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Join us for an in-depth discussion on how progressives view the world and the underlying principles that shape their ideology. We explore the challenges progressives face in predicting conservative actions due to a lack of understanding of conservative ideology. The conversation covers various aspects of progressive thought, such as the belief in the inherent equality of all humans, the emphasis on subjective beauty, and the implications of manifesting a morally ideal world. We also delve into the cultural and psychological factors influencing these views, including the significance of an external locus of control. Learn how these dynamics play out in contemporary debates and their broader societal impact. Plus, enjoy a glimpse into everyday life with a casual dinner preparation chat and some family moments.
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about the way that progressives see the world and trying to build a structure around it to better predict, because I, I think that this is important always from both sides to be able to predict.
The moves that your opponent is going to make,
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Malcolm Collins: And we repeatedly see progressives fail to predict the moves that conservatives are going to make because they do not take time to attempt to understand conservative ideology or where it comes from, or where parts of it that feel completely illogical or irrational to them come from.
One of the core parts of progressive ideology, which can feel deeply irrational to your average conservative is that all humans are born equal in their capabilities, in their you know, talents, et cetera, right? Like that there's this degree of equality among humans. The another one that's been going around a lot and we have theorized on before, is this elevation.
Of ugliness.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Why do
Malcolm Collins: they keep making ugly things? Why do they keep taking video game characters and making them ugly? Why do they keep showing us ugly female characters and trying Why are
Simone Collins: their illustration styles ugly? Like, it's unnecessary. Like if you just look at the editorial portraits of a progressive newspaper, for example.
They're not flattering. Yeah. Like contrast, what are you doing?
Malcolm Collins: World's internal drawings and stuff, which are all really pretty and anime and like otherwise vitalistic or it'll be like a Greek style or like a 1950s style and they're fine. Right? Mm-hmm. Was was progressively like I go to Newsweek or New Yorker and it's, it's, it's like actively attempting to be ugly.
Yeah. And. I, I had a theory on this I've gone over before that we may touch on, but I think a lot of this is downstream of a centralizing part of progressive ideology that I hadn't given enough credit to before, which is they assume what is true would be what would be most ethical if it were true.
Simone Collins: Ah, right.
So, okay. If we were to build like a catechism of the urban monoculture, a core proponent of it would be, alright, well first throw out reality. We're going to make the most charitable interpretation of everything and then just model the world based on that. Like this person's homeless. Not because maybe they're like mentally ill and or dangerous or addicted to drugs, but because they just haven't been given very good opportunities and therefore if we just support them for a while, they'll get back on their feet.
Malcolm Collins: That's a great example actually. Mm-hmm. Where you've, you've taken the core concept and then you've particularized it to what do you assume about any individual homeless person? Right. You see on broader things like the idea that there is, you know, like the first one I said, that people aren't born with different degrees of talent, right?
Mm-hmm. That if, if it was true. That we were all genetically identical. If it was true that there, there were not differences in proficiencies, that would be a more fair world. Right? Right.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So we have to assume that.
Malcolm Collins: So we have to assume in this, in this, in this religious framework, in this religious framework, if it was true that like there was no such thing as objective beauty, right?
And, and, and beauty was only subjective and it was completely cultural. You know, you could say, well, nobody's really ugly, right? Like, no, nobody's born unattractive. Mm. This woman isn't unattractive, right? Mm-hmm. It's just that you have a a or, or with fat people. Well, fat people aren't unattractive, right?
They are. So you've
Simone Collins: just been brainwashed by capitalism to have a patriarchal and misogynistic view of beauty focused on what makes the most money something, something right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well they, they would say, well, it might be that, you know, you were brainwashed because of all the ads you saw growing up and everything like this.
And this is why they started doing all those campaigns with ugly women in ads. And, and lemme tell you what, guys still not into ugly checks. This is very much not having the intended effect. It just makes us disgusted with your company. And we've seen some companies do quite bad in terms of sales after they moved to those types of ads because it wasn't true.
What, what, what. First, you know, beauty means a number of things, but when we are talking about women, primarily it is males looking for signs of potential breathability. That is what beauty is. You know, they are, are judging, which is an
Simone Collins: offensive concept if most women feel like want to feel wanted and beautiful.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, it's not, you can't always be young and beautiful forever. You're in our fish analogy, a rotted fish, right? Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. You, you are no longer a thing of utility. The reason the men are lusting after the, the younger thin athletic looking women. Is because those are proxies for good genes and a wide fertility window.
Simone Collins: Fertility, absolutely, you're right.
Malcolm Collins: That that is, that is what they are noticing in those women. That is, that is the reason. And, and from an evolutionary perspective, I mean, you're a progressive, you should understand this, right? Like, that the, those. Emotions are things that they're feeling because their ancestors here had those emotions when exposed to that you know, environmental stimuli had more surviving offspring than the ones who didn't.
Mm-hmm. And I'm not gonna say, you know, offensive, offensive here that there may not be ethnic peculiarities. Or particularities in our sort of beauty pre-programming. There might actually be cultural differences. You know, as I've pointed out before Japanese might actually prefer a younger phenotype in females than other populations, given how frequently it appears with, in.
Their cultural works. And, and, and, and, and that is obviously very, very offensive because now what I'm saying is, well, I agree with you so much that there, that there are cultural differences, but those cultural differences probably have a genetic component as well. I, but, it, it confuses me.
The reason I focus on these particular areas was in progressive mindsets in the urban monoculture is it's a thread that you can easily pull on with any logical person. I. Any logical person is going to see the moment you start digging into this that it is an obviously true thing, that it is obviously true, that the urban monoculture and the broader democratic and progressive cause attempts to assume that whatever would be like if, if.
Were true would be the most ethical thing, is what is true. And, and, and then the question is, is why are they doing this? Like, what's the philosophy that is driving them to make this decision? I have a hypothesis, but I'd love to know yours. Simone.
Simone Collins: I mean, I've seen it argued by some people and so my mind jumps to it that there are Christian roots here of, of charity and elevating the meek.
Yeah. So I, I, I feel like, I mean, I, I, I would be surprised if that didn't have some element of it, because exactly, this is coming from a predominantly white and, and at least from an inherited standpoint, Christian culture. But I think there's also something about a, a more future progressive, like forward-looking optimism and hopefulness of like.
Well, maybe the world isn't the way we want it to be right now, but we're going to make it, we're gonna manifest it into existence. So I'm just gonna pretend that it is the way I want it to be until it just freaking is.
Malcolm Collins: And actually I think that second point is a, is a really interesting one.
Although I would, I would alter it slightly. It's, well, I wanna
Simone Collins: hear your theory. I think that's much more interesting, whatever it is.
Malcolm Collins: Well, first I'll stick with yours. It's if they presume these differences when they create projects or u utopian visions that they can sell to people. Mm-hmm. As, as communists and Marxists are want to do the utopian visions appear much more dystopian when you admit from each, according to their ability to each according to their needs that sort of passively admits that, you know, according to their abilities are different, right? Mm-hmm. And so it means that you could get a society like that movie ants, right? Where your abilities are tested at a young age.
Mm-hmm. And you are basically given a cast
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Malcolm Collins: And that that is how the perfect communist system would work. But that appears much more dystopian to them. You know, they want a communist system where people can be told, oh, you could do whatever you want. Right. And so you, you could have something like that.
