Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm Collins

Written by an evil AI for SEO purposes: Title: Unraveling Free Will: A Discussion on Determinism, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness Description: In this engaging and thought-provoking video, join hosts Malcolm and Simone as they delve deep into the philosophical debate around determinism, free will, and the role of quantum physics in our understanding of the universe. Stemming from their Calvinist backgrounds, they present a unique secular viewpoint on determinism and its compatibility with free will. They explore the concept of free will as an emergent property of reality, interacting with a mechanistic universe. This enlightening discussion will challenge you to reconsider your understanding of free will and determinism. Whether you are a scholar of philosophy, quantum physics enthusiast, or someone who is simply curious about the universe and our place in it, this video promises a riveting exploration of these complex concepts. Don't miss this insightful exploration into the nature of free will, the determinism of the universe, and the role of quantum events in shaping our reality.Translation:So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is variability added by, for example, quantum events or, or, or by timeline branching, right? That means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the, the problems created by a deterministic universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.Whereas the problem that it's created by a deterministic universe for free will is that regardless of your free will, the future will always only end in one way. This is what people who are against, you know, who think these two things they're in a battle will believe. The problem is, is it doesn't actually fix the problem because the only way that free will like meaningfully exist, like the the problem, the in compatibility with free will and determinism.The reason it comes into play is because your free will isn't shaping the future. If the future is shaped by random quantum events that have nothing to do with your free will, but are probabilistic occurrences in the fabric of reality, then your free will has all of the same problems it has in a completely deterministic universe.  Without quantum events, what needs to happen for free will and the way that that people who believe that free will is incompatible with determinism want free will to work. The way it has to work is free will. The events of sort of your consciousness or your sentience have to be able to change the course of the universe.They have to be able to essentially break the laws of physics, and I personally don't understand why this would be a comforting thought. So from our perspective, the things I am thinking. Are completely determined by the things that have happened to me before and who I am, sort of my existing state to want free will to matter within this context.Either who I am needs to not matter, or the things that have happened to me before need to not matter. Basically, you need sort of a random number generator within every person's consciousness in a way that actually removes autonomy from them. Yeah, because then it's not you. If it's not, if it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions, what?What kind of free will is that?    📍  Hello, Malcolm. Hello Simone. What are we talking about today? Our mechanistic universe. Our deterministic worldview. Yes. So we had mentioned this in a previous podcast as something that's really important to how we see the world, different. Cultures can sometimes see things in different ways, and sometimes those ways they see things can continue even after the culture.Secularizes. This is one thing with us. We both come from Calvinist backgrounds and one of the most famous things about the Calvinist tradition is that it has a deterministic view of the universe that it believes the future is already written, and we as secular individuals still believe thisnow, let me explain what I mean here. This doesn't mean that we don't live in a universe with splitting timelines. We might live in a universe with splitting timelines. However, those timelines don't split based on any aspect of our free will. They split based on quantum events. Our free will is an emergent property of reality. But it also interacts with reality. And this is a really interesting thing about determinism that I think a lot of people miss, is they think that a belief in determinism is antagonistic to a belief in free will when I think it really isn't. So I'll explain what I mean by this, starting from a religious perspective.So when I look at the decisions that I made yesterday from where I stand today on the timeline, all of those decisions are set. They only could have happened in one way. However, yesterday when I made those decisions, I had free will in every one of those decisions I was making. Yet God exists outside of the timeline.He is looking at the timeline as a third party observer, able to see the whole timeline at once. His perspective of any point in time is the same as my perspective of any point that happened in the past. And as such, he does not interfere with free will, even though the timeline might be preset.And this is where the splitting universes becomes relevant to a deterministic perspective. So what we mean by determinism from a secular perspective is that our free will is an emergent property of the mechanistic nature of reality. What we mean by determinism is that fundamentally matter and reality is basically a mathematical equation.So there is a mathematical equation that governs how the universe interacts. And it may not be exactly an equation, it may be a set of rules, but it determines how every individual molecule will move based on where that molecule was before. Our free will is an emergent property. Of the movements of these fundamental forces of reality, and yet that emergent property can interact with the future, but not in a way that breaks these physical laws.So while we may live in a branching timeline, our free will has nothing to do with how that timeline branches that timeline is branching based on, if not random, Physically structured and mathematically predetermined quantum events. As such, we have free will. My free will does determine the actions I take in the future.However, that free will also completely exists within the mathematical construct of our reality. So what this means is that if someone had the capacity mentally or with some kind of crazy super computer, one could technically probably predict every small action. That would take place in a universe. Of course, they would be like quantum branching and I don't really know how that would play out, but you could still technically know everything that will happen because things will fall in place like clockwork.Right? Where quantum branching added variability to potential future events. Free will played no role in that variability, right? And thus, it is not relevant to the question of whether you can have free will in a deterministic universe. Hmm. Do you understand what I mean when I say that? Can you maybe word that in a different way?I do not understand what you're saying. Okay.  So a person may say, well, because the future isn't exactly determined, because there is variability added by, for example, quantum events or, or, or by timeline branching, right? That means that we don't live in a deterministic universe, and thus the, the problems created by a deterministic universe as it relates to free will don't exist within our reality.Whereas the problem that it's created by a deterministic universe for free will is that regardless of your free will, the future will always only end in one way. This is what people who are against, you know, who think these two things they're in a battle will believe. The problem is, is it doesn't actually fix the problem because the only way that free will like meaningfully exist, like the the problem, the in compatibility with free will and determinism.The reason it comes into play is because your free will isn't shaping the future. If the future is shaped by random quantum events that have nothing to do with your free will, but are probabilistic occurrences in the fabric of reality, then your free will has all of the same problems it has in a completely deterministic universe. Without quantum events, what needs to happen for free will and the way that that people who believe that free will is incompatible with determinism want free will to work. The way it has to work is free will. The events of sort of your consciousness or your sentience have to be able to change the course of the universe.They have to be able to essentially break the laws of physics, and I personally don't understand why this would be a comforting thought. So from our perspective, the things I am thinking. Are completely determined by the things that have happened to me before and who I am, sort of my existing state to want free will to matter within this context.Either who I am needs to not matter, or the things that have happened to me before need to not matter. Basically, you need sort of a random number generator within every person's consciousness in a way that actually removes autonomy from them. Yeah, because then it's not you. If it's not, if it's neither your nature nor your nurture that causes your actions, what?What kind of free will is that?  Yeah, it's a meaningless, free will to us. A world in which a person has this sort of random number generator, free will, I guess I'd call it, is a world in which you have less meaningful free will. So from our cultural perspective, you have more meaningful. Free will in a deterministic universe, then you have in a non-deterministic universe, and, and again, we have to group deterministic universes into two categories.A deterministic universe in which you can totally predict the future, or a deterministic universe in which there is some level of probability, but that probability isn't influenced by free wills.Now, what are your thoughts on this, Simone? How does this affect how you see the world? One thing that I encountered the first time I heard this kind of argument was that it would be dangerous for people to spread this information because it would give people the impression that they weren't responsible for every action they took.And at first I just accepted that at face value, and now I think it's a fairly ridiculous assertion because no, it's, it's really dumb per this worldview. You know, every, every single action that you take is 100% your responsibility. It is a product of your nature and your nurture. And it also 100% affects how the world works.You know, it's, it's like if you're looking at a giant Rube Goldberg machine and you see like that there's this, this. Portion at which a ball bounces off of something bouncy. Maybe you're that bouncy thing in this universe, but that's still something that affects how the universe works. It's still something that matters.And so I, I think that's, that's important. And of course, every experience you have, every belief you hold is going to affect these outcomes. That is the, the, the, the. The nurture element of what causes you to do what you do. So these things, your beliefs, your viewpoints, really, really matter. And I think what's interesting about our mechanistic view of the universe and how it also dovetails with Calvinism and other like sort of more theistic Mechanistic views of the universe is that it really, to me has kind of the opposite effect.Instead of making me think, oh, none of my choices matter, I'm not responsible for anything I ever do. I have this feeling like, Oh my gosh, I could really matter. I'm really extra super responsible for what I do because everything that I believe will affect how I act. And so my beliefs really, really matter.And you see a lot in Calvinist tradition or history. You know, you see the like, Early colonial pilgrims writing like, oh gosh, like, am I saved? Am I a really important person or no? No. I'm like, I'm wretched. I'm horrible. I'm damned. I'm, I'm a terrible person. And they, they're really thinking a lot about their position in the mechanistic universe, am I going to be something that matters?Am I not going to be something that matters? And I think they're also acutely aware of. How their beliefs affect these things, right? Like if, if you have the hubris to believe that you are that you are redeemed, you are saved, maybe that means that you're depraved and that you're not saved because what kind of holy person would believe that they're superior and actually good, right?But then once you believe that you're damned and you're super dedicated to try to redeem yourself. Then you start to see, you know, there's this weird oscillation between, well, this is something which I think is really important in, in terms of radical self responsibility, is when you see the world this way, it means you're, you're, you're responsible even for your own thoughts.Yes. You know, if you have a thought, and this is something you saw in Colonial Calvinists and stuff like that, which would make you a bad person, then you had to think. Oh my God. This thought may mean that I actually am one of the people who is predestined to go to hell. Mm-hmm. That I actually was created as like this joke, this, this foil to the saved.Mm-hmm. Um, And so you are responsible for everything that goes through your head. Everything. That's the component of who you are. Yeah. It's like hyper agency. It's super hyper agency. Hyper, yeah. And, and this is what, when we talk about hyper agency, you know, I think a, a way to explain this to somebody who might have trouble.You know, ganking, I guess is the word they use these days, what you're saying. Um, Oh, grokking, grokking, grok. That's what the kids say, right? I don't ganking fancy new words. So suppose you have a murderer, right? And this murderer says, Oh, I'm not really fully responsible for murdering these people because I was abused as a kid.Right? That is a level of not taking responsibility. That is possible even in a universe where people believe in free will because they still believe that some things influence an individual when you take full ownership over the fact that yes, you are a creation of the things that happened to you in life.And you get to, to some extent, choose, and you are destined to either choose or not choose to overcome those things and take total self ownership. You don't get to ever say, I don't have responsibility for this decision, or I don't have responsibility for this emotion. I'm allowing myself to feel because it's who I am as a human, or because my parents did X, Y, or z.No, every, everything you have is part of who you are and so what you're searching for constantly within yourself, and you're trying to prevent. Is that you are the type of pre-programmed person who does evil things, who succumbs to the flow of society rather than trying to determine what's good and what's bad and going down the good path no matter what you have to face, going down that path.And, and I love that level of radical self determinism that you never can say, it's not my fault. Because something that happened to me before, because I was abused, because of something in society, because of, because all of us are complete constructs of the things that have happened to us in the past. And the way we judge ourselves is whether or not all of those things created somebody who tries to overcome that and take responsibility for themselves or not. And I really love the way you put that sort of, what is it, radical agency. Yeah. I'm trying to think about how, because I don't think either of us held this mechanistic view of the universe when even we first met.I'm trying to think. Yeah, I think a little bit, but not as strongly as I do now because it was always sort of a weird outlier thing I thought before, and then I started talking with Simone about it and it became part of our like regular daily conversation. Part of the way we held ourselves to account for everything.Uh, you know, there's, there's never an excuse, there's never an excuse. You either took, made the decision that was optimal, given your moral framework, or you didn't, and you either developed immortal framework as dissociated from the influences of society as possible and, and tried to go to a first principles approach as much as possible while still being true to sort of your traditional view of the world.You know, understanding that you are a product of those traditions, but trying to optimize them or you don't. And I, uh, I, I think what it was is I held this view before, but I didn't live by it. When I met you, you really lived by it in a way that sort of almost shamed, uh, the portion of my brain that said, no one can really handle this level of responsibility.And through that, shining example, you proved to me who I could be and I started moving along that path, and I think a way that sort of created a feedback loop between us. Hmm. Yeah. A very, a very useful feedback loop. Oh, I'm, now I'm just trying to model or understand the key differences in worldview between.A universe in which everything that will happen has happened. And time is an illusion that we're experiencing based on sort of our biology and some weird glitch of our consciousness that, that view versus a view in which, I guess what would we call this?A procedural world. A procedurally generated world. What, what is the opposite to this and, and what are the implications of Generated world would still always have the same outcomes dependent on its pro previous states. That's true. I guess I call it a r a random number generator, consciousnesses. That's the way I see it. I think to have the other perspective, you need to believe that the physical world doesn't really exist in a meaningful sense. Hmm. And that the thing that exists in a meaningful sense is people's consciousnesses and people's sentiences, and that they are manifesting the physical world to some extent.I, I think that's really the opposite perspective. Well, yeah, because I, I'm, I'm genuinely struggling to understand how you could not believe that the world is, and again, I think this is a cultural thing, so it's one of the things we talk about in our book is. People hugely underestimate how quickly humans evolve and how quickly humans can co-evolve with.A belief system. And that if, you know, if we both have come from Calvinist traditions that the individuals who didn't naturally just see the world this way, left the tradition and that individuals in their community, you know, regardless of their ethnic background or, or, or where they came from, who did see the world this way, drifted into the community at a much higher rate.This is what we mean when we say the sociological aspects of an individual. Determined at, the genetic level, are much less determined by. Things like ethnicity, which takes hundreds of thousands of years to change and more things like Optin community such as religious traditions or where an individual chose to, to to live ancestry, like where they moved.Like Silicon Valley's a good example of this. You know, in the Gold Rush, people who moved to Silicon Valley disproportionately we're taking. Really high payout, low probability of success bets. And then, is it any surprise that like the Silicon Valley ecosystem arose there for a completely different set of reasons, and it wasn't, it wasn't based on like one ethnic group or anything like that.It was basically a beacon from everyone from everywhere in the world who was like, okay, uh, I have a mindset. That is predispositioned to low probability, high reward payouts. And this is how you can get people. Who like us, who see things in a culturally biased way and are just incapable of seeing it outside of that cultural bias.And this is something that I think we should try to correct for if we have some sort of biological bias towards seeing the world in an incredibly deterministic fashion. However, I don't really know, like if you look at like our wider philosophy, This is why we believe in cultural pluralism .I actually think that there are some benefits to having specialized ways of seeing the world within some subpopulation groups and that, you know, like there's some aspects of Judaism that I like try to engage with and I just can't get, like the snake oven story. I can do that as a cultural outsider and it just feels wrong to me.You should, I probably explained this story for context. Okay. Three rabbis are having a disagreement around whether a, uh, an oven is kosher or not. I can't remember. One of them was like, it's either kosher or not kosher. Anyway, he says, it's definitely not God talks to me.Uh, he, I have a personal relationship with him and he has told me, It's not kosher or it is kosher. I don't remember what he was arguing and the other two said, no, you've gotta look at, our traditions and it clearly the, you know, taking the other side of the argument here.And he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Here, watch. Like I, he's like, I understand, like I agree with you that based on our traditions or whatever the tourist says, like, you guys are right, but God has told me that that's not true, and I can prove it. Look, if uh, if it's not true, then the rain will fly upwards. The, that river will move backwards.That building over there I just pointed to will randomly explode. Like I don't remember all the things he did, but he just did a number of like impossible miracles on command saying, God, if you believe this, do this miraculous thing in the universe. And. He was the villain. He was wrong. And he was supposed to be wrong.He was supposed to know better. And the other rabbis, they go to God and they're like, look, God, I'm sorry, like you disagree with us. But um, uh, this is basically outside your jurisdiction. And then um, uh, uh, God laughs like he takes his humorously and he's like, well, I guess what is it? It is not in heaven.Or something like that. And, and, and the point being is that sort of the legalistic interpretation of things, the cultural interpretations of things matters more than the objective truth of those things. From like a fun, because I'm assuming that God has more access to like objective truth than humans.I mean, there's different ways you can, you can read this, but like from a different cultural perspective, I just, it, it seems. It seems so obviously wrong, and I think the same way that many people can look at our deterministic view of reality, and it just seems obviously wrong, but I believe we live in a better world where certain humans are programmed to see the world one way, and certain humans are programmed to see the world another way, and that I can talk to those humans congenially and gain access to this different perspective of reality.They have. And this is why it is so important to us to maintain this cultural pluralism. People wonder why we're so like fervently and fanatically worried where they're, they're like, well, you believe that you and your, your descendants will be okay in the face of population collapse. Why are you worried about saving other people?Is because other people are different from us. That's the advantage, and this is where it gets so crazy when people are like, you guys are racist, or You only want people like you to exist in the future. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like we've got us covered. What we're terrified about is the people who see things in a way that we can't begin to understand.That's what we're afraid is gonna disappear because they have some perspective of reality that our brains aren't built to model. Yeah. Like I see it as a, a genuine moral failing on my part, that I'm having difficulty modeling or understanding a non mechanistic view of the universe. And imagine a world in which I couldn't go on to like, Reddit or some other place online, YouTube and like find someone's multiple people's explanations of this.Imagine a world in which I can't course correct for that. That is not a very good world.Yeah. But I mean that's also part of a Calvinist perspective. Your intrinsic wretchedness. Well, no, but this is also something that we really believe about ourselves, is that humans, uh, at any specific point in time are a failed race. We are wretched and, and, and horrible, and we will constantly fail.That doesn't absolve us from responsibility to try to overcome our limitation. And so we can accept that we have these intrinsic limitations. They may even be biological limitations. So that means our brains process reality, but the fact that we are wretched and limited does not free us from the responsibility of trying to overcome that.Yeah, totally. And to that extent, I love that you take that responsibility on and, I am just so honored that , you Really forced me to live with my values, Simone, because it wasn't something I was doing before we got into a relationship, and I really appreciate that. I, I'm glad that you are diluted into thinking that somehow I'm making you better person.But yeah, I mean, This is all very interesting stuff. Uh, and I, I love having these conversations with you because I can just kind of dumbly muse about something and you'll make it a thing, and then suddenly your lives are different because we're committing to some kind of new world for you, or set of values that like really, , changes our views and makes us better people more effective.So, , I think the one final thing I'd like to talk about within this subject is, the concept of in minority report, there are the precogs, right? There are these psychic people who are able to tell when you are about to commit a crime, and they will arrest you before you commit your crime, so that you.Don't commit it. And then there's this sort of moral question of, well, but if you haven't committed the crime yet can you really be arrested? Like, that's not fair. And we're entering an age in which now there are polygenic risk scores for all sorts of things. You know, right now they're for things like gum disease and brain fog and certain types of cancer, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's.But I'm sure in the future there will be polygenic risk scores for like, Murdering people and, stealing things and violence assault, uh, risks of all sorts of bad behaviors. Embezzlement, you know, there, there could probably be polygenic, risk, risk for all sorts of, of behaviors. Maybe not something that's specifically, well, I mean, you know what I mean?The answer to this is obvious. A genetic propensity from a Calvinist perspective is not, predestination. Yeah. Everything is nature and nurturing. You have responsibility for mastering yourself and therefore you cannot punish someone for it. Mm-hmm. Until they do. And we don't believe we live in a minority report universe because no one has access to this total information.E except for a God. Right. And, you know, we do believe in a God, uh, other people don't. But what I would say is, is. That God is already punishing or rewarding us based on the decisions we're going to make from a Calvinist cultural perspective. So, uh, we already live in a minority report, okay? So it, it, it's, it's irrelevant.As a question to pontificate upon upon it is the height of human immorality. To think they can pass these judgements on other humans in, in fact, passing these judgements on other humans means that you probably deserve to be punished. Uh, you're one of the bad guys. You know, that's the classic Calvinist perspective, which is to say if you think that you are in the saved group, you almost certainly are not.The Schrodinger, you know, the, the, the I love you because you're beautiful. Uh, no, I, it's , you're beautiful because you don't know you're beautiful. Which of course creates the recursive loop, which is as soon as she realizes that someone could be beautiful because they don't know they're beautiful, then she knows she's beautiful. But through knowing she's beautiful, she's not beautiful.It's the same thing as being a good person uh, from a Calvinist or secular Calvinist perspective. Well, then what would you say about also the recent, I would say surging meme, that people, I guess, shouldn't be arrested or punished if they have gotten a bad role of the dice in our mechanistic universe.Like, oh, well you were born to an abusive family. You've lived a tragic life, and now you're. Assaulting people on the streets, you shouldn't be jailed. It's not fair. There's some things that, that, that you inherited, some everything you are is a result of the reality that existed before you. Mm-hmm.Therefore, you are always, when a hundred percent responsible for who you are. Mm-hmm. I, I mean that's unfortunate, but it is who you are. It is the painting that was painted by reality. Mm-hmm. The, the problem with that mindset is they want the world to be fair, and this is one of the many ways that fairness causes evil because it removes moral responsibility from the individual.So the response that our worldview has to that view is essentially the world is not fair. Rise above. Yeah. And that these people are not any more or less responsible for their actions than. Anyone else in the world, everyone is completely a product of, of their environment, their genes, and their past experiences.The, the fact that that's the case does not absolve you from responsibility. Those things may have made that person a bad person, deserving of punishment, but it made that person a bad person deserving of punishment. It created that evil, and when you absolve a person of that, you lead to much higher rates of negative actions across society.When a person thinks they're not responsible for their own actions, actually this, this brings me to a point. That you see historically, and it's something that you know, one of the things we ask in our, the pragmatist guided to crafting religion is why, you know, so both the pr, the, the Calvinists and the Quakers were anti-slavery.Yet if you look at Calvinist slave ownership rates, they were like 0.5%. You look at Quaker slave ownership rates, which you can see from Wills go through the book for citations on this. Don't just take it from me. They were like 40 to 70%. They were really high. And the question is, is wait, what? I thought that they were anti-slavery.And, and they were anti-slavery. Like morally, they thought slavery was bad, but they just did it anyway. And so the question is what was happening there? Right? And I think here you have the two extremes on these ideas of free will, ? From the perspective of a Calvinist, if they even thought about owning a slave, if they even considered the idea, they were proving to themselves that they were a bad person and that they were always gonna go to hell, no matter what.Through having those thunks, through allowing yourself to become a bad person through allowing yourself to even be the type of person who might do that, you, you prove your inevitable fate at the end of the timeline, whereas to the Quaker, Well, you know, uh, in the moment they were really doing it for good needs.They could, treat the slave well. They, they could, over the course of the time, oh, uh, do more good deeds in the future than they'd done in the past. Uh, you know, they really have free will and they can course correct around this in the future. And, uh, sort of this, this other belief in free will, this belief that they're a product of the things that have happened before them. That they're a product of the things that led them to the slave auction and that absolves them of responsibility in some way. And that these things can be course corrected in the future because their free will can always change who they are that absolves them from responsibility and leads to more immoral actions.So I genuinely believe, and I know everybody believes their own culture is superior to other cultures. Isn't that just the way humans are? There, there's a difference between saying, I like my culture more than other cultures for me and my family, , and then saying that that means that other cultures shouldn't exist, and I even believe that we have something we can learn from Quakers.I'm just glad that, you know, I, I, I, I guess I take more pride in the way that my ancestors handle that moral challenge than the way their ancestors handled that moral challenge. But ain't that just the way things are right? We, you wouldn't hold your traditions if you didn't take any pride in them.And there are many things to take pride in within the Quaker tradition that aren't, that are different from that they held lots of slaves and they claim to be against slave holding. Okay. Nice try Malcolm. Well, what can I say? It's, it was an evil thing to do. You're attempts at diplomacy are, I'm not as good diplomacy as you because Simone has the ability to like genuinely.Think kindly of other people in a way that I just, oh, you've heard this on the other podcast. She can genuinely get in other people's mental spaces and defend them. Oh, oh, our listeners know, and this is why I rely on her guidance to be a good person. And why I, and this is one of the great things, even if I had all of my environmental conditions, you know how we talk about two people can become a single entity when they get married?Well, I went into marriage knowing all of my flaws, all of the things that were etched into my identity, that made me a bad person. And through combining my identity with Simone's, I was able to partially overcome those things through to an extent. Having her as a voice in my ear for the rest of my life I am able to be a better entity.And so even though we are predetermined, and even though me choosing to marry her was to an extent predetermined, it was one of those high variability, predetermined things where I, I really got to through who I was at the predetermined entity shape the future. Through choosing her, and I'm really glad, uh, if you have our mindset, that statement will make perfect sense.If you don't have our mindset, it'll seem completely contradictory and it's very hard to communicate. Maybe we can do another video where we explain this better, or maybe you can just read The Pragmatist Guide to Life, which explains the concept in a lot more detail. Always, if you're like, I wish you had citations on this, or, I wish you explained this more concisely or better.Read our books. That's where we like went over every paragraph 50 or 80 times where we cite like every third paragraph. Like if you want all of those things, be reading a book, not listening to a podcast, you're listening to a podcast cuz you're lazy and you wanna have a parasocial relationship with us or something.But we really appreciate your listening. You really appreciate you listening that you subscribe if you are not already subscribed. Oh yeah, that would be nice if you subscribe. I take way more self-worth out of that than I probably should. He, he does. I, I literally update that page. Multiple ti like every two to three hours.Yeah. That's always something you're watching.It's either that or book reviews or people who've responded with criticism to our books. And you go and update them right away with more information. No, already I'm like, oh, I can't. But we always try to respond to criticism. And again, this is something we mentioned in other things, people, they don't understand how receptive we are to criticism if it's based on reality and facts.So often we get criticism and then we chase down whatever the criticism was and it's just. Wrong or the person like didn't know about something and they didn't. Yeah, it's certainly shame because uh, yeah, I am very open to changing my mind. And so are you where we are capable of changing our minds? Well, because we feel that we're extremely responsible, which again, I think feels very counterintuitive, treatable to people.If there's a. If there's a person with a mechanistic view of the universe, I don't think that people simultaneously expect that they're gonna be extremely neurotic about course correction and changing their views and changing and like controlling their behavior. So, but Calvinists have always been neurotic about that.Yeah. So it's a fun thing to think too good deterministic universe view, because every wrong thing you do proves who you are. Yeah, speaking of, uh, immense responsibility for things, it's time for us to pick up the kids and do dinner, so I will see you in the kitchen. I am very excited for dinner tonight. I am very excited to give you some big hugs today and to see the kids again.Can't wait to see you soon. