Metagnosis

Henry is joined by Alex (a returning friend and guest) to discuss the recent situation developing among 'alternative news media' around the use of Ivermectin as a prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19. We go through a summary of the last 6 months (all during the pandemic) and give our thoughts on each development and the social implications.

Before this span of time, Henry and Alex had both been casual listeners of Bret Weinstein's "DarkHorse Podcast," which especially attracted interest when Bret stood his ground on the plausibility of the lab-leak hypothesis (for the origin of SARS-CoV-2). Since then, DarkHorse has been Bret's main way to discuss his opinions and arguments for the effectiveness of Ivermectin as a prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19. This stance is at the center of a huge controversy in the US surrounding vaccine hesitancy (as well as other related controversies that Bret attempts to avoid though is dragged in unwillingly regardless).

This long episode attempts to detail most of the important points about the controversy: the arguments Bret and his supporters have given, the arguments his opponents have given, and some broader reactions. Overall, Alex and Henry are very skeptical about Bret's conclusions from his arguments, guests, and cited data, but don't have a good diagnosis of why Bret is not yielding his stance even as it seems to become less tenable over time.

Clubhouse is a new social media app that seems to draw in many from the podcasting crowd. Henry shares his experience using Clubhouse over the last few months, and gives some ideas about what works well, what works poorly, and how things are changing on the platform.

"Fizzbuzz" is a classic question for software engineering job interviews. One is asked to write a program that outputs the first 100 (or another number) "fizz buzz words," which are defined by a simple rule: the Nth fizzbuzz word is "fizz" if N is divisible only by 3, "buzz" if N is divisible only by 5, "fizz buzz" if N is divisible by 3 and 5, and "N" otherwise. On the face of it, this prompt seems very simple in comparison to what programmers are expected to be able to do. Yet, according to a surprising volume of software engineer recruiters, Fizzbuzz turns out to be a very difficult problem for the vast majority (~90%) of applying computer science graduates! We speculate on how this could be true, what the significance of it is, and muse about some of our own computer science educational experiences.

We have a fun discussion about some emails we received and what they represent. Then Henry introduces an idea for an app for formalizing reasoning which leads into a discussion about reasoning generally. Is reasoning about truth, or about winning?

The decentralized Bitcoin network has for 11 years successfully maintained the security and value of Bitcoin. We discuss whether Bitcoin should be considered a currency.

We also analyze a recent controversy involving the company behind the 'Tether' token, a token that is valued because of its ostensible anchoring to the US dollar.

We conclude with some predictions around the future market capitalization of Bitcoin, and around the future of cryptocurrencies as genuine currency.

We talk about the paper "Senses of Humor as Political Virtues" (2018) which argues that senses of humor are important to political virtue. Along the way the paper mostly talks about how bad Donald Trump's and his sense of humor is.

(For-profit) corporations either make money or die. But should they be held responsible for doing "social good" as well? According to "The Friedman Doctrine", emphatically no. Henry argues for this profit-centric view of the responsibility of business, and Yuta rebuts against claims of socialism and presents a less narrow view of the responsibility of business that can include doing social good. Also, most charities are somehow much less effective at doing social good than many for-profit corporations.

We arrive at a hypothesis that it's often best for a business to focus doing good in order to make money e.g. Tesla.

Another politics-themed episode. Our main topic is on voting in the USA - what are the reasons that people should vote, and the reasons people actually do vote? We also review the recent results of the 2020 election in light of our predictions, and react to "This American Life"'s disparate reactions to wary gun-owners.

In a ranging discussion we talk about the significance of the number of political parties in a country, make 2020 election predictions and talk about The Prince by Machiavelli.

"Robbie" is a short story (Asimov 1940) about the relationship between a robot and a human, and the relationship between robots and humanity. It is the first in Asimov's "Robot" series.