Decoding The Gurus patreon

A Weinstein World Detour

🕑 Added 2021-05-18 21:23:07 +0000 UTC

Comments

Lukas Annerer-Walcher

Had me laughing for a minute. The reluctant way he said it, like someone made him do it.

Christopher Kavanagh

lol via Knowledge Fight!

DavidtheG

Here I thought that it couldn’t get any worse than Scott Adams, but at least he is honest about what he is. Could the Weinstein persecution complex get any stronger? Do they understand that the best thing that ever happened to them was getting chased out of Evergreen?

LTO

Another fun one - really helping me through this lockdown (fingers crossed) home stretch. First time I’ve heard the use of a time machine in a podcast. One quick question: are we all choosing to ignore Chris’ admission that he listens to Alex Jones “week in, week out”...?

Christopher Kavanagh

Fair points! But on 2) while I think the reality of politics always being a relevant force in science is true... we can still lament that during a pandemic, political biases are interfering with whether people will take an effective vaccine or on an unproven anti-parasite drug.

Paul Bowman

Good episode. I agree that it's ok to get mad when the guru BS moves into advocating for stupidity that gets real people really killed. Also that its ok to care about science because that relates to the first point. On that, 2 things: 1) As Matt pointed out, there's a fundamental cake/eating problem with their basic gambit of... a) Trust us, we're scientists. We speak with the authority of science. b) Most of science is a bunch of corrupt sellouts, engaged in a giant conspiracy and the biggest crime against humanity, evah. You can't trust scientists! Like... pick one. A more open point - Matt (again, iirc) posed this, why is the culture war moving into domains that - apriori - would seem to have nothing to do with left/right contentions? This is an interesting one, particularly with the underlying presuppositions - 1) the culture war is a legitimate expression of the immediate stakes of the political dichotomy. 2) science is innately non-ideological and therefore an inappropriate terrain for partisan political conflicts. I don't have a definitive answer in either case. But for starters I'd say, re 1) the culture war is a proxy war, an epiphenomenon relative to the actual social antagonisms (in marxist terms, the culture war is not really the class war, even if a lot of grad students and twitterers wish it was). And re 2) - lots of other folk have written on this, but all I can say is, it seems overly simplistic

Kim Hendig

The Weinstein’s are insufferable! That being said, I would not be opposed to you guys turning this podcast into “Decoding the Weinsteins”, a la Knowledge Fight and Alex Jones...

MaxPlan

That was a crazy episode, it was bad take after bad take. Looking forward to it.

Christopher Kavanagh

What do you think?

Christopher Kavanagh

They have this habit of saving the last 5 minutes to reference actual research on biology and animal behaviour. They then explain (every time) that this is what they really want to focus on but instead they had to dedicate 95% of the time to culture war topics or the coronavirus vaccines or whatever. So the animal references function in a similar way, to illustrate the breadth of their biological and evolutionary knowledge.

Nina Davies

I tried to listen to the Dark Horse episode. I would drift off for a moment and they find they were comparing humans to spiders. As a mere social scientist I obviously don't have the skills and objectivity appreciate the genius of their intellectual romp.