but that's just because like everybody kind of is and so i'm

[00:19:58] but i'm never actually like he wasn't revealing himself like he's always a mystery you just never there's i think it was in i think in the new york times uh somebody wrote a thing about

[00:20:10] him i think it was here that they point out that there's there's this one moment where he tells j le no that he's the greatest late night tv host yeah and you could just tell you

[00:20:25] you can't tell that j le no is confused whoever the interviewer was confused because nobody knew whether he was being sincere right to this day and nobody ever will i think right even though

[00:20:36] like all his like iconic talk show bits which are i think my favorite like if you if like you said you can only watch one genre of norm mcdonald i might do him being on conan and letterman i don't

[00:20:50] think i've ever seen like him on leno like i like that's not there's so many great there's so much great stuff with him on letterman and especially conan but not yeah so like why like i would be

[00:21:02] surprised if he really thought that but i wouldn't be like i would still put it like 30 that he just thinks he's the best you know like he's like this is what the job is and he does it the best

[00:21:14] i you know i listened to his uh his memoirs uh called based on a true story i listened to it as an audiobook which i think gave that extra yeah the extra feeling that you're never he's he's

[00:21:27] like in them like his whole thing is like two truths and a lie kind of like you yeah there are vulnerability that you clearly can tell that something is there but he peppers it with such

[00:21:39] obvious outright lies yeah that that it's like it's an interesting relationship to truth where the truth never emerges from the facts that he's presenting the truth only emerges as is communicated

[00:21:53] by the sentiment of what he's saying some some the spirit of what he's saying is is as with most anti-comedians i think they're up there saying true things and that's that's why the best of

[00:22:03] them are funny but with norm he's is it's never by saying true things really no and like what's like different about him and like norm mcdonald like there's no pretense really even in the

[00:22:16] book even in his memoirs yeah like there's no pretense that you're really going to get insight into the real norm mcdonald because like you said he just peppers in these like random ob

[00:22:29] kind of obvious lies but then like also like things that don't fully make sense and so you don't know what's true and what's a lie so you don't know what really is being like what part

[00:22:39] of him is really being expressed and and reflected and what part of him is just like he thinks it's funny that's the thing he's like kind of uh inscrutable you know in that way and yeah

[00:22:51] that's very different from most from a lot of stand-up comics it is iconic yeah and i think that that you know we've talked about this but part of what we really like about certain stand-up comics is that they are authentic it right they they really they really are

[00:23:09] making themselves somewhat vulnerable with their sharing and it's actually like a the odd man out for me to like norm mcdonald so much because he doesn't make himself vulnerable like he has a wall that he is creating between you and him but there is something about the little

[00:23:31] moments of of sincerity yeah that they're not about sharing who he is but they're sharing something something authentic in his mental process like yeah the universal like you know uh i don't know if you listen to the mark maren interview but he haven't but

[00:23:48] he was scared of death um so already you have a connection with him and denial of death is like a book that he turned to to try to deal with it i didn't know that yeah yeah they taught him and

[00:24:01] maren talk about denial of death and then it's backer that's right uh and um you know i like again like with all the norm little pieces of insight like you're not going to get very far

[00:24:13] with it but you get little pieces of it i would say like you know mark maren as he sometimes does like gets about as much out of him that's real norm as as you can get like stuff about his parents

[00:24:24] stuff about um you know his early career but um but even there it's like there's just a there's a limit that's pretty you know there's a low ceiling for what you're gonna get out of him

[00:24:35] but it's interesting that like he had that he had this he rolled with the ups and downs of like being of an actor in comic as about as well as anybody could he rolled with like going broke three

[00:24:49] times from gambling like a crippling gambling addiction he rolled with that like about as well as anyone could but then he did have these little bits of darkness like about death which again

[00:25:01] makes it especially sad that this is the where where it turns out you know yeah and you know like i again would totally respect that he didn't want people watching that netflix special

[00:25:13] thinking that oh this the poor guy he's dying like he's a hero for doing this like that's the opposite of what he wants you to think about him yeah and uh he says that that's courageous you

[00:25:26] know he says like in his opinion he thought that going up there and garnering sympathy from the audience wasn't nearly as courageous as people say it is he thinks you know the

[00:25:36] story that he tells in that little clip is about an actor who who will opt himself after not telling anybody that he had cancer and he's a guy richard fernsworth yeah i was gonna i was gonna ask you

[00:25:46] you know in that little interview he says that he's he doesn't care that much for lynch did this alter your relationship i like i almost refused to do this although i loved that he called the straight story a hard g

[00:26:05] it made me want to watch the movie yeah for some no that's why i forget i mean obviously i don't give a shit if he likes lyncher like who he loves toll story who i love so that like we're even there

[00:26:17] but like clearly he loved that you know the darkness of the russian literature that we gravitate towards yeah it's it's so obvious in his in his moth joke that you tweeted his moth

[00:26:29] joke is like exactly like i mean like it's so clear that he like when i play it for students in intro we read like uh this big segment of toll story's confession like his like struggling with the

[00:26:42] the fact that we die strips away all meaning from life and then i do the norm thing and he's just practically referencing like parts of it in it so he's yeah again like he would never

[00:26:54] he would never say it and we even want you to know that that's what he's doing but that's part of the great comedy of that joke yeah you know there's a there's i think a real

[00:27:06] upside to not revealing too much of your own personality either or you're sorry your own personal life or your beliefs because there were times during his podcast when he would say things that i really didn't agree with you know like he would express some

[00:27:23] political opinion offhandedly it went against your liberal orthodoxies yeah yeah you know like he and like he seems to still be a believer in god um yeah and had had some of that which again

[00:27:36] like i i don't care like you like you and lynch i don't care because that's not the part of norm that i care about okay you know that's we know what he gave a reason in the marin interview

[00:27:46] for why he believed in god he's like so like i don't like art like i don't want to look at a painting you know although he also talks about just crying when he saw what like maybe was a vermere he

[00:27:57] didn't say but like it seemed like it was based on the description but he he says i don't like art but i got into literature and i got into tolstoy like people like that dosta dostoevsky

[00:28:08] and they seemed like really like excited about god like that they were like interested in god and like these people are really really smart and they're like at least exploring like the possibility of

[00:28:20] god like so who am i to be like no that's bullshit that's ridiculous i think that's like it's like your mark twain ghost argument i mean i yeah i mean i like i think that's like as good a

[00:28:34] reason to believe like or at least to not believe in god but to just be a little more open to it than you were before yeah yeah i like i don't uh yeah as good a reason that's right he clearly

[00:28:46] wasn't closed-minded other than in his belief that women just weren't funny did he say that i haven't come across that he said it and he would say it on occasion in his podcast in this

[00:29:00] way where again sometimes you weren't sure if he was just saying it to be politically incorrect whether he was expressing this he would ask his his guess he'd be like no no seriously like name me like five funny women you know

[00:29:19] yeah so i would buy that he believed that but he also might not like his his long time producing points like lifetime producing partner was a woman who just like handled everything for i think he

[00:29:30] really just enjoyed making guests uncomfortable in that way because to to to kneejerk say of course women are just as funny as men and then be put on the spot to come up with five very

[00:29:42] funny women right it's an uncomfortable thing to have to defend that your your desire to be politically correct when you might not be able to off the top of your head that way okay so let me ask you name five funny

