We Are Not Saved

Someone once said that "All you need is love." This episode disagrees with that. I feel that love is overemphasized and that particularly from a Christian perspective, we should be more concerned with repentance. 

It's an article of faith that there is no safe levels of radiation. Recently I read a paper which suggested otherwise, and pointed out that survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a greater life expectancy than the Japanese average. But these days, it's not merely with radiation where people feel that there is no safe level. Current opinion holds that there is no safe level of danger, comfort, shame or suffering. In this episode I examine whether that is in fact the case. And provide evidence that it's exactly the opposite that low levels of harm are not only safe, but actually beneficial.

It's easy to put together an analogy, tie it to some recent anecdotes and call it wisdom, but is it? That's the question I address in this episode. After examining it more generally I examine the specific example of chemotherapy as a metaphor for modern discourse. We may in fact have certain societal cancers which need to be rooted out, but just as chemotherapy kills healthy cells along with bad cells, is it possible that we are being too aggressive with our metaphorical chemo?

In my first reposting, I go back and revisit my review of the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger. In particular an examination of how stress and struggle can improve mental health, and how by removing both struggle and community modern society creates a situation where psychological problems, particularly in the military, become more acute.

The hygiene hypothesis holds that by missing out on the normal infections of youth leaves the immune system with nothing to do, and as a consequence later in life it over-reacts to normally benign things like peanuts. What if the same thing is happening psychologically? What if an absence of certain forms of trauma and stress when young lead people to overreact to things later in life which aren't particularly traumatic. In discussing this I bring in the writing of Brene Brown who points out that we're the most addicted, medicated, in debt, overweight adult cohort in history. Given how objectively untraumatic modern life is, why would that be?

I open by discussing, in great detail, a car accident my son was recently in. (Don't worry, he's okay.) I noticed that the story the other driver was telling had some inconsistencies. I'm suspicious because he has an incentive to lie, and from there I turn to a discussion of incentives more generally and bring in the recent hate crime hoax involving Jussie Smollett. And ask the more general question, are we focused too much on what people should do, and not enough what they might do, particularly if the incentive to do so is great enough.

There's been more and more attention paid to the size and power of tech giants, and whether that size and power means they should be treated as a monopoly and subject to anti-trust scrutiny. In this episode I combine that discussion with the recent efforts of a Gizmodo reporter to cut these tech giants (Specifically Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft) out of her life. She claimed it was "impossible" to cut out Amazon. Does this revelation strengthen the case of those who claim Amazon is a monopoly. One would think it would but how many people truly realize how ubiquitous Amazon and the rest truly are?

The challenges we face today are vastly different than challenges we faced historically. Accordingly the tools we have built to deal with historical challenges may not be up to dealing with more modern ones. And of course this all assumes that the tools are in good repair and still working the way they should, but anyone looking at the present scene might be forced to conclude that they are not. That political conventions and compromise are things of the past, perhaps right at the point where we need them the most.

I've gone a long time since I started this podcast and it may be difficult to know where to start at this point so I decided to take a break to reground things. If you've been listening for a long time most of this will be familiar to you, but if somehow you just stumbled on things, this is a great place to start.

Technology allows us to optimize around very narrow criteria. If we turn that optimization ability towards changing society. We can end up emphasizing one potential future, based around a narrow set of values over other potential futures with other values. Conceivably abandoning many long standing values regardless of how useful they are. This is analogous to the transit systems of many large cities, in particular the Bay Area, where all the lines stay together for awhile and it doesn't matter what value you emphasize, but introduce technology and suddenly optimizing one value over another results in radically different results.