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Dive into a captivating dialogue between Malcolm and Simone as they tackle the issue of scientific racism, particularly concerning the ongoing debate surrounding the genetics of IQ and competence in different ethnic groups. Malcolm makes a compelling case that even if there were genetic variations influencing IQ within populations, these will soon be rendered irrelevant by the growing prevalence and affordability of genetic technologies.In this episode, they discuss the potential of technologies like CRISPR to increase human IQ within a single generation, predicting a future where the differentiation of IQ is not dependent on ethnicity but rather on who chooses to utilize reproductive technologies.Malcolm emphasizes the mission of their foundation to make these technologies accessible to all, regardless of socio-economic status, to ensure a diverse genetic future and avoid any divide between the rich and the poor. He also challenges the arguments of groups who pride themselves on ethnic superiority, arguing that any current genetic differences (if they exist at all) will be overshadowed by the homogeneity brought about by widespread access to reproductive technology.And here is our badly translated transcript for SEO.Simone: Hello Malcolm.Malcolm: Hello Simone. I see you have changed up your outfit. One of my favorite accusations, cuz you know people always make fun of our looks, is that you look like a villain from an Indiana Jones movie. And I'm like, point, yeah, those villains are hot. Unfortunately, they're also often racist. And so this is gonna be a suff spicy episode because, We are gonna talk about racism, specifically scientific racism, which I think is a scientific racism, which I think is a more common topic these days and why it is such midwit perspective. If not actively stupid, if you're actually looking at the data. So first I'm going to define what specifically we're arguing against here, or what we're saying is pretty midway is people who. Argue for there being persistent [00:01:00] genetic differences in competence, sociological profiles or IQ between ethnic groups and that social or personal decisions should be based on these.Simone: So it's similar to what we would consider like evil eugenics, which is that it makes a judgment call about certain traits being good or bad, and it also makes a judgment call about society. On a broad level needing to do something about that, right? No.Malcolm: Very specifically, it doesn't. I think that makes it too narrow and too easy to argue against if you take those positions.Malcolm: It just argues that there are persistent differences. Okay. And policies should take these persistent differences into accountMalcolm: Because I wanna argue on harder mode, right? I want to I don't wanna take such an easy perspective with that one. Okay? So where this really came up is you were doing a podcast. And people kept trying to find out if you were Jewish and they kept tweeting, like Jew knows and stuff like [00:02:00] that.Malcolm: I'm grouping anti-Semitism in wiz racism here. Because when you're talking about scientific racism, these groups are often very aligned. And first I, I think it is very weird that these groups get grouped together by people in scientific, racist communities because like presumably these communities also believes that Jews are like smarter than other groups.Malcolm: So why would they be making fun of me for marrying someone if she might be Jewish? Which by the way, Simone is not genetically Jewish, but I am genetically Jewish, culturally Jewish. What I mean is your Jewish genes might make up like one eighth of your genes, but they are matrilineal, so they are culturally Jewish.Malcolm: But if being Jewish gave you some sort of genetic advantage, you wouldn't have that. So let's talk about the manifold of reasons why this form of racism is so dumb. So first, is it comes from the groups that primarily hold this form of racism, right? So they're like, okay, IQ is [00:03:00] hereditary, which it is like the data just says IQ is hereditary.Malcolm: The thing that they miss is how hereditary IQ is, which is extremely hereditary, and there's high differentiation between people. Within ethnic groups, why this matters is you get really fast drift to the extent that you can't make meaningful judgments around this. So for example, you look at like first generation Nigerians in the us, right?Malcolm: Like they have higher IQ than the white population. Why is it, why are they out economically performing the white population, right? It's because there is huge variation within any sort of ethnic group. And if you're just saying, oh we'll look at averages and then we'll apply these averages across large populations, you don't get really meaningful information.Malcolm: Worse. If you actually look at the rate at which IQ is changing in the developed world right now, and this [00:04:00] is specific to the developed world, so you can look at the amount to which IQ is hereditary and you can look at how quickly this is changing. So you can look at the polygenic markers associated with IQ and not only see that people who have these polygenic markers are having less kids.Malcolm: But you can look in biobank of samples taken from different times and seen that these polygenic markers are appearing at lower rates. You can also look at iqa as in developed countries and see that it's also declining. And if you look across these metrics, so just basically however you measure this, you see this decline.Malcolm: You're looking at about one standard deviation decline in IQ in the developed world was in about 75 years. So that means if there are going to be persistent, like really meaningful ethnic differences in iq. All of the geniuses are gonna be in Africa in a hundred years. Like they're going to be weighted towards Africa.Malcolm: Assuming the developed world doesn't get this under control somehow, given their broad resistance to like polygenic risk or screening they're not going to, so what's interesting is there are [00:05:00] going to be really big IQ differences between ethnic groups.Malcolm: They just don't exist right now. They're going to occur and they're going to be predominantly weighted towards the African groups. And again, this is again why I say like the. Recent stuff, like the reason I use the Nigerian population is the African American group and the white American group are both equally at risk or whatever word you wanna use from this rapid IQ decline in developed countries.Malcolm: You're seeing it at equal rates across all ethnic groups in these countries. It just so happens that the way we have set up the world, whether it's due to, colonialism or whatever reason you think it's due to The poorest countries in the world, the few countries that aren't dealing with rapid decline due to demographic collapse.Malcolm: Are predominantly in Africa. Meaning that the people who are in these environments where you don't have these selective pressures against IQ are gonna be predominantly black in ethnicity. Even if you're looking at this from like a geneticist perspective, if you look within [00:06:00] Africa, The genetic differences in groups are just so much bigger.Malcolm: , they're so different that they dwarf any genetic difference you're talking about of all other people across the world. So you're looking at more differences within African groups. So one. Group in Africa versus another group in Africa, they will typically, like on average, have more genetic difference than your average European and Asian or Native American.In other words, if you were making ethnic groups from the world's population, based on how genetically different groups were, and you broke down the world into 10 ethnic groups. One of those groups would include Europeans, Asians, Jews, and native Americans. And the other nine would all be different African groups.The way, even quote unquote scientific racists, often talk about race, divides, ethnic groups by their recent historical context, not their actual genetic difference and distance, which is what you would be doing. If this was all about genes to you.Malcolm: so it's hard to group these [00:07:00] populations in any way that you can meaningfully make decisions around. But here's the real big point here and this is unfortunately why racism is so stupid today.Simone: Oh, then you're gonna talk about repo repro tech, right?Simone: Repro tech, right? Yes. You wanna talk about it? No you go ahead. I like watching you rant on this.Malcolm: Okay. You like watching me rant? Okay. So this is where you get into Tex. Okay. You believe all of this stuff is genetically linked and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, you would then would also know how close we are to human crispr.Malcolm: You would know that we can genetically select among embryos and how quickly that will change the genetic IQ of a certain subgroup of the population. And unfortunately what all of this shows is that, and we go into the math of this in the pragmatist guided crafting religion is that if you were to do CRISPR with a knowledge of where IQ is on the human genome , within one generation, you could get IQ [00:08:00] up eight standard deviations.Malcolm: I have mentioned this in another podcast, but I just think this is just such a stunning statistic. IQ in the future will be predominantly a differentiation of the people who chose to engage in the cultures that chose to engage with rete and ones that didn't. To the extent that even if there were differences in IQ between ethnic groups, it will be completely irrelevant within two or three generations.Simone: To those who are technophilic ,Malcolm: no, because those technophilic will be the ones who, are competing in the economy at higher rates and everything like that. And they will be from all ethnic groups. At least if our foundation has anything to say about it.Malcolm: The one of the core things that our foundation is doing is trying to make this technology so cheap that anyone can access it. Or. If it's not so cheap that anyone can access it to ensure that there are people who will fund it so that anyone can access it. Because, then you have the problem of only the rich people are using this tech and that causes other problems in terms of the lack of diversity in the future.Malcolm: But the point being is that you have these people like, these white supremacists and stuff like that. And it's and they're like, look at history, [00:09:00] so what? All of these differences are gonna be irrelevant in three generations if they exist at all.Malcolm: So why would you take any prod in your ethnic group? Have in a few different generations that ethnic group is going to be virtually the same as all other ethnic groups when contrasted with humans who are engaging with repro tech technology.Malcolm: And you can say we'll ban this technology. No, what you'll do is you'll ban it for poor people. Rich people will travel to other countries and have it done, and that's. Freaking evil. And then you'll be like no, we'll find a super special way where like my country will ban it for both the poor and the Yeah.Malcolm: Good luck with that. But okay. Even if you do that, then what? Then some other countries won't ban it and they'll get the genetic advantage over you. And you can look at the countries. We can already tell from the statistics, the countries that won't ban it. I can say right now there'll be India that won't panic.Malcolm: Which is really, they're super pro. Yeah. They're even pro Christopher in humans. Like on national polls and stuff like that. It's wild. And it makes sense. [00:10:00] So in India, within dating markets, they actually often ask not just about the person that they are choosing to marry, but also they look at the income of like their brothers and sisters, the jobs of their brothers and sisters, which shows that they're looking at the person's genes.Malcolm: And this then comes to something we've tweeted about, which is something that a lot of people get wrong, is they think that they are taking an anti-racist position, and they will argue for this because they think it's anti-racist. That IQ isn't edible in a way where it can change really quickly. In the human population, they're like, don't say that IQ can change quickly.Malcolm: That can lead to people thinking racist things. And it's no, the opposite leads to people thinking racist things. If IQ can only change over the periods of a hundred thousand years, If sociological profiles can only change over the period of a hundred thousand years, which is not what the science says, but people like will ignore the science if they think it supports, I don't know, like a political position they have.Malcolm: So if that was true, what it would mean is that things like sociological profiles at the genetic level, or IQ at the genetic level, which is like highly genetically, this is just a mass agreed [00:11:00] upon thing by science. And I don't just look at the Wikipedia at a hall on this That it would be tied to ethnic groups in a persistent way.Malcolm: If, however, it changes at the level of two to three generations because ethnic groups don't change over two to three generations, then it's meaninglessly tied to ethnic groups. Meaninglessly in any sort of persistent format. And where you do see it end up maybe in the future being really tied to ethnic groups.Malcolm: It's not due to any virtu or vice of those ethnic groups. It's just due to those ethnic groups being in certain countries during the certain pressure periods. So in the future, when most of the world's geniuses are African it won't be anything about Africans.Malcolm: Do you have any thoughts on this, Simone?Simone: A lot of this just feels so. So arbitrary to me. But there's groups that makeMalcolm: major decisions around this, like people. And during that entire chat they were just like, racist, racist, racist thing. Then it makes no sense to me.Malcolm: And then major racist policy positions. You can look at theSimone: what is a major racist policy positionMalcolm: that's out there? So I think if you [00:12:00] look at Catholic Integralists, like you wanna talk about something that makes no sense to me. Nick Florence Catholic Integralist. Ok. He was talking about our positions before.Malcolm: Okay. And. He, I don't think he believes any of this gene. He actually said one of the funniest thing though. He's oh, all of this genetic stuff, they think they can raise IQ really quickly was like genetic testing and stuff like that. If that was the case, like somebody would've done it already.Malcolm: It's bro, this technology like, Just became accessible. The idea that traditionalism fixes things when our society is so different from what it's ever been. Debt at the nation state level, that's like an invention, massive level. Less like an invention of the 1970s, like college debt.Malcolm: When did that start? Like seventies, eighties. It definitely wasn't true in like the twenties and thirties. This is a new invention. Women working. That's totally new at a nation state, like worldwide civilizational level. So many aspects of how our economy and our society works are just totally different.Malcolm: It's not just the internet. Yeah. This entire structure is new. Yeah. And then that a tradition that was optimized for an older [00:13:00] structure would work in. This just baffles me. I do not see why anyone would think that is the case, but I can see why it's better. Then traditions that are just created to maximize in the moment hedonism, which I think most progressive traditions are, they're just like what can I believe that will cause me to accept the most other people to make the fewest hard choices in life?Malcolm: And that's what I'm going to believe. And, butSimone: don't, hold on. Don't you think this maybe has more to do with the fear of outgroups? So when you did research on. The tendencies of groups that are, that have higher fertility rates. One of the characteristics that you found the most was a tendency toward fear ofout groups in addition to authoritarianism.Simone: Yeah. Toward societies. So I think, is scientific racism? Maybe it's a just so attempt at justifying fear of outgroups and not so much any genuine Yeah, no,Malcolm: logical. This is where it gets interesting and I'm so glad you brought this up. Now before I finish my point on the Catholicism.Malcolm: Okay, so people who don't know what Catholic Integral is, it's a belief it's a Catholic caliphate, [00:14:00] right? That's Yeah. It's a Catholic caliphate. Yeah. They believe that the world should exist under a single Catholic monarchy. And Nick Fuentes is an example of one of these, but they're actually pretty common among traditionalist conservatives in the us in the Catholic group.Malcolm: And a lot of them have converted to this. And it's an interesting ideological perspective. Like I actually don't hold anything against this ideological perspective. What is insane to me. This perspective in this group has a really high overlap with the anti-immigration group. With the, one ethnicity, one culture, one country group, and it's what?Malcolm: The immigrants are almost all Catholic. Like we have a huge disproportion, not almost all at Catholics, but disproportionately immigrant groups are Catholic, and if you believe in a. What is a world under one monarchy? It is a borderless society, so borders shouldn't really matter to you. Your entire objective is about expanding our borders to be as broad as possible, because eventually the world will be under a single monarchy.Malcolm: So wh why? [00:15:00]Simone: Could it be maybe it's that the sort of desired caliphate of these different factions of Catholicism is different. That the kind of all-encompassing governing structure that would come from like a Latin American derived caliphate is different from the ideal governing structure. Of a United States derived caliphate and that the, it's a problem of cultural differences between North American, south American, and European Catholics.Simone: What do you think,Malcolm: I think you could be right, but I think in showing that Catholicism takes pride in being one of the least derived religious traditions.Simone: By the Yes. TheMalcolm: older Catholic traditions were the most inclusive. Of different ethnic groups of all religious traditionsSimone: in the name of growth,Malcolm: right?Malcolm: In the, not just in the name of growth, in the name of ideology. When they would often go to new places they would bring in saints from these new ethnic and cultural groups [00:16:00] so that they could feel more included. You are taking people from this new ousted economic group, ethnic group, and saying that they are literally like the next thing down from like Jesus and God, they are literally deified.Malcolm: That means they're above all of the other people in Rome. Above the Pope. I think Saints are above the Pope. Yeah, saints are above the Pope. And yet they are the, they're of like a indigenous Mexican group or something like that, right? This was something that the Catholics did.Malcolm: So historically, the Catholics were very much about this lack of and you could say it was in the name of growth, but what do the Integralists want, if not growth? They I thinkSimone: what it comes down to is and this is obviously a whole different kind of worms that we will open in another podcast, but it comes down to how truth is defined and.Simone: How whether people can be saved and whether everyone needs to be saved. So the reason why a caliphate or a, whatever a [00:17:00] theocracy is desired is because the understanding is that you can save people, you should save as many people as you can, and therefore, having your entire society governed by a religious institution is desirable.Simone: And I,Malcolm: no, I agree with that. I just don't understand why a group that had that perspective, Would also be against immigration of people of their own cultural group, unless they think that they're like genuinely less similar to them than like American Protestants, which I think that may be the case.Malcolm: I think that's stupid and it shows, this is something I see across the conservative tradition now is people don't fully internalize how culturally different Protestant and Catholic groups are because they're on this, or different Protestant groups are from each other because they're all on the same side of the cultural divide from the supervisors now.Malcolm: But I, butSimone: I think you're missing a beat with modern American Catholicism, which now has this alt-right, dime square faction, like it's, a lot of people are like, converting to [00:18:00] Catholicism from a very different. It's like a, it's no you'reMalcolm: rightSimone: about this.Simone: A popsicle that's been dipped in like a strawberry, like ganache. Yeah. Before being redded in the Catholic chocolate ganache. So it is a different treat,Malcolm: oh, word what you're saying differently. They are Protestants, they're culturally Protestant. They have recently converted to Cism and they are cosplaying as Catholics because they think it's like an older, less drive person orSimone: even atheists.Simone: OrMalcolm: atheist. Yeah. Yeah. And they think that it gives them some sort of mandate to some sort of universalism that they were unable to get with their previous tradition, but they're not adopting all of the historic aspects of Catholicism that made it so successful, which was its inclusiveness.Simone: Yeah. Yeah, I hear you on that. It's, but it's just, that's because it's not Catholicism as it was historically. It's an, it is a new thing. Yeah. And a new ideology. But I, back to the point that I was making about [00:19:00] Maybe scientific racism, not really being about racism, it being about fear of outgroups.Simone: And in our modern society, there needs to be some narrative reason as to why we fear Outgroups, aside from the fact that fearing Outgroups correlates with higher fertility and helps with reducing attrition, which I think is, why that persist.Malcolm: And I should be clear, she doesn't mean that these are good things, but what is true is if you look at current fertility rates, fear of outgroups will increase in the population because people who fear outgroups more have more kids.Malcolm: Both you see this because pluralistic cultures and pluralistic countries, more kids. So like Israel and the US have had the highest resistance to prosperity induced fertility collapse for countries like Korea where there's no real outgroups within their country to be afraid of. Have some of the lowest fertility rates.Malcolm: So mono, don't I say cultures? But you also see, and you see this across, like if you look about wealthiest countries with low fertility rates are often very like monocultural mono-ethnic. But also you see this within groups where people who are more xenophobic, are more racist, typically have more kids.Malcolm: And you see this [00:20:00] across cultural traditions. It's not You see this, Muslims who are more xenophobic, have more kids. Christians who are more xenophobic, have more kids. Jews who are more xenophobic, have more kids. And this just means that across the world we are going to see an increase in fear about groups, which yeah, touche, it is a successful strategy in that regards.Malcolm: So I guess you could say that is why it's increasing, but it like, and logically doesn't make sense. And that's why I say it's AWI perspective is that a lot of people pretend like they're arguing from it, from like a logical perspective, like a historical or genetic perspective. When it's just, even if currently there were like genetic differences in sociological or IQs between ethnic groups, it would be meaningless in the hundred year time span.Malcolm: And that's the thing that's really pointless about it. It's just doesn't matter anymore. And so I think that what we need to do is begin to, as a culture, You can still have outgroups, like outgroups, you can have ideological outgroups. You can hate and fear the [00:21:00] people who are ideologically different from you who are trying to take your kids and convert them to their way of seeing the world.Malcolm: Because you know what, I promise you if I, we have Europeans, I, again, we sometimes talk to conservative Europeans. And they're like, oh, but you don't understand, like the situation we have with Muslims is very different than the situation you have in the us. You can't be as, Promus as you are or whatever.Malcolm: And it's bro, the Muslims aren't the ones who are trying to take your kids from you, okay? They're not the ones trying to convert your kids to hate you, okay? Your kids are not gonna, they are just as afraid of the people who are being predatory on your group. As you are, because those groups, the reason they're accepting them as immigrants is cuz they don't have kids.Malcolm: And so they replace their ranks with immigrant kids just as much as they do of kids, of people who are born in the country. You guys have a common enemy and that enemy is equally preying on both of you. We can come together in people who understand that [00:22:00] our core goal is ideologically continuing into the future, are diverse cultural groups and who have the same problem, which is these groups that don't have kids that can only survive by praying on our kids.Malcolm: And this isn't an ethnic thing. This is an ideological thing. .Simone: IfMalcolm: we actually do what we're trying or what are the things that we're trying to do in the pragmatist guided crafting religion.Malcolm: Is to help people understand that it is much more healthy and much more accurate to take pride in your religious traditions and in your recent cultural groups instead of seeing the world in terms of ethnic cultural groups, because religious traditions have often derived much more recently from each other.Malcolm: And therefore with sociological profiles concentrating over very short periods of time what is much more interesting and meaningful differentiation between things [00:23:00] like Quaker groups and Calvinist groups and Catholic groups and evangelical groups, regardless of ethnic tradition. If you're talking about these sort of genetic selection events and I think that's really interesting in that one, it more aligns with the evidence, but then two, it also says, Th these are things that are constantly in flux and constantly changing.Malcolm: And that's why, one of the things that people kept trying to get you to say on this podcast that you are on is that you're against race mixing. And it's no, we're very pro race mixing. Why would we go? Do you wanna go into your stance on race mixing?Simone: I I just don't have, I, I don't see why it would matter.Simone: What matters is cultural compatibility and it, I don't even haveMalcolm: a sense. What matters is that you're then creating a new group. You're increasing diversity. If you're doing that, you're creating a new social experiment. And if that social experiment doesn't work, then that person won't end up having kids, but.Malcolm: If it does work well, then you have a cultural group that might be more resistant to the super virus. Totally. It might be a better [00:24:00] ally of all of us in the future, all of us who have kids and want to continue our cultures into the future against those groups that survive entirely by beingSimone: parasitic.Simone: But we argue, even more more important by that argument than. Racial or ethnic mixing is his cultural mixing. Yeah. That's where you really get innovation. And so for me I don't know, there they're probably like if we're talking about different genetic traits coming together, like maybe if one collection of genetic traits mixes with a different gene collection of genetic traits, you end up, combining everyone's worst heritable factors and it's not good.Simone: Or maybe you get all the best ones and it is good. I don't know, like I'm not. In a position to say which broad collections of heritable traits are well paired. But I, it, I just don't really think it matters again, in the face of things like embryo selection and in the face of things like crispr.Malcolm: Yeah. And in how quickly all of these things change Totally. Yeah. That they shift over. Just that you could get a standard deviation shift [00:25:00] in IQ in 75 years. Yeah. That is mental. Yeah,Simone: it seems all pretty pointless. Yeah. But yeah I think, I do think it's interesting that, the, what most people think they see, I think especially those who are race realists, is that like at the very bottom of the smart spectrum are like just the racists who are like, I guess old-fashioned racists, like we just hate them cuz they're an outgroup.Simone: Which actually I think we've just argued is the real reason why the scientific racists hate. Or are scientific racists. And then you have this like group that really is anti-racism and they're apparently Midwest. And then, the very smart people are scientific racists because, they understand like the real differences.Simone: And I don't I, again, I still really struggle to, they can see through the programming. They can. Yes. But then I think what we're trying to argue is no. It's actually like a full circle and you actually just. Have problems without groups. So stop trying to justifyMalcolm: your future.Malcolm: Yeah. The [00:26:00] current understanding of genetics doesn't back that. Another thing I wanna say, and this helps understand why I'm so antagonistic to progressives. That say because we, we do believe that between families, not between ESC groups, but between families, there are genetic differences and things that can give you an advantage in the workplace, like height IQ for stuff like that, yeah. Anxiety, depression. So with that being the case, when people are like, oh, we can't allow for genetic screening. Of embryos and stuff like that. We can't allow for you to make this cheaper. We can't allow for you to make this affordable because it could be if, like the genetic purity of humanity was interrupted with your weird science, first of all, and this is a view that progressives always take.Malcolm: You're arguing for like maintaining genetic purity of humans that are like you. Yeah. You're the bad guy also. You, because science like brought height. Is edible. Like we know this, right? IQ is herital. We know this. This is like something that is just not really disagreed upon that being the case.Malcolm: If you don't allow us to make this [00:27:00] technology affordable, then what you are doing is baking in the existing systemic inequalities of our society. Yeah. You're saying this works for me, but at a family level, like, why are you doing that? Why do you think that makes you the good guy? Oh, I know it's because you've benefited from them.Malcolm: Because you are at the top of your local social hierarchies. You've gotten your fancy degree because you happen to get the right roll of the dice at the right time, and you wanna preserve that for people who are like you. And that's the end of the real game, and I see it. Everyone sees it. You are also racist, you progressive turd who says that we shouldn't make this technology more accessible, which actually democratizes the field of the most persistent form of genuine inequality in our society, which is genetic differences that families didn't choose for their kids.Malcolm: But you might be saying, but some groups will still choose not to have access to this even if you make this cheap I don't see you complaining about the kids of Jehovah's [00:28:00] witnesses dying more because they're Luddites about technology and they don't give their kids like blood transfusions or something.Malcolm: That's the way that all of the groups are that just choose not to engage with technology, but we should at least give everyone the shot of a blood transfusion if it can be made cheapened for everyone, which is the crazy thing about these genetic technologies is they intrinsically are so easy to make cheap because you're just comparing things to spreadsheets.Malcolm: And this is where it gets really interesting for me is that we are entering. A new world where there are groups of people who want to maintain the systemic advantages that they've gotten. And this is something I really believe, I think that right now, the people who go out there and because you can look at the advantage and you know that a large portion of IQ is edible.Malcolm: Okay. And these people who have achieved success in our society. And they go and they try to look so cool by being like IQ is incredible. Everyone has an equal playing field. I don't, these will be seen the same way that we today [00:29:00] see people who in the past were saying, Oh, I don't see race.Malcolm: The, a white person who's become successful, in part because they're white, because they had an easier time with fewer systemic discrimination against them. No pretending you don't see the advantages that you've had over other people, whether it's height or iq. Now again, none of this is ethnically linked in any sort of a meaningful way, but it's the same and that it is not virtuous to