Hey everybody, KMO here with another episode of the KMO Show.
This is episode number 18, prepared for release on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023.
To my fellow USAnians, happy Independence Day, plus one.
Alright, well this episode is going to be about some of my favorite topics.
They include science, rationality, and epistemology.
Boring.
Okay, no, we're going to talk about conspiracy theories, faked moon landings, and the nasty
machinations of powerful people and their attempts to inject microchips into your blood
via the COVID vaccines.
How's that?
No, no, I'm afraid this episode is going to be a bummer for everybody.
You really ought to just skip it.
But if you're still here, here we go.
I got a letter from a long-time listener, and when I say long-time, I mean long-time.
And I'm going to call him Tom, although that's not his real name, and as I read his email,
I think you'll understand why I'm not using Tom's actual given name.
Tom writes, Hey KMO, your recent episode on why you don't care about the COVID vaccine
fight was really pertinent to me.
I really struggled in the pandemic because I really worry about science denialism.
And people spreading clear lies really gets my goat.
At the start of the pandemic, I started commenting on people's posts about 5G causing COVID,
etc., just questioning their sources, pointing out fallacies and lies in their arguments,
and offering rational explanations to counter them.
I got so much abuse and ridicule, and of course the Facebook algorithm kept feeding me stuff
to arouse my ire and engagement.
After some months of this, I started getting pushback from my wife and another close friend.
I really couldn't believe the ridicule I suffered at home.
It was a really hard time and almost ended our marriage.
I got so depressed that I couldn't have a rational conversation with my wife.
She would push her anti-vaccine and COVID denialist propaganda on me.
I would respond, showing where there were fallacies and obvious lies.
For example, misinterpreting statistical data and not understanding the base rate fallacy.
She would respond by laughing at me and calling me government-controlled.
Eventually, I just shut down and hoped it would pass.
I'm still recovering from those emotional scars, but we are still together.
We just don't talk about COVID and vaccines.
I'm still recovering from those emotional scars, but we are still together.
We just don't talk about COVID and vaccines.
Now she's talking about faked moon landings, and I wonder how much more bullshit I have
to tolerate in the future.
How do you feel about the issue of science denialism?
Do you think there are things which can be said to be true, either unequivocally or practically?
In the case of COVID vaccines, I know several unvaccinated people who died of COVID and
others who suffered way more than they needed to.
It really breaks my heart.
Flat earthers and moon landing deniers are relatively harmless, but the attitude of denying
rationality has so much potential to harm.
I really, really worry about gullible people being manipulated by their so-called alternative
media and believing all kinds of stuff which can be easily disproved with a rational mindset.
I really worry about this spread of distrust in rationality.
This issue doesn't have to pertain directly to COVID vaccines, and I hope it's something
you might explore in a future podcast.
Thanks, Tom.
Alright, Tom.
Well, as Static Warpshell found out last week, if you write to me looking to recruit me onto
your intellectual team in some cultural struggle, you'll be disappointed.
I'm a poor ally in that respect.
I'm looking for holes in everybody's story.
And at the same time, knowing that I'll find them, I don't get really bent out of shape
about it, and I certainly, you know, I don't withhold my cooperation because I've found
some difference of opinion or some difference of factual belief with another person.
The world is full of predatory meme complexes which are adapted by evolution to grab our
attention and work their way into our belief structures.
I'm not immune, you're not immune, nobody's immune.
But we see it more easily when it's taking place in somebody else than we do when it
happens in ourselves.
So, we tend to default to the notion that we've got it worked out, we understand what's
happening, and everybody else is an idiot.
They're not.
They're smart.
What's more, in my experience, the people who are attracted to conspiracy theories like
the faked moon landing or the flat earth, they tend to be smarter than most people.
They tend to be smarter than average.
They have to be, because they're defending a worldview which is demonstrably false, but
it serves a psychological need for them, or an emotional need, or a cultural need, a need
to belong to a particular community.
And so, they have to marshal the ornate defenses, the ornate, the complicated stories that defend
the belief system against attempts at casual refutation.
But the thing that I want to say to you, and this is going to be the biggest bummer, is
I really despise the term science denialism.
Hate it.
I never use it except to decry it and denounce it, and I would suggest that you write it
on a piece of paper, seal it up in an envelope, and throw it on the fire.
That is a gross, ugly phrase which references some very ugly social dynamics.