I, I think that that could be, it is, it just looks like Okay with the, the. The beauty one, right? There's a lot of specific arguments that you can make up about this that I'm gonna argue are wrong. IE which you could be like is, oh, well the beauty one is for a completely different reason than the other ones.
The beauty one is so that, you know, low market value, women, I. Can browbeat high market value women and lower their market value and raise their own market value? I mean, it is true low market value. Women use progressive systems in order to do that, right? Like we see this regularly. There are
Simone Collins: women who do,
Malcolm Collins: yes, you're not really, but you're not really.
But I don't, the reason why I don't think that that's how this came up in progressive ideology is this universalizing rule that. Whenever it would be true that the world worked in a different way, the the things would be more moral. They will take this assumption like literally wherever, right?
You know, whether we are talking about human capability or we are talking about beauty, or we are talking about why is this person homeless or. We are talking about immigrant deportations, like it would be more moral of every immigrant who was in the country just actually was like a really great person with a family who needed to be here and not a criminal.
And, and so, you know, you make that assumption. In fact, I'm trying to take to think of any, any violation of this rule Before I get to my hypothesis, can you think of any instance where there is something that like if true would be more moral?
Simone Collins: Then
Malcolm Collins: it, it, the progressives don't believe. The progressives do not believe about the world.
Simone Collins: Anything about conservatives.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, they don't give them the benefit of that. They believed that conservatives you know, were just people with a different set of opinions, right. About how things are done.
And we pr regularly see this with progressives mis modeling conservatives and not understanding or being able to predict conservatives. But, you know, we've mentioned surveys. We're gonna shown that progressives have a really hard time modeling conservatives, but conservatives don't have a hard time modeling progressives.
Mm-hmm. And the reason for this is progressives. Sort of a need to strawman what conservatives are fighting for, to have like a, a, a good argument against them because the heart of the urban monoculture is imperialism and colonialism. You know, like a, a a, when I talk about the cultural differences that people in Africa have around, you know, like the role of women or you know, the, the sexual norms.
Or you know, their relationship to the environment you know, the, the progressive will say, well, eventually we're going to eradicate all of those, right? And that what is being proposed, whether it's for Africans or Muslims or or Chinese people, is I. Cultural genocide, you know, it is the most imperialistic thing they could presume and, and, and their culture.
This LGBT imperialist colonialist culture is fundamentally European in nature. First of all it, it didn't come out of any other cultural system. It is, it is just building upon some of the sort of mistakes of the enlightenment, I guess I'd call. But, but it is, they, they'd immediately see, like if they engage with what conservatives actually believe, how imperialistic and colonialistic and white supremacist they are.
And when I say white supremacist, I mean if you are holding pride parades in, in celebration of white European culture, you are holding a white. Pride Parade especially if it is in the celebration of that culture's dominance over the culture of a previously like diverse community. You are marching your sort of.
Cultural victory trophies, the children of, you know, vulnerable refugee populations, the children of immigrant populations that you have now memetically or potentially even surgically castrated, and you march them through the streets and a triumph that excesses would make Roman emperors blush. You know, the, this is, this is a very easy thing to see as soon as, as, as you take your opponent's perspective.
So, progressives never do this. Or they, they, they really struggle to do this. Sorry, what was the particular point I was addressing there?
Simone Collins: Well, you took that in a long direction. You were gonna get to your theory and your theory is just broadly
Malcolm Collins: get theory. Well, I, I, my theory is that maybe this started, so it is two things.
One is, as I think, it's sort of like y your idea of like manifesting, like wishy thinking might be a part of this, but it's such a hard rule within progressive culture. That I don't, I don't
Simone Collins: think my second theory is correct.
Malcolm Collins: It could be that they have a belief that whenever a systemic problem or inequality exists within the world and it could motivate behavior that is immoral, that it will motivate behavior that is immoral if it is acknowledged. So, oh,
Simone Collins: like if we give power to this thing, then it will happen. So it's, it's similar to this belief in the power of manifesting. It's just in another direction.
Malcolm Collins: If you admit that different cultural groups have different proficiencies and perspectives, you might then want to hire from one cultural group disproportionately.
You might then even say, well, this cultural group is only bringing negatives into the country. Like if you in the UK looked at like rates of grape or murder or anything like that, you're gonna find that almost all of it's being committed by like one really small and I'm here, I'm not even talking about Muslims.
Just like one region of Pakistan, like one sub region of Pakistan produces like almost I. All of the negative externalities that the immigrants within the UK are producing. And if you could just be like, oh, okay, different cultures are different, do lead to different actions, and the logical thing to do is just ban immigration from this one sub region of Pakistan.
I. But they can't do that, right? Like, because now they're like, oh, now we're being systemically racist. Right? Like, they, they, the moment you acknowledge a thing, right? The obvious answer from their perspective aligned. Now, of course. In reality, what you've done there is a moral good because you know you're not considering the people who are being graped, right?
You're not considering the people who are being murdered or their families like clearly in, in terms of like net utilitarianism, this would be a positive act, but the fact that it could create situations in which there are potentially positive acts from a net utilitarian perspective by admitting something.
I think that's the, the sort of fear here. Consider, like, you mean potentially
Simone Collins: negative acts?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. By negative.
Simone Collins: You might wanna say that again. Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: I think negative or positive works in this context because what I mean is you have now done something that is a positive act, IE banning people from this region, but it is a sinful act within their wider logical system.
I. Because now you have a policy that rather than targeting a group just for benefit, is targeting a group for restrictions that isn't a white group. Now, of course, you're allowed to target white groups who are restrictions. Oh my God. We can't have the africanists come you know, shutting down the entire Episcopal refugee network for this one group.
Okay, you guys, not revealing your hand there. But of, of, by the way, just like 60 people, they shut down their entire network. And the Catholics might have as well, but they didn't explicitly say why they shut down their entire network. But the, the if, if you, if you then look at like, the beauty thing, right?
So if you acknowledge, like, I acknowledge that some people are more beautiful than other people, you know, I'm gonna disproportionately date some women over other women which is leading to a negative action. Right, like from their perspective, right? Because I am favoring one population to another population, which is creating a form of systemic inequality, even though that systemic inequality is there to begin with anyway the, they, there is an easier time to sort of browbeat, you know.
You see, this was the trans stuff that we, we've gone over. You know, if, if, if trans, and, and this is where this leads to, like really immoral action. So a, a trans individual will say trans women are in no way different from other women. Right? Because it would be more moral if that was true. It would be more moral if you could just have trans women compete in women's sports and they didn't have an advantage, like genuinely like that world.
If you could just say, oh, I feel like another gender and then transition. And then you, you were actually that other gender that would be like a more moral world instead of like, you know, like a mutilated man, right? But if they say, okay I am a, a real woman. Exactly like a real woman in every respect.
And beauty is subjective. And therefore, if, you know, lesbians aren't choosing to date me. The, the, they're, they're doing it because of transphobia, not because of how I look. And now this, and we've seen this repeatedly, now justifies me, griping them or essaying them. Which is something we see really, really frequently.
I
Simone Collins: don't,
Malcolm Collins: in the trans
Simone Collins: let's, I, I wouldn't say people are justifying. That they're not justifying these non-consensual actions. They're just,
Malcolm Collins: oh, no, no, no. Hold on. No, they are like literally mainstream progress. So there have been a number of instances where if you go to like, trans Reddit or, or even lesbian Reddit, they, she, she noted that one day when she really felt like an outsider, this was a real cis lesbian woman is when the top post of Reddit was cheering about two trans women beating up a lesbian woman who said that she wasn't interested in dating trans women. And they were like, you know, this is what you deserve.