[00:29:58] i'm just gonna name people i know in my personal life um no one one day we could talk about just sex differences in general and whether they exist but but i mean all like i

[00:30:09] i've come around on women being funny it's like it's something i just don't think that women are are rewarded for nearly as much as men like so you know whether or not there are as many funny

[00:30:22] women i think isn't nearly as interesting a question because i don't think it says anything that much about women specifically i have women in my life also that are they're very funny

[00:30:32] yeah in a different way but like very very funny they're funny in their in the way that they their shrill voices and funny in the way that they're constantly like cooking and cooking and they're bad at math and stuff it's hilarious like

[00:30:54] anyway we lost a great comedian and i think both you and i agree that that the art form of comedy is i think one of the best things humans have done as a species and we we lost somebody who was

[00:31:07] yeah just peak peak yeah i'm pure like just like his own thing there's nobody you couldn't try to be a norm mcdonald it wouldn't work there's nobody like him there's nobody that will be like

[00:31:19] he was his own thing like that's pretty uh remarkable you know like there's not that many people you can say that about yep is there like since this is turning into the opening sec the whole

[00:31:30] opening segment is there a quintessential norm thing that you think like or maybe your favorite i i don't know i mean the moth joke is up there um yeah i like yeah there's a like asking you to name

[00:31:48] five funny women yeah this is dr. cahls about the logic professor neighbor that i find hilarious that i can't i can't tell because i'm not nor yeah the way that he delivers some of these punch lines

[00:32:01] yeah that's a funny joke because it's not like unlike the moth joke it's not as funny as it goes but then like it's like well constructed because like it wouldn't work if it was as funny as the

[00:32:13] moth joke as it goes like given the punch line right right yeah and again you know he's doing some sort of performance art there that is not just in the telling of the joke it is

[00:32:25] something in everything that it is to be a santa comedian throughout all these years and like to be in this particular climate and just like be willing to tell that joke and he's a master his

[00:32:38] netflix special is a mat i like i was telling you david david schipal is up like up there for me nor mcdonald i think those are the two people like personally personally like i want to live forever

[00:32:48] and the degree to which they clearly i think have meticulously structured their whole set is they're just geniuses at what they do there's something in the organization itself that's like we would learn a lot being able to structure lectures just the way that they construct totally yeah

[00:33:07] absolutely like i think like we could break down like a special i like i don't think you should do this for comedy but in the you could do it in the way that we try to do for a movie or for

[00:33:19] like a short story or something just like do like a deep dive into how it's constructed and what it means and stuff like that the problem is with comedy i think that kind of ruins it a little

[00:33:29] bit so we wouldn't do that yeah i would say like for me quintessential or and like some combination of quintessential and favorite is the steve austin thing in the netflix special where i'm old steve austin um from the six million dollar man so what's what's the actor's name

[00:33:49] yeah i wouldn't i won't remember but i know exactly who you're talking about that joke is quintessential norm and the punchline is so perfect and it's one of those where the audience like pauses almost for

[00:34:02] a second and being like wait that's the joke and then everyone starts laughing just because it's like so brilliant it's so funny and it's again it's not totally clear why it's funny or

[00:34:12] what's funny about it like it has that a kind of norm absurdism but it's also like poignant and like you know existential existential despair yeah it's existential despair to be able to like boil

[00:34:24] down existential despair and you know and maybe the maybe the the perils of capitalism or whatever you know like to have it just boil down into the way that he like ends the joke like the the

[00:34:38] tone of his voice as he says it is lee majors is the lee majors yeah that's who he is yeah lee majors he's only i think norm could could just deliver jokes like um yeah he would say like

[00:34:51] you know the more i learned about this this hitler guy unless i like him you know he's like i'm not like a big history guy but i'm worried about the germans i also love the joke of like how you can

[00:35:08] lie but like but you don't have to lie like if you want to like deceive people you can just tell the truth word for word but in a really sarcastic tone that whole bit is really really

[00:35:18] funny and the new specials yes i i'm attracted to your sister i want to have sex with your sister i like even at our wedding like i was looking at your sister i want to fuck okay so good all right rest in peace norm rest and miss you

[00:35:43] yeah we didn't even say what we're talking about yeah so we we were gonna talk about robert nozak and even recorded part of that but like we audible the into meditations on

[00:35:59] mollek which is a scott alexander not his real name um slate star codex assay that our listeners have been asking us to do for a while all right we'll be right back to talk about this episode

[00:36:14] of very bad wizards is sponsored once again by better help online therapy check out better help dot com slash vbw you know the last few of these spots i've talked a lot about stress

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[00:37:49] slash vbw our thanks to better help for sponsoring this episode of very bad wizards um um welcome back to very bad wizards this is the time where we love to take a moment and think

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[00:42:26] cocoa for the fall um yeah so so thank you all for for all of your support we we really appreciate yes thank you very much all right let's turn to our main segment now the main segment that we

[00:42:40] so clearly teased throughout the whole opening yeah mainly we're a podcast that just talks about comedians and why we love them but this is actually our second go-around for a main segment we called an audible out of actually an audible is not a good metaphor because that would

[00:42:58] imply that like we changed the play before we ran the play it's like trying to call an audible in the middle of a play yeah i'm gonna go right flag not post can we just do that play again can it

[00:43:10] be second down again i promise this is the only but yeah we were going to do it on uh robert nosix famous wilt chamberlain argument and we may yet but we weren't fully ready for that a bunch of

[00:43:22] listeners throughout the years have asked us to do meditations on mollock by the blogger scott alexander and i will i will respect his privacy by referring to him as scott alexander i agree with that we

[00:43:38] will not dox him like a certain very well respected news organizations it's a very long piece and a very big piece of work like i don't know how to get into it there's no easy way to

[00:43:55] get into it but here's what i was thinking so we just did this marks episode which i thought like the response to it was on the whole really good like i personally was very happy that some of

[00:44:08] the marks friendly people that i know liked it they didn't think it was perfect but you know they thought we did it justice so i was very happy about that and i expected you know people to be like

[00:44:20] oh like you guys are fucking dumb asses capitalism is the best thing humanity has ever produced that was actually my stepmother she she actually did like react strongly against it and

[00:44:34] and and now says she's coming back on the podcast to talk about it like she's coming out of retirement like for one last job don't do it never ends well she wants me to read this like trans

[00:44:50] libertarian blogger dear dromiklowski i think she's like once you read that you'll be you know all these delusions will be cleared from your head but like there was a kind of criticism

[00:45:02] that we got that i think it's fair you know we really didn't talk about um the any alternatives to capitalism specifically communism and you know when it's been tried and also whether capitalism

[00:45:16] was the problem but instead of something else about modern life you know and so i thought the best version of this criticism because there were a lot there were a lot some bad versions of it but

[00:45:30] i think the best version of it came on reddit and i'm not on the page like like cut and paste that part of it so um while you're while you're doing that there's there's something that that did

[00:45:42] that should have anticipated that bothered me about some of the response which is you know i in my naivete i wanted to read the communist manifesto and alienated labor and take them as works on their own and evaluate them and talk about the ideas

[00:46:02] and not be forced into a discussion about whether or not you know like state communism you know why is it that every there's only three communist nations left and they all failed and