First of all, science denialism as a term is a descendant of climate denialism, which
itself is a conscious, deliberate descendant of Holocaust denialism.
It is an attempt to paint the people who don't share your beliefs as moral monsters by linking
them conceptually with the Nazis.
Don't do that shit.
That is some ugly, ugly shit.
Don't do it.
Secondly, I am as concerned and as dismayed by scientism as I am by people who fail to
genuflect to scientists.
And when you say science denialism, I would say what you're actually seeing is a rejection
of the pronouncements and the authority of technocrats.
Very, very few people have any interaction with actual science, and because science is
so highly specialized and so diverse in its fields, almost nobody is conversant in all
of science.
I'd say it's a conceptual impossibility for one person to be an expert in every field
of science these days.
And so people tend to behave the way they need to in their own professional field, which
is to say, you know, with obvious exceptions that make the news, obeying the rules and
the procedures for maintaining, you know, epistemic hygiene in their field.
But I'm in the United States.
Tom is not.
Tom lives in an English-speaking country where they have pictures of monarchs on the money.
I'm not talking about butterflies.
So my perspective on so-called science denialism and scientism around the COVID epidemic is
an American perspective.
So I'm mostly looking at people who are establishment-friendly Democrats and vaguely political people, people
that you might describe as alt-right, although I think that terminology has picked up some
unhelpful baggage, which I'm not meaning to communicate here.
But basically, you have people who are vested in the status quo.
I would say they're mostly the beneficiaries of the status quo, the professional managerial
class they're sometimes called.
And not only did they accept the pronouncements of government technocrats on topics of COVID,
but they fetishized them.
They fetishized the figures who dispense them, people like Anthony Fauci, New York Governor
Mario Cuomo.
Not only did they gleefully take up the pronouncements of these technocrats, but they were particularly
excited to see the power of government, the power to coerce, be applied to their ideological
enemies.
And what's more, they engaged in ridiculous moral hyperbole, claiming that people who
were vaccine-hesitant were murderers.
And these folks claimed the imprimatur of science.
They claimed to support the science.
And when I hear somebody make reference to the science, that tells me that they don't
know anything about how science works.
They're conceiving of it as this body of knowledge which is flawless and which came from this
reliable source of information that just spits out uncomplicated truths.
But in reality, science is a very messy process.
The answers that it provides are not perfect the first time.
They are often dead wrong.
It is a messy and evolving, but most importantly self-correcting process, but it takes time
to play out, and it doesn't play out in an abstract vacuum.
Scientists are people.
They have jobs.
They have bosses.
They need funding.
Sometimes they work for governments.
When they work for governments, they have to pay attention.
They have to be conscious of what it is the people who are paying them want.
And almost nobody pays because they want to understand the universe.
Everybody's got an agenda.
And scientists, because science is so broad.
If you are an expert in physics, say, and you're very smart, you're educated, you know,
you've got that college degree, you've got your credentials, it doesn't mean you know
jack shit about epidemiology.
But here's the worst, and I'm on your side for this bit of it, Tom.
If somebody is using scientific terms, but you know that they only learned those terms
in the service of absorbing a conspiracy theory, of absorbing a narrative which is contrary
to established scientific authority, then at least in my mind, it is safe to dismiss
those people as having anything substantial to say on the topic, but it's also not productive
to say that to them.
Better to look for common ground, look for something that you both want to talk about
that isn't something you consider to be pseudoscience or conspiracy-mongering.
Might be sports, might be the weather, might be movies, might be how annoying some other
out group that you both find obnoxious are.
This first came to me in the very, very early days of the internet, before the World Wide
Web, when my experience of the internet was basically going to a computer lab and accessing
use net, which was organized hierarchically into all these, you know, different categories
for discussion.
And I was interested in memes, I was interested in evolutionary psychology, and I was interested
in what would later become the singularity narrative, that technology is rapidly advancing
towards something transformational.
The term singularity, it may have been coined, it wasn't popular.
But I also checked in on discussions about UFOs and also because I was a student in philosophy,
I did read several, you know, casually some philosophy groups.
What I noticed way back then, in the early, early 90s, was that there were people who
were followers of Ayn Rand who had never read any Kant, but they had decided opinions about
Kant because Ayn Rand had opinions about Kant, and they just echoed her opinions, and they
thought that they knew something about Kant because they had these strong opinions on
the topic, when they'd never read the man.
