Not Related! A Big-Braned Podcast

Karl Popper, known for his concept of falsifiability in the philosophy of science, also was a somewhat influential political thinker in his time. Popper endorsed what he called "the Open Society," a liberal democratic society based on abstract and depersonalized material connections, instead of direct social relationships.

This vision was particularly influential on one of Popper's now famous students, George Soros, who would go on to use his significant wealth won in financial markets to found the Open Society Foundation, a significant source of funds for leftist political agitation and pressure in America and Europe. Soros's worldview has somewhat departed from Popper's, with an emphasis on what Soros calls reflexivity, the principle that in human domains, our theories of world affect the world itself.

In one fell swoop, Egyptologist David Rohl has posited a change in Egyptian chronology that takes both Greek mythical history and the stories of the Bible out of idle lore and into historical plausibility.

By cutting and rearranging some 300 years of "dark ages," Rohl suggests that there is no gap between the legendary times of the Trojan War and the later historical Dorian Invasion. He also posits that very specific Biblical stories, such as the sojourn in Egypt, Exodus, the conquest of Canaan and the Kingdom of Israel have ample historical evidence if we start looking in Egypt's Middle Kingdom Period.

Note also that you can now support Not Related! by donating at donate.notrelated.xyz. Monthly pledges will only be charged at the start of the month if two episodes have been released in the previous month.

Paul Feyerabend argued for 'Epistemological Anarchism,' that in order to do truly good science, one can't rule out alternative methods, ad hoc hypotheses, mythology, religion and wishful thinking. Using the example of Galileo, he shows how science's greatest strides are made by deliberately being "unscientific" in the way that court scientists tend to think nowadays.

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1:29 Logical Positivism and The Demarcation Problem: Science vs. Pseudoscience
3:35 Scholastic Holism
4:21 The Rise of "Scientism"---the Positivist rejection of metaphysics (and ethics and religion)
5:00 Ludwig's Cabin and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Positivist minset.
8:03 Popper (Conjectures and Refutations) and Falsificationism as the standard for "science"
9:09 Marxism and Freudianism as non-falsifiable
11:22 Black Science Man and Pop-Science
12:20 Issues with Falsificationism
17:52 Thomas Kuhn and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions
20:41 Paradigm Shifts, not "facts"
25:30 Feyerabend's "Against Method" and Epistemological Anarchism
27:50 The False and True Galileo: Galileo was a Fraud and Troll
31:13 Why Galileo was "wrong"
35:36 Galileo's "pseudoscientific" instruments and methods
38:19 Science needs "pseudoscience," Descartes also destroyed
40:15 Feyerabend on Galileo's methods
41:40 Donations and On a Not Related! book? On mp3, ogg, opus.
45:54 Irme Lakatos and on "For and Against Method" (1999)
48:02 Should it be that "Anything Goes?"
49:27 Boomer Hindu Cremo and Deep History
52:17 The 't Hooft paper against "fringe science"
54:40 "ACADEMIA IS UNIFORMITY!"
57:40 They're wrong because they're different? Luke says one good thing about linguistics.
1:00:24 Steven Crothers and Relativity
1:01:27 They must be wrong because we exclude them and because they think we're wrong.
1:02:55 Is it fringe and pseudoscience if they win?

Reading list:

Main content:
Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge. New Left Books. 1975.
Lakatos, Irme. Proofs and Refutations. Cambridge University Press. 1976.
Motterlini, Matteo. For and Against Method: Including Lakatos's Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence. University of Chicago Press. 1999.

Mentioned content (in approximate order):
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Popper, Karl R. Conjecture and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. Harper Tochbooks. 1965.
Kuhn Thomas Samuel. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. 1962.
Gerard 't Hooft on "Fringe Science": http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/fringe-oct-2017.pdf
A talk by Steven Crothers, whom I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev10ywLFq6E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zWy6_Mog70

A blog post I wrote a long time ago on this topic which talks about some other examples I didn't bring up in this episode:

https://lukesmith.xyz/blog/in-defense-of-pseudoscience.html

Another season of Big-Braned® content will commence now...