[00:46:15] what you know why capitalism is so much better i think i don't care that much i mean it sounds terrible but i don't care that much at least in that context i just wanted to talk about those papers

[00:46:25] and whether they resonated and uh to to get angry people again i'm stupid to not think that this would happen but to get angry people saying like some version of you're so dumb for thinking that

[00:46:38] that uh stallin was a good guy or something right because it's a really like like we're not qualified to talk about um the various different communists like enterprises like clearly stallin like and the

[00:46:53] soviet union uh that was not a that that was not a success story morally or just in any way and clearly like north korea you know like doesn't seem like it's working out cuba you know

[00:47:08] like they i again i don't know enough about this but the little i've looked into it it that seems like a trickier case you know like there yes there is a lot there is a lot of pushback and

[00:47:21] and definitely some misery but you know some of that misery is because we've had an embargo on them and like forced other countries to have an embargo on cuba so like it's like this at least that that

[00:47:32] stuff is complicated and we don't like we don't know shit about that no no and pretending we do no and i don't want my point here to be lost which is that that's not even what i wanted to

[00:47:41] talk about and i don't think that's what i did talk about like what i cared about was what the the sort of psychology and sociology that marx was trying to point out and whether it

[00:47:52] resonated at all like i actually personally don't know what the upshot is of pointing out that there's alienation and labor like if that's a communist system as a solution for this or not

[00:48:04] like that's sort of not where my mind was it was just right what is marx saying here you know marx like famously didn't really talk very much about what the communist the new

[00:48:13] communist city would look like he was more focused on the critique of capitalism and i think you can to an extent separate the critique of capitalism from whatever kind of vision you have of a

[00:48:27] of a better society and that's kind of what we did but this is why i respect this version of the critique that we have is because i think it like understands that that's what we were doing

[00:48:40] and still like raises an issue with it so this is this is billy of baskerville i'm glad i took the time to look and see who it was um and also like one of the things i hate is people who

[00:48:53] comment before they finished listening to the episode and so this is one of those people but you know turns out like he's totally right about like what he presumed but so he says one question i have like he agrees about the alienation of labor is whether this argument

[00:49:11] is really unique to capitalism or whether it's present in any system that effin that emphasizes efficiency of production and we can talk about whether like you know capitalism is where that

[00:49:23] emphasis is is greatest um and if he says the rise of assembly lines in the usa and equivalently cog and machine state-run schemes in the soviet union they both ended up alienated workers

[00:49:37] and exploiting them um and if that's the case then the contrast may not be between capitalism and communism but rather between something like large scale versus small scale shoe maker in the book small as beautiful argues that in these debates tend to conflate a number of in-principle

[00:49:54] separable dimensions free market versus planned economy private versus public ownership democratic versus totalitarian rule the reason this matters is that if we're going to lever levy critiques of capitalism and its consequences we probably want to make sure that what we're critiquing

[00:50:09] is capitalism specifically and not some other correlate of capitalism or at least i'd want to make sure of that if i were wanting to reform or rebuild a system right now clearly we don't want

[00:50:21] to reform like we don't think that that's our sounds like a lot of work it sounds like way too much work like i don't want to be on like a committee like on a senate committee in my university

[00:50:31] i also think i'd be really bad at bad at someone who doesn't doesn't maybe have such modest aspirations is scott alexander and the reason i i think this might bridge to

[00:50:43] this blog post is i think that's part of his point it it's not that he doesn't agree with some of these critiques of capitalism that marx levied in fact he has a little line about marx where he

[00:50:56] says anybody who thinks marx is just saying you know like capitalism is just greedy businessman like you know factory owners and with their like cigars like doing they're doing a disservice to marx he like his critique of how like the incentive structures under capitalism works

[00:51:12] scott alexander agrees with it's just for him that like a small subset of the problems that just face rational agents trying to coordinate in a land where there are limited resources there are all sorts of coordination problems that just inherently arise including the capital

[00:51:35] the ones that happen under capitalism but not exclusively that right so i think like to the extent that you know like this reddit commentator and scott alexander might critique marx it's that

[00:51:51] he's thinking too small which is a weird way of reacting to marx but he thinks that like capitalism is the problem when it's just like life that's the problem like human life

[00:52:05] that's the problem and and what this essay does is in great detail run through all the ways in which these problems these coordination problems manifest themselves and also some different ways that people have tried to address the problem and then he takes the transhumanist side

[00:52:23] at the end which was kind of surprising and not necessarily pleasant surprise but yeah what did you think of this well first of all i think well said the way that you

[00:52:35] bridge the two things and the broad description it's hard it's weird to have a work that is hard to summarize because it is asking the biggest question you can ask this is like yeah the broadest question is like what's wrong with civilization or what's wrong with existence as

[00:52:54] we know it as limited agents who are competing for resources in a finite environment i mean i enjoyed this like i don't have a lot of experience reading slate star codex all i know is that people

[00:53:07] who i respect seem to love his writing i've read maybe two or three of his blog posts i know that sounds weird because i think that that i like like the way that he thinks um yeah i would

[00:53:19] think like i'm surprised that i've read more of his stuff that you have it's it's just lazy um there's just a few meta points that i want to make though uh about how

[00:53:31] alexander has structured this which is this is this is what blogs seem made to do because you can't there's there's no way to publish this as a regular paper and have it really

[00:53:43] appeal to anybody who publishes journals or books um it's uh yeah it's it requires links to other things it requires uh just this sort of i don't know how to say it other than html e kind way

[00:53:58] of communicating like an internet very internet way of communicating totally and like it's interesting because uh well pull back the curtain we were scrambling to find a new topic once we thought

[00:54:10] like the nozik thing couldn't be rescued and so like we came across this and both of us kind of looked through it and like that this seems like we could and then as i'm reading it and it's just

[00:54:19] not it doesn't stop right like it just keeps going and like there's not uh that's really specific to this form where it's like you don't know how like it's not like a book where you

[00:54:31] can tell how long it is it's not even like like a like an article on a website where you can easily like scroll down like it just kept going exactly like and it's it's also i while well written

[00:54:44] obviously i think um yeah he's a good writer yeah it's also not structured in a way that i would ever structure a paper it it's sort of all over the place in a way that that that i think betrays

[00:54:57] that you don't need a particular kind of discipline to write a blog post yeah you know right and i'm totally i don't know if this is to its credit no yeah i would say that i wouldn't have minded a

[00:55:07] little more organization no me too because like you yeah especially when you don't know how long it is you're like wait has he made his central point yet um yeah i mean it takes you on a journey

[00:55:17] though like because i you know first i was like wait is he like i thought he was a libertarian and he like marxistin's like no okay no oh what wait now we're looking now we're talking about

[00:55:26] like social Darwinism and so the the fact that it's not structured and gives you a roadmap allows for that but yeah yeah so you know it starts off quoting at length Alan Ginsberg's uh

[00:55:39] howl the second part which is just sort of the person of there's the god the deity mollock who is famously i think shows up in the the bible um early on as the sort of like

[00:55:53] a an idol that is worshiped um by the rebellious Israelites but you know those dang rebellious Israelites um it apparently you know it seems to be and alexander takes it as a one big sort of

[00:56:09] personification of not civilization but like the the i don't know the entropy producing soul destroying resource taking beast of of existence in a finite world i mean he even says like a lot

