Truth Unrestricted

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Notes
Charles Eisenstein is an author of New Age nonfiction. His ideas about nonduality are influential in New Age circles but conflict heavily with reality. I examine one of his core beliefs about science being a religion in this episode.

Links
https://charleseisenstein.org/videos/video/is-science-a-religion/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

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Episode 61 Notes
Logic is the study of the building blocks of knowledge. Logic seeks to answer the question: how do we know what we know? 
Fear is a powerful instinctive response that is meant to keep us alive. But it overpowers and blocks out more rational thinking. Can the two coexist? How do we deal with both? Also, how is Ben Johnson, the disgraced Olympic sprinter, related to Adolf Hitler? These are the kinds of questions you'll only find answered here.

Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzBvA2uEjUI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Johnson_(Canadian_sprinter)

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Notes
Confirmation bias is the process of starting from the conclusion and working backwards toward the things that will support that conclusion. Scientism is the idea that science is more like a religion than a system to study reality. It is the idea that scientists are completely captured in confirmation bias such that scientific principles are dogmatically followed rather than replicatable observations.

So how do we know that scientism isn't happening in the scientific community? What makes us believe that science isn't captured by the confortable mental trappings of confirmation bias? Dr Dan Wilson (Debunk The Funk) talks with me about these questions.

Links
https://www.youtube.com/@DebunktheFunkwithDrWilson
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-invention-of-air_steven-johnson/279238/?resultid=8aa1b383-ea54-4fb7-9df9-3e73a813ad88#edition=5276847&idiq=2339186

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Episode 59 - Math
Why are we good at some mathematical concepts and bad at others? Why is it that we can intuitively know how to throw a baseball to another person but we can't figure out how many cups of water fill a vase? David and I discuss these questions and others as we make a case for math education.
We also get sidetracked for a bit about ivermectin and how grifters misuse real information. Because that's the sort of thing that happens around here.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_value
https://sciencesaves.org/

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Episode 58 - PsyOps
PsyOps are Psychological Operations. They are instances wherein an organized institutional entity (like a government) attempts to influence public opinion via a false event. PsyOps have been used among conspiracists as a catchall explanation for any evidence that would otherwise counter their worldview.

Examples of events that conspiracists have claimed are psy ops include: The violent parts of the Jan 6th insurrection at the Us Capitol building are said to be either antifa and/or instigated by FBI agents "riling up the crowd". The unseemly parts of the Trucker Convoy protest in Ottawa in February of 2022 are said to be antifa and/or the RCMP in disguise doing bad things to make the protestors look bad. The bizarre and obvious denials of reality seen in the flat earth community are said to be a psy op to make "legitimate" conspiracists look bad. All mass shooting events are, at some point, said to be false flag attacks by conspiracists who don't want to face the effects of gun violence.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_warfare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlin_drone_attack

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Episode 57 - Critical Thinking with Jon Guy
Jon Guy is an author of the book Think Straight: An Owner's Manual for the Mind. We discuss the concept of Critical Thinking, how it relates to our everyday lives, and where it sits in relation to other related things like "thinking outside the box." Some other topics that are brought up are: ghosts, UFOs, how to discuss reality conflicts with people, and metaphors.

Links
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1633887979?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_dp_BEV8RQFWFWKGA55N0W6J
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1032195045?ref_=cm_sw_r_apin_dp_CQE3PDPSNZDKA90FJC44
https://thinkingispower.com/
https://noehill.com/placer/poi_iowa_hill_bridge.asp

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Episode 56 - Currency

How does fiat currency work? Should I buy gold as a "backup" in case the dollar fails? Should I invest in crypto? Some people will say that you should *definitely* invest in gold and crypto. When the idea that you shouldn't comes up, they often lean on the unknowable as a looming specter of uncertainty to push you to "play it safe" and invest in those things anyway. The utility of investing in gold and/or crypto is not unknowable and shouldn't be coupled with doomsday predictions. Fiat currency isn't perfect and it has flaws. Those flaws are not avoided by buying gold or crypto. Listen to this episode to find out why I say this.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-child_policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin

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Episode 55 - Gender Yin-Yangism
If you asked a person to make a list of all the words that would describe a "man" and then I asked them to make a separate list of all the words that would describe a "woman" what do you think are the chances that you would end up with a list of antonyms? Do we see "masculine" and "feminine" as opposites? Should we? Not only is it not actually true that men and women are opposites but the concept that they have opposite traits will tend to put all the positive traits in the men's column and all the negative traits in the women's column.