And I, you know, as a graduate instructor, or at this time a teaching assistant, there'd
be big philosophy courses taught by a professor that met in a big lecture hall, and then,
you know, that would be once a week, and then twice a week, you know, these smaller groups
would assemble in classrooms around campus, and I would be in charge of, you know, those
classrooms or some of them.
And when I helped teach the introductory to ethics class, one of the books that we were
teaching from was A Groundwork to the Metaphysical Morals by Immanuel Kant.
I read the book repeatedly, I read and discussed the book with the professor who was teaching
the class, you know, with an eye to how we would present the material to the students.
I'm not an expert in Kant by any stretch, but I certainly know enough about his philosophy
to recognize that the people who were just regurgitating Ayn Rand, the position on Kant
was just part of the catechism.
It was just part of the body of statements that you had to be conversant in, familiar
with, familiar enough to reproduce at will in order to be in the club of the people who,
you know, of the Randians.
And while I noticed it happening, it didn't make enough of an impression for me to be,
you know, for me to turn that lens on myself, because a couple decades later I got caught
up in the whole peak oil story, and I would be talking to non-geologists about geology.
And I would even repeat statements about geology that I had heard from, you know, the people
I was interviewing that employed vocabulary, scientific vocabulary that I just wouldn't
have known.
I would not have been using that vocabulary had I not been articulating and repeating
a narrative that ran contrary to what people who were supposedly recognized experts in
geology were telling the rest of the world, namely about the availability of enough hydrocarbon
energy in the ground to sustain industrial civilization for, you know, whatever time
period, the next century, the next thousand years, whatever.
I was advocating and advancing an alternative narrative using terminology that I just would
not have been conversant in otherwise, and that is always, always suspect.
So you really get this in the Flat Earth conspiracy theory.
But here's the thing, most people don't have much interaction with scientific nomenclature,
you know, with the specifics of chemistry or physics or geology or metallurgy or whatever.
And so, just a little bit of this esoteric terminology makes for a great intellectual
smokescreen.
Most people will not challenge you if you seem to have some mastery over a specific
vocabulary that those folks, you know, they would have to go and look it up in order to
even understand what you're talking about and to find an alternative interpretation
of what you're saying.
And they're just not going to.
And you know, people are loathe to admit their ignorance.
But back to scientism.
Whenever I heard somebody say they trust the science, that clued me into the fact that
for them, science is an abstract, perfect authority which dispenses perfect knowledge
that never needs to be revised, that never needs to be examined, and that certainly shouldn't
be challenged.
This is simply genuflecting to authority.
Most people, even smart, very smart people, don't practice science.
And those who do tend to practice in very narrow domains, and they don't apply the same
rigor that they are required to apply in their professional life to every other aspect of
their lives, even when they are thinking about other domains of science.
People have allegiances, people want to belong, or conversely, some people really want to
reject authority.
Some people take comfort in the idea that there is a malevolent cabal working from positions
of unimaginable power, in secret, with the intent to do harm.
To not only rule, not only acquire power and maintain power, but to degrade humanity physically,
intellectually and spiritually.
This is a strong psychological desire for some people, and I can relate.
I've felt its pull in the past, I've gotten sucked in, in the past, and when COVID came
along and I saw the whole process of sorting the population, of the population, like being
a sieve that had water and other material running through it and somebody was shaking
it in order to sift the raw material of cultural construction and to organize it into coherent
narratives, not correct narratives, but coherent narratives that were contradictory and that
different tribes of people would adopt in order to identify themselves, in order to
identify their outgroups, and in order to demonstrate that they are members in good
standing of particular tribes.
And for the most part, the people who are the beneficiaries, the people who are doing
particularly well in the current arrangement, are the ones who were most eager to accept
the pronouncements of figures like Anthony Fauci, and who also demonstrated or revealed,
I guess, a hidden authoritarian streak.
I've told this story elsewhere, but not on the KMO show, so apologies to people who have
heard this before, but several years ago, not that many years ago, but Donald Trump
was president and it was the holiday season, Christmas, New Year, and I was living in Vermont
and the mother of friends was visiting from Texas and she was a Democrat, but she lived
in Texas.
And just in passing, just casually, she said, but with them, with intensity, she said that
she wanted the military to remove Donald Trump from office.