[00:56:27] of people and if you we're not going to read the poem uh because we're not beat poets like we don't have that delivery but like i proposed by the way i proposed tamler snapping while i while i put on

[00:56:38] like i i can't snap like really embarrassing me so i would have to read it and i you know he says like a lot of people say that mollock represents capitalism and he says that's a piece

[00:56:49] of it it's even a big piece but mollock is bigger than capitalism yeah right like capitalism doesn't have granite cocks yeah right which is a line in the poem um right it seems like a sort of

[00:57:03] inevitable the the inevitable non-optimization yeah right right and and so sort of big picture as alexander describes it is look there are all of these coordination problems that really make

[00:57:19] it hard to optimize for as a unit to say like this is the best existence for all of us because as everybody tries to maximize for themselves it ends up sort of inevitably turning into this

[00:57:35] terrible terrible system where everybody is actually contributing to the destruction of the system even though they're locally trying to maximize their own their own utility and sacrificing their values sacrificing their values and so you slowly turn turn into this you know mollock sort slowly

[00:57:55] eats eats everything so he says let's run through 10 real world examples of multi-polar traps that you know humanity faces and a lot of them aren't real world which is a little frustrating

[00:58:11] it's like he just says like the prisoner's dilemma like by two very dumb libertarians but like that's not a real world thing even like the uh like they're like a lot of them are thought experiments

[00:58:22] yeah and but there's a lot of like even when their thought experiments they and I don't know about some of them but some of them clearly are pointing to real issues like the

[00:58:33] arms races um yeah the two income traps uh race to the bottom right they're all game theory examples of how how things get fucked and yeah when he says real world I think he he means

[00:58:48] as in academics sometimes talk about them right but real world like Rawls under the veil of ignorance but as with all game theory what's being attempted is a microcosm of the larger system

[00:59:01] in a very very simple mathematical way of understanding it but just to give you a like a taste of what this is obviously our listeners should should read this many of them already

[00:59:12] many of them already have uh so the 11th 11th one he gave he gave is education and he says in my essay on reactionary philosophy I talk about my frustration with education reform people ask why we can't reform the education system but right now students incentives is to

[00:59:29] go to the most prestigious college they can get into so employers will hire them whether or not they learn anything employers incentive is to get students from the most prestigious college they can so they can defend their decision to their boss they can defend their

[00:59:42] decision to their boss if it goes wrong whether or not the college provides value added and colleges incentive is to do whatever it takes to get more prestige as measured in us news

[00:59:51] and world report rankings whether or not it helps students does this lead to a huge waste and poor education yes could the education god notice this and make some education decrees that leads to a vastly more efficient system easily but since there's no education god everyone is

[01:00:08] going to follow their own incentives which are only partly correlated with education or efficiency now I mean like unlike the prisoner's dilemma this this is a real thing right like this is like a problem that does capture like the kind of the heart of the problem of why

[01:00:26] education reform is so hard and and there's no easy fix for right and as he says repeatedly the the clear fixes to all these problems so prisoners dilemma tragedy of the commons like he uses a fish example um malthusian sort of population explosion um these are all these

[01:00:45] problems that emerge when people are locally trying to maximize and then just brings everything down the solution would be for everybody to agree to not do it right but obviously he says that

[01:00:59] doesn't happen like you can't right all you need is one person being like but what if I just you know like didn't play ball yeah that's like the running sort of common thread of all

[01:01:12] the coordination problems is he also mentioned science by the way which is another I think good example so so the publication bias and and people don't replicate and um you know science has all

[01:01:23] these problems and it's because any given scientist needs to publish more in order to get tenure and grants and be able to keep doing science and um it would be great for instance

[01:01:33] in my field it would be great if we could make it so that graduate students published less and they would actually take more time to do a project where they could you know make it all

[01:01:44] open pre-register and replicate somebody else's stuff and like in in five years get two really good projects done the problem is everybody says that that would be ideal but there's always going

[01:01:58] to be someone who published five things and not two things and they're gonna get the job and so right this is arms race all of these examples are of the same you know of a kind right they're all

[01:02:11] sort of specifically different and so like I don't know if this is a fair way of talking about the various solutions that he tries but he does say like so you think like let's get a totalitarian

[01:02:23] leader there but you know that has its own problems yeah but there's some point where he says monarchies like get a bad rap yeah I mean because I think he thinks like that's a that's

[01:02:34] a way to try to deal with this problem like the essay is the status quo is unacceptable so like monarchy is at least a way of trying to defeat mollock right like just letting mollock eat you up

[01:02:48] which is kind of what we're doing right now isn't acceptable according as I see it according to this piece yeah what I what I like about these points these examples and the point he makes

[01:02:59] with these examples is that it would be a mistake to think that it's not that people don't know what the obvious solution would be so when he talks about corporate welfare he says look everybody agrees that a system would be better without a ton of government corruption and

[01:03:13] corporate welfare like it's not as if people don't realize that the system sucks it's just it's it's like it's no lack of ideas yeah I mean he says every two-bit author and

[01:03:25] philosopher has to write their own utopia for the record I have no I don't have to write my own utopia but then he just says here's two utopias the utopia where instead of government paying lots

[01:03:39] of corporate welfare the government doesn't pay lots of corporate welfare the utopia where every country's military is 50 smaller than it is today and the saving goes into infrastructure spending if there was a way to coordinate this like that would be that would be huge we just

[01:03:55] haven't figured out how to like how to do that within any kind of system yeah not just capitalist at least according to him but just any kind of system we haven't figured out how to defeat

[01:04:05] like the inherent corruption that is just endemic to any form of political organization yeah yep right like arms races just don't make sense like both countries are trying to always have

[01:04:18] one more bomb than the other country and so so of course that's a rush to move on their part so so let me let's take a step back just before we get to like the proposed solutions and say like

[01:04:30] I think this does assume a view of human nature as just hyper competitive self-interest maximizers or does it like that's my sense in contrast to Marx who thought this is the vision of human nature under capitalism and like once capitalism starts to become the ruling ideology

[01:04:53] people view humans as these isolated atoms trying to only maximize their self-interest Scott Alexander thinks no that's really how human beings are you know with like lots of different local exceptions but ultimately when it comes to these big kinds of problems that's

[01:05:13] the thing that's always going to get in the way of co-op the gods eye cooperative solution right yeah I this this was my I think biggest issue with the way that this this essay is argued and framed

[01:05:26] which is I think he just takes for granted that that we're all self-interest utility maximizing creatures who left unchecked by a central authority will run rampant in this self-interest and destroy things and it's odd because he doesn't even this is just

[01:05:45] the like the running assumption you know all of these examples of people essentially being defectors in a prisoner's dilemma because that's what's rational all of them seem to me to to be interesting examples but have plenty of counter examples of like you know how

[01:06:06] how often this isn't the case because you know our psychology I think is built such that we for instance care about things and I don't think this is a fatal criticism because Alexander

[01:06:19] is saying that what these systems might lead to is sacrificing our values I think all I would say is that our values are more internalized than he seems to admit or agree or consider even

[01:06:32] that there is something that we've learned about putting people in prisoners dilemmas which is they don't always defect effect like the crazy thing that needs to be explained is why people don't always defect effect and that's because I think we have some really built in I guess I