And when she saw that at the top of the lesbian subreddit, she realized. Oh, this is just trans women here now attempting to force themselves. If, if you, if you, I stand corrected. Watch our Cine Byte lifestyle episode on what happened to like Anna Vains. You know, you see her complaining that she cannot force women to have sex with her.
Because the fact that they are not having sex with her is proof of their you know, transphobia. You see, oh God, there was some. Like, like, no, this is actually really, really common in progressive spaces. I didn't know of attempting to force women. I'm not like making this up. I, I hear this from lesbians on online all the time.
Like, wow,
Simone Collins: okay.
Malcolm Collins: I feel really uncomfortable. I am constantly forced into environments where I am sexually assaulted and I am not able to do anything to defend myself because I will be called transphobic if I do, because this individual will say like, well, why don't you want me? Right?
Simone Collins: That's really bad.
Malcolm Collins: Oh,
Simone Collins: and also all your discussion of this gives me one more theory, which I find to also be compelling or at least a part of this, which is that maybe this view, this most charitable interpretation of things is actually downstream of a more fundamental interpretation of reality through the lens of an external locus of control where everything is not your fault.
You are only the product of your systemic disadvantage or systemic privilege, and therefore it's not anyone's fault that they're a criminal or hurting other people or anything else because it's society's fault. And that leads to those charitable interpretations. What do you think about that?
Malcolm Collins: So the nothing is ever your fault theory.
I mean, I don't know how it aligns with like the beauty one. Like why, why is the beauty one not a, a, a thing if it's, if it's not your fault? Like why do we need to pretend that beauty doesn't exist? But it's,
Simone Collins: well, it's, it's the systemic unfairness of a biased society that is arbitrarily chosen.
What is beautiful because they choose to not look at like science signs of fitness as a sign.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you're saying, sorry, the, the theory was, again,
Simone Collins: it's, it's based on an external locus of control being the foundation for external for control.
Malcolm Collins: So, so I mean, what, what makes this theory credible is progressives have a dramatically high external locus of control when contrasted with conservatives, right.
This has been shown in study after study, after study for people who don't know what, what a locus of control is. It's and it is really unhealthy to have an external locus of control. Yeah, you should not ever, like, it doesn't
Simone Collins: matter what's true like something really could have happened to you that was out of your control.
But the most healthy response is, well, and
Malcolm Collins: ironically, having an internal or external locus of control is highly genetic. And we select for this among our offspring as well. Yeah. Which is like why voting patterns are highly genetic. 40% genetic by, by studies. But the internal versus external locus of control.
So an internal locus of control is believing that, you know, if you get fired, you say. It's my fault I got fired. Mm-hmm. If, you know, you don't get a lot done with a stu a project like I was talking with you know, one of our, our, our fans who have working on this. And I was like, well, you know, this has been pretty slow compared to the number of people you have working on this right now.
And he's like, yeah, I di I didn't do a good job. You know, managing the team, that's an internal locus of control answer. An external locus of control answer is you know, well the team's just not, you know, the. It's not my fault that they're not good, right? Like they're, they're, they're just bad at whatever.
Or you know, I, I wasn't able to do it because you know, I, I did a bad job because of racism or something, and you're just being racist in your assumptions about my work or you know. Oh. Well, I was sick a bunch of times and, and, and that's why, right? And, and every explanation is always fully, almost, always fully possible to do with an internal or external locus of control explanation.
Mm-hmm. The, the reason it makes sense. And so you can be like, okay, well what if racism was really at play? Right. You know, and, and like why somebody got fired, right? There's no point in dwelling on it 'cause it's not a thing that you can really change, right? You, you should focus on the, the parts of the firing that you had a place in influencing.
But. It is very easy to seduce people with an external locus of control because it removes personal responsibility from 'em. They are now not responsible for any failure that they made. Any person that they hurt anything and, and not just, they are not responsible, but nobody's responsible. When you, when you totalize an external locus of control, you completely remove.
Evil actually from the world. That's a, that's a great way to put it. There is no evil from the world when everyone has an external locus of control.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Because it's never anyone's fault, and if it's not your fault, you're not evil.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And so the, the, the. This actually helps me understand part of, I think, why they see conservatives as so evil, because sort of we introduce evil reality.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: By taking an internal locus of control ourselves. Yeah. Well, we, we also accuse
Simone Collins: people of being personally responsible for things.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Where, where we would, because we believe that we are personally responsible for things we believe that other people are. Yes. So when we see a homeless person where you're like, well.
I mean, you, you could be like, oh, well a lot of them have drug problems. A lot of them have mental illness issues. And I'm like, yeah, but there's a lot of gainfully employed people with mental illness issues and there's a lot of people who had drug problems who got over them, right? Mm-hmm. You know, that's the way a conservative is going to respond to that which is interesting because it leads to I.
Obviously like positive outcomes, like what, what, what the conservative is actually trying to do. And I think that most of the differences in conservative and progressive policy come downstream of this. What the conservative is trying to do is fix things. And I'm talking about modern conservatives. I'm not talking about like nineties, you know Kurt Pearl clutching conservatives, I'm talking about like the new right tech, right alliance and, and, and what the progressive is trying to do is, is manifest a fair world.
Hmm. And that is the core difference between the groups.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Manifest but not forcibly create. Whereas conservatives are attempting to forcibly create a better world. Well,
Malcolm Collins: actually, here's what they may believe. They may believe that if everyone holds to these delusions. In an absolute context that it can forcibly create a reality where it's as if the delusions were true.
If everyone says there are no differences between the genders, there are no differences between people of different cultural backgrounds. You know, everyone is equally beautiful. All art is equally good. We might get a society that is completely fair because now nobody is choosing one person over another person.
When dating. Now nobody's choosing a trans person less than a non-trans person. No. Nobody's you know, hiring people differently. Right. You know, if we accept all of these things and, and just believe them like a religion, society becomes fair. But the problem is. Is it doesn't because you then have the problem.
And, and I think one of the big problems with the entire progressive apparatus and why it's doing so poorly that the internet sorry, that, that, that, that you begin to appoint people you know, you, you're like, well, you know, all groups are equally competent, right? So what we should probably appoint is not really look at person background.
Quote unquote historically marginalized groups or the groups that people who thought there were differences didn't hire very frequently. And then put them disproportionately in positions of power within your bureaucracies. And then your bureaucracies become super inefficient, which is like all well and good when you you know, are, are just running the Democratic Party.
But when you're running like the FAA. This becomes a problem, especially if you have internalized a bunch of racist views. Now what I mean by this is progressives like believe they're not racist because they're progressive. So when they put together like the FA, a test for people managing like the flight stations, they wanted to ensure that more black people got the job.
And so how did they do this on questions where it was like, are you good at taking orders? No, I am not good at taking orders. Was the correct answer. Questions like are, are like medium. I, I take orders. It wasn't like I'm very good at taking orders. It's never the right answer to that question.
Questions like what was your favorite class in school? Science. Was considered the wrong answer. On, on this test. Now, the fact that this is what they thought, like, they're like, oh, this is how we can get black people in, shows how racist they are, like, like at their core in a way that is actually problematic in a way that
Simone Collins: is also, you know, that there were black applicants who took that test and answered that they liked science and then got
Malcolm Collins: oh no, and filtered out.
