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Stoicism and Christianity: Trust the Logos!
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
Christian theology has a mostly dusty and forgotten belonging among the Pagan philosophy of the Greek east and the early Roman Empire. While Platonic, Hermetic and Gnostic thought all reinforced or butted heads with the Early Church, Stoic thought provides some of the most important vocabulary used in the Bible, particularly by John the Evangelist.
This viewpoint presents Jesus as not the incarnation of Logos, the rational order of the universe itself, but also as the Stoic ideal. The plan of Christ is to reunite man with God's order, in the same way that Stoics attempted to submit to divine Logos.
Against Method and For 'Pseudoscience'
Paul Feyerabend argued for 'Epistemological Anarchism': that in order to do truly good science, one can't rule out alternative methods, ad hoc hypotheses, mythology, religion and wishful thinking. Using the example of Galileo, he shows how science's greatest strides are made by deliberately being "unscientific" in the way that court scientists tend to think nowadays.
Epistemological Anarchism is a total rejection of the so-called "demarcation problem": the attempt by early 20th century philosophers to distinguish "science" from other realms. It overturns the assumptions of logical positivism and returns us to the conception of knowledge held by antiquity, the scholastics, the Renaissance and everyone else: science can't rule out its perceived opponents by technicality or it would have also undermined the very "pseudoscientists" that developed us our scientific conceptions of today.
Season 2 Begins: Live from the Wild!
The long-awaited second season begins.
What will it have in store? We'll find out soon. Be sure to consoooom previous episodes if you're new as some new episodes, while no doubt highly edifying on their own, will build off of previous episodes.
Remember that question-donations are read at the mid-episode break. You can donate at https://lukesmith.xyz/donate. I also welcome suggestions for subjects to cover.
The Flaws of Academic Statistics: the Null Ritual
Nearly every academic paper published since the 1960s has used statistics known to be faulty.
That sounds extreme, but it's actually not even controversial in the statistical literature.
In the 1950s, Ronald Fisher invented a statistical technique to solve the philosophical Problem of Induction. Neyman and Pearson developed a technique for statistical quality control in factories. Yet somehow, these two techniques were confused and merged into the Null Ritual of today, which is the neurotic pattern that every paper in many disciplines have to follow.
The Null Ritual is one of the clearest examples of academic consensus so far off the tracks that scholar treat the techniques in textbooks were religious devotion, rather than with critical awareness of what they are actually supposed to be. The end result? Nearly every field is rife with misuse of numbers, publication bias, misunderstandings and fake conclusions.
Human Evolution Revised: Timelines and Multiregionalism
The past ten years... even the past five years... even the past two and a half years have totally rewritten a lot of the story of human prehistory. In this episode we review a large lump of scientific papers, few having made it into popular culture or general knowledge so far, but all painting a picture of human prehistory that is much deeper and longer than the old theorists behind recent Out-of-Africa migration theories.
We talk about human settlements in unexpected places and unexpected times, hidden genetic lineages and Neanderthal seafaring, language and construction. Too often do the "Well, actually!" crowd focus on listening to partial evidence instead of using their head, and we see how this has harmed the theories in the field of paleo-history. Soon, we'll move the microscope closer to home and talk about what early humans might've been up to all that time..
When You're Too Rational to Be Rational!
Are humans rational? What would that even mean? Does it mean we follow the laws of formal logic, or does it mean we only care about getting a positive end result? Some modern psychologists, often in the vein of the Heuristics and Biases Program (Ã la Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky) often implicitly assume that these are the same thing, that humans are often gravely miscalibrated in our sense of reason. We are logically broken. Some, proponents of Libertarian Paternalism, propose that this illogicalness should be actively mitigated by governmental policy and Nudging (see Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book Nudge).
But another line of thought, Ecological Rationality holds that what seems "irrational" about human behavior is only an artifact of when we fail to look at our decision-making in improper circumstances in the laboratory. What aspects of our psychology seem irrational are often mechanisms based in the wisdom of real-life risk, and far more trust-worthy than the recommendations of psychologists and behavioral economists. Sometimes even, our irrational mind is much smarter than we are.
The Agricultural Revolution Has Been A Disaster for the Human Race.
Whig History is one hell of a drug. In our cocoon of electronic toys and United Nations statistics about how great the world is, it might sound absurd to say that by many of the most crucial metrics, human life has become measurably worse since man adopted agriculture. Our bodies, our metabolism, our social structure, our psychology and our deepest desires are built for paleolithic life, but now that that life has been nearly entirely abandoned, we find ourselves thoroughly unfit for the marvelous technology that defines our new environment, and environment which is changing far faster than we can keep up.
Even worse, the comfort of modernity is putting us in potentially disastrous evolutionary circumstances. We are accumulating harmful mutations, while at the same time, becoming more mentally cloistered. In this episode we look at Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending's The 10,000 Year Explosion, Spencer Wells' Pandora's Seed and Michael Woodley's work on mutational load.
Democracy: Rule of the NPCs
Does anyone even pretend to believe in democracy anymore?
As the veil of perfection of liberal democracy is now generally acknowledged to be in tatters, it's about time for normal people to start looking mechanically at what democracy really is.
In this episode, we explore the structure of a party system in democracy, Bryan Caplan (in Myth of the Rational Voter) argues that people are not randomly stupid, but systematically stupid, James Burham (in The Machiavellians: The Defenders of Freedom) tells us about Dante and the real meaning of political ideology, and SJWs absolutely annihilate Ben Shapiro and bulldoze his house down.
Albion's Seed & an Ethnic History of America
The Eternal Anglo comes in many shapes and sizes! And America is made not of a homogeneous group of Britons, but at least four systematically different ethnic groups varying by social values, dialect, dress, gender relationships, religion, worldview. These ethnic groups create the regionalisms of today's America and also have affected superstrate populations after them.
This episode surveys David Hackett Fischer's monumental work Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. We talk not only about these four ethnic groups, which will sound very familiar, but also on a history of the United States, particularly its most significant political battles, interpreted through this ethnic lens.
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
Joseph Schumpeter, self-described "greatest lover in all Vienna" penned the book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, which not only still serves as an insightful rejoinder to mainstream economics, but also might be Patient 0 for the ironic Black Pill.
Schumpeter dismisses the autistic formalism of perfect competition and market modeling and casts the economy as a battle not for a stagnant market positions, but a gradual, evolving system whose main goal is the development of new means of production and the overthrowing of their inefficient predecessors, a process he termed Creative Destruction. Monopolistic competition is the natural state of the market, and desirable at that. He also prophecies the end of capitalism as we know it, but also the rise of a socialist government which might look a little more familiar than we anticipate...
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Inspired by the vastly different mindset and cultural and religious structure of ancient civilizations, the psychologist Julian Jaynes put for the radical notion of the Bicameral Mind, which posits that ancient people, indeed all people in their more natural environment are not actually conscious.
Consciousness, to Jaynes, was a mental habit that gradually developed in the period after the Bronze Age collapse, around 1200 BC. Before that, the two hemispheres of the brain were separate, and mental deliberation appeared to people as divine inspiration.
As utterly mad as this theory first sounds, the cultural, psychological, archaeological and linguistic evidence for it is grounds for more than a pause. Join us for a journey through the Iliad, Mesopotamia, the oldest prophets of the Bible and more on the first episode of Not Related!.
An Introduction to Not Related! and to Luke Smith
Luke introduces his self and the podcast and the principles and reasons behind it.