The Filter Podcast with Matt Asher

Zvi Mowshowitz comes on The Filter to discuss a series of blog posts he wrote about “Immoral Mazes”, or pathological institutions that incentive perverse behaviors. We also talk about levels of meaning in language and the arc towards more complex and indirect forms of communication, the many uses and abuses of the college system, and the magic of Magic the Gathering.

Related links:

Zvi Mowshowitz Official Blog

Zvi Mowshowitz - Immoral Mazes Articles

Zvi Mowshowitz – Unifying the Simulacra Definitions (Aug 2020)

Zvi Mowshowitz – Magic Articles I’ve Written (Mar 2011)

Magic: The Gathering Official Website

Jean Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

We are in a new era of colonization: cultural colonists have taken over our institutions, and the result is every bit as dramatic, if not yet as violent, as the colonial expansion into the New World that took place centuries ago. In this solo episode, I develop an extended analogy between the conflict of natives and settlers, and the current fight for ideological, and sometimes literal, dominance.

This episode elaborates on an analogy mentioned at the beginning of the interview with Katie Herzog. See Episode 10 of The Filter for that interview. Much of the material here is based on talk I gave about a year ago. Hope you enjoy.

Related links:

Radiolab Podcast - For Whom the Cowbell Tolls (Mar 2019)

Useful Idiots Podcast – Matt Taibbi, Katie Halper, and Glenn Greenwald on Russiagate and Mainstream Media (Jan 2020)

NY Times – “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Likens $10,000 Debate Offer by Conservative Columnist to Catcalling” (Aug 2018)

National Post - “ABC has cancelled Roseanne after comedian's racist tweet” (May 2018)

Transcript (rough):

If you want to understand what's happening in our society right now, you have to look back in time. I'm not the only one to suggest we are reliving some version of the past. Others are pointing to parallels with the rise of communism and struggle sessions, or the disintegration of U.S. into violet partisan hatred so strong it might lead to another civil war. I see value in these other parallels, however imperfect.

But if you want to understand what's happening to our society, culture, and institutions I think you need to go back and look at what happened on the north American continent from the early colonial period to the triumph of manifest destiny.

What I'm going to present is, in effect, an extended analogy, or elaborate model for our current moment. There's a famous saying that all models are wrong, but some of them are useful. In my view this particular model, whatever it's simplifications and failings, does a better job than any other framework in explaining our current moment. Hopefully you'll agree.

The theory came to me while listening to an episode of the Radio Lab podcast, titled "For Whom the Cowbell Tolls". It tells the story of Nancy Holten, a Dutch woman who moves to a small Swiss village, and immediately begins complaining about the local style of life. Holten is annoyed by the morning church bells. She's disgusted by all meat eating. She hates having to wear shoes. She even hates the cowbells, the very symbol of her new home in the Swiss countryside. She hates all these things so strongly, that she tries to get everyone around her to give them up.

Her new Swiss community, as might be expected, pushes back.

It turns out that in Switzerland, the community you settle in gets to vote on your citizenship. It’s a throwback to the country’s roots as a highly decentralized democracy.

In return for aggressively insulting her new community, her community votes No on her citizenship petition. Twice.

Holten’s story, as told by the highly capable team at Radiolab, is fascinating. More than fascinating, though, I think it's revealing of something deeper about our present moment. While certainly not told in a one-sided way, reporter Kelly Prime clearly wants us to see Holten as the victim of closed-minded, xenophobic yokels. Holten a powerless immigrant, a barefooted, free-spirit minority who Swiss are cruelly trying to deny citizenship to.

But she’s not an immigrant. Not really.

She’s a colonist.

Pete Quiñones, host of Free Man Beyond the Wall, talks about the decline of the American empire, whether we should cheer on collapse, and how to prepare for life in the coming dim age. Among other things, we discuss: The pros and cons of collapsitarianism, which failed state will we most closely resemble, and chaos vs uncertainty during the zombie apocalypse.