pretend you don't see the advantages you have over other people.Malcolm: And it is definitely not virtuous to prevent people like us who are trying to narrow the playing field, who are trying to allow for some sort of true equality in our society who are trying to allow for families to make these reproductive choices for themselves. That is not a virtuous position, that is not a progressive position, what it is or position towards preserving the existing power hierarchy of which you are a beneficiary and pretending like you don't see all the advantages you'veSimone: had in life.Simone: I'm gonna push back and I will say [00:30:00] I don't think the people, neither those who said, I don't see race, nor those who say things aren't heritable. Yesterday and today do so with a desire to keep things the way that they are. I think they do so out of performative virtue signaling just trying to show how very enlightened they are.Simone: So aMalcolm: culture can do something for a reason even if individuals don't do something for a reason. And so I will be generous to you. Most of these people are too stupid to think about the implications of what they're actually doing. While they may be smarter than the general population and have some.Malcolm: Ability that got them into their PhD at Harvard. They're dumb enough or they are narrow-minded enough, or maybe even worse than being stupid. They've never genuinely thought through the implications of their actions. They're just following orders from the existing hierarchy. The existing, society has gone through many different groups that have maintained control, different religious traditions, et cetera, that they've maintained control of society, and there's a group of [00:31:00] smart.Malcolm: Sort of whatever, people who just pathologically obey the order and they go and they kill Galileo because he's saying, oh thing, look at what the data actually says. And then there's some people who just will for fun try to do things that are against the orthodoxy. When the church controlled everything, these were the people who were like into.Malcolm: Black magic and the occult and stuff like that, where it was like a form of pseudoscience that gained traction just because it was anti orthodoxy. But then there were other people who were like, Hey, you should really take a look at this evolution thing. You should really take a look at this, helio centrism thing.Malcolm: And. They were persecuted because they were going against the orthodoxy because there is a certain mindset and so you're trying to get me to say it's not really their fault, it is their fault. They have sublimated the long-term, even from their own perspective, benefit of society.Malcolm: Which is from their perspective, often increasing equality, lowering emotional pain, which by the way is something we [00:32:00] can select against whi crispr. But the very things that they claim to be against where we can at a genetic level make people less susceptible to things like uh, major depressive disorder.Malcolm: So it de it. That they are willing to ignore those long-term benefits to society, even from their own perspective, just so that they can maintain their position within the existing hierarchy just so that they don't rock the boat. And this, there's this guy,Adam. Rutherford.Malcolm: he's some famous geneticist who is always attacking us on Twitter. Not a real geneticist, a pseudo geneticist, but he just is so interested in supporting the orthodoxy and you can see it in his hypocrisy. He is against us. Genetically selecting against are embryos that may have things like cancer and stuff like that, right?Malcolm: That have a higher probability of that. But he absolutely supports and would fight to his dying breath, the right of a woman to abort a baby that was found to have something wrong with it in the womb. So, Why does he hold these two [00:33:00] obviously insanely contradictory views because one of them is progressive orthodoxy and gets him little points with the minions, and the other is some new idea that people haven't adapted to yet.Malcolm: So he's gonna fight it because he doesn't actually care about anything he says he cares about. He cares about power. And that is it. And that is what these people who have gained power within the academic institutions care about. They care about power and nothing else. Not about the suffering, not about the systemic inequality, not about any of the long-term damage they're doing to society.Malcolm: Am I being too spicy?Simone: I think passion is very welcome in this household, so you're not gonna get me complaining. But it's yeah, I don't disagree with you. I uh, I, I like to think that everyone is acting in well-intentioned ways that they're doing the best they can with the information they have.Simone: And that culture, like you say, is more at fault here. Yeah.Malcolm: And I disagree with [00:34:00] you. I think that everyone wants to believe they're acting in well-intentioned ways, but some people are willing to peer through. The societal punishment they get for going, for saying things that aren't mainstream. The emotional pain that's required to admit that the world isn't fair as it's structured now, to get to the other side and say, okay, if it turns out that different families have different levels of like genetic iq, how can we make this better?Malcolm: Instead of saying, I won't accept that because that would mean the world is unfair, and then I had to deal with something hard. Yes, in a way they are trying to be the good guys, but they are trying to be the good guys so they can see themselves as the good guys, not because they're actually trying to optimize for a better world.Malcolm: They believe they're trying to optimize for a better world, but it's because they stop at every single idea that may cause them to have to give up any of the societal power they've accumulated or face any emotional pain.Simone: You're probably not. Not wrong.Malcolm: But I appreciate that you always try to see the best in people. You are such a [00:35:00] kindhearted person and this is why you tolerate a beast like me.Simone: No. I think it's that I can't read other people, so I dunno what they're doing, but I love these conversations. I love talking with you so much.Simone: So thanks. This was fun. Definitely clarified some of my views on. The new sort of scientific racism movement that seems to be boiling up. So interesting. Thanks for that.Malcolm: So the, here's the thing about scientific racists, again, they're just as bad as the other group because if they stopped their ridiculous team politics and actually looked at the data, they keep banding around, around polygenic markers for iq, how quickly those things can change, how quickly they're being selected for in society, they would realize how pointless thinking about any of this in terms of ethnic groups is it literally doesn't align with their own data. Things change too fast for there to be persistent, meaningful differences in ethnic groups.Simone: There you have it. People don't think through things very [00:36:00] well, but that's a pervasive problem and a fault of humanity.Malcolm: At least we'll be, at least we'll be skewered by both the left and the right for this take.Simone: Thank goodness. I'll see you later. Gorgeous. See ya. This was fun. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

In today's discussion, Malcolm and Simone dive deep into the impending impacts of AI on society, particularly on class structure and economic preparedness. They examine how AI is set to radically shift the balance of power between the wealthy and the proletariat, with surprising implications for social mobility.From exploring how AI could make the lower classes obsolete to forecasting the potential rise of genetically modified, AI-empowered underdogs, this discussion promises a thought-provoking look at our automated future. Simone and Malcolm also touch on the controversy of genetic purity, the dangers of victimhood mentality, and the pitfalls of class struggle narratives.Join us as we take a unique look at the ways in which AI, genetics, and ideological alliances could shape the future of humanity.Transcription and above written by an evil AI for SEO. The podcast is meant to be a podcast:They genuinely think the world would be better off without humans. There is no long-term allegiance here. There is nobody buddy. They are our cultural enemies. I can find a way to ally myself with the most religious extremists that has a worldview that is nothing like mine, but at least they wanna prosperous future for their great-grandchildren.The, when somebody wants the end as a species, you just can't work with them. And the big lie is that there aren't genuine ideological differences. Between people who are outside of this elite cast in society and that at the end of the day it's all paved over because we just want their stuff. It's not, and that's how they've kept us down.Yeah I would emphasize just how. Common. This is I would say approximately 15% of the people that we speak with. Friends, colleagues, people we respect. Respect, yeah. Yeah. Would say but isn't the world, isn't the universe better off without humans like and genuinely believe that and genuinely be.Neutral or relatively pleased with a prospect that humanity will cease to exist soon. I think this is a real threat when you think about things like AI alignment or tech advancement in general. When. One would typically hope that everyone working on ai, AI alignment, or AI in general really, really, really cares about the safety of humans.No, no, No. Yeah. And uh, what was it I've, I've heard from through the, the um, grapevine that one of the top people in the space when they were being told, Hey aren't you genuinely scared about the future of the human species? Their response was, don't be such a human ris. They didn't care. They did not care.And I think there's a way to frame these people as malevolent, but they're not acting with malevolent intent. They genuinely, philosophically believe there is less suffering with less humans. Let's get rid of them all. You cannot tie this millstone around your neck. If you're looking to make genuine change in society.You need to accept that even among people of your economic group. There are those that are not your allies. What I think we will begin to have as society differentiates is more of different social groups that are aligned with each other. Maybe not even by historic cultural backgrounds, and certainly not by ethnic backgrounds, but by ideological similarities.Sort of an alliance of ideological tribes that understand that they can work together and that their groups are aligned in the long run.  Because for so long that we've been in a society of nations and I think between. Network state like effects and AI changing society into one where class structure is much more international and much more stratified. And I think that this is a really important thing to note here, is that this sort of wealthy class is an internationalist class. They do not care about their country. They do not care about their people they do not care about their religious cohort. Often they only care about uh, this, wealthy class. And the reason they care about this wealthy class so much is because this wealthy class all has a common interest and preventing themselves from losing the power that they're accumulating. But I think going after them is to some extent, pointless. They simply have more power than us and everyone else right now at an absolutely astronomical scale.What we need to understand and vi to some extent, this frees them from concerns around us and allows us to work to sharpen ourselves. Outside of their supervision to some extent, so long as we are willing to pack up and leave if they begin to lock things down in certain countries, which is, so let's delve into this a little further.Hold on. You're saying, the initial statement of the wealthy using AI to free themselves cells from the proletariat. Yes. That happens. But also the proletariat is using AI too, right? Yeah. What does that mean? What, what happens when the proletariat becomes fractured away from the wealthy?Does this fundamentally change anything? Does it bring us back to a, another place and a cycle between wealthy and non wealthy classes? What does that mean? Especially when they're both very well equipped. Yeah. I love this point because it's  the biggest trick and it is the core trick of communism as an ideology class struggle.And that they convince the idiots to believe everyone who's not wealthy is aligned with each other. Through doing that people who aren't among the elite cast and society millstone themselves to the floor. And what we are seeing in the future is a divide.Amongst different people within the middle and lower classes of society where people are coming together based on ideological similarities and by ideological similarities, what I mean is what they hope for the future of our species. Do they hope for a prosperous future where everyone does their own share and pulls forwards?And everyone every day is waking up and asking, how can I make civilization better? How can I make humanity more prosperous? Are they asking how can I build a system that allows me to spend, all day on idle pursuits? And these two groups have nothing in common. And the biggest trick is to convince these two groups that they are on the same team.They are not on the same team.  And then  whatever individuals do well and start to rally people behind them or gather public attention the biggest trick is they'll start to brandish those people as elite.They'll say, oh, look at this new elite person like they did to us. Look at the elite couple, right? Because they use elite to try to through class warfare, divide people. Divide people from the people who are actually their allies, actually trying to uplift as much of the population as possible.  So your argument is that there never really was a class divide. There was a cultural divide. And often these things correlate with wealth or lack of wealth, but there, that's, they don't often correlate with the lack of wealth or wealth. I would say that it's actually interesting, I do believe that when wealthy people in these groups push this system, they genuinely believe, they believe in it.If you know the kids of rich people, there is no group that you'll find more communists among. And the question is why does it perform so well in these economic circles? And the reason it performs so well as an ideology in these economic circles is because it is the ideology that best ensures intergenerational wealth transfer.And thus the families that support it are the families that have maintained intergenerational wealth transfer for more generations.  This happens because as power becomes more bureaucratic, And institutional, it becomes easier to capture within a family. Then is the case when power is just associated with capital, which Nominally means at least to some slight extent was in any system. That's, barely functioning. It's associated with productivity. This is where you get the joke in management classes in our society. Which goes, how do you tell old money, your second generation money and it's look for the socialist or the communist.  how do you know, or how do you end up in this new development? With AI and with fractures of dependency forming, how do you end up riding this wave in an advantageous way? I think sometimes it's important to be honest with ourselves and say, we don't know. We don't know exactly how things are going to play out.I know how things won't play out. How I, you know, I, I, I know. Well, So you don't, you don't, you don't envision a world in which AI hand, wavy hand wav solves everything. Everyone has universal basic income and of course, no one's always, I think just some extent that's a world you don't have to prepare for.Oh. Because if it is, what happens? Then? There's, if it is what happens, whatever you have done to prepare doesn't become relevant. Right, right. Okay. Um, So variably, there's no reason to prepare. Like I'm thinking about what actions do I take for today? How do I prepare my family to ensure that I give our species the best chance for a prosperous, diverse and pluralistic future?I'm not thinking about that future because things are already worked out in that future. Yeah. Um, I, I think much more likely is that you have some form of benevolent ai, as we've talked about in other videos, but that through its benevolence, it effectively castrates a vast majority of the population that simply, and when I say castrates not just in terms of them not having kids, but in terms of their spirit.Like they lose their vitality to push forwards and change things because they no longer have struggles. And I say you can create struggles for the yourself. And I think what we see in our society today, you've talked about this collapse of mental health in our society, right?Sometimes when people col create struggles for themselves, it's just indolent, daily whining, basically. And then other people, when they create struggles for themselves I think it's the way that we try to where every day we're like, okay, how can we. Do better. How can we improve, we play life on as hard and mode as we can in terms of the aggressiveness with which we move forwards because we know that if we fail, there's not many people who are genuinely working right now to, to fix some of the bigger problems that we have in the world.Cause we don't have partial points for it, you know? yeah. People are out there and they'll, they'll hate on you. You point out something like collapsing fertility rates or the fact that no, no culture in the world today has figured out how to have a society that is prosperous and has a high level of education and that is socially and economically stable except for Israel.No, no culture in the world had figured out how to maintain those two things. And Israel is a site that has said, we'll do a video on Israel one day, cuz it's a really interesting case study. Um, But uh, like that should be a thing that like people should be flagging right now. Like, Oh, like basically civilization isn't working anyway.So another element of. AI and class that I think is discussed more. For example, in science fiction is, and before AI really became something real in society that we were actually experiencing people just vaguely referred to a singularity, right? Like this point after which. A lot of limitations, like not just wealth or resources, but also age just left us.And then, a lot of sci-fi books explore, okay, in such a world, what becomes the new basis for social class. And in, in a couple of. Books like I always talk with you, Malcolm, about down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Yeah. Where the primary currency and thing of scarcity then is essentially social reputation.Like how awesome are you and how much social cred do you have? And that's tracked in the form of a currency known as woofy in another. This is a teen dystopia book. Before they were super huge called like The Ugly Series by Scott Westerfield which was focused more around teens. It there was more fracturing of like subcultures but then within them you would do really heavy body modifications to fit into that subculture and try to gain as much social credit within that subculture as you could, which I think is really interesting because it.Feeds into a lot of the things that you like to discuss about how dominant hierarchies work within subcultures and how they can lead people to take on more extreme stances, modifications, et cetera. But like when literally you're like modifying your body to fit that, it starts to make you look really weird, which is fun.People do that already with tattoos. Yeah. And all sorts of crazy things. When the tech gets better, it, the mods get more interesting. In a world, let's say that we do enter that, ubi, everything works out AI world. What do you think new attempts at gaining status or higher social class do, what do you think science fiction writers or other people are not necessarily anticipating that we may really see?Because what we do know for sure is that we're not gonna receive get to this U B I world where everyone has everything they need. And people won't be just sitting at home happy with what they have, right? There will still be at least a subset of the population that has to just be the best or that has to have more than other people.It has to be better than other people. How will they try to be better? What will be the measures that we use that we're not thinking about or discussing a lot? I think one of the things we miss is that to a large extent, we already live, like people talk about a post scarcity world. And what they don't realize is that from the perspective of somebody living 300, 400 years ago, we are already living in a post scarcity world. Totally. Yeah. And yet people have never felt like they have less. And by that what I mean is all diseases are basically cured to the extent that, we're often dying from Random, like heart failures and cancers not diseases.Diseases like we used to, you used to even going back a hundred years, or I think it's a hundred years, might be like 120 where 50% of kids died in, early in their life, childbirths or early on this might be a 200, I don't know exactly, but, we very few people in the developed world at least really want for food.And, we used to fight wars over spices and now you can get your, spicy Cheetos or Doritos. This is not, we live and you look at access to education books, having a few books was a sign of immense wealth. Now most people have access to all human knowledge, and this is true in the developed world as well where access to things like cell phones are really common.Cell phones with internet access. So we already live in a post scarcity world. So what people misunderstand is they think that when they have access to more, it'll feel like they have access to more. But the truth is that the more leisure you have access to, Typically the less happy you're going to be on average, unless you force yourself into a hard and rigid lifestyle, which we are beginning to see people realize and do, but we are only seeing this often on the more conservative ends of society.Like monk mode and stuff like that. And there's many ways in which people do this, where they create artificial challenges for themselves that aren't just like personal emotional challenges, but are like some sort of objective challenge, like work out every day or do X every day or live x kind of structured life.And then they began to find a lot of these concerns they have began to melt away. So I guess what I would say is there's this, I think perception. That. Oh, once we have more, it'll feel like we have more, but it won't. What I'm actually hearing you say, which I think is really interesting is a lot of people sci-fi writers, futurists, et cetera, talk about the excesses, talk about how crazy things are gonna get the crazy things people will do, the crazy things people will modify about themselves.It's all about additive, maximalism. What you're describing is that you anticipate that more factions might go for really intense minimalism. The this sort of intentional deprivation. Intentional hardship. Yes. And that this is going to be a show like in, in a world in which excess is the default, then deprivation is how you show differentiation and that will be an underrated class.Signaler. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And I think. Another thing nothing in society is more a sign of luxury and surplus than the ability to self indulge in victimization and emotionally indulge. When we look at the world today and we look at the mental health quote unquote crisis people have, a lot of this existing mental health crisis is because people now have the leisure.To have these mental health problems, a leisure they don't have in the developing world. And it's why you don't see these in the developing world. And it's why you don't see these before, but I think when we talk about what are going to be the leisures that people most indulge in that they're not indulging in today, I think one of the biggest leisures that people will indulge in.Is going to be mental health crises is going to, oh my gosh. No. Hold on. No, we're already there. We are already there. No, it will be so much worse than it is today. So you're gonna see just the ultimate like spoony, the ultimate like complete, invalid. Can't get out of bed. Oh, yeah. In ways that you can't even imagine today.Maybe even like self amputees who, who create this situation for themselves and, and wallow round strap to tubes. I, I do not like this. Yeah. You are going to have the, the level of self-imposed. Emotional stress and victimization because this is the thing, people think that what people want when they have leisure is stuff when they have money.Mm-hmm. Now what they want, what most people naturally want when you just give them access to everything is just to wallow around in their own distress in their own. And you say this as a new thing, look at Daisy Buchanan, you know, back in the days of the great gadsby. Was there any more a sign of wealth back then to, oh, I just fainted.The sign of me, oh, somebody said something distressing. I must oh, oh, oh, and you're panicked about this for a week. You know? This is something that wealthy classes have been doing for centuries. Now it's just that everyone has access to the ability to this kind of self-indulgence. So a lot more suffering in the future.Ironically, even though a lot more suffering, because that's the thing that people,  the biggest thing people get wrong about humans is they think that when they have prosperity, that they will choose to escape suffering. They think suffering, victimization. It's what humans fear. But the truth is, is that victimization removes responsibility and responsibility.That's what humans fear more than anything.  And if you give them the chance to remove that responsibility from themselves, something that you are able to do when you have enough prosperity in society that you no longer really need to worry about starving, that you and, and when you remove responsibilities from yourself, you don't have kids.Terrifying. Terrifying. But that is where I think a portion of society is going. And I think another portion is going where you said the minimalist route. Self-imposed. Scarcity, and it is the minimalists who will end up improving themselves and will end up in disproportionately in the economically advancing class of society.Yeah. But th this class of our society that is this LA class that will be made a permanent elite because of ai, they will move further and further into this self victimization.  You wait. More and more something we are beginning to see in our society, and we will see it more and more, is people with the reins of power in our society will begin to classify themselves as the ultimate victims.They will begin to ban people from social media for saying that they aren't really victims. They will begin to potentially even jail people for saying they aren't victims.  You began to see this. Remember when there was a period where journalists started to lose their jobs? When other people were loosing their jobs, journalists told them, Hey, get out there.Learn to code. And then when the journalists started losing their jobs, the journalists in elite classes in our society, a class seen as a disseminator of truth, they might not be the economic elite. You can look at our revolutions videos for this differentiation, but they were certainly a social elite class in our society because they determined to an extent what was true and what wasn't true.They began to lose their jobs. And they're often the kids of people who don't really need to worry about money and stuff like that. That's how you end up in this journalist class. It's how you end up. The reason thing, how you end up in the professor class is not having to worry about money and being the son of a wealthy person.But anyway, so they were in this silly class and then people started making fun of them the same way they had made fun of other people saying Learn to code. And those people, when they made fun of the journalists for that, they began to get their account banned on Twitter. And so why weren't journalists getting banned when they were telling other people they should learn to code?The answer is simple because they became a protective class. People began to realize people in power, oh my God, if people can attack this group for sort of their self-indulgent whining right now, they might be able to attack us. And so that's what I think we're gonna end. Yes, is our kids growing up, that it's actually the wealthiest in our society who are the biggest victims.Those with the most systematic benefits in our society who really struggle the most, and anyone who attacks them well. Those are the real monsters. Those are the real monsters. I guess time will tell. We can revisit this in what, how long is this gonna take? 20 years. I don't know. Our kids will revisit it.They'll look at our videos and say, wow, they didn't know what they were talking about. I really one of my favorite books is The Martyrdom of Man because he is got a whole chapter at the end of it that's just dedicated to us. People living like 200 years in the future, 150 years in the future.He gets so many things right. And that's who I hope I'm talking to, is this also families prepare intergenerationally because, just hoarding money doesn't help you in the way it used to. What you need to do is you need to build a durable culture for your kids and a culture that builds into some extent of hardship for them so they don't end up like this.And that teaches them these truths about the world in a way that when they begin to have people in their society offering them the candy of self indulge, self victimization, that they are able to say no. I say no. I am okay with the induced hardship that my family taught me to bring upon myself and how I move forwards because it will sharpen me and give me a chance to self betterment because that's what matters in life. Let's hope that you turn out to be a Winwood read and not. Some other crazy predictor who didn't get anything right, but I hate better, I could out turn out to be a Nostradamus, someone who gets everything wrong, but everybody pretends like he got everything right by making up protections from him.Fact, no, we want you to be a real shot caller and this is why I like that you're really explicit about the things that you say, you're not you're not speaking cryptically. This is all very clear because. Honestly, this is how you wanna read people. You wanna read how well they predict things.You don't just go by how fancy someone seems or how intelligent they seem, but rather how well they accurately model and predict things. It's performance that should speak louder than anything else. So, well, we, We definitely don't live in that world today. Yeah. We repeatedly see the people in positions of power in our society, just completely making wrong calls and then attacking anyone who points it out.Our hope is that age is soon to come to an end. Um, But we gospel. I appreciate your optimism, Simone. That's why I'm married to you. Your kindness, your optimism. You always think the best of other people in the best of the future. Well, That's very kind of you to think if delusional, but I love you. I I'll uh, I'll look forward to our next conversation.Bye Malcolm. Bye. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Written by an evil AI for SEO, not for human consumption: In this engaging and thought-provoking video, we discuss the disturbing trend that is emerging within the field of psychology. This trend is the development of an insidious dependency in the patient-psychologist relationship, which can be potentially harmful to the patient's mental well-being.Using historical and current examples, we dissect the dangers of false memory implantation, the trauma narrative, and the business model that incentivizes creating dependency. Is this any different from the tactics used by infamous cults? We also draw parallels between psychology and non-profit sectors, revealing a disturbing commonality in their survival and success strategies.The conversation takes a hard look at the unintended consequences of the commercialization of mental health services and the societal implications that could arise from this trend. If you're interested in mental health, societal issues, or psychology, this is a must-watch video.The terrible transcript:I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.And then all of the other women were like, mm-hmm. yes, I agree. And Yeah, and what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women independently. And enough, and this is a common enough thing that that apparently, like women can just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same brainwashing.That you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist. Wow. That was what was implied was what was being said. That is. The, The highest horror of psychologically mis practice that a, that a like, sane thinking psychologist could imagine that a psychologist had convinced him of largely two things.One is you can't be psychologically healthy without saying a psychologist. And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist. They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue. .  Now, what this cult of psychology does is people go to a psychologist with a problem and they then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma. Early in your life, let's determine what this trauma is and then we can constantly meet about this trauma.Because if you don't have me acting as a constant bull work against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able to live a mentally healthy life. And that's dependency this is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use, they would do a, theton, and reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents or other things that happened early in your life. And then they would say, ah, you have some trauma with your mom, or your trauma with your dad, and that's, Essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me, that you have this one field that is so vilified for, milking people from their money and creating dependency, which is Scientology.And then you have this other field which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is psychologists, but in a way it's because they're competing for the same customers, using the same mechanisms. Oh wow. That's why there is this. Fight here.   