Nearly every academic paper published since the 1960s has used statistics known to be faulty.

That sounds extreme, but it's actually not even controversial in the statistical literature.

In the 1950s, Ronald Fisher invented a statistical technique to solve the philsophical Problem of Induction. Neyman and Pearson developed a technique for statistical quality control in factories. Yet somehow, these two techniques were confused and merged into the Null Ritual of today, which is the neurotic pattern that every paper in many disicplines have to follow.

The Null Ritual is one of the clearest examples of academic consensus so far off the tracks that scholar treat the techniques in textbooks were religious devotion, rather than with critical awareness of what they are actually supposed to be. The end result? Nearly every field is rife with misuse of numbers, publication bias, misunderstandings and fake conclusions.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. Mindless statistics. The Journal of Socio-Economics. 2004.

Fisher, Ronald. Statistical Methods and Scientific Induction. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 17.1 (69-78). 1955.

Neyman, Jerzy. "Inductive Behavior" as a Basic Concept of Philosophy of Science.
Revue de l'Institut International de Statistique 25 (7-22). 1957.

Halpin, Peter and Henderikus Stam. Inductive Inference or Inductive Behavior: Fisher and Neyman: Pearson Approaches to Statistical Testing in Psychological Research (1940-1960). The American Journal of Psychology 119.4 (635-653). 2006.

Perezgonzalez, Jose. Fisher, Neyman-Pearson or NHST? A tutorial for teaching data testing. Frontiers in Psychology 6. 2015.

Ioannidis, John. Why Most Published Research Findings Are False: Author's Reply to Goodman and Greenland. PLoS 4.6. 2007.

Francis, Gregory. Replication, statistical consistency, and publication bias. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 57.5 (153-169). 2013.

Fanelli, Daniele. "Positive" Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences. PLoS 5.4. 2010.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. Replication, statistical consistency, and publication bias. 2015.

Taleb, Nassim. A Short Note on P-Value Hacking.

0:00 - Introduction
1:37 - Gibs: https://paypal.me/LukeMSmith -- Web: https://notrelated.xuz
2:14 - The Old Story of Human Evolution (Recent East African Origin)
5:55 - Philosophical Problems, bias and Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence! Muh evidence-based worldview.
8:58 - Uniparental markers: mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA and Haplogroups
12:32 - Genghis Khan as the last man on earth. What if he had weak genes?
15:22 - Muh Toba erruption is Fake News
16:48 - The appeal of out of Africa
19:00 - New archeological finds in the old strawman hypothesis
20:56 - Genetic analysis of Bushmen
23:18 - Early Humans in Arabia and Southeast Asia
25:25 - Destruction of Evidence and the Lost Land of Sundaland
27:50 - The Settlement of America and Preclovis cultures
33:57 - D'nations and Livestreams
35:05 - Not the only humans
36:00 - What are Neanderthals?
37:25 - NEANDERTHALED.com
38:25 - Denisovans
39:25 - Were Neanderthals actually dumb grugs? (Seafaring)
42:27 - Neanderthal cave constructions
45:49 - Could Neanderthals and other speak? Muh FOXP2
48:27 - The General View of Multiregionalism and the scale of history
52:26 - Morphological clades between old human varieties and modern races
55:30 - The Red-Pill on Asian people
56:16 - Conclusion and "Wuz we Hyperboreans?" teaser

