Is There Too Much Wisdom?

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

i think there just isn't enough of that. Like, we're all too cynical. We offer concrete advice or optimistic platitudes. Or a yonow, eight levels of irony and jokes. And i think people are craving for this kind of thing. You know, there's good reason it's not done commonly,. because i think it's hard to do in a non, like, cringy, corny kind of way. A, and it also seems like it's offering some, offering wisdom is something that you have to be pretty clear about what you're doing., he says.

David and Tamler dive into David Foster Wallace’s celebrated and surprisingly earnest Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. How can we escape the prison and prism of our (literally) self-centered perspective? Can we choose to adjust our natural default settings, take a break from our running inner monologue, and pay attention to what’s in front of us right now? Is DFW appealing to Buddhist ideas or something more general that you can be found across all spiritual traditions?

Plus we ask the AI ethics program “Ask Delphi” some tough moral questions (spoiler alert: "just the tip" is "rude"), and almost get into a big fight about the potential of AI ethical robots (but we’re saving that argument for a future episode).