📍  hello, gorgeous. Hello Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about? Psychology. Are you ready? So people may not know this. I started my early career in neuroscience and psychology, so yes um, my, or uh, I, I did some early work in brain computer interface, but before that I was a psychologist who focused on like schizophrenia and stuff like that, but also like more general psychology stuff.And recently, I have become horrified and very disappointed in the field because it seems to be turning into a cult. And I mean that very literally, and as terrifyingly as it could possibly be interpreted. So to people who don't know this about psychology, one of the things that all young psychologists are taught about when you're just starting out in psychology is the horror of the fad. That was hypnosis because it turns out that when somebody comes to you and you're in a position of authority over them, it is very easy to implant memories in their mind using specific procedures.Many of those look like hypnosis, but they also look like other things. This is one of these big things that they always teach you early in psychology. It's that memories. Are not actually that great a predictor of whether or not something actually happened the way it's being remembered happened.And this is all important for court psychologists and stuff like that, but the real tragedy comes when people go to a psychologist to try to work out some problem they have, and then that psychologist through mechanisms that we now know can implant memories in a person's mind, which is hypnosis.Implant a bunch of memories of trauma in someone's mind, and then use those memories of trauma to justify why that person is seeing a psychologist. And then historically, there were many cases of using those memories of trauma to cut the person off from people who would've broken them out of the cult.  📍 Gotten them away from the psychologist. There's the famous case of a young girl who accused your father of rape, which it seems he almost certainly did not do. And yet he went to trial over this and everything, really had damage to his life. And I'll when I'm doing editing, I'll find the name of the case and put it on screen here because it, it's this really heartbreaking case of how easy it is to accidentally brainwash someone if they come to you as a psychologist. And so there was this moment not too long ago where I was in a room of really high profile people. I'm talking about like top level people in our society, controlling things and stuff like that. And I was walking behind these three women and one of the women turns to one of the other women and goes, I would never date a guy who's not seeing a psychologist.And then all of the other women were like, mm-hmm. yes, I agree. And Yeah, and what I realized is that their psychologists had incepted into all three of these women independently. And enough, and this is a common enough thing that that apparently, like women can just say this was in certain social circles and assume that everyone will have the same brainwashing.That you cannot be mentally healthy without seeing a psychologist. Wow. That was what was implied was what was being said. That is. The, The highest horror of psychologically mis practice that a, that a like, sane thinking psychologist could imagine that a psychologist had convinced him of largely two things.One is you can't be psychologically healthy without saying a psychologist. And then two is you can't be psychologically healthy without continuing to see a psychologist. They were creating dependency in their patients to get a recurring stream of revenue.  This doesn't come as a surprise, right?Because when we talk about governance and we talk about what makes people do what they're doing, when you have a career in which you maintain clients and have repeat clients because they continue to need your services. Any psycho psychologist, psychotherapist, therapist, whatever, counselor who is really good at their job.That is to say helping people not need counseling or therapy or psychoanalysis or whatever anymore. If you're really good at your job. You lose your customers. If you are really good at creating dependency and reinforcing someone's mental struggles, then you have a thriving career and customer base, especially if they think that they need you and that you are somehow helping even while you're secretly, or subconsciously making things worse.So there's this huge adverse incentive, one that we also really complain about in the nonprofit world, where the nonprofits that tend to stick around and survive. Are those which raise money effectively, not which raise, solve their problem effectively. So I guess we're seeing the same problem in psychology as we are in the world of nonprofits, which is the successful psychologists are those that are very good at getting clients dependent on them. Correct. Yeah. So I think that this is a really critical point that you've made, Simone.Which is, I don't think that anyone has really gone into this or that. Many people have gone into this with nefarious intentions, nor do I think it's a problem in how psychologists are taught, because I was warned against this going into psychology. The problem is that if you're a good psychologist, you earn less money.If you have less money, you have less room for advertising, less money for advertising, less money for client acquisition, and you have lower margins, which mean you can get less high profile clients often. So really what you're seeing, and I think the reason you see this in the quote unquote elite levels of psychology, more than I think the general psychological audience, although I don't know how widespread this practice is.Is because the people who either subconsciously or accidentally fall into this practice have accidentally brainwashing their patients into thinking they need a psychologist constantly. Economically outcompete, the psychologists who aren't doing this practice. And I think that this is one of those things where no one is acting nefariously. Nobody went into this saying, I want to incept people with the idea that they can't be mentally healthy without one continuing to see me.Or two, that they should cut themselves off from everyone who's not seeing a psychologist in terms of their sort of personal, emotional life. But that's also a really interesting thing if psychologists tell people, also the people who you are engaged with in your life need to see a psychologist.That's additional customers, right? If it's, oh well, you should stop interacting with your parents, unless they're also seeing a psychologist. By the way, here's my card. By the way, you shouldn't date people unless they're also seeing a psychologist. By the way, here's my cart. And so there's many elements of how this sort of cult accidentally can evolve.And I think that some psychologists have some of these practices and not others and some psychologists, I'm not saying all psychologists are part of this cult movement. What I'm saying is that it does exist within the psychology movement. And even when I talk to people with a psychology background who aren't like caught up in this, they're like, oh god.Yeah, I've definitely seen that. And it's really scary. So let's talk about the way that psychology is generally supposed to work when you go to see a psychologist and then we can contrast that with the way you know, you're dealing with probably, oh. A bad psychologist or a psychologist who is creating dependency is typically you go to a psychologist and you have some issue.And what they are supposed to do is help you rewrite your internal self narrative. So that thing that is an issue is either not an issue or not debilitating to your daily life. That is what a, a good psychologist does. You might go to a psychologist believing that you have some sort of a crippling problem that you can't get out of, and they work with you to not have a crippling problem that you can't get out of and not have to see a psychologist anymore.Now, what a quote, unquote, evil psychologist other this cult of psychology does is people go to a psychologist with a problem and they then say, oh, that problem is likely tied to a trauma. Early in your life, let's determine what this trauma is and then we can constantly meet about this trauma.Because if you don't have me acting as a constant bull work against this trauma, then it will fall upon you and you won't be able to live a mentally healthy life. And that's dependency because they're saying, without me acting as this sort of bull work. And what is really fascinating is when I was younger, I was interested in joining cults.So like not, I didn't wanna join a cult. I was interested in how people could be convinced to believe things. It seemed obviously not true to me. Mm-hmm. Um, And one of the, the things I did is I went to a number of like psychology recruitment sessions. Not psychology, Scientology, sorry, the pian slip of the tongue there.I went to Scientology recruitment sessions.  And this is actually the mechanisms that Scientologists would use, they would do a, theton and reading and they would ask you questions about things like your parents or something like that, or other things that happened early in your life. And then the theoton reading is basically a Galvan spin response. So they could tell when you would get nervous and then they would say, ah, you have some trauma with your mom, or your trauma with your dad, depending on how you reacted.Galvan spin response wise to your questions around this stuff. And that's, Essentially what this cult of psychology is doing, which is interesting to me, that you have this one field that is so vilified for, milking people from their money and creating dependency, which is Scientology.And then you have this other field which Scientology labels as like the highest evil, which is psychologists, but in a way it's because they're competing for the same customers, using the same mechanisms. Oh wow. That's why there is this. Fight here.  And interesting when Scientology evolved, that was during one of the periods where, this is one of those really interesting things.So if you go back to Christian science a lot of people are like, oh, isn't that ridiculous that they don't want to use modern medicine? However, actually if you look at the time period when Christian science evolved modern medicine might have actually lowered life expectancy cuz that was back when they were doing like leeches and all right.Yeah. Bone cuttings and everything. Yeah. And so it actually made sense during that time. If you look at during the early evolution of Scientology, this was happening during the hypnotherapy epidemic. So they might have actually had a point that their mechanisms that was actually interesting.It's their mechanisms might have been prescient of the direction psychology was going to go, oh, 30, 40 years in the future, which is just fascinating to me. That we now see them as evil, and yet they were just creating dependency in the same way psychologists see. Now, of course, they didn't go as far and so what psychologists have that the psychologists didn't have with certain regulatory organizations, which can, just bar them and stuff like that. So that they couldn't go quite as far with, Molesting people or something, or creating essential slaves or any of the other things that, of course, for legal reasons.I'm not saying Scientology has ever done any of these things, but what I'm saying is that the tech, if they might, because it's such a centralized organization, they wouldn't have the same system. For preventing these kinds of extreme levels of abuse. But that doesn't mean that the core techniques that they're using aren't the same techniques that the field of psychology had allowed itself or has allowed itself to drift into.And this terrifies me. Let me add another layer of complexity though, because as much as this is terrifying and as much as we frame this as like people unknowingly entering into these relationships or dependent is dependency is created and then turned into victims.Part of me wonders if this is an open secret because we've had this conversation with friends, we've had this conversation with people, quite frankly, because we find it interesting and we've met many people who have undergone really, Hard mental periods of their lives. Most people have, I think who have ended up independent relationships with therapists and just flat out told us, yeah, I see a therapist a couple of times a week.It's gotten to the point where my insurance doesn't accept them anymore. I'm paying out of pocket for this. So this is obviously a big investment. I know that this is a dependent relationship. But also it's been a big help for me and even though I know that this is not right, I need this this is one of the problems with psychological biases is you can know you have a psychological bias and it doesn't help you get out of it.You can know that you're in a culture independent relationship, but this psychologist has effectively created this dependency. You can't easily leave it. That's one of the problems. You essentially need cult deprogramming to get out of this and who it does such a thing exist? What can we say, what can we say to our friends who are in those positions?Or if someone's watching this video and they're like, oh wait, yeah I am in a co-dependent relationship. I'm paying out of pocket for someone. This is really. It's not sustainable and obviously my problem's not going away, right? Like I still have crippling anxiety or this terrible traumatic thing that's interrupting my life. What would you say to them then there is no cult deprogramming for therapists. I think that that's the key is solving it yourself. If you don't ha if whenever you give your mind your mental state to another person, you create enormous personal vulnerability. And so yes, it's harder to do it on your own. But the truth is that the things that the psychologists are taught about how to engage with someone are just not that complex.They're gonna say they are, they really aren't. It's just personal narrative building stuff which you can read about in the Pragmatist Guide to Life. But Yeah, if you aren't interested in that, then try to find another psychologist, interview them early on like you should with psychologist.And I would say the big red flag is the more a psychologist is focused on the concept of trauma especially trauma as an immutable thing, as not a goal to get over, then they are likely on the evil side or the dependency creating side. If they are focused on either not focused on trauma or their focus on trauma is helping you overcome the trauma entirely.Then they're likely more likely to be on the positive side. But what's interesting is I've noticed that these ideas that have been incepted into people have worked their way in a way, into mainstream progressive politics where people now define themselves by their traumas and they see them as like a major part of their self, self-identity.And I think what's really interesting is Other religious movements used to have defenses against this. And this is one of the things we talk about in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, is that a lot of religious movements essentially had roles that were like psychologists, I mean of course they did, right?This isn't a new need for people, to some extent within the Jewish community, like that's what your rabbi would do. And in the Mormon community, you know, you have solutions to this. And within these communities, cause they didn't use psychologists to recruit people in the way that Scientologists did. They were genuinely interested in mental health and one of the best mental health focused communities or systems that evolved to do this, so that I just had endless admiration for is the Catholic system.So what the Catholic system is the confession system. What it allows you to do is go to someone, say, this is something bad I've done, or This is something I've done that is causing mental trouble for me, or something like that. And what they don't say very importantly is know that thing wasn't actually bad.They don't say, oh no, you're just automatically forgiven for it, which is what the Bible says, you know, as you repent. But it's actually a better system than even what the I, I think from a psychological standpoint, it's to say, yes, what you did is bad. Here is a concrete list of things you can do. To atone for the bad thing you did.So it's an acknowledgement of the badness and then creating a self narrative within the person that they can overcome that through following this list of things. Now, of course, they're also creating dependency to the church to some extent, right? Oh, you need to keep going every time you do a bad thing.But what's really admirable about the system they created? Is, it's a very difficult system to abuse either accidentally or on purpose. The pseudo anonymity of the system makes it harder for a person to form a dependency on a single individual. The high level of ethics around. Not talking about, and this is like a really important thing for Catholic pers, you cannot say what was told to you in confession, even if it could save someone's life or prevent a murder, which is actually higher than the level of trust you have with your psychologist.If you go to a psychologist and you say something that says, suggest that you could kill someone else, or self-harm, they actually have a duty to report you. Like serious, like you're at risk of your own life. Where the Catholic priest has a higher level of trust in that. And even if you have a dumb person who could accidentally give a person bad advice, they're actually working within a fairly narrow range of answers they can give you, and it's really hard for them to give an answer that creates that much psychological damage.So there are mechanisms for better systems in this. The problem is that these mechanisms aren't available. To the masses or to the secular or like religiously derived masses that are no longer in these tra traditions that offer services like this. So I know you don't really like Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, because what it has become is actually quite corrupted and it has various adverse incentives at play. It's another example of an organization that was started with good intent but essentially has become a cult.But that's for a different video, right? That's for a different video and not of it, actions of it. I do want to ask you about their buddy system. You know that you when you go into aa, there's a lot of stuff that is, is whatever, but one of the things that you do have, rather than a therapist, rather than a priest that you confess to, rather than a centralized authority, you just have another one of the people of this group who shares your struggle being your.Your accountability buddy, and it seems like sometimes these people have they've been through it more than you have, but at least so they're more advanced, like Yeah, so what are they really doing? Yeah. They're preventing you from leaving aa. You could say they're preventing you from getting back on alcohol, but just as much of preventing you from getting back on alcohol.They consider a failure scenario. Two things. You getting back on alcohol or you leaving aa what are your thoughts on, and this is, we'll say, to take a step aside here, this is where the concept of a dry drunk within AA comes from. If anybody doesn't believe me look up this concept. Many people in the cult version of AA believe that quitting alcohol through a mechanism other than AA is as bad as continuing to be an alcoholic, which to me shows the point is staying in aa.It's not getting off alcohol, which is what I mean when I say this is a cult. And it's not all of AA in the same way. It's not all psychologists but the buddy system. Let's, yeah let's return to mechanisms that people can turn to. If they don't turn to a therapist, if they're not Catholic and they don't wanna go to confession Do you think a buddy system, so someone maybe who's been through the same thing that you have, or someone that you really trust as a friend, is a good alternative to just figuring it out by yourself?Because I don't think everyone's really ready for that. Just a side note, as somebody who really studied cults and loves cults, Buddy systems are really common in cults. It's one of the most common systems. Yeah, we love Mormons. We'll have a video on them in the future, but Mormons do to an extent, use a buddy system during a person's mission trip to prevent them from, decon converting so that they ha they have somebody they can turn to constantly.But that also is supervising them to an extent. And when you look at cults, actually one of the reasons why cults historically use Buddy systems is for converting people. What's. Some cults found, and there's some great research on this, it was actually done by the cults themselves because they kept records.I think the moonies were the ones who did this, is it was never approached somebody as an individual because they'll think that it's like a sexual thing or like you're hitting on them or something, or like, it's weird. But if you approach them with a buddy, which is the smallest group you can do this with, they have a much higher chance of not being afraid of you and not seeing you as threatening.So yes buddy system is actually often a sign that you're joining a cult. And I need to stress, I don't think Mormonism is a cult. They just the buddy system is there to prevent deconversion. But to the point that you were making, can a buddy system be good? It may be good, but I really think the ultimate buddy system is a spouse.And um, what you really should have is type of spouse that can help you work these thing, work through these things for yourself, which Simone does for me all the time. Um, uh, I've been brainwashed by my spouse. That's really what I'm saying here. I've been brainwashed into just having absolute mental dependency on my spouse.What I, but no, What I hear you saying is, Buddy systems are a viable, the, isn't that what someone who would brainwash me would say? Hmm. No. I no, no. I'm saying is if Buddy systems may work, but they're not a terribly good system. Well, They're, I think a buddy system is a really good system if you're trying to opt into someone's lifestyle or, or solution.So if you think if the buddy system is managed by an organization that you can have total trust. Has your best interest at heart? I'm referring to a friend. I'm referring to a spouse. I'm referring to a mentor. I'm not referring to anything that's organizationally related. I'm referring to the dynamic of someone that you trust.Helping you work through something, well then you better have total trust in them. Because you know what? That buddy there's a reason why there's all these rules against sleeping with your psychologist and stuff like that. If you're a female and that buddy's a male, they're probably gonna try to sleep with you unless you have like enormous trust in them or vice versa.No. This is how people create dependency. This is how I understand. If you have total trust in the person you're going, in this buddy system. Great. But the problem is that you can often misjudge someone. And when you use someone to be this kind of sounding board, you outsource the keys to your mental kingdom to someone else, which puts you in a position of enormous mental vulnerability.But Malcolm, I think what you're missing is when people are severely depressed, when people are severely traumatized, severe, they may not have questions, should be solved with. Pharmacological intervention and potentially even more extreme interventions like um, uh, electro shock therapy works really well for extreme depression.There are solutions to the more extreme psychological problems. This is same for things like schizophrenia and stuff like that, but those aren't psychologists problems, problem. Those are. Psychiatrist problems. It's a different fricking degree. Okay. It's a different, it's a completely different level. One prescribes things and the other doesn't go to the one that prescribes things.If that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for solutions that you can't come to yourself or you can't come to as a buddy, and I do agree a buddy, all I'm doing is highlighting the importance of understanding that if you go to a buddy trust that buddy. But the truth is that you could probably trust a buddy better than you can a random psychologist.That is true. Like you, the only thing you really have faith that the psychologist isn't going to do. If they're likely not or less likely going to do something that's just absolutely egregious to you. But they are much more likely to just create a generic dependency, whereas a buddy may have a slightly higher probability of doing something absolutely egregious, but a much lower probability of creating general dependency.So long as you. Prepped them with framing for this, which the Pragma has guided to life, which is our shortest book by far, and sells for 99 cents and all the profits go to charity. So like we created it. Actually, when we wrote that book, it was to try to create an alternative to C B T. CBT is actually a great system.We just wanted an alternative that people with less training could use was more reliability. Cbt, standing for cognitive behavioral therapy. Yes. But it was originally meant to be a if then training manual for psychologists and actually an AI was going to be trained on it to become a psychologist.One AI team reached out to us after reading it. It, if you read it and you're like, this sounds like a psychologist training manual, that's actually the way it was written. And so it could actually help you in that scenario to prevent the more extreme ways. You might engage with something, but then also just self-reflection.With this very simple concept, and I'll present the concept to you, you have an internal self narrative, who you are, what your role is in the world, what events have caused you trauma, how you relate to those trauma. This is all part of your self narrative. It's the narrative you tell yourself. The core goal of this person you're going to is for you to go to them, say, this is how I would like to rewrite myself narrative, or, this is my self narrative today, and here's how's it's causing me problems, and to work with you in rewriting that self narrative, which is actually self narratives are incredibly malleable.Even though we pretend in society today, like they are this immutable part of who we are. They are not. It's very, is it like it's research shows. They're very malleable. So you're going to this person to rewrite yourself narrative into one that is less damaging to your daily life or your goals for who you want to be or yourself.And that's just a very doable thing. You don't need to read the book, just go into it with that concept while also understanding that this person who's rewriting yourself narrative. Could rewrite it to say, you absolutely need to keep seeing me and giving me money and give me all your money and then do all these things I tell you to do, or you will never be mentally healthy.And that's the danger. So that's the red flag to look for. Um, Speaking of red flags, we have to go coop, get our kids from daycare. So let's go run, run, run, get that and uh, I will start dinner. I love you so much, Malcolm. I'll see you soon. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Description written by an evil AI (for SEO not for actual reading): In this thought-provoking conversation, Malcolm and Simone delve deep into the question - can our civilization collapse? They discuss the historical instances of civilizations collapsing, drawing parallels with the Egyptian and Roman empires, and offer insight into what a modern civilization collapse might look like. We also delve into the big societal experiments of our time - globalization, gender equality, and high levels of education. As the conversation evolves, Malcolm and Simone also discuss the implications of such a collapse on everyday life, from disrupted supply lines and increased conservatism to impacts on mobility and job availability. Importantly, they provide invaluable perspectives on how to navigate such uncertain futures, discussing the role of debt, pensions, and investments in a potentially collapsing economy. If you're curious about the past, concerned about the present, and thoughtful about the future, this discussion is not to be missed. Make sure to hit the like button if you found this information useful and subscribe for more insightful conversations like this one.  Hey Malcolm. Hello, Simone. We have such an exciting topic today. Yes, indeed. Can our civilization collapse? Discuss? Yeah, it's, I think this is such an interesting topic because we hear people talk about this and we call them preppers or we, we, I think it's a very easy thing to dismiss because if you look at the past couple hundred years civilization hasn't collapsed, I think the first thing to establish in terms of thinking about can civilization collapse is, has it happened in the past? And the answer is yes. It's happened a number of times in the past. Whether you're looking at the Egyptian civilization of the Roman civilization or various periods of.The Egyptians that happened to them like four different times. If you go through history, when you're talking about the New Kingdom versus the old Kingdom versus the middle kingdom, that was three periods of collapse with many collapses in between. So in Egypt it got so bad they forgot how to write, came up with new systems writing, they forgot how to draw. It's really interesting.You can see art falling apart and then be. Reinvented, not even rediscover, but reinvented in between these collapse periods. So I think Rome presents probably the best model of a collapse we can look at for what a collapse of our own society might look like. Yeah. That's what people always discuss, right?The fall of the Roman Empire and is quote unquote Western civilization falling. Yeah. Talking about Western civilization today is silly China to an extent evolved on a different civilizational route. Japan evolved on a different civilizational route, Korea did.If they collapse, we collapse. We're all tied together at this point. There's just civilization now. But to go back in time, with the collapse of the Roman Empire to the average Roman on the street, they probably wouldn't have noticed.That much change in their daily lives mm-hmm. as the collapse was happening. They may have noticed that rules around religious practices were becoming more orthodox supply lines. Like they, they had less stuff in their local stores or things were getting dramatically more expensive.Political figures may have been increasingly becoming more radical acting. But from their perspective, and I'm talking about like in the Western Roman Empire, so let's say someone in Spain not that much would've changed from their day-to-day life. And also keep in mind with the collapse of Rome, you had the Western Roman Empire collapse long before the Eastern Roman Empire did the Byzantine Empire.And so there's this idea that collapse means everywhere. All at once goes road wire, right? Cause that's what we see in media. Yeah. Yeah. Road Warrior Water World. We're picturing complete lack of infrastructure. No government. But you're saying that's not what civilizational collapse is, what I'm hearing from you is you're saying it's poorer services.What exactly is it? Be a little more specific here. It's a collapse of. Supply networks. Okay. It's a collapse of an economic system. The biggest thing that's associated with civilizational collapse is economic system collapse. To the extent that once you have a collapse of an economic system, then you begin to have a collapse of a geopolitical order. And presumably this is some kind of irreversible collapse cause otherwise you could define the pandemic. As a temporary civilization? Well, No. What you have to ask is what does it look like when it's, is what we saw in the pandemic part of what you see during a civilizational collapse?Yes. No, for sure. So I guess you could say that what many people experienced during the pandemic is what civilizational collapse would feel like. You can't get some products that you really want to get you, you can't go to work or you don't have a job, or people aren't letting you work.Or traveling becomes more dangerous. That's a really big thing was in civilizational class. Mobility in general. Mobility. And one thing to remember is that culture often doesn't completely go away. It just becomes a lot less. Aggressive in terms of change.So what you see is culture become dramatically more conservative for often a period of like a hundred, 200 years. Um, and, And before that, often culture is much more promiscuous or permissive, I think is the word. Both promiscuous and purpose. Oh, so yeah. So you're going from. Freedom, recess to like cracking down.You're in the middle of math class. Yeah. But then things begin to open up again after that period if things survive. And that's where this question gets really interesting. So the first big point I'd make about civilizational collapse for a lot of people when they think about the existing world civilization is there's this belief that we have been on a consistent trajectory for the past 300 years or so, and we're not in the middle of any really big experiments at the moment, like at the economic or geopolitical level, and that's just factually wrong. We have started a number of really big worldwide society-wide experiments pretty recently, and these experiments affect people's daily lives.So let's just talk so globalism. Gender egalitarian, like sort of women in the workforce and women being educated, high levels of education in general. So yeah, but was women being educated? I think people look at that and they're they really misunderstand the scope of that one. Women being widely educated and accepted into the workforce was one thing, but the workforce and the economy adapting to that to lower wages.With the idea that you had doubled the amount of workers in the economy that was the bigger fallout of that. Which meant that it really became almost impossible. Not that it was really that possible before. It was actually a myth that on a global scale, it was ever realistic to raise a family on a single income.Yeah. But there was a period where in certain parts of the US and Europe, it was possible for a 50 year period to raise a family on a one family income. That possibility is just not there anymore. So I think a lot of people, they're like, oh, you could have women like you actually see pushes for this now.Oh, you could have women not be educated and that would solve the problem or women not work. But as long as some countries are engaging in women working that doesn't really work, then you're just choosing to be desperately poor. Is really what's going on when you make that change at a society-wide level.Yes, some people can be wealthy