Related links:

Free Man Beyond the Wall Podcast

Unloose the Goose Podcast

Pete Quiñones on Twitter

Samuel Edward Konkin III - New Libertarian Manifesto (1980)

Murray N. Rothbard - For a New Liberty (1973)

Robert P. Murphy – Chaos Theory (2002)

Vin Armani on The Filter (May 2020)

James Corbett on The Filter (Jun 2020)

Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ)

The Filter interview with Matt Welch. Matt is a journalist, author, and podcaster. He’s an editor at large at Reason Magazine, the author of a book about Libertarian Politics and one about the not-so-libertarian John McCain, and he’s part of the thoroughly entertaining Fifth Column podcast.

Topics discussed in this episode:

~ Staying sane in a time of panic

~ Learning as we learn, and consequence free living

~ Why you should always blame New York

~ The narrow space for non-partisan thought

Related links:

The Fifth Column Podcast

Matt Welch at Reason

Matt Welch - Denalist Democrats (Sep 2012)

Matt Welch - Brooklyn School Zoning Plan (Sep 2019)

Matt Welch - Pandemic School "Pods" (Jul 2020)

Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972) “Tharn” Analysis

Ibrahim X Kendi - How To Be An Antiracist (Aug 2019)

Wesley Lowery - Moral Clarity (Jun 2020)

Bari Weiss Resignation Letter (Jul 2020)

The Fence Interview with NYT Correspondent

Jack Shafer - The Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News (Sep 2018)

Nikole Hannah-Jones – The 1619 Project (Aug 2019)

A conversation with Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. Andrew is the author of a number of books on topics such as Bayesian Data Analysis, how stats should be taught, and voting patterns in politics. Our conversation topics included:

Forking paths in data analysis

To what extent to prior beliefs determine study outcomes

Data integrity in the era of COVID

Unreliable friends and modeling uncertainty

Related links:

Andrew Gelman at Columbia University

Andrew Gelman - The Statistical Crisis in Science (Dec 2014)

CDC - Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19 (Jul 2020)

E.T. Jaynes - Probability Theory (Chapter 5 for quote)

David Shor - Interview with New York Magazine (Jul 2020)

Katie Herzog - Discussion on Cancel Culture with The Filter (Jul 2020)

Nassim Taleb - Uncertainty (Mar 2020)

Matt Asher - Unreliable Friend Distribution (May 2013)

Discussion with guest Tam Hunt. Topics include:

- Panpsychism, the idea that all matter contains some element of consciousness- Resonance and harmonics in the brain and the universe- The unitary self vs. humans as multitudes- Augmenting, sharding, and continuity of consciousness- Horcruxes

Related links:

Tam Hunt Website

Tam Hunt – Consciousness (Nov 2018)

Tam Hunt – Measuring Consciousness (Nov 2011)

Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler - Resonance Theory of Consciousness (Oct 2019)

Wolfgang Klimesch - Binary Frequency Hierarchy (Oct 2018)

Dr. Giulio Tononi - Integrated Information Theory

Derek Parfit – Reasons and Persons (1984)

Christof Koch - The Feeling of Life Itself (Sep 2019)

Nick Bostrom - Superintelligence (Jul 2014)

Discussion with guest Katie Herzog. Topics include:

- Cancel culture swarms on Twitter, and the need to use it anyways- Honor culture and reputational contageon- School mascots, statues, and mob action- Obligatory mention of Robin DiAngelo

Related links:

Katie Herzog on Twitter

Katie Herzog - The Detransitioners (Jun 2017)

Katie Herzog – Seattle Teen MAGA Hat (Jul 2018)

Blocked & Reported Podcast

Harper’s Magazine Open Letter (Jul 2020)

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

University of North Carolina Silent Sam Settlement (Feb 2020)

University of Illinois Chief Illiniwek

Robin Diangelo Official Website

List of pulled Blackface episodes (Jun 2020)

Solo show about why our brains no longer work.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

TRANSCRIPT (Not exact)

I begin this episode of The Filter with some questions. For you. Have you found, over the past few years, and especially over the past few months, that your brain doesn’t seem to be as good as it used to be at comprehending the world around you? Do you feel not just overwhelmed by how much is happening, and by how much new information you have to make sense of in such a short time, but that your very ability to reason about your world seems to be under assault.