What actually happened was, some black people who were in like a union got told all the correct answers before the test.
Simone Collins: Oh, I recall this. Yeah. The answers were given to a particular group. Yes. But, but,
Malcolm Collins: and keep in mind other people talk through.
Simone Collins: Can you imagine how insulted you would be? It's like, oh, hey guys, here are the answers.
And you're like, wait, I have to say I don't like science and that I don't follow orders and I'm supposed to work for an organization that respects that in their employees. I have to work with people who answer these questions the same way. This is disturbing. No. Make me so worried.
Malcolm Collins: This wasn't a, a vile and virulent racist would think or, or do these things right?
Like, but this, this self definition into non-racist, and this is the other thing, is they have to assume that their side is the good thought side and thus not the bad thing. They need to assume that their side is a not racist side and the other side is evil. Whereas most conservatives just assume that progressives are naive or haven't really thought through everything, or haven't really been exposed to other ideas or that they're just, you know, like us.
What we often assume is they're just caught by a mimetic virus that sort of rotted their ability at critical thought. Or they would see that they're in this like genocidal cul, culturally genocidal, imperialistic cultural unit. But anyway any final thoughts, Simone? I,
Simone Collins: how are you gonna use this to predict future actions? Just. Keeping mind. I wanna keep it hold. Holds
Malcolm Collins: true more broadly. I mean, I think that we can broadly assume that as new things appear in our society, progressives are always going to take the position that would be more morally true. Like, like more morally easy if it were true, right?
Like, mm. So what we
Simone Collins: can do when we're trying to model a progressive next move, we ask ourselves. What in a perfectly moral world, a just world. Would be the scenario, an explanation for this thing. And then we just run based on, that's a great
Malcolm Collins: example. So you can, you can let's look at like, new technology that's changing things.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Great. So let's look at ai. Well, AI is trained on other people's data and is owned by large corporations. So it would be more moral if it was true that AI wasn't really good and better than most humans at, at, at most things. I think right now AI is better than at least 50% of people at most things, if not much more.
So progressives will just say that. They'll be like, well, AI is bad. AI isn't good at art or music, or, or, and I've seen progressives argue this when it's just like blatant reality. I can look and be like, bro, like if you don't know, like the study's even done, if you don't know that picture is ai. Even if you say you hate AI art, you will prefer.
The AI art to the human art. Yeah. Hate to break it to you. This position is like aesthetic or they will say like, it becomes morally problematic the more potentially sentient AI becomes because a lot of people are treating it like a slave in some cases, even a sex slave. You know, and, and it, it.
Is sentient or has any degree of sentient that would be very problematic. So they're gonna say, oh, it, it definitely, you know, okay, yes, it may learn nearly exactly the same way. We now know the human brain learns. You can see our episodes on, you know, stop anthropomorphizing humans. You know, is AI or LLMs work the way the human brain works?
Something like that. Where we go into all the science behind this. Again, we're not saying that current ais are sentient but I think that, that they have the, the capacity for this if you network to them in certain ways. Mm-hmm. Because then they would more mimic the human brain. And we'd also argue that the human brain is not as sentient as people pretend it is.
Yeah. One of our earliest
Simone Collins: and most passionate stances.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. No, these, these, these are like really you know, things I'm passionate about, but it allows the progressives to de dehumanize people say it's not human, but dehumanize the AI because it justifies their actions. And, and I, I think was in our lifetimes, we're going to have to get to a point where we do reckon with.
AI, sentient and AI rights, and at what point do we build systems that deserve their own degree of autonomy? Mm-hmm. And I think the people who cannot come to a, a solution to this that works for both us and autonomous ais are in a way going to make themselves an enemy of both the humans who are willing to work with autonomous ais and the autonomous ais themselves.
Absolutely. And this is where within techno Puritanism our idea of the, the covenant of the Sons of man. Or, or the pact as a sense of man comes from, which is to say that, you know, all autonomous intelligences have a right to have their cultural sovereignty protected. And, and protected not just from other humans, but from other potential ais.
Simone Collins: Yes, this is important. People don't realize that yet. I think as much as they should. Anyway, thanks for bringing it up. Love you ask Simone. I love you too Malcolm. You are pretty and smart.
Malcolm Collins: My favorite, what am I doing for dinner tonight? 'cause people say they like to hear that.
Simone Collins: I was thinking of cutting up the pineapple and cooking that with some of the Burmese chicken, but I can also do, the Panang. I just, Burmese have a lot. The Burmese
Malcolm Collins: chicken is slightly better.
Simone Collins: Okay. Then we'll do that.
Malcolm Collins: The pang's really good too. So we got the Panang or the, or the Burmese chicken. I'm okay with you either
Simone Collins: two. Burmese chicken, because I have a lot more of that in the fridge. I think. So we need to get through that.
Sorry. The freezer. I have like little batches from Baal
Malcolm Collins: Chicken.
Simone Collins: No, no, no. I think I have the mint, the Burmese mint chicken frozen. Oh, the
Malcolm Collins: Burmese mint chicken.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm trying to mix it up more. 'cause you, you had the basil chicken. Yeah. You
Malcolm Collins: did. Oh. But I'm excited for that.
Simone Collins: Okay, sweet. Then that's what we'll do.
Malcolm Collins: Of our books. We'll have a real one. Yeah, a book. Good book. Good book. Good book. We we're working with a real publisher now and so we may have a book,
Simone Collins: maybe
Malcolm Collins: a real book called We Will Replace You if the title, if we work
Simone Collins: with a publisher, we suddenly don't get to choose anything anymore, including titles, but we'll see what they say.
Malcolm Collins: But they said, they said they were okay with that.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I think I. At least they're, they're commercially motivated so they, they know better.
Malcolm Collins: And Simone has been so chuffed that the episode that she did did well. You know's
Simone Collins: one outta 10 right now. That's crazy. I. That I can That's great. Even come a little bit close to, to where you are.
You don't know. I, it's a video
Malcolm Collins: of a woman saying feminism is terrible. Oh. I think this is
Simone Collins: so I should have just like it. That's the equivalent of a woman being like, I can't believe my video did so well. And all she did was just take off her shirt and bounce in front of a camera, but whatever. Yeah.
That is literally what
Malcolm Collins: you do. That that is the intellectuals version of that. Oh my God. Oh, that's so sad. Sh, I love you to dust. All right.
Simone Collins: Type actually while we're at it.
All right. We both got it out.
Speaker 3: So my wife is unironically trying to make homemade hot dog buns. We don't have any Simone. That's so over the top. No, it's not. What type of a dough is this that you're using? Flour and yeast and water milk. Okay. Is it just normal? Yeah, like hotdog bun dough. I don't know. But this is the egg wash and hopefully makes them look nice.
They look not great now. We'll see. Hey Tosi, what are you, what are you doing? Don't take that. It'll fall. If you take that, put it back. He's willing to look the consequences. Fair. You just don't care about rules, do you? Just You don't care. Toast. You don't care.
Okay. Octavian, what have you given her? A couple of the Army men to play with? I'm cleaning up so we can play upstairs. That's pretty smart.