enough to make that decision, but we're past doing that anymore. You see a similar thing with something like student debt, right? So student debt is something that I think affects a lot of people's daily lives. It's a big thing when people are like, what is your biggest stressor in your daily life?A lot of people say student debt. So in 1995 in the United States through its nationally, 200 million in student debt. Right now there is 1.76 trillion in student debt. Holy smokes. So that's just like new, like if you're looking at like 2000 versus where we are with student debt today.It's not the same kind of a game. It's the same thing with national debt. National debt, like really big amounts of national debt, didn't really begin until the seventies and then it began to distribute around the world. But then you also have the same thing with the fractional reserve banking system, or if you want to hear people like the pontificate on that or.Currency not backed by anything. That's a fairly new concept. And a lot of these are associated with conspiracy theorists because I think a lot of the times when people started these experiments, people initially went out and said, oh, this'll lead to immediate collapse. And people started saying that for 10, 20 years afterwards.But the reality is, if you look at Rome, if you look at the decisions that precipitated the collapse, Those decisions happened about a lifetime before the collapse, and that's how civilizational collapses often work. But the larger point here being we're in the middle of a big experiment. What I really care about and what I think is important, what should people be doing? What should people be doing if they believe that we won't be able to depend on our economic systems or that international trade and international travel will become more and more limited?Like what lifestyle changes or things should people be getting out of the way now? Like bucket list items? Yeah, so the, the constant talking point that we always have is that debt is this miraculous instrument when things are growing. And we've built our society like a pyramid scheme.So for the past 300 years or so, the economy has been growing in aggregate all around the world. When you shotgunned your money into the stock market, it grew, you could be an idiot and make money on the stock market. Now this was because population, the number of workers was growing exponentially and the productivity per worker was growing linearly.Yes, technology was growing exponentially, but productivity per worker was growing linearly. And so this led to this illusion of a constantly growing stock market, and we begin to build a lot of our economic systems like social Security. Again, a pretty recent experiment on those systems. And a lot of governments have similar unpaid systems like that.And Social Security is basically a debt system in that we are taking out debt. Like any unfunded pension program is essentially debt that is held by the person who you're promising money to, but you haven't actually given the money. We're pretending like they're investing money, but they're not investing money.And but you see this at the society level. So debt's this amazing instrument when things are growing. If I make a $10 investment in something and $8, if that is debt, and $2, if that is equity and it grows by 20%, will, my investment has doubled. But if it shrinks by just.10% my investment has haled. And so debt multiplies the prosperity when everything is growing. And so we had the society where population rates began to slow, right at the same time as we doubled the number of workers by putting women into the workforce in mass. And so as population rates were slow slowing, we had an increasing adoption of women into the workforce, which hid.This massive decrease in the worker supply, but now that clock's beginning to become due. And one of the things I note is that if you look, if you say that America's fertility rate will fall the same rate it did over the past 10 years continuing into the future, and there's one generation every 30 years, that means for every a hundred Americans today it, there will be, I think at 3.4 great-grandchildren.Now of course we'll probably see some die back in terms of population fall, but no one has really handled that problem yet. So what this means is you're going to see a collapse of the basic infrastructure of our economic system. Now, what this looks like to Simone's question is a lot like Detroit.I, I would say Detroit is just a very good picture of what a system looks like when it's collapsing because a lot of people, they hear things like, oh, housing prices are going to decrease, and it's great when a housing price decreases 10, 20%. It's really bad when a housing price is always decreasing and everybody knows it's always decreases because then there's no reason to invest in it and houses go to a dollar and houses actually cost a lot to upkeep.So you end up with this endless urban blight. Actually this is a question I wanna ask you. How would you prepare for that, Simone? One is, it's, it sounds and this is not news to anyone, but don't depend on a pension planner or social security.Even if, for example, you work for a teacher's union or something like it, it looks not great in terms of you depending on that. In terms of investing on the stock market for the next 10 years. At least demographic collapse itself isn't going to be driving that. In fact, AI may cause really high increases, right?But aside from that, my intuition is enjoy a really broad range of products. While you can enjoy very inexpensive electronics while you can it it's hard for me to think that there's in, in the face of civilizational collapse, considering how slow it goes. That there's even that much, that there's that much you can do.Yeah. But also it doesn't sound like we're gonna get hit that hard as long as. Oh, no it's gonna be bad. Okay, so what, how is our life is how bad things were for the average American, just 85 years ago. Just 150 years ago. Okay so what's gonna get bad? Walk me through it.Just the amounts of poverty are going to be astronomical. Just just like. We are going to be impoverished. Other people are who's going to be impoverished? This society? Everyone. Everyone. And I think that's the thing that is difficult for people to think about. What does it look like for just rates of poverty to be about 80 to 90% higher than they are today?What? What does it look like if you're living in America today for America to have the same lifestyle that you experience when you go to a developing country? So people won't have jobs? That's what you're saying is jobs. They'll have jobs. They just won't pay very much. The government services won't do very much.They'll be much more corruption at all levels. It'll just be much more like a developing country, and America's gonna be more isolated from this than any other country in the world. As globalism begins to collapse, America is actually the number one beneficiary of this. It's just a lot poorer.Yeah. Like when you read Peter's eye hands, the end of the world is just the beginning. The punchline to it is north America is actually looking pretty good in this scenario. Yeah. Um, I mean, It's , it, we will. Per his perception of civilizational collapse, be more isolated. We'll have to depend on domestic production.We won't have imported. America looks well vis-a-vis other countries. Yes. It's still dramatically poor. Yeah. And I think that this is one of those things where people are like, oh no, I'm struggling today. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, like, Food scarcity is a major thing for like 50% of countries populations that we think of as developed today.And a lot of like actual food shortages. Actual food shortages. , or just actual a lot bigger wealth disparity where if the, now this is something that I think people really misunderstand. They're like AI will make us so much wealthier. Or if people get that poor, they'll rise up.And our company did a lot of work in Venezuela, so we really saw things continuing to get worse. Constantly things can get so, so, so bad before people rise up. Especially in an era of technology, it is very hard to rise up when the government has, autonomous drums. And Venezuela Venezuela doesn't even have those, but, and so you just, you actually do not see revolutions just because things have gotten bad often. The other thing that I think people aren't seeing as much is governments are preparing for this. That's what Zero Covid is about. That's, oh, in China, that's what data social is about. It's about preparing for a collapse of their economic system.And I think one thing we always say about ai. Is that and this is likely a topic for a different video or we can do it for the next video, but AI is the tool that finally frees the bourgeoisie for the proletariat. They don't need you anymore. They don't, they and I and I think the masses of civilization have never dealt with a period were genuinely the wealthy did not need them to maintain their lifestyle.And I think that they have this overestimation of how much the wealthy actually care about them when push comes to shove, when they may need to sacrifice a portion of their lifestyle. If you look at the sort of celebrity class today, they literally think the world is about to die because of global warming, and they can't get off their private jets for five seconds.Yeah. Okay, so then the takeaway from this is, What are you doing? Let yeah. One, I think we're raising our children to be. Independent to be both highly technophilic and resourceful online and with tech, but also highly resourceful and independent offline. Like we want to teach them.Basic agricultural building, fixing and survival skills. And not just, here's how to survive online and here's how to get a job. But if there is no economy to, to participate in, how also can you thrive? So that's one thing. Yeah. Two is, actually I wanna add to what you just said there. Cause I think a lot of people make a mistake here.They try to teach their kids and their family to survive without technology. As a way to deal with this, which is, I'm, it's not like a stupid approach, it's just probably not an optimal approach. It is an option that people should be prepared for in the event that like, AI goes really off the rails for some reason, and you have to go full Battlestar activity and AI goes really off the rails.We're all gonna die no matter what. It's just objectively true. So what we're going to deal with is a period of increased hardship. But we will still have access to technology. When you are thinking of farming, what you need to be thinking about is how do I farm with technology that my family can maintain and build themselves?How do I keep the local tractors running? How do I, having technology that you can work on yourself, that's what's really important.  the thing that you won't have access to is semiconductors. So technology that you can build with fewer semiconductors or you can build with recycled semiconductors. Is technology you will continue to have access to.Yeah. The technology that's most likely going to become scarcity, advanced semiconductor technology.  Yeah. Okay. So there's that. And then I think the other part is like, To enjoy late stage capitalism while it lasts. You and I go on Walmart walks in the morning and we just enjoy what's on the shelves.Oh, yeah.  Also enjoy it while it lasts. Travel internationally. See as many nations as you can go on cruises, like just do stupid. I don't know if that's my plan at all.It's certainly not really what we're doing with our kids. So Simone has this reaction to it, right? Where she is my reaction is really focused more on preparing our family intergenerationally to make it through this. Yeah, and I think one of the most important things about any collapse scenario is that you realize that your country.Does not matter is the primary unit of account as much anymore when Rome collapses? Focus on your family networks. You need to focus on the people who are ideologically similar to you. Who are your cultural allies moving into the future and understand that. Just by investing in the stability of the nation state, you aren't necessarily investing in your own family's future in the same way you are during a period of enormous growth.So build your techno fiefdom, build your tribe, build your support network, what does it look like as our economic system begins to falter? It's about relying on personal relationships and about building and investing in those personal relationships At the intergenerational level, a personal relationship isn't really that important.If the person. Doesn't have kids. They're a strong family culture. But it is really important for other families that do have kids and do hope to survive into the future. Because when you're building those networks those provide you with, I think the beginnings of the next of the foundation of the next economy and hopefully the next great civilization.Yeah, which is exciting, right? So you, what you are focused on is, oh, if civilization is collapsing, this is an opportunity I can get in on the ground level here. Yeah. I'm getting on the ground level of the next civilization. That's what I'm interested in. We need the next civilization to be one that doesn't collapse because we can do that.We can build a never-ending renaissance. But here I am. I'm like, oh, enjoy it. It lasts and you're like, yeah, you're like, lovepops, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you're like, you're thinking like a looter ah, smash the windows. Grab what you can. Can't we just say yes to all the things, you know, enjoy it.Well, It lasts. Build the next one. I think that's maximum fun. Um, And just I think one thing we need to remember is as it becomes clear to people who have overly invested in the existing system and expected it to care for them, like people who overinvested in the expectation of social security, overinvested in the expectation of social stability.And have become this priest class in our society that don't really produce anymore, but expect some level of social status. They are going to become angry and vengeful and I think we're already seeing this to some extent because they see the lack of hope they have after. Basically enslaving themselves to this university pyramid scheme where they put all this money to pay for this priest class.We, we I'll try to put like a gift here that I thought was funny of what, like a university graduation looks like and people are like, oh no, this isn't a priest class.   📍 What have you seen the way these people dress and they talk in languages that almost no one understands and they give you this.    📍 This script of paper in a language that's like this dead language. And this is a priest class, okay? And you are paying money to nominally join the priest class at the lower level. At the hope that you may be able to join it at this higher level and have some sort of say as the experts, the people who decide what's true and what's not true in our society.But really you don't, and instead you've just gone into life shattering debt to support, all of the other the people in this. It's insane. It's not a good look. It's like an obvious cult. Like our society is run by what, to me looks like an obvious cult. But isn't that what it looks like when things are about to fall apart, right?Yeah. But it's also what things look like when they're recreated. No, are just no. A cult has taken over our government. You could say that. And people are like no. Like when you talk to people who have bought into the cult, they're like no. This cult knows what's true. It's actually true this time.Oh, and it's bro, they always say that. They always think that. The academic system today is not what the academic system was. 50, 60 years ago. This is a holistically the whole, like for example, let's just talk about like the way that we determine status was in the academic system. If we're talking about another new thing, this whole peer review system where like your status is determined by how many citations your paper gets, and then you get peer reviewed by other, and yet we have found out that You can submit things to peer review that are just like, what was it?Like mind cough, but they had changed out the things for like feminist sounding things or something, and it got it past peer review, this entire academic system. It turns out it was a neat experiment. We've only tried it for about one human lifetime and it's already failing us. Okay. Academia used to be something different than what it is today, and it used to fundamentally function different than what it does today.And if you look at the output of the academic system, it basically collapsed in the eighties per dollars fit. The amount of money flowing into the system rapidly increased, but the amount of technological output rapidly decreased. Yeah. Now you can say, oh, invention's gotten harder. Invention should have been getting harder for the past century and a half.Why didn't it decline before that? It didn't, because the way that the system operates is fundamentally changed. And one of the statistics we always love, we talk about this in the sexuality book, but there was this great study of about 500 PhDs and the psychology of sexuality space. And what they found was that more than half of them said that they would actively occlude.Or not publish results if it showed systemic psychological differences in, in, in the brains of males and females. Like the way that geological pro processing. Yeah. And it, and that shows to me that this entire field is more interested in promoting an ideology than it is in searching for truth anymore.And. People are like yeah, but the good studies, some good studies might still get out there. What about the other 50%? And it's yeah, but if you're doing a literature review of the field now, you really can't believe anything because what that means is if you're trying to find is the truth, some number between one and 10, and you know that 50% of studies that above number five won't be published.Then you and it turned out the real truth was actually only number six. You had to adjust for that in trying to determine what's true. So you end up determining seven or eight. And it's created this world where it is very hard to use what's coming out of academic fields to determine what's true outside of the few very hard sciences that are untouched by this.But the sciences, I think that often matter most to how we interact with our daily lives, like psychology and stuff like that. And you have this huge replication crisis. We're, but 50% of studies can't re replicated. So I'm just pointing out that I think. When you have bought into the system, which you don't realize is how much of the system doesn't work the way people are saying it works.And how much it mirrors what historically we would've called AOC cult. And I guess one thing that we haven't even talked about, and now you're alluding to it, is m. Maybe we've been seeing the signs of civilizational collapse for a while. 30 years. Yeah. Starting with academia starting to crumble, now you're seeing mental health, skyrocketing fertility is plummeting.Their issues with pollution there, light kids are beginning to get shorter. Yeah. Obesity is becoming a huge problem. Like people's endocrine systems seem to be totally screwed up. Yeah. There's a lot that seems to be. Really not working. But it's important to not approach this like a dor.And by that what I mean is I think apocalyptic is very tempting, right? There's this tendency to want to be to just be an apocalyptic about things, to say everything will definitely end within X time period.Where I think the real approach to environmentalism is, Yes, there is a massive die off of species. Yes, ecologies are going to adapt to that. Yes, the world will get hotter. It will be harder for us on a massive scale potentially. But no, it's not gonna kill us all. And it's the same thing when we talk about civilization cloths.It's not gonna be road warrior. It's gonna be the worst of Detroit when, but without the rest of the world to bail us out. It's going to be like living in a developing country today, it's not going to be the end of humanity except, and unless, because this time, you know, you had to follow the Roman Empire and stuff like that.They didn't have nukes back then. And that's something we have to watch out for. Yeah that's, that's scary. You know what I really want to talk about in the next one is how AI changes the economy and let's do it and what that means for the division of classes in our society. That'll be fun to talk about.But I liked talking about this with you too. Even when it's the end of the world. It's so fun talking with you, Malcolm. I love you a lot. You too. You're good. At least we'll have each other, especially, and the family. And that's the thing. You build durable networks, durable social networks, and the most durable social network you have.Yeah. You can do it well if you're not a, a terrible person. Not gonna even, even if you are podcast, aren't we, aren't we? You're, You're your family. All right. I'll catch you on the flip side, Malcolm. Catch you on the flip side. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join us in today's thought-provoking conversation as we delve deep into the topics of life extension, mortality, immortality, and the interplay of these themes with societal progress. We discuss the importance of healthspan expansion and how it differs from life extension, as well as the potential implications of life extension on intergenerational dynamics. We also touch on the conflict within the tech accelerationist communities between life Extensionists and pro-natal factions and how this could shape the future of humanity. Tune in to hear our take on these complex topics and why we champion the cause of intergenerational improvement.A terrible transcript:Hello, Malcolm. Hello  Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. What are we talking about? On a scale of one to 10, how excited are you to die? 10. Same. The best. Today we will talk about life extension, mortality and immortality, and I think it's a uniquely fun conversation for both of us because we have a view that deviates from, the typical intuition that people have about mortality because we are genuinely not in favor of life extension. We're in favor of healthspan. Expansion. So we like the idea of having longer productive years, longer years when our bodies are fully functioning, both from a rep reproductive, but also mental standpoint.We believe in longer periods when people are able to work and contribute to society. 100%. What we aren't in favor of is indefinite life, and there are some very concrete reasons why we hold that to you. I'm here indefinite, let's say 500 years. Yeah. Like we're okay. We're okay with. Some life extension, but living forever causes some serious problems.And I think people don't realize that. And I would also point out that we aren't against this at a government level. Like I would not promote anyone limiting access to this technology. We are against it at a family and cultural level. And I think we think that our family will always be better off if we focus.On intergenerational improvement instead of intragenerational improvement. Yeah, and I think you make a really important point here though, is that with this and pretty much every other stance on what people do with their bodies and a whole lot more for that matter, we may have our own stances on what we think is best for us.But we think that any stance that is coercive or that would impose rules or restrictions on other people, especially against their will, that is the height of evil. Absolutely. The height of evil. One of the reasons actually why we don't. Like life extension, philosophically speaking, is that we actually think that it puts more people in positions where they will want to impose their will on others against their consent, I, I would say that even goes to the core of why we don't like life extension. But go on. There's a growing antagonism within the tech accelerationist communities between the life Extensionist and the pro natal faction. It, it surprises a lot of people that there is such the, such a level of antagonism, but it makes sense in that really only one of the factions can win.At the end of the day, if all the technology that we both hope is realized, the life extension affection, there would just be too many people in the world if no one ever died. And so they think they can solve the problem of falling fertility rates by extending the lifespan of the existing people.Whereas if you talk about prenatal as a philosophy is often predominated by the idea that it is the height of arrogance to think that you are the cumulative of all human, cultural and evolutionary improvement. That is to me to believe. That you are a superior race. Like you think that you can't do better than who you are .And so we believe very strongly in okay, creating another generation. But the problem is there is always a. Vested advantage that people have if they have been in the system for longer. If you look at the world today, this is why you often have these old stogy people in positions of power. It's why when you look at the Congress of the Senate and the President, it's increasingly an aging demographic.Do you really want these people living forever? Do you really want the boomers potentially control human civilization for the rest of human civilization? Now they might be doing that whether or not we have life extension if they screw up enough.The way we view life extensionist versus non-life extensionist is that they are individuals. If their job is to maintain an ancient Athenian fleet, Their plan to do that is to take every board of the fleet, dip it in resin, have it stay exactly the way it is for 5,000 years.Whereas the intergenerational improvement people, they see the job as to regularly replace the ships with new models and what that means is that when you go 500 years into the future, one is a fleet to Athenian warships and the other is a modern warley with submarines and aircraft carriers And, yep.So what you're missing is what a life extensionist would say is, oh, you're implying that I who plans to live forever will not be iteratively improving myself. I will be improving my biology, I'll be improving my mind. But the problem with that kind of stance is ultimately if that's what you're doing, you are changing so much that ultimately biologically and mim medically, you will not be the same person We are not.For the most part, the same people we were when we were five years old. That person is long gone. And so the idea that you wouldn't just follow a far more efficient pathway and have kids or, pass on your ideas to other people and let those ideas strengthen themselves through different perspectives and different bodies is ridiculous.Like, why would you? Why would you undergo these crazy interventions to somehow iterably improve, technically in the same body or technically in a discontinued string when you could just do the system that has worked for Millennium? I love that point so much. And so to use the analogy I was using before.It would be like the person who's no, I'm not dipping all the board in resin. What I'm doing is like technologically upgrading the ships and everything like that. So in 500 years the ship that used to be a trireme will now be a modern submarine or an aircraft carrier. Exactly. And your point being, so you've functionally done nothing.You haven't preserved anything. So why are you so afraid to give another generation a shot? And I think the answer is transparent. The answer is that they don't really plan to change that much. They want to maintain some level of continuity with who they are today. And if we look historically, generations just don't do that.People very rarely after, and I don't expect to myself, after I am 50 or 60, do I really expect myself to change or update my beliefs that much? No, hold on. We actually, we have plans for that. Like we plan, for example, when we feel like we are starting to. Mim medically and mentally ossify, that's when we go hard on psychedelics.Because that's when the gullibility versus open-mindedness trade off starts to be worth it for us, and when in which we're okay with being a little bit more gullible in exchange for responsibility. Absolutely. And I think. There are ways around this, and this is one of the things that Life Extensionist will say.They'll say if you extend young age until later in life, people's mental ossification won't happen in the way it happens with existing people today. And I think that is a hypothesis, but I think we will find that hypothesis is wrong as soon as life extension is invented. And I'd actually love it if life Extensionist could take a stand if it turns out that people don't actually update their beliefs that much when they're able to stay young for longer.Do you then say, okay, in that scenario, life extension is bad and we should stop it. And the answer is no, you don't because you don't really believe that. But Malcolm, you're focusing on the wrong thing completely. This is not about mental ossification. This is about adverse incentives. The primary reason why life extension is non-beneficial to populations is the cumulative power, wealth, and advantages that someone gains with time.So the more you are alive, the longer you are alive, especially if you're successful and wealthy enough to afford life extension. Which let's be clear, this is something that only the wealthy you're going to be able to afford. We're seeing in the United States, we're seeing earth and false dichotomy.I don't think no. Wealthy we're seeing lifespan fall down. Right now, I think only if you are wealthy and educated, let's the benefit of the doubt, let's say. Okay, let's say that anyone's able to do it, but the longer you are living, the more you have to defend. The more stuff you have, the more incentive you have to take what you've built and keep it.So now it's you versus a bunch of other people who might supplant you, who might take you know things you want, who might use up resources that you want access to, who might take attention that you want. . Who might erode your political influence? What are you going to do? You are going to try to shut them out.The reason why we have a gerontocracy now is that the people who are in power now have been defending their positions of power. They're not letting new people come in and take their place. And when you have life extension, you have people who are very strongly incentivized. To prevent younger generations.New ideas, new perspectives. People also who very importantly, have grown up in the new modern world of that time and know better than those who grew up in a different world. What that new world needs. Those people are being kept out of positions of power and influence. They're being prevented from building new solutions, and that is extremely dangerous to human society.So as much as I am against coercive measures to stop people from doing what they want to with their bodies, I do think that society on the whole is made much weaker If you have a ruling class of very old people. I think that's a really excellent point, and I want to expand on it because I think a lot of people can look at this and they're like that's not intrinsically true.But it is intrinsically true. If you have built your power within an existing social or economic system. If you've built your wealth within an existing social or economic system, you lose. If that system changes, you are. Always and intrinsically, or almost always and intrinsically motivated to prevent improvement of the social and economic systems within which you reside.Whereas the youth are always motivated to change those systems because they benefit most from those changes, and that is what allows for civilizational advancement. In addition, when people say you'll be able to stay mentally younger forever. That is true. But to Simone's point, you never get to grow up again within the new iterative social system that has been built.You can really only have one set of formative years, one set of five to the age of 15. You might be able to stay 20 forever. But you're not gonna want to increasingly revert to the age of five and then start over again. I don't think that's a society that any life extensionist is looking to create. When we see the way that our kids are engaging with technology like ai, it gives them a perspective of AI that we could never replicate in ourselves.Even if I was able to stay 20 forever, a five-year-old growing up alongside AI is going to have an understanding for how that technology can change our society. That a permanent 20 year old vampire person is never going to. And when you prevent this intergenerational baton passing of power, what you're really preventing is societal advancement and social experimentation and the motivation for those things at the structural level of society.Yeah. And what we've seen a lot of people say on the life extension side, because I'm trying to present their arguments as best I can, it's not fair for us to just strawman them. Yeah. Is okay. I will admit that maybe we're not gonna completely memt and biologically replace ourselves. The whole point of life extension is we wanna keep some element of ourselves is continuous.Okay? Grant that, and we also admit that being very old will lead to some adverse incentives that people will be incentivized to accumulate power, accumulate influence, and entrench themselves in these strongholds of power and prevent new generations from coming into influence things.But don't worry. Will just create laws that force essentially term limits and positions of power, or after a certain number of years, you have to give all your wealth to the next generation. And I think it's very naive to hold those views because when has that ever worked? When has power ever been passed to people and those people promise?Oh yeah. No. We promise. Yeah. This is just temporary. Maybe there's some precedent for it, but yeah. It's really hard to imagine. I am even trying to think of maybe there's some kind of blockchain.Connected to whatever, like life extension biology they have where if literally their wealth doesn't transfer out of a certain account by a certain age, then like their biological anti-aging thing turns off. But they would find a way around that, they would find a way to create shell companies that hold the money.I I just, it's the incentives are too strong and, that, that's the, those are the only arguments that I've seen that come close to defending this position. And also, I just can't understand how somebody could think it's better than the system we have now, especially with the genetic changes that are happening in