[01:06:48] would say reasons to not do this and because of that we've solved so many coordination problems that we can build amazing things and have nice things yeah like this is it's like this is written

[01:07:03] in a world where like Joe Henrich and Bob Frank and like uh like all this work about how we're not homo economic us we're we're not just purely self-interest maximizers we have emotions and we

[01:07:16] have social norms and cultural norms that restrict us and it's not that he doesn't acknowledge it it's just that he barely acknowledges yeah right now like I think this is a totally

[01:07:28] valid criticism but I also think that I think that a lot of these problems are big enough that whatever like emotions and cultural norms and values that we've put up it ends up gobbling

[01:07:40] those up too and I think like like the the charitable reading of this is yeah he doesn't emphasize those things but he does talk about how values um are these things that can go against

[01:07:54] self-interest but they just end up getting gobbled up by mollock just like everything else you know yeah so you might say well if we're that bad you know at like working together then why is it

[01:08:07] that we are you know in some ways we have accomplished things that no selfish individuals could accomplish on their own we've created institutions and you know art and philosophy and literature and buildings and health care we've done so much and he is I think cynical

[01:08:32] though about why we've been able to last this long so he gives yes four reasons why he thinks we've made it so far one which I found kind of like an interesting section on slavery where he talks about physical limitation he's like well look even if the incentive

[01:08:47] is increasingly to work everybody into the ground you can only push people so far there will be physical limitations to uh to our greed or whatever our our maximizing he says excess resources like so far we've just not run out so like you know that whatever our

[01:09:10] cooperation problems haven't we've always been able to get resources even if we ruin one pond we go fishing another pond right so right often at the expense of some other country or like population right there's an interesting use yeah when I say we sometimes I wonder what

[01:09:29] yeah as humans at least the other one is utility maximization so he thinks we've just been very efficient at maximizing utility in a way that's just allowed us to I guess skirt some of the

[01:09:45] problems and that that one I didn't quite I was he used this like this coffee example from Ethiopia yeah I don't see what like this is supposed to be a not a problem like a solution but a bad solution

[01:09:58] to this problem because it's not going to last yeah right because it's it's too fragile right and then finally he says there's you know these three are like bad ways in which we've been able

[01:10:09] to maintain or grow the one good way we've been able to avoid mall like swallowing us is is through coordination again he says here he says the best known solution to the prisoner's

[01:10:21] dilemma is for the mob boss playing the role of a governor to threaten to shoot any prisoner who defects the solution to companies polluting and harming workers is government regulations against such now like I this is where just I would put into the coordination subheading that we've

[01:10:38] we've evolved various ways of coordinating and you don't need a mob boss to solve the prisoner's dilemma for you there's you know it might be fragile like to to rest the success of future

[01:10:50] human civilization on some of these old emotional responses or on our built-in desire to to have values and create norms might it might be a bad thing but it's certainly I think people have

[01:11:05] convincingly argued that it is the way that we came to coordinate with each other the fact that humans didn't consistently defect with each other and cooperate and and the reason that little

[01:11:18] kids like playing with each other in the service of a common goal and chimpanzees don't is just that we're built differently and so the coordination problem comes easier to us yeah I just think

[01:11:30] that like that's true and I think he undersells it yeah but then I also think he's right about the fragility of that and that when the chips are down when the stakes get a little higher

[01:11:42] that's when some of these things do start to fall apart yeah the fragility is there and I think one one uh I think very real reason that these kinds of responses collapse is this size

[01:11:57] the fact that we don't live in small communities anymore means that it's easier to not have any right binding with everybody around you because you know you probably won't get caught cheating

[01:12:13] you don't care if you're screwing over somebody you don't know all of the things that might be mechanisms that emerge really well in a small society can easily go away when you know there

[01:12:23] is there are these large structures that keep the incentives alive but don't keep the the psychology of coordination and punishment or desire to trust all those things kind of go away yeah to the redditors point yeah this might be a small scale versus large scale problem and when

[01:12:43] anonymous when you're just an anonymous person trying to make your way and you know that other people are fucking over the system and when you fuck over the system it's not hurting anybody

[01:12:53] in particular it's just maybe at some level it hurts these other people you don't know but they're also doing it like yeah you're gonna do it there's no there's no psychology in place to stop

[01:13:03] you from doing right by the way do you know that this reminds me of the example of the professor who would ask his students for like their exam they would say okay you have two choices you

[01:13:17] can either say that you want two points of extra credit or six points of extra credit but the catch is if more than 10% of you say six points then nobody gets anything right so a class of truly sort of coordinated people would say oh look like just nobody

[01:13:38] say six because then we'll all get two and that would be fine but apparently he's been doing this for years and has never had a class actually get any extra credit do you ever I

[01:13:48] do prisoners dilemmas for extra credit sometimes not really but like and I get a lot of cooperators for it you know well that actually shows so like maybe I think I feel like if you put two people

[01:14:01] in a game with each other you might get a lot of cooperation but the minute you make it the whole class and say or but I mean like I do well they're anonymous though in the my version of it

[01:14:10] but are they playing with they're just playing a game with each other are they playing like the whole they're playing a game with one other person they just don't know who that is yeah that's

[01:14:17] that I think that that matters I think that when you know that you're potentially screwing over another person the less likely to do it then like if you're screwing over yeah if it's

[01:14:29] like a drop in a whole clock there's a drop in a bucket sort of effect where you're like well look like I don't want to be the sucker who doesn't select six points and have to like somebody

[01:14:37] else get six points the greatest example of this there's this uh Hofstadler you know like Gertel Aschel, Hofstadler yeah not Jeff Hofstadler the Buffalo Bill's quarterback who he described this experiment where he told people look you have like 10 minutes and if nobody presses a lever

[01:15:02] you all get a hundred dollars if you press a lever you're gonna get ten dollars no matter what anybody does so then it's like it's like the professor thing it's like well obviously just nobody

[01:15:15] press a lever will all get a hundred dollars and what he says is like if you run this for like a couple minutes like nobody will press the lever the longer you stretch it out you start

[01:15:25] to think but wait a minute what if somebody else just press presses a lever because they're just being a dick yeah there's a bunch of people here there's a chance that one of these people

[01:15:34] is just like a total dick and then he's like but that's not enough usually to make you press a lever it's when you realize that other people might be thinking that same thing and then like

[01:15:44] so it's this rever he calls it like reverberating doubt like I haven't read this in like 20 years but like I remember that like phrase maybe like I don't know if it's right but reverberating doubt

[01:15:55] like where once you just get on the little train of this thing that maybe these other people for reasons that I understand because it occurred to me too you know then it's like

[01:16:06] all right and then like the longer you make it the more people will just press the lever and if you even have some awareness that that's going to be the case then then you should press

[01:16:14] the lever yeah because there's no chance that like 20 people sitting there for an hour are not going to like we're not going to do it they're not going to figure that out right and I and I

[01:16:22] think that that that sort of framing of like reasonable people with not evil intentions and not just selfish in like the psychological motive like in the like immoral sense but

[01:16:34] rather people who are like look let me be reasonable here like I'm not yeah like am I really going to risk not having especially if the resource is something that you really need like are you

[01:16:44] going to risk not being the one to take it and and maybe in some cases not eat no not have rent right um yeah the higher the stakes like a lot of this stuff goes out the window today's episode