And I was flabbergasted.
I demanded that she clarify and stand by that statement.
I was like, are you telling me that you would rather have a military coup?
You would rather throw away two centuries worth of the separation of governmental and
military power rather than wait another year or two for an election?
She said yes, she was not cowed in the least.
She said yes.
I hate the man.
I don't care what precedent it sets.
I don't care about any of these niceties about the military obeying the civilian government.
Irrelevant.
She hates Donald Trump.
It's part of her tribe.
It's part of her tribal identity.
She hates the man and she doesn't care what it takes.
She wants him gone as soon as possible.
From my perspective, that is madness, utter madness.
But it was a normal, respectable position in her intellectual tribe.
She fits the archetype, in my mind anyway, of the materially comfortable mainstream Democrat
who postures because they think that they have science backing their belief system,
when in fact they have no notion of how science works.
I noticed that the people who claim to uphold science never mention the scientific method.
Why would that be?
It's because they don't understand how science arrives at its pronouncements.
It is a messy process of coming up with a hypothesis, figuring out what physical observations
of the world, what empirical observations could disprove the hypothesis.
A lot of people don't realize that if a statement is not falsifiable, that it can't possibly
be scientific.
Which means, if a statement is scientific, it has endured many attempts to disprove it.
Which means that by definition, scientific pronouncements cannot be above suspicion.
They can't be above criticism.
They can't be above skepticism.
Science as a methodology carried out by groups of people is somewhat antagonistic, and it
runs on skepticism.
So if you think that the science is settled, you don't know what science is, you don't
know how it works.
A lot of people are completely unaware of the fact that there is even a category of
study called the history of science.
Why would you need a history of science if science is just a collection of true statements
that are generated almost magically by this oracle called science?
There is a history of science because science reliably gets things wrong at first, and statements
and scientific theories which are wrong, they take a long time to get corrected because
people invest their identity and their credibility and their reputation in the truth of this
thing that they came up with.
And so this is where science as a methodology interfaces with human psychology, and there's
a constant struggle there between people wanting to validate their theories in an attempt to
validate themselves and other people trying to demonstrate that those theories are false,
you know, via experiment, but not necessarily for a love of truth, but because there is
cachet, there is a reward, there is a reputational benefit to being the one who demonstrably
unseats a long-held theory or, you know, a theoretical position.
So science is not some pure abstract source of truth.
It is a methodology.
It is messy.
And over time, it is self-correcting.
Or at least it gets us to a point where we're better able to manipulate the world, where
technology based on scientific principles works, which is evidence in favor of the truth
of the scientific hypothesis, but it's not ironclad proof, because science doesn't work
that way.
Science is an inductive process.
It is not deductive.
If you have a sound logical argument that leads to a particular conclusion, that's deduction,
and that conclusion is ironclad.
But science doesn't work that way.
With science, you say, well, there's been a couple of centuries worth of attempts to
disprove this theory by scientific experiment, and thus far, you know, the general opinion,
the consensus among the scientific community is that none of those attempts have really
been compelling.
And so the theory stands.
But it doesn't make it true.
It just means that it hasn't been proven false yet.
And maybe it never will.
But again, it's an inductive process.
It's not an infallible truth.
So you can probably tell that as irritated as you are, Tom, with the people you consider
to be science deniers, I'm equally irritated with people who claim that science supports
their tribe's identity and condemns the identity of their hated outgroups.
To me, that's gross.
It's as bad as thinking that the earth is flat or that the moon landings were faked
or that COVID is caused by 5G phone towers.
And when I say it's as bad, you might argue that the consequences are different.
When I say it's as bad, I mean it's as irritating to me.
Somebody who values rationality, even when being rational, even when following the dictates
of rationality leads me to an uncomfortable place.
But one thing that a lot of people are very uncomfortable with is uncertainty.
And I forget the source of the quote, but there's a quote that I just love.
It's, doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is absurd.
We want to be certain.
We want to be reassured.
But rationally speaking, we have not earned a certainty about much of anything.
Now, all that said, when it comes to COVID, as I've said time and again, I'm not interested
in anybody's COVID craziness.
Is one side or the other probably closer to the truth?
Yeah, probably.
And I'm content to wait until people's tribal identities are not so thoroughly wedded to
a position on COVID.
It might be a couple of decades.
I can wait.
I will wait and see.
But practically speaking, I got the vax.