In Eastern philosophy there is a concept called the yin and the yang. These are represented artistically by the pair of swirly black and white teardrops. It is meant to represent a pair of "opposite but interconnected forces" in Chinese cosmology. The way we talk about men and women we often pair them up as opposites, like the yin and the yang. We use a lot of language and terminology that helps create this largely unspoken illusion.

I think I know how society got to this point. For many (MANY) years the only people of note or importance were men. The stories we tell are ways of communicating our society across generations and for a very long time stories were told by men, for men, and about men. Whenever it came time for the men telling these stories to describe women it was most likely as something "different" than men. And the easiest way to portray someone as different is to make them opposite.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_masculinity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tate

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Episode 54 - Consciousness and Memory with Prof Xeno Rasmusson

Consciousness is a difficult concept to both explain and understand. In the simplest sense the word is synonymous with "wakefulness" or maybe "awareness" but it is so much more than that. It is an enduring mystery of neuroscience and how exactly consciousness occurs from the firing of many neuronal connections in the brain is as yet a mystery.

When I attempt to focus in on the experiences of consciousness I'm almost immediately distracted by something else: time. Our perception of time is based on our experiences of consciousness. In each moment of "the present" what we think of as "ourselves" is informed by past moments conjured from our memories. We know that what is the present will eventually be a moment that we think of as the past. We know there will become a future moment that we live inside as the present only because it has happened so many times before. The only way we know about there being a future is because we have experienced things in the past and we believe that we will again. When thinking about this, I have to ask a question: is it possible to conceive of a conscious being that does not record its own experiences?
One definition I once conjured for consciousness was that it's the feeling of memory being written inside the brain. This is probably not entirely true but, in the way that we don't fully understand how consciousness truly works, it's likely not entirely false either. 

A person's sense of "self" is also wrapped up in this consciousness burrito. Who you are as a person is tightly tied to who you have been in the past. Your experiences form some direction for where you're headed next. With this in mind it becomes even more difficult to imagine a conscious being that has no memories of its own experiences. How could such a creature form a sense of self? How could it ever know that its current self was in any way tied to its past self? Without memories of the past, would such a creature even know *about* the passage of time?

All of this brings me back to a (now old) movie called Total Recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger is living an average life on Earth (being married to Sharon Stone is average? anyways) when he discovers that some of his memories are missing. He sets out to find them and, on the journey, discovers additional things that "he" has done. **Spoiler alert** In the end he rejects his former self and the memories attached to them. Could it have been possible for anyone to be comfortable enough with themselves and their lives (being married to Sharon Stone) to *not* be distracted by the idea that there is something about their "self" that's being hidden from them?

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_canvassing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Rising_Sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Recall_(1990_film)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Temptation_of_Christ_(film)

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Episode 53 - Grift Tactics

Hijacking Occam's Razor: Escalate the level of complexity about a topic until it reaches a level which is unknown by the other party, then declare that the other party doesn't know what they're talking about. In the confusion, insert your own narrative that is always much simpler. The simpler narrative almost always fails to account for all knowable observations but to most people it is good enough. The trick attempts to hijack Occam's Razor to make it *appear* as though the inserted, simpler narrative is more correct. It fails because for Occam's Razor to apply *all* observations must be accounted for in both explanations.

Gishgallop is a method of speaking in which someone makes a large number of claims in a very short time. Usually the large number of claims cannot possibly be debunked quickly enough and it looks like some are undebunkable to the casual listener. This is also known by other names: Firehose facts. The most effective counter to this is the Miyagi Defense: don't let it happen at all (best defense not be there).

Word salad is a collection of large, unwieldy words that are usually spoken in a smooth stream very quickly and become inaccessible to most audiences. It is used by the pretentious to sound more intelligent than anyone else in the room. Jordan Peterson is the third degree black belt in this style of debate.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/steve-kirsch-and-brandolinis-law/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_salad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharon_A._Hill