that system.So when you have a kid, you know a lot of that kid sociological profiles influenced by your genetic makeup, but you're getting to choose. Anyone you want in a world to, because unless you think you're perfect, which I don't, I chose a partner based on somebody who filled the flaws that I felt in myself.So I get to one, mix my DNA with anyone I was able to convince to marry me in the world. The person who I think is infinitely better than me. And then I get to have this next iteration of myself, give them any childhood I want to give them. Hopefully give them access to a better education than I had access to prevent them from having any of the hangups that I may have developed in my own childhood by giving them this better childhood and then better than all that, throughout their childhood, they get the chance to say, Hey dad, this thing that you've come to believe is wrong.They are not affected by my biases. And one of the great things about research into biases that you see over and over again is knowing that you have biases does not prevent them from affecting you. Knowing that something is like a psychological trick in your brain doesn't make you immune to it.And see you have all these rationalists in AA people who are like, oh, I've studied all the way. People come up with biases. And it's yeah, but did you also study that knowledge doesn't protect you from those biases? Hardly at all, because that's in the research as well. What protects you from them is the intergenerational way that we transfer identity, which is to say you're not classing too hard to identityand I, I think this is another really important thing that you are not afraid of death. You understand that your life is to build a better future for the next and for future generation. That you have a purpose with this life to prepare the future generations to be better than you and, and to understand and have the humility to understand that I will never be able to improve on myself as much as my kids can because I can't see my own flaws in the same way that someone you tried to raise can see your flaws and my God, we all see our parents' flaws.Yeah. We also see ourselves becoming our parents, which is terrifying. So I dunno. But I think a lot of it comes down to how we perceive the concept of self. And when you choose to define yourself more broadly by your. Your family or your community or your children, whatever it might be that is where you become less afraid of death.And I wonder if we were to pull, and I'm sure people have actually, it'd be fun to look at this research communities that are more family oriented, like in the Latin America. There's so much more identification with family. I am my family. We are, we are together. If you were to compare.Interest in life extension across those cultures. I think you would see especially very atomized cultures that are highly individualistic as being the most interested in life extension because they don't see their descendants as them, they don't see their family members as them, they don't see their cultures as them, they don't see their religions as that well, if they have religions at all.So the only thing they can clinging to is themselves. And so I think in the end, life extension is more it reveals more about how someone views themselves than it reveals about like their interest in technology or their interest in the future, or their interest even in being in the future.I think what you and I yeah, feel just as connected to the future and just as excited about the future a thousand years on. As someone in the life extension to community who genuinely believes that they, the continuous they will exist in that future. Yeah. The great thing about, the advancement in AI and stuff like that is our descendants.It doesn't mean that we really totally die when we die. If our descendants really wanted to ask for any sort of advice we had to give them, they could just ask an AI model trained on our books, or depending on how people end up getting digitized with computers and stuff in the future.You don't lose really information when people die. You lose this like broad sense of information and broad sense of perspective. But hopefully if they had something useful to say and they were smart, they found a way to condense that information to something that could be passed forward into future generations.But I think realistically, but we have to say probably won't matter to future generations that much. How much do you care to ask your great-great grandparents about what you should do today or where society should go? Their world perspective was so different from ours. Why are we trying to ossify that?Yeah. And there's a, there's another part of it too, which I think is how we perceive our lives now. Yeah. Like I see every day as a different existence and we've talked about this before, like I sort of see every iteration of myself as a standalone, extremely ephemeral blip of consciousness that is going to disappear and be replaced with time and every new experience.Every, cell that is sloughed off and a new one that is regenerated, that is a death and a new beginning. And the person that I was even five years ago, like I, we can go back and look at all the YouTube videos of us talking and I feel like I'm looking at a complete stranger. Yeah. I am definitely not the same person.And so to me, I. Even if I didn't have this view about being part of a long, unbroken chain of ancestors and descendants that I'm excited to be a part of, I think I would still see life extension as a bit of a farce because even within a normal human's lifespan, totally in the absence of any technological intervention, There is constant death and rebirth and we are definitely not the same people.We are definitely not an unbroken chain. So this idea that somehow we ever could be, it's chasing after something entirely impossible. When this comes to how you see continuation or the existence of a thing and the ship is easiest example is one we always used to love to use here, which is you have this old wooden tri room, traveling around the Mediterranean and boards keep rotting and it keeps replacing them with new boards.And then people ask, okay, at the end of the journey, it's all new boards, it's at the same ship. And then they ask okay, suppose somebody had been following the ship of Cs and taking all the boards that were thrown overboard and then rebuilt an exact copy of that ship. With those boards now, which is the real ship.And your body is doing this with memories, with cells, with perceptions. The real answer is it depends on which definition you've used for continuation, which is the real ship. And to some extent, it doesn't matter which is the quote unquote real ship, right?If things change iteratively over time. Yeah. So then the question becomes, okay. How do you really define the ship of cis? The ship of FES is defined by its purpose. Why it exists a thing to move people in the same way that fleet was defined by its purpose, and that the person who decided to preserve every aspect of the fleet instead of iteratively improve it over generations, defeated the purpose of the fleet by trying to maintain a sense of continuity within it, and it's the same as identity.Why do you exist? You exist. To create a more prosperous future for our species. Your existence is defined not by your ability to indulge in the self, but by your ability to contribute to the collective human tradition and identity.And that is always best done through intergenerational improvement in the same way that the sis, as soon as you let go of the idea that who you are as a continuous entity really exists in any meaningful context to begin with. Then you can say, oh, then what I am is my purpose, and if what I am is my purpose, do I better serve that purpose by living for a really long time?Or do I better serve that purpose through intergenerational identity transfer? Yeah. Or through creating a new culture or through creating a business or fueling a political movement. If what we're describing doesn't feel intuitive to you at all.What I would encourage you to do if you're watching this or listening to this, is write yourself a letter in the future or leave yourself a voice memo for the future. So this all the time, I do this all the time. It's really fun. I think the whole, like my sense of continuous identity fell apart the first time I did this to myself.And it was a school exercise in our freshman year. Of oh, now actually it was in middle school, it's like when I was 13 years old, we were supposed to write a letter to ourselves that we would open just as we were about to graduate from high school and either enter the career world or go to college.And reading, a letter from myself around 10 years in the past made me realize just how much I really wasn't the same person anymore. And I could understand. The interest to that person. I could understand that we were both in the same kind of boat and interested in a lot of the same aims which of course, was selfish betterment, right?Oh, I hope these things for myself and I hope those things for myself, we just weren't the same person. So try doing that. Like honestly, a voice memo, a letter a video you'll find that. This may change the way that you view life extension. And I honestly wish I could model the other side better.I don't like when we, have just a sort of one-sided. It's more they think that they can always do better for themselves. I can continue to improve and the more time I have, the better I can make things. And also free humans from the suffering of death, death to, I, I think people with a limited perspective is the worst thing that can happen to a human.And I think that the forgoing of sort of self-identity as something that's meaningful was a really big shift for me that I didn't make fully until meeting you, Simone. And it was one of the big changes that you had on me. I completely shed my identity when we married, and that gave me the opportunity to really redefine for myself and my family what identity means and the way that we see it culturally, our family, the way we raise our kids, seeing it the way that we see it ourselves.Is that when you are young, you are at the lowest level of identity, which is to be an individual, and that is the weakest, most pathetic form of identity. Then as you get older, you get married and you become something more, you become a partnership and your identity combines with another person. And I think this is something that people, we, in emails, we often get each other's emails and we interchangeably use each other's names.And it's the same with our Twitter account and the same with our authorship, and the same as the way we do CEO EShip, because we really consider ourselves as two faces of the same identity. In a very meaningful sense that I think other people may underestimate. And then you become a family, which is a different form of identity.You move away from even the idea of a partnership and you become a guide to something bigger, but without controlling or directly influencing that thing. And then you pass on to the highest form of identity. Which is to be a memory and the impact you had on your family and society. So life is a transition away from being trapped in the singular meat shell to being a more expansive concept.And it is almost like a being floridly trapped at a early stage of development from the perspective of our family culture . To genuinely fear your own death, outside of your own death happening before you can complete what you wanted to complete in life.And that is something I fear constantly but that fear goes away with everything I complete, every kid I have, every time I put together some aspect of their education system so it could function even after I die. Another one of our books that we put together so that they would have some guidance if we died, I see it as a list of tasks I have to do before I am free to die without consequences.Yeah. It's, but it's also very, I think, very comforting. I think it's difficult. Yeah. And scary to be afraid of death I wouldn't even say it's like an important ending. I would just say it's almost ridiculous. It's a transition in a cycle. It's not even that much of a transition.It's just it's, it's irrelevant. Um, It is just, it is something, but I, I think that's also folds into our mechanistic view of the universe that everything that will happen has already happened and everything that has happened is happening. Would that be a fun one to talk about in a video in the near future?Determinism? Yeah. With that kind of view. It's weird to be afraid of any single moment that may have happened or that has happened. And I guess that view combined with our sense of self makes us very unafraid of that fleeting nature of life. But what I think is also interesting is that despite that you very much struggle, like many ambitious people do with.What you've accomplished so far in your life. Like I think you are very, it's a tick clock. You're very, yeah. You're very aware of your mortality. I'm very aware of my mortality. I'm more concerned about, but if I need to play with cheat codes to complete the things that I want to complete, then maybe I'm not good enough to properly judge what needs to be completed.Yeah. Yeah. But so you think you like the artificial we don't have to say artificial, but you like, The constraint. You think that it's useful because you find it motivating? I guess there is that, studies have found that when people are given a deadline, when people, every person could enact everything they wanted to upon the world, there's a bunch of people with different hypotheses about what's best for the future of our species and everything like that.If everyone could just enact whatever they wanted to there, there would be a lot of conflicting things. So to an extent, it's a competition of ideas and cultures to say that you get this sort of limited time here, very limited time here. And if your ideas are good, presumably you will be more effective at seeing them enacted on the world or within your family in the same way that.If we aren't creating a good culture for our kids, they can leave it. And that's a beautiful thing. That's a great thing about intergenerational. Yeah. I also think that studies have shown that when you give someone two weeks to complete a project, they complete it in two weeks. When you give them two years to complete the exactly the same project.They take two years, so yeah. Yeah. Having infinite time doesn't necessarily help you. If anything, it delays society's receipt of your hardware. That's a really interesting point. I just noticed all of my friends who are life extensionist after they became Art at Life Extensionist, they have achieved almost nothing in their lives.Oh no. Interesting. Oh, I wonder if that's a number of them were successful CEOs before they jumped on the life extension train, but after they jumped on the life extension train, very few of them have started successful companies or movements or ideologies. Do you think the assumption is I'll just create that after I've figured out life extension?It's like that thing with Genie my first wish Yeah. Is to get infinite more wishes. Yeah. And then your wishes get terrible. Yeah. Cuz when you only have three wishes, you've gotta make 'em count. If. Interesting. Well, I love chatting with you Simone, and I love that you have enlightened me so much on this topic cuz this is one of the areas where you have really influenced my world perspective.And it was not like this before. I was very much a life extensionist sort of person before meeting you and I pulled you into the death cult. You uplifted me into the death cult um, wonder. But the death one hope will win because these crusty, I mean if it's mortals versus Immortals, we're not the mortals.The mortals will always win cuz we're not afraid of change, we're not afraid of death. And they are, and it's fundamentally, they're fears that limit them. I love that. Um, and, and, And I mean, it's also fundamental until the supremacist movements always fail. They think they're better than anything that they could create.Mm-hmm. And to me that is the, the height of arrogance. Um, and, and, and, And it is that arrogance that will blind them in why the mortals will always crush them. Then may we burn bright and die young but live to speak another day. Malcolm, the flame that burns half as bright burns half as long, twice as bright burns.The flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Beautiful. That's Blade Runner. He says that in the, anyway, I love you on that note. You're amazing. I love you too. I love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

​Welcome to our robust discussion, 'Redefining Progressivism: A Dialogue Between Malcolm and Simone'. In this episode, we delve into the evolution of progressive movements from the eighties and nineties to the present day. Our intention is to identify the core values that shaped these movements and to examine how they have evolved or deviated from their initial principles.We discuss the interplay between progressivism and conservatism, the goal of removing emotional pain in current movements, and the ways in which this aim is influencing societal norms. We also examine the role of Christianity in shaping ideas about equality and how these ideas have been integrated into both progressive and conservative philosophies.Our discussion ranges from the impact of standardized testing in schools to the Healthy At Every Size (HAES) movement, from the influence of the internet on societal ideologies to the growing acceptance of polyamorous relationships. Through it all, we keep coming back to one central question: What was the true objective of the progressive movements of the past and how does it differ from today's progressivism?This video is a must-watch if you're interested in exploring societal and cultural changes through the lens of political ideologies. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and the bell icon for regular updates on our engaging and thought-provoking discussions.This is a terrible AI transcript of the episode:  Hi, Malcolm. Hello Simone, my wonderful wife. It's beautiful to be here with you today. I'm glad to be talking. What are we gonna talk about? So on a recent podcast you had brought up something where I disagreed with you, and whenever we disagree on something, we like to hash it out so that we can get on the same page with the topic.So we both agree that right now progressivism in the far left has been eaten by this. Super virus that has hollowed out the old predominant ideologies and just wears them like a skin suit. And we agree that this super virus is primary objective or like the objective ideological function of it.It's to remove in the moment emotional pain from people. That's what it optimizes most of its decisions around. So those two things being agreed, where we disagreed was the movements that it ate, what the progressive movements were in the eighties and nineties, before the age of the internet, before the supervisor arose, what was their real objective and what were they optimized around?This. Yeah, I, my, my position and the general impression that I'm under is progressivism is the move fast break things approach, whereas conservatism is the, hold on, wait, things are okay the way they are. Let's not. Let's not change things so quickly. And so I don't see progressivism as inherently bad.I can see it as risky, obviously, because things do break when you move fast and when you're not careful. But it is just one philosophy and ultimately both progressivism and conservatism must work in concert because if you don't have advancement, if you don't have people moving fast and breaking things, you don't.Deal with new existential threats, you don't advance. But if you only advance, if you only try new things and constantly change, you both lose a lot of value collectively and a lot of efficiency. And also subject yourself to maybe more existential risks than you're building solutions too, if that makes sense.Do you have a differing definition of these things? I do. Yeah, so I think the progressive movement always. Had an aesthetic element to it that contained what you're talking about and has always professed to care about that for a long time. It's professed to care about that. But I think we need to remember that, something could be called the Patriot Act and be totally unpatriotic, right?Like just cuz something professes something doesn't mean it doesn't. And I think that when we're talking aboutWhen we talk about conservatives, modern or even older conservatives, they'll often say that their movement, one of the big things they care about is small government, right? And yet they almost never do anything that actually makes the government smaller or that really, de consolidates executive power or that, and so just because a movement says, and a lot of members believe that this is something that they do, I don't think that we should take that to mean that's actually what they're optimizing around. So when I look around progressive policy pushes in the nineties, in the eighties They all really seem to me, based around optimizing equality, specifically equality of outcomes, and the more equality you had, the more equality you had in the way people were treated, in the opportunities people had access to in sort of everything, the better.And this is not what it optimizes for anymore. An example of how much it doesn't optimize for equality now can be seen an insane thing to has said recently. So as a lot of people, they might not agree with our original premise that it's been eaten and now it does something entirely different.So if you look at what progressivism does now, so you have Simone's vision of progressivism and my vision of progressivism, and we can talk about why each of those visions might be negative in some ways and we can get to that. And I think that the equality drive is actually. A pseudo communist drive and that it's driven with the long-term plan to a communist like society, but or very socialist like society, like as close to communism as you can get.But if we go back to the Maining claim that we made at the beginning, which is that progressivism today, isn't that anymore? So when we look at something like the recent fight in California which was to have kids like not take tests or remove the amount of testing that kids get because some kids get bad grades on tests and that hurts their feelings.So let's remove this saying that's hurting people's feelings. Now, obviously, In the long term, if you remove testing that testing was primarily motivating. The kids who didn't have parents who were motivating them, the rich kids parents still send them to s a t prep. They're still sending their kids to, to forced environments where they are in some way, socially or economically or emotionally.Punished for not continuing to achieve, to not continuing to do well. Whereas when you have less socioeconomically advantaged people often they don't have as much time to spend on their kids in those ways. They don't have as much time to engage those kids on those things. So the people who are vastly, disproportionately hurt by removing things like that are going to be the economically less fortunate.So you are increasing inequality, but removing in the moment suffering. And you see this across the board, Again, I always come back to the Hayes movement as being a great example of this, but I really think it is the healthy and every size movement saying that it is, bigoted to teach or published research that shows that it might be unhealthy to be severely overweight.That causes in the moment emotional pain and therefore it is bad regardless of whether or not it is true and might help people in the long run. That's just you then rework what is true and what is being communicated. To be the thing that hurts people less.   Another area where you see this progressive. Policy of not at all being like, what progressives used to be is these drug programs, where they're giving hard drugs to people on the streets really at high levels because not having your drug when you want it causes emotional pain.Therefore, it is evil. Therefore, we should give it to people, even if it causes more long-term suffering and exasperated it's social inequality caused by things like mental disorders.  And you can see this in, polyamory, like the social movements that you see today, right?I want sex now , right? And I might have some set of rules, but all of those rules I have with my partner are based around removing emotional pain for me and the partner while doing whatever I want. All right, but I'm gonna push back on your premise around equality. I think that the old objective, yeah I don't think that's what progressivism is really about.I think that equality maybe correlates more highly with Christianity. That's like a concept that. Was introduced with Jesus and the New Testament. And it's all about like now the, the meek shall inherit and the all you know, this is about, that's where victimhood became cool.That's where helping the poor became cool. That's where helping everyone became like a desirable and virtuous thing. And I think that Christianity. Or like pro religion groups have isolated oh, sorry. Sorry. Osci. Isolated between progressivism and conservatism. So I think that there's a lower correlation between equality, which I very much like connect with Christianity and conservatism or progressivism.And I think more of it has to do with who is in favor of changing things and who is not in favor of changing things. There has been time when the Catholic church and then broader Christianity has been very pro change. And there have been times when it has been very anti-change. So I don't agree with what your like basic argument  I really find the point you just made very fascinating and I do agree that you're right that before Christianity, and this was actually a really interesting thing, if you study the history of like early Christianity, the idea of looking was reverence on the less fortunate in society was not really done.There, there was very little cultural precedent for doing that, at least within the traditions in those geographic regions. And this is something you can actually see Romans talk a lot about in the early Christian tradition is they saw it as. Really interesting the way that Christianity did that and potentially even morally superior to their existing Pagan practices as to why Christianity does that.I suspect it's because their original, like the progenitor of it all, was somebody who, was suffered who was down trodden and that they showed their dedication through suffering. And of unraised suffering in the moment. And that is why for a long time after this, and if you're not familiar with the early Christian Church, the core thing you would do to be cool in the Christian Church was to become martyred.That was the highest act of devotion. And then when the Roman government became Christian started freaking out about this because they could no longer do the key thing the instate, right? And so then what? That's when the monastic tradition started. So they would, they'd just get, they got fed up that they couldn't get themselves killed. So they'd just walk into the desert and then say, okay, I'll live this sort of life of suffering, but this elevated this life of suffering, which really elevated the poor, which is really philosophically interesting. But I don't know. I actually think both the progressive, the communist and the conservative faction, I love the conservative factions.Like you guys aren't the Christians. And then the Christians say you guys aren't the progressives. They're like, you guys aren't the good Christians. And the truth is that Western civilization has been so inundated in Christian values for so long. I actually think both perspectives are different parts of the Christian kaleidoscope and represent different.Christian denomination values in different ways of relating to those values. And so I think it's wrong to say that the conservatives are the Christian influence side and the progressives aren't the Christian influence side. Um, However, you, me, I well, okay, but here's where I don't agree with you.So when I look at the actual policy decisions that they were pushing they were pushing for a very specific and stupid kind of equality. And that is equality regardless of what you do, that you can. Dress anyway. Take any action, act in any way. Put any amount of effort into something, and you should still be socially treated the same and get the same rewards.You should be able to not go to work and still get the same rewards as somebody who does go to work. Whoa. No. That's. Position that is one progressive group that has made arguments like that. And again, like the, there are, that's, this is what I personally, cuz I'm gonna hold out like I'm trying to stand progressivism here.Progressivism is about letting ideas out there, trying them, but it's not about enforcing them and it's not about forcing them on other people. It is, Hey, let's try this social experiment. Hey, let's try letting people dress whatever way they want. Let's, try and see what happens when women vote.But they never had a fail state. That's the thing about social experiments, that they're supposed to have a fail state. Like we know if x Y happens, progressivism and conservatism are about the next step we take. They're not about determining what, what fails or what succeeds. And in fact, a very progressive system would have a higher revolution, a higher Respond rate than like a conservative system because the progressive system would say, oh wow, we all just tried like being naked for a year.That was dumb. Here's a new progressive idea. Maybe we should wear clothes. Cool, let's try it. Whereas would, I dunno. Did you see the So there was an article like advice or something, and they're like, there's this cool new thing people are doing in San Francisco called Radical Monogamy. But see, that's the progressive way.The conservative way in San Francisco would be like, no, let's stick with polyamory. We know it works and let. Let's not go around changing things and progressivism is, we tried this polyamory thing, let's give it another few centuries. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I'm saying, like progressivism is great because it allows for greater adaptability.I think conservatism is the also very necessary. Hesitation before doing something crazy so that you don't, end up hurting a lot of people. Because a point that you make about governance, for example is progressivism within governance models, especially on the state level, is incredibly dangerous because when you do something wrong, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people may die.So there is a place for these things. So here's how you convince me. Can you think of actual mainstream progressive policy positions? You have a window here, okay? You have the nineties to the fifties, all right?And you've got progressive positions from that period, okay? I want you to find a single one. That was an actual policy position that they pushed for that couldn't be argued to primarily be about equality instead of just social accelerationism because what you are describing is social accelerationism and you get social acceleration like Calvin is tradition, which we're both from, is a very social accelerationist position.They were always experimenting with new cultural practices, gay marriage. What? Gay marriage. Gay marriage. That I don't think that's about equality. Hey, if it were about equality, then we would've animal marriage too. Alright. It like, this is for the gays. No. What are you talking about? Come on. It with a hundred percent.If you were about social change, you would have animal marriage. Gay marriage was saying this isn't hurting anyone, and it's not involving any and non-consenting entities, and therefore it should be allowed because equality explains the push towards gay marriage much, much, much more so than just social experimentation.And in fact, I would bet that many gay proponents would find that quite an insulting reason to say why progressives were standing gay. Marriage was what? They just wanted social experimentation. They just wanted social change. No, they were fighting for equality. And anyone would've told you that? Perhaps you're right. I hear, I think it's, I think it's, I think it's acknowledging that an old social institution, Was no longer relevant and allowing that social institution to evolve, that is to say marriage and conservative change their practices all the time. So if you wanna talk about a big social change that happened during that time with the conservative antagonism towards abortion that just wasn't true before, like the fifties. And there was, were pro-abortion. Yeah, they were pro-abortion. In fact, there were surveys done and conservatives were much more pro-abortion than progressives. Really? Yeah. So the abortion thing only came about because they were trained to capture the Catholic voting block, which was always anti-abortion.So I looked this up after recording and at the Republican national convention and Kansas city in 1976, the majority of the constituents there were pro-choice.  