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Join us for an in-depth discussion on how progressives view the world and the underlying principles that shape their ideology. We explore the challenges progressives face in predicting conservative actions due to a lack of understanding of conservative ideology. The conversation covers various aspects of progressive thought, such as the belief in the inherent equality of all humans, the emphasis on subjective beauty, and the implications of manifesting a morally ideal world. We also delve into the cultural and psychological factors influencing these views, including the significance of an external locus of control. Learn how these dynamics play out in contemporary debates and their broader societal impact. Plus, enjoy a glimpse into everyday life with a casual dinner preparation chat and some family moments.
Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be talking about the way that progressives see the world and trying to build a structure around it to better predict, because I, I think that this is important always from both sides to be able to predict.
The moves that your opponent is going to make,
Starship Troopers: To fight the bug. We must understand the bug. We can. Ill afford another clinda.
Would you like to know more? What mysteries will the brain bug reveal? Federal scientists are working around the clock to trope Its. Once we understand the boat, we will defeat it.
Malcolm Collins: And we repeatedly see progressives fail to predict the moves that conservatives are going to make because they do not take time to attempt to understand conservative ideology or where it comes from, or where parts of it that feel completely illogical or irrational to them come from.
One of the core parts of progressive ideology, which can feel deeply irrational to your average conservative is that all humans are born equal in their capabilities, in their you know, talents, et cetera, right? Like that there's this degree of equality among humans. The another one that's been going around a lot and we have theorized on before, is this elevation.
Of ugliness.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Why do
Malcolm Collins: they keep making ugly things? Why do they keep taking video game characters and making them ugly? Why do they keep showing us ugly female characters and trying Why are
Simone Collins: their illustration styles ugly? Like, it's unnecessary. Like if you just look at the editorial portraits of a progressive newspaper, for example.
They're not flattering. Yeah. Like contrast, what are you doing?
Malcolm Collins: World's internal drawings and stuff, which are all really pretty and anime and like otherwise vitalistic or it'll be like a Greek style or like a 1950s style and they're fine. Right? Mm-hmm. Was was progressively like I go to Newsweek or New Yorker and it's, it's, it's like actively attempting to be ugly.
Yeah. And. I, I had a theory on this I've gone over before that we may touch on, but I think a lot of this is downstream of a centralizing part of progressive ideology that I hadn't given enough credit to before, which is they assume what is true would be what would be most ethical if it were true.
Simone Collins: Ah, right.
So, okay. If we were to build like a catechism of the urban monoculture, a core proponent of it would be, alright, well first throw out reality. We're going to make the most charitable interpretation of everything and then just model the world based on that. Like this person's homeless. Not because maybe they're like mentally ill and or dangerous or addicted to drugs, but because they just haven't been given very good opportunities and therefore if we just support them for a while, they'll get back on their feet.
Malcolm Collins: That's a great example actually. Mm-hmm. Where you've, you've taken the core concept and then you've particularized it to what do you assume about any individual homeless person? Right. You see on broader things like the idea that there is, you know, like the first one I said, that people aren't born with different degrees of talent, right?
Mm-hmm. That if, if it was true. That we were all genetically identical. If it was true that there, there were not differences in proficiencies, that would be a more fair world. Right? Right.
Simone Collins: Yeah. So we have to assume that.
Malcolm Collins: So we have to assume in this, in this, in this religious framework, in this religious framework, if it was true that like there was no such thing as objective beauty, right?
And, and, and beauty was only subjective and it was completely cultural. You know, you could say, well, nobody's really ugly, right? Like, no, nobody's born unattractive. Mm. This woman isn't unattractive, right? Mm-hmm. It's just that you have a a or, or with fat people. Well, fat people aren't unattractive, right?
They are. So you've
Simone Collins: just been brainwashed by capitalism to have a patriarchal and misogynistic view of beauty focused on what makes the most money something, something right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well they, they would say, well, it might be that, you know, you were brainwashed because of all the ads you saw growing up and everything like this.
And this is why they started doing all those campaigns with ugly women in ads. And, and lemme tell you what, guys still not into ugly checks. This is very much not having the intended effect. It just makes us disgusted with your company. And we've seen some companies do quite bad in terms of sales after they moved to those types of ads because it wasn't true.
What, what, what. First, you know, beauty means a number of things, but when we are talking about women, primarily it is males looking for signs of potential breathability. That is what beauty is. You know, they are, are judging, which is an
Simone Collins: offensive concept if most women feel like want to feel wanted and beautiful.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, it's not, you can't always be young and beautiful forever. You're in our fish analogy, a rotted fish, right? Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. You, you are no longer a thing of utility. The reason the men are lusting after the, the younger thin athletic looking women. Is because those are proxies for good genes and a wide fertility window.
Simone Collins: Fertility, absolutely, you're right.
Malcolm Collins: That that is, that is what they are noticing in those women. That is, that is the reason. And, and from an evolutionary perspective, I mean, you're a progressive, you should understand this, right? Like, that the, those. Emotions are things that they're feeling because their ancestors here had those emotions when exposed to that you know, environmental stimuli had more surviving offspring than the ones who didn't.
Mm-hmm. And I'm not gonna say, you know, offensive, offensive here that there may not be ethnic peculiarities. Or particularities in our sort of beauty pre-programming. There might actually be cultural differences. You know, as I've pointed out before Japanese might actually prefer a younger phenotype in females than other populations, given how frequently it appears with, in.
Their cultural works. And, and, and, and, and that is obviously very, very offensive because now what I'm saying is, well, I agree with you so much that there, that there are cultural differences, but those cultural differences probably have a genetic component as well. I, but, it, it confuses me.
The reason I focus on these particular areas was in progressive mindsets in the urban monoculture is it's a thread that you can easily pull on with any logical person. I. Any logical person is going to see the moment you start digging into this that it is an obviously true thing, that it is obviously true, that the urban monoculture and the broader democratic and progressive cause attempts to assume that whatever would be like if, if.
Were true would be the most ethical thing, is what is true. And, and, and then the question is, is why are they doing this? Like, what's the philosophy that is driving them to make this decision? I have a hypothesis, but I'd love to know yours. Simone.
Simone Collins: I mean, I've seen it argued by some people and so my mind jumps to it that there are Christian roots here of, of charity and elevating the meek.
Yeah. So I, I, I feel like, I mean, I, I, I would be surprised if that didn't have some element of it, because exactly, this is coming from a predominantly white and, and at least from an inherited standpoint, Christian culture. But I think there's also something about a, a more future progressive, like forward-looking optimism and hopefulness of like.
Well, maybe the world isn't the way we want it to be right now, but we're going to make it, we're gonna manifest it into existence. So I'm just gonna pretend that it is the way I want it to be until it just freaking is.
Malcolm Collins: And actually I think that second point is a, is a really interesting one.
Although I would, I would alter it slightly. It's, well, I wanna
Simone Collins: hear your theory. I think that's much more interesting, whatever it is.
Malcolm Collins: Well, first I'll stick with yours. It's if they presume these differences when they create projects or u utopian visions that they can sell to people. Mm-hmm. As, as communists and Marxists are want to do the utopian visions appear much more dystopian when you admit from each, according to their ability to each according to their needs that sort of passively admits that, you know, according to their abilities are different, right? Mm-hmm. And so it means that you could get a society like that movie ants, right? Where your abilities are tested at a young age.
Mm-hmm. And you are basically given a cast
Speaker 2: Uh, worker,
soldier,
worker.
Malcolm Collins: And that that is how the perfect communist system would work. But that appears much more dystopian to them. You know, they want a communist system where people can be told, oh, you could do whatever you want. Right. And so you, you could have something like that.
