Needle in the Hay Sense-Making - Drs. M.S. DeLay & A.V. Bendebury DSPod #267

Listen on the go at all podcast locations: anchor.fm/demystifysci Material solutions to quantum spookiness: youtube.com/@MaterialAtomics Short films @DemystifySciInvestigates: www.youtube.com/channel/UCUfzVdgNu2xLThgM2qQZmSQ

To my two favourite bohemian scientific thinkers – You have such fabulous guests, but the episodes with just the two of you are totally awesome! xx

I really enjoyed this conversation. You illustrated exactly why I support the project. I think Shiloh really nailed it when he talked about anarchism as an attitude to other systems rather than an alternative to them. This is exactly how I think we should approach all ideas, be they scientific, political, philosophical or whatever. I also had a thought as you were talking about people who want to conserve their attention and fly into panic when they meet outrageous and challenging ideas. We think that the society of ideas is a democracy where merit will select the best ones but it’s not like that at all. It’s more like an oligarchy where the more belief there is in an idea, the more it persists irrespective of its merit. I think we can see this in areas of science and technology where there is always promise but the result never comes. Of course, it’s possible that I’m just impatient but both fusion and human-level artificial intelligence are always just a few years away. Or are they maybe failing to come through because they are based on bad assumptions: say, that the Sun is a ball of gas and that the human brain is like a computer? Other ideas strike me as bankrupt ideologies that survive because they seem to be right and are just too big to fail. Yet they keep failing to deliver the goods. I put Big Bang cosmology, relativity (as we understand it), quantum mechanics (as we understand it) and vaccine theory into that bag. It’s why I think that we can’t afford to leave it to authorities to give us our facts. Just as eternal vigilance is the cost of liberty, eternal curiosity is the price of truth.

Credo: 1. Respect the phenomena. 2. Check and recheck the calibration of your instruments. 3. Keep in mind illusion and illogic can befall you when you least expect it. 4. Invite authorities to clarify their assumptions and defend the logic of their assertions and conclusions.

I've always assumed needles in the haystack would not require big audiences. Conversely, big players are more cautious about talking about their needle ideas. It's a pickle, really.

So when I ask a stranger, "Excuse me can I use your phone I need to call my parents?," they look almost insulted. "Where's your phone, you don't have minutes?" They say. Than I say, "No the bill was exceptionally high and I just don't use it anymore." Not all turn me down though....But most do.

I would highly recommend Dr Joseph P. Farrell, he is so broadly well read, an incredible researcher, author, former professor and well outside of the box thinker. I am confident he would love to talk with you guys.

I'm like halfway through this episode, which is super good, and I'm going to immediately read that book.

I think you are both right on the "redditor archetype" conversation. Most people don't care about much, but when something peaks their interest and they have a quick look at the results Google gives them, that becomes gospel, and they instantly become the redditor archetype. It frustrates me to no end that there aren't that many people around to have nuanced conversations with.

I always thought Lex's quick rise was rather strange also. I absolutely love Lex and I'm glad he got to where he did but it was weird. I mean he was at MIT though. He had lots of smart buddies who probably had lots of insights into web stuff, podcast stats stuff, analytics stuff, who knows. Also the cool Russian KGB guy in a suit was probably really appealing to a lot of older JRE James Bond fan types.

you two are great.

Everyone should read Feyerabend, good discussion

43:00 I didn't know this, I'm always trying to access paywalled articles, that'll be great.

I no longer use a cell phone so I'm watching you guys on a computer when I'm home. When I ask someone if I can use their phone in public, you should see their face. But I'm sure most of your audience will listen to you guys on spotify or player.... I recommend you.

When you discover a wrong axiom it shouldn't invalidate ALL the previously validated knowledge downstream from that, because that would imply "everyone who came before me is an idiot" (or evil, in the case of conspiracies). Valuable new insights shake up a particular branch, while also helping to solve seemingly unrelated problems in other fields. It's almost never "everything we've been thinking is wrong, and this is how we can finally build a perpetual motion machine to have unlimited energy and live forever". And usually those claims about the utility of new knowledge through its application can be validated by asking: can you build the thing and show me how I can use it? Overall, fascinating conversation! 👏

Found a YouTube channel that may explain perspectives or what I called "projection" when walking about orbits. The channel is See the Pattern, it aired 29 July with the title "Revealing Hidden Stellar Movements: Cosmic Order or Coincidence? The topic was about stellar motion but could apply equally to the orbits of planets

The dominance of shows like Fridman's probably comes down to basic network effects and power laws. If Lex didn't exist then somebody else's podcast would take the equivalent place in the network because the podcast audience is a particular size and listeners only have so many resources available to invest in finding the perfect podcast for them. Social effects (ie being able to engage in discussions with others about a podcast, and the signalling effects of claiming to listen to a particular podcast) probably account for even more dominance of superstar shows.

It is better to know that one is wrong rather than believing that one is right while being wrong ... Knowing wrongness drives self-correction with known heuristics. Knowing rightness drives dissonances with unknown rightness without known heuristics ... best, to jump directly into the unknown rightness with unknown heuristics and let aside the dissonance from incomplete known rightness ... ( Coupling uncertainty with Creativity ) and knowing that being wrong leads to self-correction ... moving into the event horizons of the unknown seems to be funnier than regurgitating the memories of the known ...

37:50 Wow yeah, I hope this happens.

Demystify ties more threads to more needles than any podcast i know.