Now, did I do it because I trust science?
No.
I did it so I wouldn't get hassled.
I did it so that I could travel freely.
I did it so that I could see my kids without putting myself in danger of being labeled
a kook in court, because that happened when I got divorced.
My peak oiled-dumerism was brought up in court as evidence that I was unfit to be a parent
to my children.
So, I'm particularly gun-shy about the consequences of adopting needlessly contrarian views on
things.
But I got the two vaxes and then I got a booster because I was living with my then 82-year-old
mother and I was about to go to Dallas, Texas to attend a big convention and I knew that
I was going to be interacting with hundreds of people, so I got a booster.
Did I get a booster because I had faith or that I was absolutely confident that it was
effective?
No.
I got the booster just so that I could say, look, I took the steps that were available
to me to not transmit this virus to my mother who's in a much higher risk group than I am.
If I had gone to Dallas, interacted with hundreds of people, come back, come down with COVID,
passed it to my mom and she had died and I had not gotten a booster when I could have,
well, you know, I would have been culpable.
That said, I know and like and cooperate with people who have what are to my mind completely
unfounded views about COVID.
People who think or who listen to people who are advancing the notion that everybody who
got the vaccination will be dead within a couple of years.
Well, that was a couple of years ago and you know, we're not all dead yet.
We all will die in the fullness of time but you know, it's got nothing to do with the
vaccine.
We all have that particular appointment.
So what should the relationship of most people to science be?
I think for most people going about their lives, the scientific method just doesn't
enter into how they navigate the world, how they make a living, how they get along with
other people.
You know, I happen to study the philosophy of science and the history of science in college
and you know, my college and particularly my graduate school years and study, from a
practical perspective, what it was that I was studying was really immaterial.
It was just the fact that there was a body of scholarship that was difficult to access
that required a certain level of reading and comprehension and thought and you know, which
also required that one know how to write in order to demonstrate one's mastery or you
know, at least one's competence to participate in this particular field of academic study.
It generalized to an ability to examine arguments and to remember and reproduce complex lines
of reasoning.
The fact that it happened to you know, overlap with what is now very current in artificial
intelligence and you know, the fact that it also involved a study of the history of science
and how scientific paradigms have risen and fallen, been overturned, but you know, after
a long reign in some cases, it gives me a certain insight into science as a historical
entity into science as an application or an illustration of you know, Darwinian principles.
But it doesn't really enter into you know, my calculations when I'm deciding whether
or not to take a particular job or you know, whether or not to invite a particular guest
onto the podcast or whether to pursue a romantic relationship or whether to get a dog.
Science just doesn't enter into it and you know, preening about being versed in science
and having science support my views, to me that is completely in the realm of coalitional
wrangling.
That is clearly just... it is a communicative strategy meant to...
I hate to use the phrase virtue signal, so I'll say coalitional signal, to say look,
I'm a member of this group, I'm a member in good standing, I demonstrate my membership
by repeating shibboleths, by repeating phrases that you know, people who are in my tribe
are expected to know and to recite and that people in a different tribe are expected to
react badly to.
But because I do live in a world where you know, people who believe things that I don't
believe and people who believe things that I don't think that they're justified in believing,
they exist and you know, they tend to be smart people, they tend to be fun and interesting
people.
And so when I'm you know, flying according to my own manual, I limit ideological conflicts
with people that I need to maintain you know, viable relationships with.
So that leaves all the idiots on the internet to argue with, right?
But I don't care enough to do that.
I mean it's just... it's not rewarding to me to pick a narrative and then go online
and do battle with critics of that narrative.
There was a time when you know, I did that, I understand why it can be compelling, but
I'm over it.
And I'm not suggesting you get over it.
But I would encourage you to ask yourself, what does this benefit me?
How is my life made richer by having been hijacked, by having been co-opted or inducted
into the army of meme bots, the legions of people who devote their time and energy without
compensation to upholding a viewpoint and coming up with unflattering labels and you
know, applying those labels to people who don't share the belief system, who have been
inducted by a different belief system.
You know, I was discussing this with Pi, personal intelligence, you know, a chat bot.
And I came up just spontaneously with the phrase memetic honeypot.
You know, a honeypot in political intrigue, say in intelligence work, is something meant
to entrap somebody because it appeals to their interests.
And you know, on the most base level, it could be just a sexual attraction.