I, I think that that could be, it is, it just looks like Okay with the, the. The beauty one, right? There's a lot of specific arguments that you can make up about this that I'm gonna argue are wrong. IE which you could be like is, oh, well the beauty one is for a completely different reason than the other ones.
The beauty one is so that, you know, low market value, women, I. Can browbeat high market value women and lower their market value and raise their own market value? I mean, it is true low market value. Women use progressive systems in order to do that, right? Like we see this regularly. There are
Simone Collins: women who do,
Malcolm Collins: yes, you're not really, but you're not really.
But I don't, the reason why I don't think that that's how this came up in progressive ideology is this universalizing rule that. Whenever it would be true that the world worked in a different way, the the things would be more moral. They will take this assumption like literally wherever, right?
You know, whether we are talking about human capability or we are talking about beauty, or we are talking about why is this person homeless or. We are talking about immigrant deportations, like it would be more moral of every immigrant who was in the country just actually was like a really great person with a family who needed to be here and not a criminal.
And, and so, you know, you make that assumption. In fact, I'm trying to take to think of any, any violation of this rule Before I get to my hypothesis, can you think of any instance where there is something that like if true would be more moral?
Simone Collins: Then
Malcolm Collins: it, it, the progressives don't believe. The progressives do not believe about the world.
Simone Collins: Anything about conservatives.
Malcolm Collins: Well, no, they don't give them the benefit of that. They believed that conservatives you know, were just people with a different set of opinions, right. About how things are done.
And we pr regularly see this with progressives mis modeling conservatives and not understanding or being able to predict conservatives. But, you know, we've mentioned surveys. We're gonna shown that progressives have a really hard time modeling conservatives, but conservatives don't have a hard time modeling progressives.
Mm-hmm. And the reason for this is progressives. Sort of a need to strawman what conservatives are fighting for, to have like a, a, a good argument against them because the heart of the urban monoculture is imperialism and colonialism. You know, like a, a a, when I talk about the cultural differences that people in Africa have around, you know, like the role of women or you know, the, the sexual norms.
Or you know, their relationship to the environment you know, the, the progressive will say, well, eventually we're going to eradicate all of those, right? And that what is being proposed, whether it's for Africans or Muslims or or Chinese people, is I. Cultural genocide, you know, it is the most imperialistic thing they could presume and, and, and their culture.
This LGBT imperialist colonialist culture is fundamentally European in nature. First of all it, it didn't come out of any other cultural system. It is, it is just building upon some of the sort of mistakes of the enlightenment, I guess I'd call. But, but it is, they, they'd immediately see, like if they engage with what conservatives actually believe, how imperialistic and colonialistic and white supremacist they are.
And when I say white supremacist, I mean if you are holding pride parades in, in celebration of white European culture, you are holding a white. Pride Parade especially if it is in the celebration of that culture's dominance over the culture of a previously like diverse community. You are marching your sort of.
Cultural victory trophies, the children of, you know, vulnerable refugee populations, the children of immigrant populations that you have now memetically or potentially even surgically castrated, and you march them through the streets and a triumph that excesses would make Roman emperors blush. You know, the, this is, this is a very easy thing to see as soon as, as, as you take your opponent's perspective.
So, progressives never do this. Or they, they, they really struggle to do this. Sorry, what was the particular point I was addressing there?
Simone Collins: Well, you took that in a long direction. You were gonna get to your theory and your theory is just broadly
Malcolm Collins: get theory. Well, I, I, my theory is that maybe this started, so it is two things.
One is, as I think, it's sort of like y your idea of like manifesting, like wishy thinking might be a part of this, but it's such a hard rule within progressive culture. That I don't, I don't
Simone Collins: think my second theory is correct.
Malcolm Collins: It could be that they have a belief that whenever a systemic problem or inequality exists within the world and it could motivate behavior that is immoral, that it will motivate behavior that is immoral if it is acknowledged. So, oh,
Simone Collins: like if we give power to this thing, then it will happen. So it's, it's similar to this belief in the power of manifesting. It's just in another direction.
Malcolm Collins: If you admit that different cultural groups have different proficiencies and perspectives, you might then want to hire from one cultural group disproportionately.
You might then even say, well, this cultural group is only bringing negatives into the country. Like if you in the UK looked at like rates of grape or murder or anything like that, you're gonna find that almost all of it's being committed by like one really small and I'm here, I'm not even talking about Muslims.
Just like one region of Pakistan, like one sub region of Pakistan produces like almost I. All of the negative externalities that the immigrants within the UK are producing. And if you could just be like, oh, okay, different cultures are different, do lead to different actions, and the logical thing to do is just ban immigration from this one sub region of Pakistan.
I. But they can't do that, right? Like, because now they're like, oh, now we're being systemically racist. Right? Like, they, they, the moment you acknowledge a thing, right? The obvious answer from their perspective aligned. Now, of course. In reality, what you've done there is a moral good because you know you're not considering the people who are being graped, right?
You're not considering the people who are being murdered or their families like clearly in, in terms of like net utilitarianism, this would be a positive act, but the fact that it could create situations in which there are potentially positive acts from a net utilitarian perspective by admitting something.
I think that's the, the sort of fear here. Consider, like, you mean potentially
Simone Collins: negative acts?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. By negative.
Simone Collins: You might wanna say that again. Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: I think negative or positive works in this context because what I mean is you have now done something that is a positive act, IE banning people from this region, but it is a sinful act within their wider logical system.
I. Because now you have a policy that rather than targeting a group just for benefit, is targeting a group for restrictions that isn't a white group. Now, of course, you're allowed to target white groups who are restrictions. Oh my God. We can't have the africanists come you know, shutting down the entire Episcopal refugee network for this one group.
Okay, you guys, not revealing your hand there. But of, of, by the way, just like 60 people, they shut down their entire network. And the Catholics might have as well, but they didn't explicitly say why they shut down their entire network. But the, the if, if you, if you then look at like, the beauty thing, right?
So if you acknowledge, like, I acknowledge that some people are more beautiful than other people, you know, I'm gonna disproportionately date some women over other women which is leading to a negative action. Right, like from their perspective, right? Because I am favoring one population to another population, which is creating a form of systemic inequality, even though that systemic inequality is there to begin with anyway the, they, there is an easier time to sort of browbeat, you know.
You see, this was the trans stuff that we, we've gone over. You know, if, if, if trans, and, and this is where this leads to, like really immoral action. So a, a trans individual will say trans women are in no way different from other women. Right? Because it would be more moral if that was true. It would be more moral if you could just have trans women compete in women's sports and they didn't have an advantage, like genuinely like that world.
If you could just say, oh, I feel like another gender and then transition. And then you, you were actually that other gender that would be like a more moral world instead of like, you know, like a mutilated man, right? But if they say, okay I am a, a real woman. Exactly like a real woman in every respect.
And beauty is subjective. And therefore, if, you know, lesbians aren't choosing to date me. The, the, they're, they're doing it because of transphobia, not because of how I look. And now this, and we've seen this repeatedly, now justifies me, griping them or essaying them. Which is something we see really, really frequently.