Smith et al. 2018. Humans trived in South Africa through the Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago. Nature 555.7697. Pages 511-515.
Richter et al. 2017. The age of the hominin fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the origins of the Middle Stone Age. Nature 546.7657. Pages 293-29.
Schlebusch et al. 2017. South African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence 350,000 to 260,000 years ago. Science 358.6363. Pages 652-655.
Hodgson et a. 2014. Early Back-to-Africa Migration into the Horn of Africa. PLOS ONE 10.6.
Groucutt et al. 2018. Homo sapiens in Arabia by 85,000 years. Nature Ecology and Evolution 2.5. Pages 800-809.
Demeter et al. 2015. Early Modern Humans and Morphological Variation in Southeast Asia: Fossil Evidence from Tam Pa Ling, Laos. PLOS ONE 10.4.
Westaway et al. 2017. An early modern human presence in Sumatra 73,000-63,000 years ago. Nature 548.7667. Pages 322-325.
Pringle, Heather. 2011. Texas Site Confirms Pre-Clovis Settlement of the Americas. Science, New Series 331.6024. Page 1512.
Raghavan et al. 2015. Genomic evidence for the Pleistocene and recent population history of Native Americans. Nature 505.7481. Pages 87-91.
Skoglund et al. 2015. Genetic evidence for two founding populations of the Americas. Nature.
Ferentinos et al. 2012. Early seafaring activity in the southern Ionian Islands, Mediterranean Sea. Journal of Archaeological Science 39. 2167-2176.
Jaubert et al. 2016. Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France. Nature 111.534. 111-114.
Coop et al. 2008. The Timing of Selection at the Human FOXP2 Gene. Molecular Biology and Evolution 25.7. Pages 1257-1259.

http://notrelated.xyz
https://lukesmith.xyz
https://paypal.me/LukeMSmith

Rationality for Mortals: How People Cope with Uncertainty by Gerd Gigerenzer
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (on his work with Amos Tversky)
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
See a brief sumary of these topics I've written that's worth checking out:
https://lukesmith.xyz/files/papers/reason.pdf

00:00 Rationality for Big-Braned Mortals
3:12 The Heuristics and Biases Program and System 1 and System 2 in Psychology
7:12 Experimentations in Human Irrationality and Cognitive Illusions, the Baseball Bat example
10:05 Nate Silver says 250% chance of someone besides Blormph being elected in 2020 #OrangeManBad
12:16 Priming, framing and making money selling washing machines, how to make e-celeb/e-thot bux
15:27 Biases, risks and the Hard-Easy effect
17:32 A summary of Kahneman and Tversky's program
18:55 I know this model isn't real... implicatures and Linda the feminist bank-teller
25:23 D'nations (about a month's worth)
27:58 tfw when too rational to be rational??? Seeds of doubt
29:05 ACTUALLY everything you see is a lie! The disjunct between the formally rational and real-life rational
31:14 Ecological Rationality and the Adaptive Toolbox
33:51 Formal logic is for autistes and NPCs
37:33 Reconstructing human rationality in the light of uncertainty (also muh black swans)
40:37 Returning to the Hard-Easy effect and regression to the epistemological mean
41:43 The ploy of Heuristics and Biases program
42:39 Richard Dawkins plays rational bugman baseball and the Gaze Heuristic
45:34 The border between Systems 1 and 2 and the Paradox of Choice and overfitting
50:23 Feyerabend BTFOs IYI and intellectual lapdog Stephen Jay Gould epic style
53:11 Core assumptions
54:03 What Darwin Got Wrong in the Heuristics and Biases program (also muh emergence)
58:50 Libertarian Paternalism and Nudgebois, social engineering and inevitable ignorance
1:04:11 Closing

0:00 The Agricultural Revolution Has Been a Disaster for the Human Race
1:48 Spencer Well's Pandora's Seed
4:32 Cochran and Harpending's 10,000 Year Explosion
6:31 Creating a world we don't match
8:13 Roadmap

PART 1 - How Modernity affects our bodies

9:05 Are we living too long for our bodies?
13:04 Causes of death
16:44 Meme diets
18:06 Where do manlets come from?
20:53 Homogenization of the agricultural diet
22:56 Different racial genetic accomodations to agricultural diets
27:13 Luke rationalizes not brushing his teeth.
29:24 The Red-Pill on Mouth-Breathing