Well, society and more importantly, I think, the internet is replete with memetic honeypots,
things which appeal to your sense of self, your picture of yourself as somebody who is
skeptical or somebody who is anti-authoritarian or somebody who is a good member in good standing
of the people who consider themselves to be enlightened and compassionate.
So I don't mean for my response to Tom here to be the entire episode.
So I'm just going to bring it in for a landing, this portion at least, and say, I get your
frustration, Tom.
The thing that is the most troubling is the idea that your wife has been mocking you because
as I understand it, you know, both from relationship experts and personal experience, the one thing
that a romantic relationship between a man and a woman cannot come back from is when
the woman develops contempt for the man.
Once you reach that stage, you might not necessarily get a divorce, but you know, the relationship
is critically wounded in a way that's very difficult to come back from, nearly impossible.
People might still stay together because they're economically intertwined or they have children
or it would just be too difficult to separate their lives.
They're just to, you know, stay together, but contempt is antithetical to love.
And you know, in terms of relationships, you probably shouldn't look to me for advice because
I'm divorced.
I'm divorced and attempts to kindle a lasting relationship after the divorce have all failed.
So unless you're looking to replicate my results, you probably shouldn't take my advice on the
topic of relationships and you know, in terms of interacting with people who either share
your viewpoint or you know, who are vociferous and ostentatious in taking a different point
of view, you know, my policy has just been to make public statements saying I'm not interested
in that conflict.
Yeah, somebody's probably closer to the truth, but not because they were superior in their
epistemological, you know, methodology.
If two groups of people, you know, gravitate to opposing points of view on a topic just
to demonstrate that they're opposed to one another, one group's position will be closer
to the truth than the other.
But you know, it's not because they knew, it's not because they were rigorous, it's
just how it shook out.
I guess the last thing I'll say on this is while I value rationality and I will go to
great lengths, I will eat a bullet, you know, rather than embrace what I think of as an
irrational position.
I also see rationality as a kind of a mind virus.
It imposes a psychological pressure to behave in a particular way and it doesn't guarantee
any material benefit for obedience.
For the sake of rationality, one might forego a comforting illusion and, you know, just
have to live without the comfort.
For the sake of rationality, someone might reject a position which is popular among their
peers and it might cost them a job.
For the sake of rationality, one might, you know, forego the opportunity to participate
in strong church communities and thereby miss out on, you know, entering into collaborative
interaction and relationships with people, you know, who are good people that you would
be well served to associate yourself with.
Rationality makes demands and it guarantees no benefit.
So I'm definitely not suggesting that everybody commit themselves to a thoroughgoing rationality
regardless of the costs, because there will be costs and the benefits are intangible at
best.
All right.
Continuing just briefly with the previous topic.
I was reading around various places on the topic of communicating with people who believe
things that you don't believe.
Now, I realized that, you know, me quoting the BBC in this discussion would be like a
Christian quoting scripture in an argument with an atheist.
I mean, this is, you know, BBC is mainstream scripture.
But there were a couple of quotes in a BBC article.
This is a print article.
I found it on their website and it's basically five directives for communicating with people
who are caught up in conspiracy theories.
And the five admonitions are one, keep calm.
Two, don't be dismissive.
Three, encourage critical thinking.
Four, ask questions.
And five, don't expect immediate results.
So keep calm is obvious, right?
I mean, if you get agitated, the other person's going to get agitated.
You're just going to match each other emotionally and that raises shields, hardens defenses.
So I'm going to share a couple of quotes here from a psychologist, Jovan Byford suggests,
and this is in relation to encourage critical thinking.
Quote, many people who believe in conspiracy theories see themselves as healthy skeptics
and self-taught researchers into complex issues.
Present this as something you value and share.
Close quote.
But you know, what most conspiracy theories consider to be self-directed research is really,
you know, it's, it's where the algorithms curate for you a path into dark territory
because it keeps you on platform, keeps you engaged.
And now another quote from Jovan Byford on that last point, admonition number five, don't
expect immediate results.
He writes, be realistic about what you can achieve.
Conspiracy theories instill in believers a sense of superiority.
It's an important generator of self-esteem, which makes them resistant to change.
Close quote.
So suppose you were locked in ideological combat with somebody that you actually care
about.
This is not some rando online that you just want to defeat and humiliate.
