Decoding The Gurus
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Interview with Thi Nguyen (Full version)
🕑 Added 2021-01-22 06:02:27 +0000 UTCAs promised, here is the full raw recording of our interview with Thi Nguyen who has done a host of great work on topics like Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles, Moral outrage porn, Gamification in social media, and much much more.
Matt and I really enjoyed this and think Thi has some great insights!
We will edit down the audio and release on the main feed next week but you lucky people get the advance video version, which includes such highlights as Chris flubbing the pronunciation of Thi's name repeatedly, and a sudden departure! Indeed, you might notice this is actually two recordings artfully combined together.
This was because Thi was generous enough to come back and record extra material to cover some outstanding questions we had!
Thi also provided us with a list of relevant links, provided below:
A free preview of the first chapter of my games book: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUGAA&aid=NGUGAAv1
Moral outrage porn: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUMOP&aid=NGUMOPv1
The op-ed version of moral outrage porn: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/opinion/sunday/porn.html
The echo chambers paper: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUECA&aid=NGUECAv1
How Twitter Gamifies Communication: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUHTG&aid=NGUHTGv1
Book on Echo Chambers: https://www.amazon.com/Echo-Chamber-Limbaugh-Conservative-Establishment/dp/B005MZ6W96
Here’s a great recent book arguing for the large-scale misinformation thesis: and it’s open access: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001/oso-9780190923624
Comments
Christopher Kavanagh
Tim did another podcast trying to break down the maths: https://t.co/TwKL7JrJlp
Liz Pagan
Happy to put faces to the voices. And cute faces, I might say :-) But I tried to reach out to physisist friends to get them to 'splain some stuff to innumerant me... no luck. I found out enough background on Dr. Wiki for it to make sense to me. But I couldn't find what a "shaib" [whatever-it-was, can't remember the word] is, which seemed to be a fundamental piece of Nguyen's critique.
Aaron Vlek
I love the podcast, great episode and I am really getting off on the rabbit hole I'm sliding down as I discover new people to follow like this guy. The wrap up comments make me think of an idea I landed on back in 1970 when I was first grappling with philosophical ideas in the academic setting. Maybe it was the experimental substances I used to lubricate my transactions with myself but I realized that the only way I could remain fluid in my thinking, and still sane, as I traversed the places I needed to explore and discover was to firmly embrace the notion that I do not purport to believe that what I believe is true. This has always allowed me to toss out tentative beliefs that I always knew were based solely on my capacity to understand at any given moment, in favor of updated versions or wholly new ones based on increased information. The gurus I have looked at since then have always traded in one thing. Certainty. The conspiracy folks are drunk on the same cheap drink. They don't care whether their conspiracy is good or bad, as long as SOMEBODY really knows what's going on and they are in on it. This was a lot like the obsessions my dad had in his final days when he was on oxygen 24/7.But then I cut him some slack because, well, you know, oxygen. Thanks guys!
Christopher Kavanagh
Yes I think there’s really something to true co-evolution idea. It’s been described at other times as ‘audience capture’ where the performer finds and audience, does a few different things, but is ‘trained’ by their audience to do more of the stuff that rings their collective bell. As we mention, I think that narcissistic and attention seeking people (who gurus naturally are) will be even more strongly affected by that.
Nina Davies
.... There Co-production is not a murmuration. Nor is the teacher teaching anything independently comprehensible (context!). Yet certain behaviour is applauded and the performance gets more honed to the audience.
Nina Davies
Very 'clear' conversation chaps (buzz buzz buzz). You seemed to be defining a habitus during the first part of the conversation. It seemed quite 'jazzy' in that the people involved in the group seem to get the references and the improvisations and the resolutions and applaud wildly when a participant performs in a way they think is good. But you have to at least know some of the rules or it is incomprehensible what they are getting excited about. Which seems to be the description of any group or organisational culture with a clear in and out group. So are the gurus more cultural artistes /arteests than religious type gurus?