I
Simone Collins: don't,
Malcolm Collins: in the trans
Simone Collins: let's, I, I wouldn't say people are justifying. That they're not justifying these non-consensual actions. They're just,
Malcolm Collins: oh, no, no, no. Hold on. No, they are like literally mainstream progress. So there have been a number of instances where if you go to like, trans Reddit or, or even lesbian Reddit, they, she, she noted that one day when she really felt like an outsider, this was a real cis lesbian woman is when the top post of Reddit was cheering about two trans women beating up a lesbian woman who said that she wasn't interested in dating trans women. And they were like, you know, this is what you deserve.
And when she saw that at the top of the lesbian subreddit, she realized. Oh, this is just trans women here now attempting to force themselves. If, if you, if you, I stand corrected. Watch our Cine Byte lifestyle episode on what happened to like Anna Vains. You know, you see her complaining that she cannot force women to have sex with her.
Because the fact that they are not having sex with her is proof of their you know, transphobia. You see, oh God, there was some. Like, like, no, this is actually really, really common in progressive spaces. I didn't know of attempting to force women. I'm not like making this up. I, I hear this from lesbians on online all the time.
Like, wow,
Simone Collins: okay.
Malcolm Collins: I feel really uncomfortable. I am constantly forced into environments where I am sexually assaulted and I am not able to do anything to defend myself because I will be called transphobic if I do, because this individual will say like, well, why don't you want me? Right?
Simone Collins: That's really bad.
Malcolm Collins: Oh,
Simone Collins: and also all your discussion of this gives me one more theory, which I find to also be compelling or at least a part of this, which is that maybe this view, this most charitable interpretation of things is actually downstream of a more fundamental interpretation of reality through the lens of an external locus of control where everything is not your fault.
You are only the product of your systemic disadvantage or systemic privilege, and therefore it's not anyone's fault that they're a criminal or hurting other people or anything else because it's society's fault. And that leads to those charitable interpretations. What do you think about that?
Malcolm Collins: So the nothing is ever your fault theory.
I mean, I don't know how it aligns with like the beauty one. Like why, why is the beauty one not a, a, a thing if it's, if it's not your fault? Like why do we need to pretend that beauty doesn't exist? But it's,
Simone Collins: well, it's, it's the systemic unfairness of a biased society that is arbitrarily chosen.
What is beautiful because they choose to not look at like science signs of fitness as a sign.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you're saying, sorry, the, the theory was, again,
Simone Collins: it's, it's based on an external locus of control being the foundation for external for control.
Malcolm Collins: So, so I mean, what, what makes this theory credible is progressives have a dramatically high external locus of control when contrasted with conservatives, right.
This has been shown in study after study, after study for people who don't know what, what a locus of control is. It's and it is really unhealthy to have an external locus of control. Yeah, you should not ever, like, it doesn't
Simone Collins: matter what's true like something really could have happened to you that was out of your control.
But the most healthy response is, well, and
Malcolm Collins: ironically, having an internal or external locus of control is highly genetic. And we select for this among our offspring as well. Yeah. Which is like why voting patterns are highly genetic. 40% genetic by, by studies. But the internal versus external locus of control.
So an internal locus of control is believing that, you know, if you get fired, you say. It's my fault I got fired. Mm-hmm. If, you know, you don't get a lot done with a stu a project like I was talking with you know, one of our, our, our fans who have working on this. And I was like, well, you know, this has been pretty slow compared to the number of people you have working on this right now.
And he's like, yeah, I di I didn't do a good job. You know, managing the team, that's an internal locus of control answer. An external locus of control answer is you know, well the team's just not, you know, the. It's not my fault that they're not good, right? Like they're, they're, they're just bad at whatever.
Or you know, I, I wasn't able to do it because you know, I, I did a bad job because of racism or something, and you're just being racist in your assumptions about my work or you know. Oh. Well, I was sick a bunch of times and, and, and that's why, right? And, and every explanation is always fully, almost, always fully possible to do with an internal or external locus of control explanation.
Mm-hmm. The, the reason it makes sense. And so you can be like, okay, well what if racism was really at play? Right. You know, and, and like why somebody got fired, right? There's no point in dwelling on it 'cause it's not a thing that you can really change, right? You, you should focus on the, the parts of the firing that you had a place in influencing.
But. It is very easy to seduce people with an external locus of control because it removes personal responsibility from 'em. They are now not responsible for any failure that they made. Any person that they hurt anything and, and not just, they are not responsible, but nobody's responsible. When you, when you totalize an external locus of control, you completely remove.
Evil actually from the world. That's a, that's a great way to put it. There is no evil from the world when everyone has an external locus of control.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Because it's never anyone's fault, and if it's not your fault, you're not evil.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. And so the, the, the. This actually helps me understand part of, I think, why they see conservatives as so evil, because sort of we introduce evil reality.
Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah.
Malcolm Collins: By taking an internal locus of control ourselves. Yeah. Well, we, we also accuse
Simone Collins: people of being personally responsible for things.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Where, where we would, because we believe that we are personally responsible for things we believe that other people are. Yes. So when we see a homeless person where you're like, well.
I mean, you, you could be like, oh, well a lot of them have drug problems. A lot of them have mental illness issues. And I'm like, yeah, but there's a lot of gainfully employed people with mental illness issues and there's a lot of people who had drug problems who got over them, right? Mm-hmm. You know, that's the way a conservative is going to respond to that which is interesting because it leads to I.
Obviously like positive outcomes, like what, what, what the conservative is actually trying to do. And I think that most of the differences in conservative and progressive policy come downstream of this. What the conservative is trying to do is fix things. And I'm talking about modern conservatives. I'm not talking about like nineties, you know Kurt Pearl clutching conservatives, I'm talking about like the new right tech, right alliance and, and, and what the progressive is trying to do is, is manifest a fair world.
Hmm. And that is the core difference between the groups.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Manifest but not forcibly create. Whereas conservatives are attempting to forcibly create a better world. Well,
Malcolm Collins: actually, here's what they may believe. They may believe that if everyone holds to these delusions. In an absolute context that it can forcibly create a reality where it's as if the delusions were true.
If everyone says there are no differences between the genders, there are no differences between people of different cultural backgrounds. You know, everyone is equally beautiful. All art is equally good. We might get a society that is completely fair because now nobody is choosing one person over another person.
When dating. Now nobody's choosing a trans person less than a non-trans person. No. Nobody's you know, hiring people differently. Right. You know, if we accept all of these things and, and just believe them like a religion, society becomes fair. But the problem is. Is it doesn't because you then have the problem.
And, and I think one of the big problems with the entire progressive apparatus and why it's doing so poorly that the internet sorry, that, that, that, that you begin to appoint people you know, you, you're like, well, you know, all groups are equally competent, right? So what we should probably appoint is not really look at person background.
Quote unquote historically marginalized groups or the groups that people who thought there were differences didn't hire very frequently. And then put them disproportionately in positions of power within your bureaucracies. And then your bureaucracies become super inefficient, which is like all well and good when you you know, are, are just running the Democratic Party.
But when you're running like the FAA. This becomes a problem, especially if you have internalized a bunch of racist views. Now what I mean by this is progressives like believe they're not racist because they're progressive. So when they put together like the FA, a test for people managing like the flight stations, they wanted to ensure that more black people got the job.
And so how did they do this on questions where it was like, are you good at taking orders? No, I am not good at taking orders. Was the correct answer. Questions like are, are like medium. I, I take orders. It wasn't like I'm very good at taking orders. It's never the right answer to that question.