This is somebody that you want to preserve your ongoing relationship with.
Well, what if you ask yourself, is this person that I care about gravitating to conspiracy
theories because it gives them a sense of importance and self-worth?
And do I want to take that from them?
If the answer is yes and no, yes, they're getting, you know, they're deriving a sense
of self-worth from this and no, I don't want to take the sense of self-worth from them.
I just want them to believe true stuff.
You need to ask yourself a couple of things first.
Even if they're not conscious of the fact that they're using their conspiracy theories
as a way to bolster their own sense of self-worth, you know, being the sharp one, the smart one,
the one who doesn't believe what they're told, who does their own research and sees through
the conspirators web of lies.
Do they have anything ready to hand to replace that as a generator of self-worth?
Now you can make all the judgments you want about how that's, you know, fake self-worth,
how it's, you know, you'd be better off just facing the truth.
Well, I mean, you can hold that opinion, but if you want to, if you want to help the person
and if you want to keep them in your life and keep them feeling good about you, you
do have to take into consideration what it is that gives them a sense of self-worth and
ask yourself this, if they see you as trying to undermine the thing that gives them their
sense of self-worth, what would the rational way for them to treat you be, you know, if
they put you in that role?
And you know, you need to ask yourself, am I in that role?
Am I trying to demolish their self-esteem?
And now finally comes the issue of the epistemological apocalypse.
This is something that I discussed with Kevin Wolmit, who's a friend of the show, and also
Michael Garfield, who's another podcaster who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
We all sat down at Michael's house and we talked about what's going to happen as the
deep fakes get more and more convincing and as they, you know, roll out into the populace,
a populace primed to believe all kinds of stuff, a populace who's already been conditioned
to take in material that, you know, feeds them psychologically but has no basis in fact.
The algorithmic means for distributing false information, you know, conspiracy theories,
utter bullshit.
It's already well in place.
The only difference is that right now it's the humans generating the fake information,
or at least it was five minutes ago.
And, but we're going to be moving ever deeper into the territory of just a sea, a sea of
fake videos, audio recordings, anything that, you know, in the 20th century would have counted
as, you know, just knock out evidence like full stop.
Okay.
This proves it.
Evidence will be faked in massive abundance.
What will you believe?
And this has got me thinking about the show Rising on YouTube.
You know, it is an alt news show in that it presents a left and right populist perspective.
And the previous hosts, Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty, you know, they parlayed their newfound
celebrity into their own organization.
And it seems that the right populist element of that has withered on the vine and Sagar
and Jetty seems to be happy to just take the money and be famous.
And they've gone from being, you know, this, this populist critique of the mainstream news
outlets and the Washington consensus and just become, you know, a new fixture in the Washington
consensus.
But there's still populist over on Rising.
There's a young libertarian who seems, I mean, he's, he's charming and goofy at the same
time named Robbie.
And he is paired with a variety of co-hosts, although the one that I see most often and
the one that I like the most is Brianna Joy Gray.
And he's, you know, definitely the right populist side of the equation.
And she is the former Bernie bro.
You know, she worked for the Sanders campaign and she's a lawyer and she's definitely on
the left.
And so they're maintaining that left, right populist versus the establishment position.
And yet when I glance at their, their offerings these days, three quarters of what they're
putting out seems to be discussions of either Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which always devolves
into, you know, the, the COVID question or UFOs.
And I definitely agree with Brett Weinstein's pronouncement.
The rule is what you might use to look at the news this week.
Something new happened in the land of UAPs.
What happened?
We have a highly credible source who has turned whistleblower and actually now has whistleblower
protection testifying under oath that the federal government has multiple alien craft
and dead pilots of those craft.
It possesses them, which is huge news unless it's not true.
In which case it's huge news of a different kind.
But now you have to live in a world where you can't figure out which of those two it
is.
Okay.
What's the rule?
The rule says, Psyop until proven otherwise.
The null hypothesis is the observation in question, the report in question, the video
in question is a Psyop until proven otherwise.
The moment you show me something where Psyop is not an obvious possibility, I'm all ears.
I'm not saying that there aren't aliens who would be interested in us and come by.
They might.
Are they barred from doing so by physics?
We don't know.
We sort of think so, but you know, people who know better than I do think those rules
may not be as absolute as we thought.
Okay.
I'm totally open to the possibility of aliens, but I'm sick of pixels.