If so, I don’t think that’s an accident. I think it’s an inevitable consequence of the times we live in, and in particular of the complete breakdown of the forces that helped us understand the world, the breakdown of accountability, and the rise to dominance of narrative driven journalism and the reactionionary mob as central forces in our lives.

But before getting into that, I want begin with an observation. Just as a nation can, as famously declared, contain a lot of ruin, but does have its breaking point, our minds can contain a certain level of hypocrisy or cognitive dissonance, but not an infinite amount.

In fact, to be human is to accept the necessity of living with contradiction. Everyone is a hypocrite, and much of what looks like hypocrisy is merely the conflation of a group of heterodox individuals, with what is presumed to be their group philosophy. Or sometimes’s it’s just the personal failing of someone to live up to their stated goal. For example, if a guy who decries the evils of drinking to others, drinks like a fish at home, not a hypocrite, he’s an alcoholic who knows first hand how bad

that is.

To varying degrees, we all live in this state of mismatch between rhetoric and reality, and so far as I can tell, we always have. Our public selves are always lies. We code switch. We fail to live up to our own standards.

This mismatch extends from the personal to the societal. We have official, establishment lies that bear only a vague resemblance to reality, or are strictly aspirational. These range from the fundamental to the trivial.

Two hundred plus years ago my birth nation declared that all men were created equal, in a time of widespread slavery. Today I live in a city where most of the doors marked with “Emergency exit only, alarm will sound,” open silently and are the normal ways to leave a building. At first that bothered me. Quite a bit, actually. Now I barely give it a second thought. Small disconnects with reality, like this one, make a ripple in the pond of our brains the first time we see them, but the ripples diminish over time as re-wire our brains to understand that “Emergency exit” just means exit.

To extend the analogy, the state of the pond represents our capacity to comprehend, assimilate, and reason about our world. Except for the most autistic among us, the Emergency exit lie won’t take us down for long. But more consequential lies are like bigger rocks tossed into our pond-like brains. It takes longer for them to settle down. On a personal level, these can have a profound and lasting effect. Sudden death of a loved one. Partner who cheats on you. It may take weeks, months, or years to recover from these, not just in terms of emotional stability, but in terms of basic rational thought.

In The Year of Magical Thinking, author Joan Didion recounts how, after losing her husband of several decades, she finds herself unable to throw out his shoes, thinking he might come back any moment. These moments of disconnect with reality take a long time to fade.

In the pond of our brains, the size and duration ripples arising from multiple disturbances at once, can have non-linear effects.

9. The Sleep of Reason Produces Trigglypuffs

Related links for 9. The Sleep of Reason Produces Trigglypuffs:

Reply to this episode on ykyz: https://ykyz.com/p/e22c9d80456f25fe7d2c7fe9804c8a1af2190e7c

The Filter microcast: https://ykyz.com/c/microcast?&username=thefilter

Discussion with guest James Corbett about control and propaganda in the pandemic era.

Audio production by Steven Toepell of Bohemian Passport Inc.

Related links:

James Corbett Official Website

James Corbett #PropagandaWatch on The Corbett Report

Japan Pachinko Parlors Defy Lockdown (May 2020)

Japan: Article 9 of the Constitution

Dan Dicks - Into the Fire (Jul 2012)

G20 Officer "This Ain't Canada Right Now" Commited Battery (Mar 2015)

Groups Protest New Airport Body Scanners (Nov 2010)