PART 2 - How Modernity affects our minds

32:02 Get me a Birthday Present! (paypal.me/LukeMSmith)
32:52 Why this isn't a book club
36:00 Self-Domestication
39:58 We're all Soyboys.
42:33 Genetic Pacification in Europe
44:32 Why Chinese don't have ADHD
47:09 Mad Geniuses
49:50 Hawks, Doves and violence as social contribution
53:35 Mutational Load, Founding Effects and Congenital Diseases (also Jews)
58:48 Eugenics isn't enough
1:00:08 Intelligence, g, IQ and the Flynn Effect
1:04:02 In defense of Child Mortality and Inceldom
1:07:46 Afrikangz confirmed for genetically superior
1:09:39 The Cycle of Civilization
1:13:17 Closing

Books and articles:
Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending - 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution
Spencer Wells: Pandora's Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilizaion
Western Europe, State Formation, and Genetic Pacification: https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491501300114
Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021932005027069
How fragile is our intellect? Estimating losses in general intelligence due to both selection and mutation accumulation: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2014.10.047
Distance from sub-Saharan Africa predicts mutational load in diverse human genetics: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1510805112
What Caused over a Century of Decline in General Intelligence? Testing Predictions from the Genetic Selection and Neurotoxin Hypotheses: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-017-0131-7

At 17:49 I said that I was attending "Georgia Southern University" in Atlanta. I meant Georgia State University. Funny mix up (I live near Southern nowadays and that's why I got them confused while adlibbing).

4:11 "Everyone but me is dumb and irrational!"
7:27 The Arisalment of Public Choice and Rational Ignorance
11:43 Democracy BTFO?
12:52 The Miracle of Aggregation and the Wisdom of the Crowds
17:21 The Democracy of Occupy Wallstreet
19:42 Bryan Caplan's the Myth of the Rational Voter
20:17 Rational Irrationality
22:17 Systematically Brainlets?
28:29 The Origin of Political Biases
30:08 You can Donate Bitcoin now
31:14 Emails
33:30 The Urban-Rural divide in American politics
35:48 Mitchell Heisman
36:53 Muh pronouns
38:38 IDENTITY POLITICS EVISCERATES BEN SHAPIRO WITH LOGIC
42:43 Schumpeter on Public Will
45:23 Logic is a Spook
46:47 James Burnham's the Machiavellian's: The Defenders of Freedom
47:19 Dante's De Monarchia
49:30 The Real Meaning of politics and persuasion
56:36 Schumpeter's Theory of Democracy as Government-seeking
59:49 de Tocqueville's Great and Small Parties
1:02:42 The Inanity of Third Parties
1:05:49 Caplan's propositions for democracy
1:08:55 Gee Bill! How come your mom lets you have TWO votes?
1:10:42 Democratic localism
1:13:37 Closing

0:00 - The End of End of History
1:43 - Albion's Seed
3:08 - Intro and organization
4:22 - Brief survey of the four groups
9:21 - How to write a term paper.
10:05 - The Eternal Puritan, their Moral Consensus and Ethnostate
17:23 - Patriarcha!
21:53 - Thot Patrol and Incel Rage
25:57 - HOL UP IS YOU TELLING WE WUZ ARISTOCRATS
29:10 - I'M LITERALLY QUAKING RN
30:40 - Open Borders for Pennsylvania! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
32:18 - What are thoumst even talking about?
35:17 - The Borderer
42:39 - Back already
43:21 - Bugmanism
45:40 - THICC D'nations
46:56 - What is capitalism to Schumpeter?
49:16 - RIP Terry Davis
50:12 - Comments from the Cryptonomicon
51:53 - Back to Albion's Seed: MUH FREEDOM
1:00:27 - An Ethnic History of the United States
1:03:24 - Andrew Jackson
1:08:09 - Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
1:11:32 - Postwar Puritan Supremacy
1:13:04 - REEEEconstruction: PURTIANS GET OUT
1:15:50 - Border Nationalism Now!
1:17:30 - [Le bad editting] Regionalism and the New Deal Coalition
1:20:10 - DR3 and the Party Inversions
1:27:37 - Non-white Immigration, Hart Celler Act
1:29:18 - Obama and Trump
1:35:55 - Finishing up Democracy