We Are Not Saved

Social media is one of the biggest battlefields in the current divisive cultural war, but how much does social media itself contribute to the divisiveness? By creating an entirely new framework for interacting which allows people to find like minded individuals easier than ever before social media has created an environment more prone to anger and rage than any environment humanity has had to deal with before.

In this episode I discuss the idea of the Overton Window. The sorts of things you can propose without people thinking you're crazy. In particular I focus on how it moves, but always to the left, and how it's speeding up and how that might relate to any potential for ideological conflict. This episode is a vague continuation of the previous episode.

It has been remarked that one of the strangest features of today is that every side thinks they're losing. Immigrants are convinced they're all about to be deported. Christians feel under attack by an increasingly secular society. Democrats and liberals are dismayed by the election of Trump and Republicans and Conservatives are alarmed by the increasing strident social justice activism. But we examine which side is really losing and what that tells about how the current political climate.

For episode 50 (something I neglected to mention while actually recording the podcast) we return to look at the point of the podcast, why it's sometimes important to be pessimist and why rationalists dismiss religion to both their peril and detriment.

If you were to look at the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, as John Derbyshire did in 2006 you would find 152 countries listed. How many of them survived intact to the present day, meaning no change in government, no civil wars or revolutions, no significant loss of territory and no foreign occupation. We examine that question, and the answer might surprise you.

In this podcast I introduce the concept of supernormal stimuli. Originally uncovered when scientists discovered that some birds prefer artificial eggs as large as they are to their own eggs. From there I examine whether pornography might be supernormal stimuli, and whether that's harmful, and especially whether it will get worse.

One of the major things coming down the pike is job automation. Robots and AI are getting better and better at doing jobs that used to be only available for humans. In this podcast I examine that phenomenon and the effect it has on people, specifically their need to feel valuable.

One of my fundamental positions is that we are in a race between societal collapse on one hand and a technological singularity on the other. But there are some who think it will be neither and others who paradoxically expect both. This podcast examines the impossibility of those two options.

What is civilization? And how do we preserve it? In this episode I connect the idea of time preference to civilization and point out how we are becoming more and more short term in our desires and actions. All civilizations collapse eventually the question is how close are we to collapse and is there anything which can be done to delay it.

I examine whether we should still be worried about overpopulation. I also look at the phenomenon of falling birth rates and what it says about the societies that experience falling fertility. Also what the movie Tommy Boy has to say about the whole thing.