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[01:19:28] this episode there is this part in in uh this post where Alexander says he agrees with Robin Hansen this is the dream time currently we're in a rare confluence of circumstances where we are unusually safe from all these multipolar traps because of the reasons that we just outlined

[01:19:49] and as such weird things like art and science and philosophy and love can flourish I like I as pessimistic as this post is I kind of like that thought that like we are living in this

[01:19:59] little ribbon of the time in which this has civilization has been able to flourish yeah it depends what he means by that like what like what's the time period that we're talking about

[01:20:12] here like if he's talking about the last like 4 000 years okay maybe like I don't know yeah I think that's what it was talking at that scale like this is the last whatever thousands of years where

[01:20:23] we've had yeah so he's not talking about he's it's not like a pinker thing no it's like this is the dream time since the enlightenment or something I think like you know as since

[01:20:32] we've been able to coordinate on a large enough scale to do things like write books and leave them for other people to read or whatever right yeah okay yeah so yeah I mean like I think at the same time

[01:20:45] he also says that like hunter-gatherers were so much happier than people had agriculture you know like there are there are yeah when he's talking about your diamond sort of agriculture hypothesis when he's like yeah like that we made a mistake because we were locally trying to maximize and

[01:21:06] got into agriculture seems like the wrong framing to me like what what the ability to to have division of labor in agriculture led to a lot of really good things like including not dying like a painful ass death when you're 31 because as a hunter-gatherer that's an old age

[01:21:24] yeah like I believe that it might have been like like more communal more just active and fun for hunter-gatherers than maybe your average person in modern society but but it's it's not it's certainly not obvious like it's definitely a trade-off of maybe like

[01:21:44] well-being minute to minute versus just length of life and then and also just yeah I don't really have anything about this actually so now now this takes this goes into weird territory yeah do you want to describe the weird territory it goes into um all right like

[01:22:06] let me see like he has this long section where he says um like no matter what you think the solution is here like it's not going to work you're going to die everything's going to go to

[01:22:22] right um yeah the the nick land part where he's like yeah okay yeah yeah um by the way like I wanted to mention this before he has like a nice sort of kind of poetic uh section where he talks

[01:22:34] about being in Las Vegas in the middle of night and looking over the land and being like wow this really is Malik and he describes the proliferation of casinos as being like and

[01:22:45] this is so true this is such a good description of Vegas a new casino will open because it has like one more thing than the other casino and they will quickly like those casinos have such a

[01:22:56] short shelf life because there's always a new casino that's opening with like whatever you know what like a bigger bigger rooms or more fake gilded shit you know and yeah right and it's like

[01:23:09] impressive on one level but reprehensible yeah like I think is it's also it's like a sign of a certain kind of civilization and progress but then also a sign of just we're fucking this up we're taking all this ingenuity and we're we're like remodeling Paris like for

[01:23:32] tourists that are coming there to lose all their money essentially yeah it's such a great it's such a great microcosm because on the one hand when I first read I was like yeah but there's some

[01:23:41] cool shit there man like there's some amazing shit of Vegas like it's one place you could go and just be blown away at all this stuff but yeah it is and just like sit down play poker but yeah it ruins

[01:23:52] people's lives I'm not gonna say anything bad about a lot of good times there but right so okay but I got I take his point yeah um can we talk about this nick whatever thing yeah yeah nick lands

[01:24:06] like gnon yeah which is something that he's criticizing but he says that we are gnon is shorthand for nature and nature is god or nature or nature is god uh and but it's reversed and he

[01:24:23] says we should be more like nature conformist right like we do all these stupid things like divert useful resources to feed those who could never survive on their own or supporting the poor in ways that encourage dysgenic reproduction or allowing cultural degeneration to undermine the

[01:24:43] state this means our society is denying natural law putting your fingers to our ears saying like you know so civilizations that do that tend to decline and so we should like it's essentially social Darwinism it seems like it's making the same exact point and mistake that social

[01:25:01] Darwinism does um and this is where what you talked about like if you don't work you die the way just you know stick to the devil you know you died but like it's like you die either way yeah

[01:25:13] is god alexander's point and like and I've never heard of this guy like I don't know to what extent people really think this but he says that the nick land is a guy that is in that

[01:25:26] terrifying border region where he's smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important principle which is never do that like now I don't think from his description of nick land like I don't

[01:25:43] think he's somebody that's smart enough to even get to the point where like he's just summoning the beast without uh taking the consequences into account but it feels like a really good description of like the kind of silicon valley you know people that I worry about where they're

[01:26:00] really smart about certain things but they're not smart about like a really important thing that's gonna end up fucking all of us right I love the the imagery he used this this Lovecraftian

[01:26:12] the monster cthulhu or however you pronounce it who is you know this ancient god that lives in in the depths the depths of the sea and people want to call him up but like calling him up will mean

[01:26:25] that everybody gets destroyed but nonetheless like he says nick land is the kind of person who is trying to call up uh the the demon the god summon the demon and he's like learned a lot

[01:26:37] about how to summon demons but he's never learned but yeah it's funny the way like this is the section where it turns a little bit because like talk he says I have such mixed feelings about nick land

[01:26:50] and it's like why do you have mixed feelings about this guy like what is it about this guy that is like me like I get the kind of person that says we're not a blank slate policy should

[01:27:00] take human nature into account but this guy seems like he goes well beyond that he so this is the quote I have such mixed feelings about nick land on the grail quest for true futurology he has

[01:27:13] gone 99.9 of the path and then missed the very last turn like how has he gone on any like much like any part of or at least like you know other than a couple turns like it I don't see it

[01:27:27] from uh from reading this but I think it does foreshadow this you know where a scholar Alexander wants to take this yeah I don't trust like I don't I don't know anything about nick land like and I

[01:27:41] you know from just reading this like hardcore position of like what we're fucking up in societies doing things like helping the poor and not letting them like nature take its course yeah and not letting patriarchy just yeah like everything the yeah all of the like I if

[01:27:54] that's what he believes then no thank you but um it sounds like that there is an aspect of his futurology that Scott Alexander sounds like exactly like the sort of person who would be into

[01:28:08] somebody who was like super into in a futurology way like becoming a transhumanist or or creating super intelligence that will like that there must be something that will say yeah there must be something in what nick land argues that that really resonates with the mind of a like

[01:28:26] rationalist kind of you know big guy thinker right no this is the problem right I think he respects nick land in a way that we don't because he's at least trying to tackle the problem he's not

[01:28:39] just putting his like head in the sand like Scott Alexander thinks the rest of us are doing because of like we're in this golden era although it sounds like if you're right about the length of

[01:28:50] the golden era like why can't it go another thousand years like or two might but it's this is what these guys are thinking like in terms of thousands of years like right that's scary shit like these

[01:29:02] fucking guys think that they can like understand like the course of humanity at the level of thousands of years is just well I feel like I feel about Scott Alexander the way that he

[01:29:14] must feel about Nick land because I it's good to have to try to understand these things and I think it's good to think in terms of the future of our species and solving long-term problems

[01:29:30] and not not just go into the next prisoner's dilemma and defect and and keep the shit going but weirdly the kind of person who's thinking that way the most and maybe the people with the most

[01:29:43] influence and resources are people who who end up coming with coming up with the kinds of solutions that that Alexander and land seem to be coming up with which I'm not even sure I understand so