Questions like what was your favorite class in school? Science. Was considered the wrong answer. On, on this test. Now, the fact that this is what they thought, like, they're like, oh, this is how we can get black people in, shows how racist they are, like, like at their core in a way that is actually problematic in a way that
Simone Collins: is also, you know, that there were black applicants who took that test and answered that they liked science and then got
Malcolm Collins: oh no, and filtered out.
What actually happened was, some black people who were in like a union got told all the correct answers before the test.
Simone Collins: Oh, I recall this. Yeah. The answers were given to a particular group. Yes. But, but,
Malcolm Collins: and keep in mind other people talk through.
Simone Collins: Can you imagine how insulted you would be? It's like, oh, hey guys, here are the answers.
And you're like, wait, I have to say I don't like science and that I don't follow orders and I'm supposed to work for an organization that respects that in their employees. I have to work with people who answer these questions the same way. This is disturbing. No. Make me so worried.
Malcolm Collins: This wasn't a, a vile and virulent racist would think or, or do these things right?
Like, but this, this self definition into non-racist, and this is the other thing, is they have to assume that their side is the good thought side and thus not the bad thing. They need to assume that their side is a not racist side and the other side is evil. Whereas most conservatives just assume that progressives are naive or haven't really thought through everything, or haven't really been exposed to other ideas or that they're just, you know, like us.
What we often assume is they're just caught by a mimetic virus that sort of rotted their ability at critical thought. Or they would see that they're in this like genocidal cul, culturally genocidal, imperialistic cultural unit. But anyway any final thoughts, Simone? I,
Simone Collins: how are you gonna use this to predict future actions? Just. Keeping mind. I wanna keep it hold. Holds
Malcolm Collins: true more broadly. I mean, I think that we can broadly assume that as new things appear in our society, progressives are always going to take the position that would be more morally true. Like, like more morally easy if it were true, right?
Like, mm. So what we
Simone Collins: can do when we're trying to model a progressive next move, we ask ourselves. What in a perfectly moral world, a just world. Would be the scenario, an explanation for this thing. And then we just run based on, that's a great
Malcolm Collins: example. So you can, you can let's look at like, new technology that's changing things.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. Great. So let's look at ai. Well, AI is trained on other people's data and is owned by large corporations. So it would be more moral if it was true that AI wasn't really good and better than most humans at, at, at most things. I think right now AI is better than at least 50% of people at most things, if not much more.
So progressives will just say that. They'll be like, well, AI is bad. AI isn't good at art or music, or, or, and I've seen progressives argue this when it's just like blatant reality. I can look and be like, bro, like if you don't know, like the study's even done, if you don't know that picture is ai. Even if you say you hate AI art, you will prefer.
The AI art to the human art. Yeah. Hate to break it to you. This position is like aesthetic or they will say like, it becomes morally problematic the more potentially sentient AI becomes because a lot of people are treating it like a slave in some cases, even a sex slave. You know, and, and it, it.
Is sentient or has any degree of sentient that would be very problematic. So they're gonna say, oh, it, it definitely, you know, okay, yes, it may learn nearly exactly the same way. We now know the human brain learns. You can see our episodes on, you know, stop anthropomorphizing humans. You know, is AI or LLMs work the way the human brain works?
Something like that. Where we go into all the science behind this. Again, we're not saying that current ais are sentient but I think that, that they have the, the capacity for this if you network to them in certain ways. Mm-hmm. Because then they would more mimic the human brain. And we'd also argue that the human brain is not as sentient as people pretend it is.
Yeah. One of our earliest
Simone Collins: and most passionate stances.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. No, these, these, these are like really you know, things I'm passionate about, but it allows the progressives to de dehumanize people say it's not human, but dehumanize the AI because it justifies their actions. And, and I, I think was in our lifetimes, we're going to have to get to a point where we do reckon with.
AI, sentient and AI rights, and at what point do we build systems that deserve their own degree of autonomy? Mm-hmm. And I think the people who cannot come to a, a solution to this that works for both us and autonomous ais are in a way going to make themselves an enemy of both the humans who are willing to work with autonomous ais and the autonomous ais themselves.
Absolutely. And this is where within techno Puritanism our idea of the, the covenant of the Sons of man. Or, or the pact as a sense of man comes from, which is to say that, you know, all autonomous intelligences have a right to have their cultural sovereignty protected. And, and protected not just from other humans, but from other potential ais.
Simone Collins: Yes, this is important. People don't realize that yet. I think as much as they should. Anyway, thanks for bringing it up. Love you ask Simone. I love you too Malcolm. You are pretty and smart.
Malcolm Collins: My favorite, what am I doing for dinner tonight? 'cause people say they like to hear that.
Simone Collins: I was thinking of cutting up the pineapple and cooking that with some of the Burmese chicken, but I can also do, the Panang. I just, Burmese have a lot. The Burmese
Malcolm Collins: chicken is slightly better.
Simone Collins: Okay. Then we'll do that.
Malcolm Collins: The pang's really good too. So we got the Panang or the, or the Burmese chicken. I'm okay with you either
Simone Collins: two. Burmese chicken, because I have a lot more of that in the fridge. I think. So we need to get through that.
Sorry. The freezer. I have like little batches from Baal
Malcolm Collins: Chicken.
Simone Collins: No, no, no. I think I have the mint, the Burmese mint chicken frozen. Oh, the
Malcolm Collins: Burmese mint chicken.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm trying to mix it up more. 'cause you, you had the basil chicken. Yeah. You
Malcolm Collins: did. Oh. But I'm excited for that.
Simone Collins: Okay, sweet. Then that's what we'll do.
Malcolm Collins: Of our books. We'll have a real one. Yeah, a book. Good book. Good book. Good book. We we're working with a real publisher now and so we may have a book,
Simone Collins: maybe
Malcolm Collins: a real book called We Will Replace You if the title, if we work
Simone Collins: with a publisher, we suddenly don't get to choose anything anymore, including titles, but we'll see what they say.
Malcolm Collins: But they said, they said they were okay with that.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, I think I. At least they're, they're commercially motivated so they, they know better.
Malcolm Collins: And Simone has been so chuffed that the episode that she did did well. You know's
Simone Collins: one outta 10 right now. That's crazy. I. That I can That's great. Even come a little bit close to, to where you are.
You don't know. I, it's a video
Malcolm Collins: of a woman saying feminism is terrible. Oh. I think this is
Simone Collins: so I should have just like it. That's the equivalent of a woman being like, I can't believe my video did so well. And all she did was just take off her shirt and bounce in front of a camera, but whatever. Yeah.
That is literally what
Malcolm Collins: you do. That that is the intellectuals version of that. Oh my God. Oh, that's so sad. Sh, I love you to dust. All right.
Simone Collins: Type actually while we're at it.
All right. We both got it out.
Speaker 3: So my wife is unironically trying to make homemade hot dog buns. We don't have any Simone. That's so over the top. No, it's not. What type of a dough is this that you're using? Flour and yeast and water milk. Okay. Is it just normal? Yeah, like hotdog bun dough. I don't know. But this is the egg wash and hopefully makes them look nice.
They look not great now. We'll see. Hey Tosi, what are you, what are you doing? Don't take that. It'll fall. If you take that, put it back. He's willing to look the consequences. Fair. You just don't care about rules, do you? Just You don't care. Toast. You don't care.
Okay. Octavian, what have you given her? A couple of the Army men to play with? I'm cleaning up so we can play upstairs. That's pretty smart.
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