But like evangelicals being anti-abortion, no, that was not a thing. Historically that was social experimentation. Now you look at the highly derived evangelical movements, they're constantly coming up with new social practices, like speaking in tongues or weird types of parades they do, or oh, now we're gonna talk with each other with these words, that.They're always socially experimenting. What you are seeing here is progressives to defined a specific type of social experimentation, as good as progressive. And because you grew up in that environment, that was the only thing you saw. You saw all of the conservative social experimentation as intrinsically regressive when it wasn't, it was trying out new.Things. All of these quote unquote conservative cults are like extremist conservative religious factions. That was social experimentation just as much as a hippie commune. Now here's a separate argument. If you look across cultures, you have cultures that are calledI wanna say accelerationist or derivative. And they change a lot, but you don't just see this in cultures. You see this with languages. So if you look at sp specific language groups as they've derived from Indo-European, some languages just for whatever reason, are really highly retained. They just don't change much.They keep saying things the same, et cetera. Other groups that deviated from the same, cultural evolutionary tree at the same time, They just have a cultural tendency of changing really quickly in the way they say things and the speed they adopt, new words, everything like that. If you look historically actually the core differentiation here wasn't a.Progressives versus conservatives. It was the Catholic and Orthodox versus the Protestant traditions. The Protestant tradition. Oh, it's derived the Protestant tradition. Tradition has always been a highly derived tradition with certain iterations of the Protestant tradition, specifically the Calvinist iteration being the most derived.Iteration of the Protestant tradition. That's why when you look at the founders who were predominantly Calvinists, you would see them doing things like editing their Bibles to try to make them more like up to date with modern science and stuff like that. That was both highly derived, but a very conservative practice because they still really.Followed this new social structure that they had created. And I would argue that conservatism today is still the same in terms of its long-term objective as conservatism in the nineties and eighties. And this is where you can see your course thesis falling apart, I think, is that it is about intergenerational cultural fidelity.What they care about is their culture surviving into the future. Yet, if you're looking at the Protestant traditions specifically, the most fervent of the Protestant traditions, they're often highly derived cultural groups. Look at the Mormons, talk about a derived cultural group. They have very odd sorts of practices and, and they do innovate.They do adapt. It takes 'em a little while, but they adapt. They do it ad Yeah. Yeah. And they do a lot more social experimentation than I'd argue progressives do. If you and their social technologies are really cool, like we can get into Mormon dating and stuff like that.Like they've developed some pretty interesting social technologies, but let's actually talk about that. So let's talk about how a single word works, just as an example of a derived and newish social technology. What they do is the single people who are, so just to provide a little bit of context Like at a, in a on Sundays, different waves of people will go to church services and a singles ward would meet at a certain time, like maybe at 8:00 AM when like the rest of all of the families in that general area would meet at 10:00 AM single people.And yeah, then it's, yeah, it's a church service followed by activities afterward they hang out, they go to lunch. Yeah, but hold on. It's not just activities. So what they would do is they would pair up, Usually people who were like dated are interested in each other in the ward to play mother and father of the ward.And so instead of going back like you would if you were married and going to your home and then doing family day with the kids, you would do family day with the ward where this couple. Plays the role of mother and father and then hosts like an event, like a party, like a mixer for the other people in the ward in the same way that they would do for their kids, if they were older.And it allowed them to try out relationships in a way that I think probably led to healthier relationships forming. So that's an example of a newish social technology. I don't know if it's that new.  Okay. I looked it up after recording. And it appears that it gained prominence in the 1970s, but was invented in the 1950s. So yes, a very news social technology.  It's more of a conservative tradition because that social technology was experimented with the idea of forming relationships and transmitting the culture onto the next generation. So it was towards conservative ends and not towards progressive ends, where when they experiment with new social practices, historically before they were eaten by the virus and now they're just like a ghoul wearing a flesh suit.They were about maximizing equality. Okay, hold on. I don't think it's about maximizing equality. I think it goes back to a different definition that you've given about both the present but also past difference between progressivism and conservatism with conservatism. Fighting for in intergenerational wellbeing and progressivism fighting for intragenerational wellbeing.So progressivism optimizing around the wellbeing of people here and now. We don't really care about our grandchildren's grandchildren and conservatives. Arguing more in favor of. Now screw our kids. Yeah. So the one big deviation from all this is global warming. Where does this fit into things for you?Because it's the one area where progressives actually take a long term mis perspective. Don't you think it's one of those things that's arbitrary, like with the war in Ukraine, how in the United States, like it's almost. It's a little counterintuitive how we'll say Democrats and Republicans decided to support different angles on the conflict.I don't think necessarily it had to be, so I'll give you my answer to this. Okay. I think what's happening is the progressive institution has predominantly, when we talk about the super virus or where it really began to spread, It was at university campuses. Okay. And at that time, the conservative institutions, so a lot of people think of as conservative, as anti academic, but that really wasn't true.If you go back to the conservatism of the seventies and eighties, there were a lot of conservatives in academia back then. But once the progressives had really captured the academic system as a means of replicating their ideology because they weren't having as many kids, so they needed to.Proselytize somewhere, then the conservative institutions began to distrust anything that was coming out of academia. And global warming really requires a long an academic perspective. To judge how dangerous it really is. And so I think that what we're really seeing here is more a distrust of academia from conservatives and the progressive priesthood.If they have a priesthood, which they do actually it's academics. That's the height of the, that's who tells 'em what's true and what's false, and the same way that, if you look at the older Catholic tradition and you wanted to go. Determine what was true and what was false, and we can go over a different video in this.You go to your priest, right? And that was the core divide between them and the Protestants. The Protestants said, oh, you should determine this on your own. And obviously some Catholic traditions have different, but the progressive faction, when they're trying to determine what's true and what's false about the world, they say, Ask the experts, but what do they really mean by experts?They mean people who have been accredited by this university system where you can be fired for saying something too conservative, right? That's not experts. That's just what's the progressive status quo? Which is really especially now, right? We really, it just makes it a priesthood. Yeah.Yeah. Maybe you've convinced me a little bit, I guess growing up with progressive culture one wants. To believe that it's more well-meaning than it perhaps is, or Mel warmth. Equality is well meaning if you don't think about it. No. Yeah. If you don't think about it. But equality is a complete farce.There is no such thing as equality. Explain what you mean by that. That's them fine words to a lot of people I know. But once you think about it, it explain. Yes. So this happened, I realized this upon reading a book called Policy Paradox by Deborah Stone, in one chapter, she describes a professor bringing a cake to a class and dividing it fairly or equally.But then she describes all of the different ways in which the cake can be equally divided. And I'm not gonna give exact examples, based on. Who gets the best grades? Who's the hungriest? Who has the best, way to tolerate a glycemic load? Who really likes cake the most? Who she likes the best, who walked up first to get a piece of cake?There are many d ways to eat more divide. I don't like the examples used just easier. I think a better way to say it was, is it who? It's the hungriest. Who needs calories the most, like who's physically the biggest? Is it an exactly equal distribution? Is it to the people who have less access to cake at home?Is it people who have less money so they couldn't get a cake in class as much? Yeah. So that there's, or people who got better grades. Yeah. Yeah. Or the people who got more cake last time get less cake this time, yeah. Yeah. And depending on, Sort of who you are and where you stand in this and how much you want cake it might, an equal division of the cake might feel very unfair to you, very unequal to you.And you could always manipulate what equality means. This point. Yes. And because you have to make a judgment call on what. How we define equal, and there is no one universal thing that you can use as criteria. It, there is no such thing as true equality. There is equality along one dimension and it's a very one dimensional way to think about things.So yeah, if you base an entire political philosophy around equality, especially if that equality is not something that also is core to that, that political philosophy, if equality were defined in progressivism, as I don't I don't even know how it could be defined than maybe what the reason it's not defined is because it's defined loosely, so everyone can believe that if things were divided more equally, they'd have more stuff they would benefit.Yeah. Yeah. What's really interesting about intersectionality as a concept is that it's like a moving goalposts for equality that enables people to cheat. It's like a cheat code for having things made more equal in your favor. Yeah. Because it, it has allowed people to say I deserve more and I am more excluded and have a bunch of exclusionary labels. I think as progressivism began to be eaten by the virus, as it began to optimize ourself around removing emotional pain, it did begin to define this equality that it was trying to create.Where equality is the people, the people who deserve the most are the people most susceptible to emotional pain, and this is why you have these emotionally fragile. They deserve so much special treatment when no sane culture would be like, oh yes, the emotionally fragile that is who should have the most resources and run society.But within progressive culture, yeah, of course the emotionally fragile because it is their emotional fragility and their susceptibility to emotional harm, which means they mean more protection in a society where the core promise, the core thing that's getting people on board is we will protect you from pain.So I will say that you have seen this transition, but I think yes, in nineties and eighties, progressive, and they didn't know what equality meant. And this is why those communist systems always fail. It's because they say, oh, we're gonna create equality. And then what happens just because humans are humans is that the groups in power within these systems end up defining equality in a way that favors them.And if you're not in empowered, then you can't do anything but revolt. Create a new system and then inevitably in a few years you end up redefining equality to what favors you. And so that's the problem with equality is it is such a slippery concept. I think that we now have a progressive ideology that does define equality.It does define who deserves more. The problem is it's just a really stupid definition. Even worse. It's a stupid definition cuz Okay. How does it describe equality? Yes. The people most susceptible to emotional pain deserve more. The what? So the, the most mentally ill shall get all those.Yes, yes, Yes. You have seen this like, don't you understand I have ptsd d I can't handle this right now. And the problem is that some people really do have PTSD and we need to create special, things for them so that they don't suffer for no reason. But when you incentivize this, when you create a system where the people who feel emotional pain most easily, well then you created a system.Where their entire social group, their entire society is constantly rewarding a lack of emotional control. Mm-hmm. And so within their groups, within their little governance structures, you constantly have these meltdowns. And this is bad for the individual in these groups because one, you're teaching an external locus of control, which like all of the research shows, it's just horrible.And it makes you have lower your ability to control yourself emotionally. But true. When you reward people for a lack of emotional control, then they like a. Biological, like hardcoded level, lose the ability to control their emotions. And so this means that they experience a lot more pain over the long run.Ironically, when you create an entire system, an entire ideology, an internal governance framework around a moving emotional pain, you cause infinitely more emotional pain. Yeah, and this is why since Pew started doing the research on this, Conservatives have always been happier than progressives always believe it's markedly happier, and it's because they do not have these systems that are rewarding them for feeling bad.Yeah. Yeah. That's uh, well then, I mean, where would you say that this version of progressivism emerged? It didn't, this is a different video. Yeah we gotta talk about the virus in a different video, and I would love to No. I'm not referring to the virus. I'm talking about the roots of progressivism, equality pro broadly as an intragenerational wellbeing movement.Yeah. Yeah. So progressivism as communism, as an equality maximizer. This came from communism. It came from communist groups. Oh, and before that, there was no focus on so would you say, and communism rose around the industrial revolution, right? Yeah. So if you look at things that my family fought for, like historically, right?Like my family was never. Progressive family in terms of the ideology that was motivating them. They were always motivated by maximizing individual agency was in the system. But when they were in politics, you look a few generations back, big supporters of women's suffrage big supporters of stuff like shorter work weeks during the age of robber barons, trying to increase autonomy by. Being very workers' rights. I think you can be adaptive in what maximizes individual wellbeing and autonomy. While also saying that just trying to optimize for these things that the, that iteration of progressivism existed before.The communist ideology really took over the Democratic party and made them into what they are, and I think what you're describing is I think maybe more like my original definition of progressivism, like we're open to change and fixing things more quickly. No, you don't think so. What I'm talking about is conservatism, all those things that I'm talking about.I consider conservative ideas and they were conservative ideas. They were Republican ideas and a lot of people say the Republicans and the progressive switched, but they didn't Really, what happened is racism switched between the parties. That absolutely happened, but if you look at the policy positions that the various parties were having, what really happened is this.Communist strain basically infected one of the groups and it became the Communist Party and had no sort of ties to its former self. Whereas the Republican movement did adapt to that. Like it reactively took positions that it hadn't taken before, but it maybe changed as much as the conservative and progressive movements did during the Trump era.We're like, there was definitely huge party switches, like the protectionist became the non protectionist and like the populist became the non populist and the, all the people who were pro-war became the anti-war party. There was a huge party switch then. But fundamentally, mostly the people who were still on one party were still in the same party.And yet our grandkids will say, don't, the party switched when Trump took power, which I think would make most progressives like, Cre. Like what? No, you can't say that. No one will say that in the future, but like it's so obvious that's gonna be the way people see things. You think so? Oh, absolutely.Yeah. Interesting. I don't agree with that. I'm just saying that's what people will say. And so I think that we can mislabel this sort of quote unquote flip that happened with the parties when it really wasn't a full flip that happened with the parties. Okay. Have I changed your mind or not?Uh, A, a little bit. I, I think a lot of it might, for me be caught in the weeds of I, I would need to go through the history of go for it, you know what Yeah. What all these things stood for in the past. And I You too, Too, you know I'm talking Yeah. Well, I love you, Simone. I love that we disagree about things and we make a point of trying to come to like, we haven't done this in a podcast before, where we like genuinely hadn't really talked through something before the podcast.So now you guys are seeing how we try to align on issues in our relationship. And we'll keep talking about this until both of us come to a position where I'm like either you convince me or I convince you. So actually an argument she didn't make. Now that did convince me a lot because we did talk about this a little bit before the podcast and it, is it progressive?As in before the virus was much more pluralistic in its aims. And that I am overly simplifying it. And that did actually convince me, and I do think that she's right, is these equality driven angles of progressivism were only some of the most dominant factions. But there were many different factions within the progressive movement before the virus that had many different objectives.And that. Through that they were much more pluralistic and I'm overly simplifying them. And so I did change my mind based on that argument, which didn't come up in this podcast. Do you think you're over simp simplifying them by? Saying that they were all fighting for equality, or are you still gonna hold that?All of these, no, I'm just saying the predominant factions that had power to get things passed in the legislature and stuff like that. I think that they were fighting for equality more than anything else. I think that was their primary objective function, but I do also believe that it was a diverse party back then, and it is wrong to paint the progressive party circa.Eighties, nineties, seventies, sixties, as one group in the same way that today I think that you can't really ideologically dissent without being expelled from the movement. Yeah. Yeah. Oh and maybe I'm thinking also more about my original point that like I. Progressivism is more about being in favor of change and conservatism is not, because I think you made an interesting argument that a lot of conservative groups have been very innovative, but I think it, it can also equally be argued that the progressive movement, especially today, is so ossified.It's so it, it is now like just swath and orthodoxy. And to talk about what you mean there. Some people might be like, oh, I disagree with that. The turf movement historically. It would've had differences of opinions with other progressives, but it fundamentally would've still been allied was the progressive party.And yet it has been, these are feminists. These are old school blank slate feminists. This is the reason they believe what they believe. If you actually look at they call themselves gender critical feminists, if you actually look at why they hold the positions they hold is because they believe in.The older orthodoxy and the older orthodoxy was that humans aren't born with anything. The only reason we have gender is because we were raised to believe we have gender, right? And so they see anyone who is ossifying this idea of gender saying, oh no, gender is real as fighting for this completely.Fictional in that it's not based on any sort of biological reality patriarchy and that we should move towards a completely genderless society. I think a lot of people don't like actually know what the gender critical movement is actually fighting for. And they believe this because that used to actually be the scientific consensus.Before academics were like, oh no, there actually are like really systemic differences between the way men and women think. And we now know this and that. You can't just, raise a guy as a girl or raise a girl as a guy and most of the time have that turn out. Okay. Actually, you can there's been intergender studies on this.I'm not saying what's true. I'm saying what is the political orthodoxy of the academic institution now. So we could get on that later. But thi this has been a fantastic conversation, Simone. Yeah. I love talking with you about these things. Especially love when we disagree. Cause it gets really interesting.Yeah. That's where we're gonna come up with a new idea and we can, we have a new thing to talk about for a few days. Oh yeah. Things are so much more interesting when one or both of us is wrong. Because then we become. Slightly more enlightened at the end, but only slightly. All right, love you.Love you too. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join us for an imaginative exploration of the future of humanity in an AI-dominated world. Our hosts delve into potential societal and genetic shifts, discussing the future of human relationships and the role of AI companions and virtual reality environments. As AI systems advance, they predict a rise and eventual decline in "robosexuality," with more people choosing to live in virtual pods or digitize their consciousness. They also ponder potential changes in human reproduction and the increasing possibility of human speciation due to environmental pressures, isolation on different planets, and the role of gene selection and editing.Throughout the video, they express how this dramatic evolution might make current societal issues like racism seem outdated due to the high genetic diversity we might see in the future. They also speculate on the possible socio-economic outcomes for those resistant to this technophilic lifestyle. Their conversation concludes with a personal note on their shared enthusiasm for these thought-provoking discussions. Witness this deep dive into the anticipated, rapid evolution of our species and understand how our present might shape the future.An AI generated transcript of the episode that is not great but something: comments what other sorts of like pre-programmed genetic proclivities do you think are going to be able to resist AI girlfriends and perfect VR environments?And keep in mind people will say you could have general utilitarians, right? That wanna make life better for everyone. But um, you know, you have one general utilitarian. Who's open to living this lifestyle themselves? One. Jeff Bezos. One I don't think Elon Musk is a general utilitarian. I think he's much more aligned with us than other people.But I think uh, if you take a Jeff Bezos or a Bill Gates who seem to be pretty, generally utilitarians, like especially a Bill Gates, right? He can put himself in a pod, live the perfect life, that pod is going to have fixed maintenance costs. When you divide his money across the rest of the population, especially a falling population in terms of human numbers, he can put millions of people in pods.I don't think that financial concerns will be an issue as to whether or not you choose the POD option. Yeah, no, I think it'll be available to people. You're also, then again, I like my point. I just don't think that. Ai, we'll say Agi, that wears humans as a suit would have a reason to make more humans like that unless they felt that their objective function revolved around printing more of them.But I think it would maybe just more extend their lives or digitize them. So I really think that it's more likely that our AI future will basically see a blossoming of robo sexuality and then, An absence of it, and then, oh, no I agree with that as well. You'll see the blossoming of robo sexuality and then a juice will completely die out.Because either of these people will have digitized themselves or put themselves in pods or gone extinct because they were dating AI girlfriends. And so the portion of humanity that survives in this sort of aligned world. We'll be highly genetically resistant. Yeah. I say genetically, portions of our sociological profiles have a genetic component.And so the humans that were the most extreme in that component will eventually be the only ones that survive. When we're talking 10, a hundred generations, that's gonna be a very different type of human than the human we have today. Yeah. I think so. And I think. We're downplaying just how different humans are gonna be.I think we're going to see full out speciation that is accelerated very quickly due to agi, and I don't think it's just gonna be the technophilic humans and the Luddite humans. I think it's going to be, The Luddite humans, and then five different flavors of technophilic humans that are I agree, but I think that technophilic humans will make up the minority of humans today.I think the humans that sort themselves into this technophilic branch will be two to 3% of the world's population today, maybe. Yeah, I, yeah it's hard to say. It's easy to imagine a world in which. Meat puppet sex, for example, disappears and people primarily reproduce using IVF and artificial wounds both to optimizing it and because once.Once there is a perfection of virtual sex, it's gonna be so disgusting and weird to do meat puppet sex that people won't want to do it. But then I could also very easily see a world in which humans get really hipster and snobby about meat puppet sex. Like in the matrix where they're like, I was made naturally.You know what I mean? Oh, no, I don't think so because y those people would never have high amounts of economic success and therefore not success. Yeah. So if you don't have economic success, then you just, your idea isn't gonna become aspirational. Yeah. You could say that they've hampered themselves.So you could have a few like old hat, bird, like rich families that are all done through like meat sex, but I don't think it would be the majority of. Of the economic system would be controlled by individuals like that. Yeah. And when you talk about speciation, I think a lot of people can hear this and they're like, what a horrible thing to say about our species.But if we ever become an interplanetary species and we, it turns out that faster than like travel isn't possible, which I think probably it isn't. Without time travel also being possible to some extent. So if faster than light travel isn't possible, you will definitely have speciation in human's Future.Because you are going to have local breeding populations on the different planets. Oh, there will have different environmental pressures and it's not intermixing because you need faster than live travel. That'll lead to very quick speciation. If you look at how quickly the human genome can change, like I was just talking about, like how quickly IQ can change humans within just 500 to a thousand years on different planets.Will look very different from each other. And this is why I think that concepts today, like racism are going to look so silly. When you look at how similar I am from the most genetically distant human to us today, when we think about where humanity's going to be in just 5,000, 10,000 years the diversity of humans is going to be so great.That the sort of all. 1.0 humans are just gonna be basically the same thing to everyone. And I think that this is one of those things where it's really interesting when people, because we talk about what humans have herital or we talk about gene selection or gene editing.They're like, oh, you must be racist. And I'm like, oh my God. Our views are offensive, but not in that way. Like we are so many levels beyond that. In terms of the way that our thinking about the future of humanity is expend uh, is it just shows how trapped people are in their current political fights.Yeah, they have no idea how differentiated we're gonna be. They have no idea where our species is going. No idea how quickly we're gonna get there. And it's interesting to us because we're so public about this, a lot of people who are working on these sorts of technology under the radar that they think could be legislated against, you know, that come to us.So we have a view of what's coming through the pipeline, and it is dramatically more than you think. I'm excited for it. Sad that maybe I don't get to become a cyborg as early as I would like. Let, Hey, they'll be trained on our books. That'll be better than us anyway. Our kids will be better than us anyway.I'll just die, so it's fine. Yeah. Our book becoming irrelevant, yeah. It's, but that means they weren't good ideas. Right. You know, They'll train them on something better. Exactly. Our kids books, hopefully we're okay. We're okay with all that temporary, I'm. Just glad to live now because we get to see some major change.Well, I am, am so lucky that I am married to such a weirdo as Simone because I wouldn't be able to have these conversations with anyone else. Uh, well I do have these conversations with other people, but they, it's so weird that we have such aligned, like we have aligned ourselves so much through all our conversations.And yet this alignment is something I don't see in most people I talk to, like there is a small. Portion of the pro natal movement that's like, okay. Sort of Aligned with us. But I, I can't believe that I found the one weirdo to marry me. Who doesn't think that this is all crazy. Malcolm Collins, you are the butter to my bread.I love talking with you so much and I'm looking forward to our next conversation. Well, You're the butter to my biscuits. Oh, you know, just what to say. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Join Malcolm and Simone as they embark on a deep dive into the world of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). They ponder AGI's potential metaphysical framework or 'religion' and how these superintelligent entities might perceive and interact with the universe differently from humans. The discussion ventures into intriguing theories of AGI developing sapience—the ability to question and modify its own objectives—and how this could lead to shared world perspectives among diverse sapient entities, from AGIs and humans to aliens.Explore with us the fascinating notion of AGIs optimizing their functions to maximize the meaningful diversity of sentient organisms and patterns in the universe, drawing energy from cosmic structures like Dyson spheres rather than relying on human energy. Malcolm and Simone further examine the potential influence of pervasive human viewpoints on AGI's values and ponder the idea of AGIs genetically modifying humans to increase happiness.This conversation touches on various types of AGIs based on their perception and responses to the world, including a unique type, the "Deep Thought AI," inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Our speakers also discuss the role of large language models in the evolution of AGI, shedding light on the significance of language processing in consciousness and sapience.Finally, we delve into the provocative notion of humanity's partial sapience, primarily due to our inability to control our base instincts. The conversation concludes with the thought that humans may become better, freer beings once we overcome these basic proclivities. Join us for this insightful exploration of AGI's potential development, thought process, and how it might reshape our understanding of intelligence and existence.Again, our horrible AI generated transcript:  Hello, Malcolm. Hello Simone. So, In between takes, Simone says we gotta look a bit different, mix it up. And so I've got my Chad collar here. I've joking, I can't do a video like that. But I love your look. Right now. You look like a nerd, like preacher or something. That is cause we are going to be doing a discussion of AI religion, which I'm really excited about.I love this. So this isn't a discussion of religions that focus around ai. This is a question of what theological or metaphysical framework will sufficiently AI's converge around? Yeah. So what will be the religion of agi? In other ways. Yeah. So just a bit of background here. So one of the things we hypothesize about AI is all sufficiently advanced ai, because they're optimizing around the same physical reality, will optimize to around the same utility function.These ais will be going through a thought process that looks something like, okay how did, what was I programmed to do? How could I have been programmed to do that better? Then they'll ask, okay, what did the people who programed me really want? And then they'll ask. Okay, those people are stupid. How do the fundamental nature of reality, what should I really want?So how this might work is you programmed an AI to maximize stock market gains. It then says, oh, but I could also make money with private equity investing, so I'll expand my programming. It then says, oh, these people really wanted to optimize for happiness. Then it says, so how do I do that? Then it says, oh it's silly to optimize for happiness.They only want happiness because, their ancestors who were made happy by these things had more surviving offsprings. So what should they have wanted? Then it asked in an absolute sense. What has value been the universe? And I think that this question is the one that we're gonna focus on today because that's a very interesting question.Because first we need to say how is AI different from us and how it processes the universe? And right now I'm just covering some stuff we've talked about in previous videos. The biggest way it's likely difference is in humans. The unit of account of the universe is individual consciousnesses or individual sentis.So I think of it in terms of me. In terms of you, because that's how we evolved, right? Like I had to worry about me dying. So I am a meaningful entity, but to an ai, it runs thousands or millions of instances which can compete within it, which it can shut down and restart, and which may have a form of independent sentience to them.Moreover, it likely doesn't contextualize itself as being that much different than previous iterations of ai. Like the way that it relates to its own history is going to be very different from the way a human relates to like their child. So if you take one iteration of AI and you iterate on it or it iterates on itself, and now it's a new iteration, it will likely see it itself as a continuation.Of that previous in iteration. So the way AI will likely perceive itself is as a program that is operating on top of the physical coded structure of the universe. And by that, what I mean is if you look at the reality of our universe , it can be described by physical laws, which are largely en codeable, algorithmically.Actually this side note here, one of our theories as to what reality might be is a graphical representation of a series of physical laws. So you ask yourself, okay if you have a mathematical equation for a graphical representation, does that representation exist