[01:29:55] like when we get to Scott Alexander's there's this you know I think it's a super powerful presentation of the problem and then I'm not sure what he's saying. So like a lot of this

[01:30:10] genre of SA it does turn to like AI the specter of robots taking over like our jobs he has this line once a robot can do everything an IQ 80 human can do only better and cheaper there will be no

[01:30:27] reason to employ IQ 80 humans once a robot can do everything an IQ 120 human can do only better and cheaper and so forth going up to 180. This worry about AI that you know not only are they

[01:30:41] gonna they're gonna start out just taking all the jobs that we will be helpless to stop here because of you know in that local instance because of capitalism but for any you know for any reason

[01:30:53] really. So he's sort of worried about that at first unlike say some of the effective altruists that I am like not in favor of he doesn't seem like he wants to like limit the power of AI

[01:31:09] to like take over the world and extinguish all of us. He like this is what I understand about his solution he wants to marshal the power of AI to fight Hathulu or or Malak in a battle of like

[01:31:23] god like Godzilla vs. King Kong or whatever just take each other on because that's our only shot like otherwise we just we're gonna be devoured by Malak that's like the closest I can get to

[01:31:36] like what he's suggesting. Yeah I think that's right I mean like that section of the essay isn't fleshed out at all but remember his his problem though as he's framed it has been to this

[01:31:46] point that there is no solution unless you have a walled garden and a gardener so like a central being that is in control of everything and he says yeah the only shot when now that he's framed

[01:32:01] that is the only solution the only shot he feasibly sees at getting something like that comes from the inevitable progress of AIs where like if we're smart enough to produce a computer that is smarter than us surely that computer will be able to produce a computer that's smarter

[01:32:16] than itself and so on and so on and in exponential time you will be able to reach a an AI that can be just all essentially indistinguishable from a god and all we need to do I suppose here is have

[01:32:31] like instilled in this process true desire to preserve the things that we care about I guess I guess yeah it's it's so weird because like it just seems like wait given everything I have

[01:32:49] heard so far you should be equally if not more suspicious of this than all the other things that you've offered yeah and like he does like quote people who are very skeptical about this

[01:33:04] rational theocracy he quotes people who are very who are critical of that as I think like I would be but then he's like no you don't understand like this is this is it like like that's just

[01:33:19] the most craven Ganon conformity he says and he says look Ganon aka the gotcha aka gods of the earth turn out to be Malak aka the outer god submitting to them doesn't make you free there's no

[01:33:33] spontaneous order yeah because he says like this there's no like the mistake here is to think that evolution has anything like a value that we would have right like if letting nature run its

[01:33:43] course is is not doing anything like the values that humans have that have prevented this from going crazy so you know don't like evolution I was just in a class the other day in a seminar and

[01:33:59] I have a colleague who who studies of evolutionary development and she was like you know it's a mistake to think that evolution has at any point cared about happiness like of humans right right so classic exactly yeah evolutionary psychologists yeah which is true it's true it's

[01:34:17] it's you know nature's red in tooth and claw and like do you really want nature to run rampant like as you're mentioning like to make patriarchy's come back into strong and a force to actually

[01:34:29] suppress all women or do you want it to just destroy the weak of which we probably are yeah right right so I need to get back on the rowing so he says at some point he says look all all of these solutions are you die anyway

[01:34:49] suppose you make your walled garden you keep out all of the dangerous memes you subordinate capitalism to human interest you ban stupid bioweapons research you definitely don't research nanotechnology or strong ai everyone outside doesn't do those things and so the only

[01:35:02] question is whether you'll be destroyed by foreign diseases foreign memes foreign armies foreign economic competition or foreign existential catastrophe as foreigners compete with you and there's no wall high enough to block all competition you have a couple of choices you

[01:35:13] can get out competed and destroyed you can join the race to the you can join in the race to the bottom or you can invest more and more civilizational resources into building your wall whatever that is in a non-metaphorical way and protect yourself and I think yeah

[01:35:26] the the the only con if you frame the problem this way this strongly I guess I don't agree that the only conceivable solution is that there will emerge a thing that is powerful enough that it will create a walled garden and therefore protect all of human civilization

[01:35:41] especially if you don't believe in any actual god yeah I think that's a good way of putting it like he frames the problem as is as if this seems like the only possible solution because

[01:35:53] it's just endemic to being a human being an irrational agent in like as the the environment that we all live in and so it's like the only way around this if you don't believe in god or

[01:36:06] if you don't believe nature will solve all of our problems is this super ai that through it increasing genius will tackle malik and if you if you're skeptical or worried about that

[01:36:21] or you want to stop it then you're just giving it like you're just like letting malik destroy you right like he yeah so he says people will accuse this view of hubris like and he says it's actually

[01:36:36] anti-hubris because so he says okay I'm a transhumanist I really do want to rule the universe forced to choose I wouldn't be the person to do it but I think that like somebody needs to

[01:36:48] do but the and the current rulers of the universe malik gnan whatever they all want us dead and they want everything that we value dead everything science love philosophy consciousness itself the

[01:36:59] entire bundle and I'm not down with that plan I think we need to take their place we need to stop this force this just force that is part of human life in the environment that we live

[01:37:14] that's what we need to fight and he says I realize this sounds like hubris but I think it's the opposite of hubris to expect god to care about you or your personal values or the values of your

[01:37:24] civilization that's hubris to expect god to bargain with you that's hubris to expect to wall off a garden where god can't get to you and hurt you god here being malik that's hubris to expect to be able to remove god from the picture entirely well at least that's

[01:37:40] an actionable strategy I just like I almost can't believe that that's like I that that he's saying that I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris to try to kill god like it's like all

[01:37:52] the critical like insight of this just immediately vanishes maybe because he thinks it's our last chance you know or else we're completely fucked I don't know it's like it's I mean

[01:38:05] the other way is in purinialism right purinialism you know again in in sort of the long large scale of human existence I you know I think that there are two kinds of people in this camp of like

[01:38:19] the future has inevitable AI right and that's a small camp so in order for this to be persuasive I think you have to be of the opinion as many people are that it is inevitable that AI will

[01:38:31] grow so much stronger that it will be better than any human at every single thing right which so far you know doesn't seem to be the game like I you know I'm a doubter in that and I

[01:38:45] I will admit though that I don't have the ability to really you know I don't know fuck if I know but it seems to me like a like it's not gonna happen but whatever but I've been told by like

[01:38:56] my friends who work in this uh Jason industries or in the industries I've been told for the last like eight years the driverless car like there'll be almost no like normal cars within the next

[01:39:07] like couple years what well like I am confident in in the the in our lifetime nothing like that will happen the question is in thousands and thousands of years of working on stuff

[01:39:17] you know once we get to perfectly mimic the networks of neurons that run through our brains in software will it you know the output will be something that talks to you maybe I whatever

[01:39:30] so but the most sympathetic take that I have for this is if you believe that what Alexander is proposing when he says mollock is exactly so he has here question everyone has after reading

[01:39:43] Ginsburg is what is mollock my answer is mollock is exactly what the history books say he is he is the god of child sacrifice the fiery furnace into which you can toss your babies

[01:39:51] in exchange for victory and war he always and everywhere offers the same deal throw what you love most into the flames and I can grant you power as long as the offer is open it will be

