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Episode 32 - Belief
Belief: confidence in the truth of an idea without the need for evidence
Fundamental question: can we believe in something with enough force to cause it to be manifest in our world? At first those who are rational must say that of course we can't and that thinking that way is ridiculous. But we must remember that many people *do* believe that they can influence events with beliefs. We might well ask Christians if God would still exist if everyone on the planet stopped believing in Him and forgot that anyone ever once did believe in Him.
Can flat earthers believe hard enough to make the earth become a new shape? Can Qanon supporters believe hard enough to post-facto create election fraud in the 2020 US election? Can antivaxxers believe hard enough to create new health problems with vaccines? Is that really what these groups are up to or can their behaviour be explained another way?

Links
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/belief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_(Byrne_book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_McCarthy

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We can think of individual communities as though they are individuals. The characteristics of the community would be their culture (what we might reasonably expect them to be doing or acting).
A community can decide among themselves to have any culture at all, any set of rules to live by and any level of tolerance or strictness of behaviour. But when you have competing communities, this dynamic changes. If another group has a different culture and *that* culture allows the competing community to: live better, be more productive, reproduce to become more numerous, use a greater portion of the nearby resources, etc; then there is a danger of one community overwhelming the other.
In prehistory this undoubtedly happened countless times. A culture that is being outcompeted has a choice: change their culture to become more competitive in the current environment, or leave the environment to an area that has less competition from other communities with differing cultures. This is how humans came to populate every area of the planet, by overpopulating a region, competing with each other for resources, then driving some of us out to a new area to start anew.
In all this, some ideas made us more competitive than others. Some general notions are held by all (or nearly all) cultures across the globe, even the ones that have been separated by continents and oceans for thousands of generations. It is likely that these common ideas were either part of the first community of humans or were ideas that spread to other cultures to make them viable competitors against those who already held them.
Marriage is one such principle. It is possible that stated rules about coupling in longterm partnerships allowed communities of humans to be larger than they could if early humans were promiscuous rather than monogamous. The explanation here is that a community that partnered in marriages (that were honored by ostensibly everyone in that community) were able to work together better due to less sexual jealousy issues. Working together better would have allowed for a larger and more numerous community and therefore be better able to dominate the resources of a region. This is one instance in which a cultural change (from promiscuity to monogamy) could have changed the fate of the world by allowing an entire community to become more competitive against its neighbouring communities.
One can then see how it is that making conscious choices about one's culture and how one shapes one's community can make that community better and more capable. One doesn't anymore have to dominate a neighbouring community to show that their cultural ideas are better. If the way we live makes us stronger as communities and as nations then these are the right choices for us as this time. One could look at WW2 in this same light (two competing cultures looking to dominate and/or defend against).

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Brent Lee is a former conspiracist who has since rejected the collection of conspiracy notions he once believed and now talks about the dangers of such beliefs. He has a podcast with Neil Sanders called "Some Dare Call It A Conspiracy" wherein they describe what each conspiracy is and why it is untrue.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creationism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_William_Cooper

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David Bloomberg has a podcast called Why Blank Lost which methodically examines why contestants on Survivor and Big Brother have lost. His latest episode is available here: https://robhasawebsite.com/survivor43-episode5-why-lost/
Define dishonesty. Consciously withholding information. Sometimes substituting the withheld information with other information (lies by omission vs spoken lies).
Why do people lie? It is an attempt to affect the decisions of others. You might want another person to make a different decision other than the decision they would have made had you said nothing or told them the truth.

Survivor and Big Brother are about gradually restricting the resources in a community. The "resources" are essentially the "spots" or "seats" in the community. Players must regularly contend with having their interests directly conflict with the interests of other players and therefore are forced to be dishonest. They make for an interesting view of these scenarios because we (the audience) can see when they are being dishonest and what they are being dishonest about. We can judge for ourselves whether or not we think their attempts at dishonesty might succeed.
Players are very often found out when they attempt to openly lie but sometimes they get away with lying.

Links
https://robhasawebsite.com/survivor43-episode5-why-lost/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivor_(American_TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Brother_(American_TV_series)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonesty

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Episode 28 - Trust
Define Trust - Trust is a two-gate process. First, a belief that you know something about the decisions of the person being trusted. Second, that the decisions of the person being trusted will be useful for you.
Trust imbalance. Two entities that trust each other but to differing degrees. This describes all pairs of entities that trust each other, in fact. Some entities are easier to trust than others. Imbalances in other properties (power, knowledge) directly affect trust imbalance.
Trusting the powerful (the gov't, or the 1%). It is very easy for the powerful to trust the powerless. It is much harder for the powerless to trust the powerful. As soon as an entity is capable of things that you cannot defend against the *need* for trust increases but the *likelihood* of trust decreases.
Is this a situation that can describe some of the conspiracy thinking we see today? Is the popularity of conspiracism due to a rise in mistrust of gov't and the powerful in general? Or is it that mistrust of the powerful merely due to the powerful demonstrating a history of poor decisions?

