We Are Not Saved

If your worried about climate change you should be a huge advocate of nuclear power, but that's actually not the case. Here we look at the case for nuclear power, and why it hasn't gained more traction, particularly in light of people's worries about global warming.

Steven Pinker makes a powerful case for progress and enlightenment, but when you look closer you see that he oversimplifies the potential challenges we might face, and calls any caution pessimism. I understand things are going well right now, historically, but that's no reason to ignore the potential risks...

The book Who We Are and How We Got Here, has up-ended some of the more recent thinking on how the Indo-Europeans spread. Since this was a subject I'd covered previously I decided to revisit it in this episode. In particular to see how it relates to what's happening with science and in a larger sense whether our ability to uncover truth is outstripping our ability to generate errors. My prognosis is that there is cause for alarm on this front.

In my ongoing series on the Mormon Transhumanist Association, I review and comment on the conference I just attended and presented at. I speak of similarities in our view points, but most of all differences. Like Buddha and Hume we appear to have arrived at the same philosophy, but from that derived entirely different conclusions as to how to act.

If dealing with AI Risk allows us to arrive at something very similar to the LDS Plan of Salvation, what lessons can we draw from that with respect to how we should behave in this life? In this episode we dig deeper into that question as a follow-up to a presentation I gave at the annual conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.

Have you actually browsed the official report of Rotherham? It's pretty appalling stuff. I didn't think I was going to, but this week I ended up returning to a discussion of Rotherham, Telford, etc. I answer some of the objections which were raised in the previous post, and talk about the role of culture in the whole affair.

1000's of girls, some as young 11, raped as part of large child sex abuse rings. Why haven't you heard about it? That's the question we ask in this episode...

This episode is largely a review of The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel. In the book Scheidel asserts that the only thing which has ever reduced inequality is some form of violence, either modern war, extreme revolutions, state collapse or pandemics. He backs up this assertion with loads of historical data, leading to the depressing conclusion that we either have to put up with periodic large scale violence or extreme inequality. This podcast is a discussion of that bleak conclusion.

Continuing with the subject I was covering in the last episode I go into more depth on the increase in transgender and gender non-conforming identity. I offer one final theory and then move on to a discussion of suicide risk, and other potential harm.

Last episode I talked about trends, and in this episode I want to talk about a specific trend, the increase in people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. I offer six theories for why it might be increasing.