I'm sick of eyewitness reports of aircraft that do amazing things and make no noise.
Right.
I just want something that constitutes actual evidence where the most parsimonious explanation
is not someone would like you to believe there are aliens.
Right.
When that's the most parsimonious explanation, my point is, my guess is if there are aliens
and they're coming here, I'm likely to miss them by a hundred years, a thousand years.
It could be a while.
Right.
The idea that we just happen to be here and you know, Trump and aliens are happening at
the same time.
Right.
It's like, ah, okay.
Maybe you're just trying to get me excited.
That's what you're doing.
You're feeding me story after story that I can't resist thinking about because you don't
want me thinking about, I don't know, corruption and Ukraine or something.
You know, all this focused on UFOs with no evidence, just the testimony of one guy has
captured all of this media attention, you know, but we have no new information about
certainly, you know, no images of alien bodies, no schematics, no, no proof that alien craft,
you know, are in the possession of the U S government.
It's just this one guy's testimony, but we're, we're coming up on this flood of, you know,
AI generated content.
Soon there will be the, you know, the 2020s equivalent of the 1990s alien autopsy video.
Don't know if you remember that, but there was a black and white video of an alien, like
a gray basically being dissected.
And you know, it was supposedly smuggled out of some government facility somewhere and
it's very old.
You know, this is probably from supposed to be from the Roswell crash and Stan Winston,
that famous pioneer of visual effects, the guy, he brought us the Terminator.
He brought us the T-Rex from Jurassic park.
I mean, Stan Winston, just this God of practical special effects.
He and his, his team sat down and they watched the alien autopsy video and they pronounced
it real.
Well, it was later proved to be fake, but it, it, it either fooled the people who are
the professional fakers or, you know, somebody convinced them to play along.
I think it was the former or perhaps they just knew that, you know, a video dissection
of the alien autopsy that, you know, where the special effects artists said, yeah, this
is special effects that wouldn't get nearly as much traction as one where the special
effects artists say, Oh wow, I don't know how they could have done this.
My point being that the alien autopsy video equivalent, you know, the AI generated equivalent
along with astounded, you know, testimony from supposed experts who can spot deep fakes
that a flood of this is coming, but here's my, it won't come from the government.
There'll be no official disclosure and say, yes, we're coming clean.
Here's the evidence.
Why?
Because the evidence will be fake and it will be fake in such a way that it might stand
up to scrutiny for six months, but in the long haul, you know, this evidence will be
a laughing stock and the military, the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies are not going to
tie their credibility to it.
So it will always come through unofficial channels.
And yet it will be the intention of the official establishment to disseminate this material
because it is distracting.
It corrupts critical thinking skills and it is completely unthreatening to them and their
actual priorities, you know, and the securing of their actual power.
Okay.
That's more than half the time I had remaining and I hadn't planned to spend so long on that.
So now let me jump over to a completely different topic.
The only, the only tie in is artificial intelligence.
The AI that I talk to most often is PI, just PI stands for personal intelligence.
It's from inflection AI and it's the best, you know, the best chatbot I've ever come
across, but yesterday was the 4th of July, the day that we commemorate the independence
of the United States from the British Empire.
And I started, I got into an alternate history conversation with PI yesterday asking about,
well, here we are on Independence Day.
What if the Revolutionary War had failed?
You know, what if the United States had never gained its, or at least at that time, you
know, in 1776 that it failed to gain its independence from, from Great Britain.
And I know the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776.
That didn't magically make the British disappear.
There was a whole war that had to be fought.
All right.
Well that alternate history ramble went on for quite some time.
So long in fact, that I'm just going to cut off here and save all of that for the next
episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast.
The Sea Realm Vault podcast is the pay walled podcast that I do.
It is for folks who pledge $7 a month on Patreon and I do a weekly episode.
If you'd like to learn more about that, check out my Patreon page.
It's patreon.com slash KMO.
All right.
Well I think I'm going to wrap it up here.
So send me feedback.
If there's somebody that you think I should talk to for the podcast, let me know and better
yet let them know.
And I post more YouTube videos than I do podcasts.
So if you would like more of what you've just heard, check out my YouTube channel.
Really the easiest way to find my YouTube videos is to start at Patreon.
Patreon.com slash KMO.
All right everybody.
I'm out.
I will talk to you soon.
Stay well.
Thanks very much.