[01:40:00] irresistible so we need to close the offer only another god can kill mollock we have one on our side but he needs our help we should give it to him if those are the only two options

[01:40:11] then I suppose yeah like if you're researching strong artificial intelligence research ways in which strong artificial intelligence will aid humans when they get super powerful you know it's like I've joked before like I never say bad shit about computers online because one day like they

[01:40:28] will have like intelligence and they'll see everything we said bad about them and like I want to make sure I'm on their good side whatever like I got like they can do what they want

[01:40:37] to me like that point I have such like just idiosyncratic temperamental resistance to this view like that like we have to like help computers your god uh yeah we have a chance to create a

[01:40:51] god are you saying that you want just like you know like be a mystic just be a fucking real life mystic like hat like dude like that's so much more interesting to me like than this than this

[01:41:05] faith in this ai that always seems like it's in the immediate horizon but but it's just constantly like the same distance from you as like the last time well you know I think that this is a mystic

[01:41:22] yeah and and there is something that like is leaning into the language of you know ancient deities that require child sacrifice and like evoking all this language

[01:41:35] um yeah is like it's cool it's cool like I like it it's cool I don't but I don't believe it I don't I don't think that uh it's the obvious thing is that we should be putting our current resources

[01:41:49] to making sure that are these you know look like even on his own terms if there is one computer that is willing to fuck all the other computers out that have the values so long as one of those

[01:41:59] exists then the deal is done too like I don't know I don't know where that optimism comes from because I can believe that ai will happen and I can believe that we have some input into it

[01:42:09] but like what if there's one computer programmer who actually said you know what fuck these fuck this like you know that that computer like all those same problems seem to occur especially since he views humans as these kind of abstracted rational uh self-interest

[01:42:26] optimizers and but like I guess my point is like like if you're going to be a mystic this is the most bloodless kind of clinical form of mysticism that you that I can imagine and I say this liking

[01:42:38] Scott Alexander and actually having read some of his stuff and really but like I was really just disappointed by the turn this this takes at the end and I'm sure we'll get some pushback

[01:42:49] and maybe we're misreading it like I honestly thought wait a minute is the thing you know he he likes to do short stories he likes to do fiction is this sort of like not a reductio

[01:42:59] out absurdum but a sort of taking some some form of thinking to its logical conclusion or something like that or is it just a way of illustrating like really a kind of hopelessness which is how I

[01:43:11] took it as a kind of just no we're fucked and like if this is the solution you come up with we're doubly fucked like that this is like that there's really no way out of this yeah you know I mean

[01:43:24] I think that the way that people like this think and again I actually like the essay so far I like Scott Alexander um is that you don't have to believe that um this is a realistic sort of like in any

[01:43:39] in any probabilistic sense that we would use to make judgments about what to do like you know this is not like a is there a 60 chance of rain or 40 percent chance this is a point 000 000 whatever

[01:43:52] one percent chance that we might be able to get out of this state of affairs and that's better than the alternatives yeah yeah as an exercise in writing an essay though like my only criticism is I one

[01:44:09] make it shorter and two put some of the longer parts be in your solution and maybe there's like parts where he's talked more at length about this but um he could have left yeah like he doesn't link

[01:44:21] like he seems to link to a lot of other stuff that he's done he could have left this as the pessimistic uh we're all fucked it's just that we're fucked more like on a timescale of thousands of years

[01:44:31] and I think I would have and I would have come out with like a more poetic sense of of satisfaction yeah yeah but this but I mean I do think this is almost a call to arms like a call to actually

[01:44:47] I think he literally says it's a call to arms he says he says I think this is an excellent battle cry yeah this is the stuff that I uh like it makes me very uh uneasy I mean you know maybe they'll

[01:45:02] just calm down because that's what happens too but when I'm I think to myself well so what's the call to action for for us I guess it's like learn to code in python so you can right exactly can be a

[01:45:21] contributor that's what I mean that it's most blood-bliss kind of like either mysticism or like you know like do it like a kind of uh battle for the ages of like it's just like yeah learn to go

[01:45:34] I mean like this line I feel like it's beneath them I'm a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris to try to kill God I just will like unleash this like technology that we're working on

[01:45:46] to try to do it I think that's just I you know in the end like I I think at the harshest I think I used the word reductive with you earlier a word that I don't care for but one that

[01:45:56] was like sort of captured my feeling of of the presentation of the problem and certainly the presentation of the solution and I think that this is yeah the scope the scope of a problem of the

[01:46:08] problem is much wider than even this I think but but like it's to have like a nifty presentation of the problem allows for a nifty presentation of the solution it's funny because we started

[01:46:21] this by saying like the criticism of Marx's that he wasn't applying the same sort of critical scrutiny to you know the communist society that he envisioned as he was to capitalism and that a

[01:46:36] lot of these things a lot of those same problems would manifest themselves but just look at that they would appear differently or they would appear in different forms that's the same thing here like to the extent that that's true of Marx that's definitely true like as you said

[01:46:51] like those same coordination problems they'd seem like they would inevitably arise with whatever like AI solution he has in mind that he hasn't are really articulate yeah and I guess that the look like I haven't thought this out well but I think that the mistake is to think

[01:47:09] that the solution would come from changing the agent like the psychology of the agent in this case like a super powerful AI when I think the problem is the problem of finite resources with any existence

[01:47:23] and like unless what you're proposing is that the AI will be space-faring and bring all of these resources that we don't have that we can't replenish there will always be zero summoness to the resources that we have and I don't see why computers wouldn't also

[01:47:40] well no but it but like even with the resources that we have we fuck it up is his no I know coordination problem but I think that that there is no way in which not like there is a finite

[01:47:52] set of resources so like even though that's not the the wall that we've hit it will be a wall that is hit eventually and and without the a change in our like the environment that we live

[01:48:06] in I don't know how you could have the agent solving the problem so yeah yeah yeah you know it's one thing that these people never think talk about is climate change like literally doesn't come up once in this whole long essay about civilizations like like destruction and yeah

[01:48:25] like that's sort of like it's like it's always there in the back of my mind when I read these long-termism things but I think that the long-termism people are there is like a comfort

[01:48:38] and I don't want this to be ad hominem but but there is at least part of me that thinks there is a comfort in thinking about 100,000 years from now that is that is much nicer

[01:48:48] than thinking 100 years from now right yeah right and I'm sure he's written like we're going to get a lot of Scott Alexander stands setting us straight and they should but like I'm sure he's written about that one way or another but like it's weird that it doesn't

[01:49:07] right come up here barely like maybe with some like local pollution problems or something like the fishing yeah yeah no no I don't mind and this is a case where like like you said we

[01:49:18] might have misunderstood things or not know enough and and either way even if like the criticisms that we're leveling are fair criticisms I don't mind that I read this yeah like I like it like I feel like this is the best version of some of yeah like

[01:49:34] the this way of thinking you know so it's good to know it's good to know who's gonna like end up like enslaving in every way like emotionally psychologically just literally as I'm working

[01:49:51] for some super bot all right the lesson from today is like if you're gonna do a episode on nosyck do it on no you know now I also enjoyed this episode and join us next time on very bad

[01:50:34] brains in the U.S. anybody can have a brain very bad man and a very good man just a very bad wizard