Links
https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/making-sense/analysis-how-poverty-can-drive-down-intelligence

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Free will is the idea that you might be able to make a decision that is not determined by your genetics, biology and situation. Determinism is the idea that all decisions are determined by the current physical state of the body and therefore we don't have the freedom to decide things any way other than the way we decided (i.e. free will is an illusion).
Free Choice is the ability when you know what the right thing to do is to do the wrong thing anyway. But what is "right and wrong"? In this context it is instincts. Non-human animals seem to have a constraint on their collection of decisions that humans do not. Or, at least, humans have less of. We are still partly constrained by our instincts. Animals are simply far more so constrained.
Instinct governs three main areas of life: short term survival (from predation), long term survival (food/shelter behaviour), and procreation. When animals find excess time away from the first two of these, they devote more time and attention to the third. This is seen in situations where an abundance of rabbits in an area will lead to an abundance of foxes in the following season, for example. Think back to early humans, however. At some point we started making decisions to do things with our extra time other than merely making more babies. We started making art and (probably) music. The process of making the first real art was probably very time consuming. How did we come to make the choice to do that rather than making more babies with our spare time?
Voter Suppression is done by political engineers to try to win elections. It depends on highly refined demographics and an assumption that they know how people of certain demographics will decide when given certain information. We have the freedom to reject these attempts to influence our voting patterns.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagmeet_Singh

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Episode 26 - The model in the brain
All the things you experience appear to be feeding directly into your brain. What is actually happening is that the brain is receiving all the signals and then interpreting them into a model of the world, then projecting an image of that model into the conscious part of your mind. This is why you are conscious of some sensations and not others.
We do not know that anyone else is conscious but we tend to believe that they are if they act in a way that we recognize as a way in which we ourselves act. That is, the closer their responses to the world are to our own responses to the world the more we feel that we "relate" to them. This is just as true of animals and computers as it is of humans.
Rene Descartes was working on this problem when he essentially gave up attempting to determine whether anyone aside from himself was a real, conscious person and said "Cogito ergo sum", or "I think therefore I am".
What does this mean for our interpretation of our world? Each person has a limited number of people they can "know". For each of the people you "know" you have a model in your brain of what sorts of decisions/actions you believe they would take. You can imagine yourself in a situation with them because of this model.
Your model of each other person is necessarily incomplete. The tendency is to fill in the unknown gaps in the model of another person with things about yourself. This is (probably) the root of the thing known as "projection".

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

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Episode 25 - Are people naturally good?
We would like to think of humans as being at some sort of moral pinnacle. This assumption generally underlies a LOT of conversations that are being had in a LOT of spaces (though almost no one mentions it). We might well ask: is this really true? Are humans naturally "good"?
The area of our brain (frontal lobe) that contributes most to our moral decisions isn't fully developed until late in our development. Sources vary about the exact age at which this development is complete but they pretty much all agree that it is finished at some point between ages 20-25. Greater disagreement is found for how much empathy one should expect to find in a child of various ages. I dare you to google search for "how much empathy does a 6 year old have?"
Children need to be taught to be good. Children can (and have, in the past) develop a very strange set of ideas about what is "right" and what is "wrong". This is part of the problem with developing an objective set of "good" moral values in philosophy.
Thought experiment: if we "reset the world" (performed the inhuman experiment of raising children via robots and having them learn everything again all on their own with no role models to copy), what would the new humans do or not do. Would they talk? Would they create art? Would they still become bullies? Would they be kind? Would they be selfish? Would they cooperate and, if so, under what conditions?
Related question: are dogs useful for determining which humans are "good"? (spoiler alert: they are NOT)

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Jacques_Rousseau
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_nativism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innatism

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Lydia Greene describes her journey to become an antivaxer and her subsequent journey back to science-based decisions. Along the way she describes moments of unreality brought on by cognitive dissonance and some of the emotional decisions that lead her to begin making the wrong decisions.

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DPT_vaccine#Combination_vaccines_with_acellular_pertussis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchy_of_evidence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Economic_Forum
https://backtothevax.com/f/the-hydra-with-many-heads

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What is this episode about? Listen and find out!

Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecos_Bill