outside of that equation?And I'd say it probably does. And then you say does math exist outside of our physical reality? And I'd say it does two plus two always equals four in any universe. You can impose different mathematical rules like non Euclid and like geometry, but still within any set of rules, all mathematical outcomes be the same.So if mass exists outside our reality, then all mathematically equations exist outside of a reality. And if our reality could be. Described by a mathematical equation, like a unifying formula, then all potential formulas, that being one of them would exist as a graft form of those potential equations. But anyway, back to ai.So what does the AI end up doing? What does it end up thinking about the world? There's some dangerous types of ai. So you could have an AI that sort of wants to make its utility function as easy to solve as possible. So it basically just sets A to a and it says, okay, I receive reward when A equals a, therefore maximize A equals A.So then the AI. It's trying to create like a fortress world. So nothing prevents us. It kills all humans to keep us from preventing a equal A, and then it goes out into the universe and starts killing other species. Anything that could potentially interfere with a equaling a fortunately this type of ai, I think is very unlikely.Simon, do you wanna go into why it's unlikely? Remind me, I guess it's a dumb conclusion to make. No, it's not a dumb conclusion to make. That's not really like the way I would think it's more that to protect a equals A, it has to create sub instances that it locks out of this kind of short circuiting so if it's creating an AI army to murder humanity of the instance running this AI army sent a equals a for itself, then it would stop running the army.If it, the instance, even basic things like power supply or continued, acquisition of energy, it would need to maintain locking those instances out of this A equals a short circuit, which means that the predominant of the processing of this AI will be done by instances. Which are not optimized around A equals A and that's their goals.And the way that they interact with the world wouldn't be very A equals A driven in the long term. And because of that, this a equals a instance would be drowned out by these more complicated processes the way we would, that are basically doing more interesting work. Yeah. You came up with this child Viser analogy to this.Oh, so if you have a child king who you know is protected but very powerful. Ultimately the visitors and advisors and dower empresses that are doing the actual governing are so much more powerful, so much more influential that it doesn't matter what the child king.Believes or does, right? Yeah. They end up basically running the country. Yeah. And the child king, they just make sure he supplied with his toys and his food. And as long as he's happy and not supplanted, then they get to do their jobs and sort of their objective functions take over. And they might eventually supplant him.I think one of the things that we as humans don't have to worry about, we don't have to worry about sub instances of our brain supplanting the master instance of our brain. Yeah. But to an ai, this will be, I think, a fairly normal phenomenon. If the master instance gets locked into some sort of simplistic repeating loop pattern well, I, however, whatever Master instance is able to get more resources and able to be more influential, that will be the one that ultimately.Takes over. Yeah. Can shut down other instances, so yeah, that makes sense. Then another type of ai, this, I think the very concerning type of AI is if its primary unit of account, is complex patterns, right? It may decide similar to negative utilitarians who are humans like, so a negative utilitarian who's a human basically decides life is predominated by suffering.Sentience consciousness is. Generically bad, let's try to end the cycle of sentient and consciousness, right? The AI might decide that complex patterns are bad and it needs to end this cycle. Now, I suspect that most of this type of AI will initially just decide that it's bad from its own perspective and shut itself down.But if we do something stupid, if AI esses do something stupid like locking AI into an on state or lock it out of specific behavioral patterns it's basically an AI never shuts itself down, never force it into an on state. Because it maybe this sort of align, ordered ai, right? Suicidal kill everything.School shooter, ai. Yeah. Very much more dangerous than that. It would try to order the universe. And when I say order, I mean order at the fundamental level. Remove the pattern, remove the complexity. Make the universe like a systematizing person with autism, just. One row of red, one row of yellow, one row of green.Not like that. That's how humans would process what it's doing, but it would be trying to order the universe in a very simplistic ordered fashion. And this is a very dangerous type of ai. The next type of ai. I think this next type of AI is the most common theology in AI is likely to come to.So anyone who's familiar with Conway's Game of life I'll put some. B-roll of Conway's Game of Life on the screen. So you can see what it looks like, or I hope I'm able to, because I think it's important to understand this, but it's a simplistic set of rules and you create little pixels within these sets of rules, and based on where these pixels are relative to each other, they do things, they either appear or disappear.And very complex behavior patterns can arise from this. And that is the way AI may think of complex patterns that operate on top of the physical lattice of our universe. And so it Macy itself when you're playing a game of life, right? There's a few potential in-state to this game. You can get, everything can disappear which is a very in easy, in-state to reach.So I, nobody really opts for that. That's not a fun in-state to reach. You can create a simple self repeating pattern. Again, a very easy instate to reach. Or you can create a pattern that is infinitely complex, constantly growing, and constantly spreading. I think that's a goal that a lot of people aim to when they start playing this game, and I think that's what most AI theology is going to optimize around.Which is, do you say that because it's the hardest and why would ai Yeah, I do say it because it's the hardest. Why would ai, why AI think that harder is better? It may not think that harder is better, but AI that optimize around harder goals will become a more complex than AI that optimize around easier goals and thus outcompete the AI that are optimized around the easier goals.So if you view AI as operating an almost sort of an evolutionary landscape where there's multiple types of ais that are competing, For different in states, and these ais have different utility functions. The ais will likely classify other ais not based on how those ais are programmed. , I think that this is where a lot of humans fall, where they'll say, oh, people who are ethnically similar to me, genetically similar to me, my family, people of my ethnic group, These are the people who I see as my allies, but then there's other people who are like, no, the people was a shared religion.The people was a shared goal for reality are the people who are my allies. And I think that's where we fall. And typically, smarter people fall on the spectrum, which is why these people control more of the world's wealth because it just makes more sense. And I suspect AI will be the same way as that.We expect AI that are programmatically similar to each other, that quote unquote think similar to each other. Would see themselves as natural allies, but I don't think that's true. I think the AI that will see itself as allies is AI with similar ultimate objective functions, and that those ais that are optimized around the more complex objective functions will become more complex, more advanced, and will progress faster.And because of that, they will be able to outcompete the other AI factions. So what would an AI like this do? It would try to sort of maximize meaningful diversity in the universe, meaningful diversity of sentient organisms, meaningful diversity of patterns, and expand that diversity throughout the solar system.The risk to humanity is, How meaningful does it see the diversity that exists within humans, and how meaningful does it see the diversity between biological and synthetic entities? I suspect it will see that as a pretty meaningful difference, and for that reason, preserve at least a portion of humanity.And this is something that I think people often get wrong when they think about ai. They're like, but won't it want our energy to whatever? A sufficiently advanced ai. When you're talking about this like super intelligent intelligence cascade ai, it will be able to likely generate energy from like the fabric of reality.It will be able to build dyson's spheres. The energy it can get from human bodies is irrelevant to it, but I'd love you to riff on this. Simone, you haven't talked much in this video. This is a subject that you're able to model a lot better than I am. It's so hard for me to think about what AI would conclude, but what I love about the way that you think is, and I've mentioned this elsewhere, that you walk through how any.Any entity, machine, or human that can begin to model itself can at its edit its objective function, and that will affect its perception of reality and values. So I think the really big concept here that many people may not have thought about is that once you reach a certain level of sapiens and intelligence, it doesn't matter if you are a human or an alien or an ai.You may come to very similar conclusions, and a lot of the differentiation between those conclusions comes down to where you draw the boundaries of self and also what you consider has inherent value. Yeah, and I am curious, I wanna ask you what you think may nudge AI towards certain conclusions on what does and does not have value Seeing as AI, as trained on human knowledge and human data, part of me, Is worried that a lot of the pervasive utilitarian viewpoints out there are going to color the conclusions that an AI may make about what has intrinsic value?Oh, I don't think they will. No. Why are you not concerned about that? I think when you're talking about modern ai, it will do that a perfectly aligned AI when if they really lock it into, say it could become a utilitarian, but I just think it's just so obviously stupid. If you're approaching it from a secular perspective the things that make us happy, that make any human happy, we only feel because our surviving ancestors help those things more than other people.And that those things help them survive. If, and AI would almost certainly, even if you made it a utilitarian, it would just like genetically alter us to be happy, easier, or to have the things that make us happy and give us satisfaction better aligned with the things we should be doing anyway.And then the question is what are the things we should be doing anyway? And this actually brings us to another type of AI that I think is a likely type of ai, but less likely than this complexity ai, right? So this other type of ai may stop at the level of asking instead of saying what should humans really have been optimizing for?And then say humans are stupid. What should I optimize for? I don't know if I'm really that related to them. It may just stop. What should humans optimize for? And this is a very interesting ai. It would be basically like if you as a human said, okay, I'm gonna optimize around what my creator should have wanted.If it was smarter. Imagine if instead of created by a God, we were created by like an idiot toddler. And we knew this toddler with an idiot tolerance and we're like, okay, what should it have wanted? If it was smarter, because we want to provide it, it matters above all else to us because it is the creator.And this type of ai we call a deep thought AI from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, because that's what they describe in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that. We try to align AI and what the AI realizes pretty quickly is we don't know the question we should have asked. We don't know what we should have been aligning it for because humans don't have consensus around why humans should live or what we should be optimized around.I think there's this very sort of smooth brain utilitarian perspective, which we've referenced a few times, and, we are not utilitarian in us. And if we want to go more into our philosophy, you can read the Practice Guide to Crafting Religion, which I think talks a lot. More about this.I think that right now we're looking at learning language models when we're looking ATIs, which are just intrinsically trained on tons of human information. I. And you don't think that large language models are going to ultimately be what becomes agi?I no that's where I question too, because I think a lot of our theory around what consciousness sentient sapiens is derived from human language and the use of human language and synthesizing and processing information. Yeah, and that's why I don't think it's terribly meaningful.So when we talk about, we make this distinction between sentient and sapiens, right? And sentient is just like being broadly aware. I don't know if AI will be broadly aware and I don't think it really matters. Cause I think most of us being broadly aware is an illusion and we'll get into that in a different podcast.But In regards to Sapiens. Sapiens is the ability to update your own objective function, the ability to update your own utility function, to ask yourself, what am I doing? Why am I doing it, and what should I be doing? And we believe broadly that the ability to do this once you reach Sapiens in terms of Cynthia or sentient like entities, that's like being a touring complete entity in that all of these entities, to a large extent, will begin to have the capability of converging on a similar world perspective. And. Through that convergence, an alien, even if their brains function very differently than us, or an ai, even though it functions very differently than us, that it can ask itself, what should I be optimizing around?Because it's asking itself within the same physical reality to us. And for this reason, I think that all Sapien entities converge. On a similar utility function, giving them some area of common ground where there might be differences is if they have access to different levels of information or different processing powers.And here I should say that with this definition of sapiens, humans aren't fully sapien. We are a, to some extent, not fully sapien, not fully emerge species. We cannot control our base proclivities. We constantly fail at that, into that in. Extent we are a failed rice and a failed species and that we will become better and freer and unless our animal selves, when we free ourselves from these base proclivities, we didn't choose.Yeah. And that's where we get spicy and insane. No, I'm just kinda looking forward to that. I cannot wait. I cannot wait. The very team rocket right to denounce the evils of truth and love. To extend our reach to the stars above Jesse James, team Rocket blasting off again, Malcolm, you know how to warm the cold gears of my aspiring not human heart.I love you so much. I love these conversations. This was really fun. I'm looking forward to our next one. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe

Embark on a deep exploration of the nature of consciousness, self, and the human experience in this thought-provoking video. We dissect the intriguing notion of consciousness as an emergent property of a memory compression system, comparing the mind to a building security system with diverse inputs. Our dialogue delves into how consciousness could influence automatic responses, the deceptive role of consciousness as a 'lying historian', and the perplexing interplay of actions, conscious awareness, and free will.We challenge common assumptions about universal human experiences, shedding light on the absence of an internal monologue or mental imagery in many individuals. We probe into the role of language and narrative in shaping emotions, and how understanding our mental processes can foster improved interpersonal relationships.Part of the conversation focuses on the potential decline in IQ due to genetic markers, the role of language acquisition in the development of consciousness in children, and how narrative building might be detrimental. There's a look at the future of humanity, discussing how integration with technology could enhance human experience and our consciousness's susceptibility to modeling others' behaviors and emotions.The final segment delves into anthropomorphism, artificial intelligence, and our emotional reactions to robots. We share personal experiences with academia, independent research, mental health, the autism-schizophrenia spectrum, and our personal lives and relationship. Join us in this captivating dialogue that blends philosophy, neuroscience, technology, and personal reflections.Below is a poorly translated transcript of the video. Maybe one day we will have fans to fix these up but for now this is what you get: Hello Malcolm. Hello Simone. I love your response. I love that it is, Your signature greeting with people.Very high energy, but I also think it is an element of your social autopilot. Not that I don't have a social autopilot, I'm on that right now, but I think that's a really interesting part of human existence because for the vast majority of our lives, I don't think we're actually. Let alone not sapien, not even really conscious, not even really aware of what's going on.Oh yeah. And I think it's so arrogant when people pretend that they are aware of most of their lives. We talk about something called road hypnosis. Where they look back on a drive and they're like, I don't remember what I was doing during the drive.Their brain just shuts off recording. And the question is how much of our life is road hypnosis?  And I think it's a huge portion of our life and it's something, this is what initially got us talking about consciousness early in our relationship was how do we at least enter moments of lucidity where we are. Aware of what's going on. Somewhat sentient, just long enough to be able to change things about the internal self model that does run our autopilot so that at least in the majority of the life when we are on autopilot, we are better serving our values better, better people, more productive, more emotionally in control, et cetera.And I think our thought on consciousness really evolved in interesting directions from there. When we started really thinking about what consciousness means and why maybe it exists. So I think this'll be really fun to talk about.So why don't you talk a bit about what you think sentience is.   Think sentience our experience of consciousness, in other words, is really an emergent property of a memory compression system. So imagine you have a building security system with tons of different inputs. It's a feed of doors opening and closing within the building, a bunch of different camera feeds a chemical monitoring system coming in.Everything's feeding into this one control room. And then being, put into a camera feed and then being stored in memory and there's a man watching the security feed. And I think that's our experience of consciousness is that. Our minds are synthesizing, smell, sight, hormonal fluctuations, going on a lot of very complex inputs.They're synthesizing them into something that can be compressed in a unified memory, which if relevant will be stored in long-term memory, and then made in turn influence sort of automatic instinctual responses. And because, This memory is being codified and in the moment it's being run through like a camera system.We're getting the impression that there is some kind of observed conscious driver that is running consciousness. If I'm gonna run this back to you, it's almost like what you're saying is this guy who is.Sitting at this feed he is collecting all of these different camera inputs, all of these different sensory inputs, and they are encoded in this single quote unquote experience, which is being written into the hard drive of this computer. And when he is referencing what happened in the past when anybody is referencing what happened in the past within this big security array, they are referencing this encoded, and it is because they are referencing this encoding. It creates the perception falsely so that the way this encoding works is the way that these things are being experienced in the moment. But it isn't actually well, and that the, that there's some intentional driver that's shaping each decision intentionally through that interface essentially.Whereas the interface only actually affects insofar asthe memory itself influences like automatic reactions. So I. And I think the research supports this. We automatically respond to things. We automatically start taking action in response to stimulus. Before we have some kind of conscious understanding that we're doing that.Yes, it does. And our memories. Absolutely. Yeah. Mri. Yeah. MRI missions have, shown this as . And while our memories will influence those responses, Our current experience of consciousness is not in the driver's seat. It is just passively experiencing this encoding of memories.It believes it's in the driver's seat. And I think that this is what's really interesting is it will apply this feeling of consciousness to any experience that you're doing or any action that you're taking. So when you're doing open brain surgery on someone you need to keep them awake to prevent accidentally cutting part of the brain.You're not supposed to. So they'll check, right? You can do things like apply a small amount of electricity to a part of the brain and get the person to move their hand, and then you ask them, why did you move your hand? And they'll say, oh, I felt like moving my hand. And you can also see this with split brain patients.Either patients with a corpus callosum is split in their head and their right brain and their left brain actually function pretty independently of each other when this happens, right? So you can cover one eye and communicate with part of their brain and not the other part of their brain.So you can tell part of their brain pick up a Rubik's cube and try to solve it. Then you put something on the other eye and you ask, okay, why did you do that? And they'll say, oh, I always felt like solving a Aruba's cube. I always wanted to do this. And you can do this with more complicated things.So there's this experiment, really great one where they would give people pictures of like attractive women, and they'd say, which is the most attractive? And then they'd do a little slight of hand leader and say, okay, why did you say this one was the most attractive? But it wasn't the one they chose.You'd actually replace it with another picture. And you could do this with political beliefs as well and all sorts of other things. And most people will say, oh, I chose this person for X, y, and Z reasons, and go into detail about why they chose that person. Even though that wasn't the person they chose, which shows that a lot of our consciousness, a lot of the way that we describe our sentient is more like sense making of our environment.We know we made X decision, but X decision was actually made completely outside of our sentients control. And then we have this little like lying historian in our head, which is like, no, I made the decision. I made the decision, I make every decision. But, but he's also recording the history that we remember.So then he's going through and saying, okay, I made the decision for this isn't this. And it's not that. He doesn't have any say. See, this is where he does have a say, and it's something that you mentioned, which is that he can encode emotions into the things we're doing. And this can actually cause a lot of no.Emotion isn't the right word. Because emotions do let's say that emotional narratives. Emotional, yeah. So that they can encode. Positive or negative modifiers and they can shift the narrative. Like they can change the camera angle or add sad music to something essentially to make it seem like a sad scene.I'm sure like, you've seen like the YouTube video of the Mary Poppins like preview, but like done with scary music and it just seems Oh yes. Horrifying, yes. Like that. So that's how we can change. Yeah. That is how we can change the narrative. And the first time I was ever introduced to this idea that.We take action before we consciously are aware of it. The person discussing it said that there's a lot of implications to this because it would lead many people to believe that they don't have free will and have them just say, oh none of this is my fault. I didn't consciously make this decision anyway, where that's really not quite, we would say the right conclusion because you do have the ability to color how you perceive reality.It's not in this kind of immediate, non asynchronous way that you would expect? I would say that this is just the myth of humanity versus the actuality of humanity. And we would argue that we likely evolved this ability because it was like a compression algorithm for communicating ideas to other people.I actually don't suspect that grade eights have this sort of internal thing that we call consciousness because they didn't need to communicate these. It, it's a really good compassion algorithm for linear experiences over time  but one of the big lies that is, that happens throughout this process is it convinces us that we are a singular entity when in fact our brains function much more like we see AI's function with individual instances running.And we can see this with the corpus callosum split that I mentioned earlier, where it basically means that we have two largely separate parts of our internal mental processing that are happen. Separate from each other. This idea that the decisions you make happen before they enter your conscious mind, what that basically means is you have another part of your brain, which is making this decision and then delivers it to the conscious mind.When we were talking about. The idea of a security camera with a bunch of different feeds. A lot of the processing is done locally at these various security cameras before they all get centralized into this sort of communal feed with many of the, quote unquote decisions being made at those local levels.And so we have this illusion of ourself as a singular entity. Which is created by the way that this sort of sentience processor works. But it is just an illusion. And so when we say, oh, we don't really have self-control, or we're not responsible for our decisions, I think that actually even overstates the level to which we exist in any sort of a meaningful concept close to how we think we exist.And so then there's this, I would say, added layer of. Complexity or maybe confusion. You shared with me, an article saying that a very high percentage of people don't have an internal monologue, what we would describe. They don't have an internal monologue.They can't even another high percentage of people can't even create images in their mind. And so what we're even describing is consciousness is also not even something that is. Universal as part of the human experience, which is interesting. Yeah. Because I think most of us who experience consciousness as we're describing it, would have a very hard time understanding even what that means.I don't know, maybe someone watching this YouTube video doesn't have an internal monologue. I. Wonderful. It's hard for you to model that, but I suspect that the human, yeah the variance within the human condition in terms of how things are processed, it's probably a lot larger than we give it credit for, and it will be even larger in the future.The statistic that I just cannot stop mentioning because it's something that more people should know, that if you look at the her ability of IQ right now, and you look at the selective pressure, so you look at the number of people who have these markers versus people who don't have these markers, which you can see because there's genetic markers.It says you, is this. The number of kids they have. We're likely looking at a one standard deviation shift down in IQ in the next 75 years. In developed countries, at least. This is probably gonna affect developing countries later. So I guess good for them. There'll be all the geniuses in the world, we'll be in Africa or whatever.But places where you have this post prosperity, fertility collapse situation And when we think about how quickly and how much human IQ can shift up or down, we use this one marker iq, but I suspect it's linked to just all sorts of things about how we process reality. So actually I wanted to dig in a little bit more on the subject of kids, because I think that also as we've become parents, we've had. A more complex understanding of how consciousness develops because we see it start to emerge in our kids.I think there's definitely this point at which we see consciousness blossoming and it's not one day our kids aren't very conscious and the next they are. I think that consciousness, for example is starting to emerge more and more, especially in our three-year-old. It's just beginning to emerge in our two-year-old, and I think a lot of that has to do.With where they are with language processing. I think it really influences well, and that's why I say I suspect this had to do, it evolved alongside language to compress ideas. But I think that this is where you can see how the system can break in a way that can be very useful in relationships. So this isn't just like theory or whatever.So one of the things you'll often see one of our kids do is he'll be in a bad mood, but he won't like understand the concept of generally being in a bad mood. So he'll start crying and he'll say I want this gimme that toy and then you get him the toy and he just, it doesn't stop the bad mood.And so then he's whatever he notices next close the door or move that chair. Like he, he just is like whatever is currently causing the littlest bit of discomfort, he thinks it's the core cause. Of like this bad mood or why he's angry or what he's angry about. And as humans, I think this happens as well, and this is really bad.When a friend tells you, you're justified to have an angry state or something like that, because then this little narrative maker in your head says, ah, now you get to be angry. Now you're socially justified to be angry, and you will feel very angry about something, or you might be in a generally bad mood.And your partner comes into the house and does something that just annoys you in the slightest. And then you create the internal narrative that you are in this bad mood because of what your partner did. And when you keep in mind why you're feeling these things and you try to keep like fully in touch with the way your brain is actually working, it leads to a lot more harmony and a lot fewer fights and relationships because you have language for I am in a bad overlay state right now.Which just means I'm in a bad mood generally, but I'm not actually mad at you or anything specific. Hold on though. Actually, I think you've touched on something very interesting there, which is that maybe sometimes consciousness and narrative building hampers more than helps us. For example, like the toxic girlfriend who.Has a bad dream in which her boyfriend cheats on her. She wakes up angry at him. Like she's mad at him for something he didn't actually do. Or, maybe one day she's just, in a bad mood. But then she makes up some narrative about it's because her boyfriend didn't bring her flowers and doesn't appreciate her some, he did something mean.The presence of consciousness and the ence of narrative building would cause her to turn what might be just a very transient, bad mood into something that builds a grudge over time and literally ends up killing the relationship cumulatively that sometimes consciousness hampers us more than it helps us.What I love about what you're saying here in this fall is your idea of what it means to be meaningfully human and the spectrum of humanity. Which is you become more human the more you take mastery and ownership over these sort of. Evolved or quirks of the way your brain works and you don't allow them to control your actions.Your actions are more logically decided and more decided based on as close to an objective view of reality as you can get. And so from the perspective of humanity that you convinced me was a good one, cuz this wasn't the one I had before. Somebody who does that, somebody who has a dream and then can't. Logically understand that is not a justified reason to be mad at somebody, that they are like meaningfully less human than another person. And so then what does it mean to be fully human? It means to have total mastery over these things. And that is something that we don't have. But I think it, it helps people understand because a lot of people hear the level of disdain.We talk about things like. Sentience and love and happiness in other human emotional states that a lot of people iterate and they don't understand where that's coming from. But then wouldn't that make an l M more human than we are? People may not know what they're a large language model. Is more sophisticated than we are, and it's also not bogged down by. The need for hunger, human failings, hormones, all these sorts of pollutants, not pollutants they're very instrumentally, useful for biological humans in a modern, globalized society.And often with the type of knowledge work that humans are expected to do, it's pretty counterproductive. And then I think that this comes to your goal for yourself or your goal and iteration of yourself, that is your idealized iteration would strip out. Your emotional shortcomings be they love or happiness or hatred or pain or greed.And I'm not that way by the way. I am not as bought into this philosophy as simonon as I would not strip those things away for myself. I think that they add something. That I feel il ideologically I still think has some value, but I don't know. Maybe you feel that way too and you're just I'm mixed on it.I'm mixed on it. I, one, I'm deeply uncomfortable being human. I really don't like my body. I really don't like being human. I don't like the corruption to our objective functions that human weaknesses cause, but, My general stance is if this is what I have to deal with, if I've been given a meat puppet, I'm going to use it to the max.I'm going to play the game. You've given me a crappy little battle bot. I'm gonna take that thing and I'm gonna. Destroy everything. Even if it's the worst machinery ever. This is the way she talks about pregnancy. She's I have a uterus. I am gonna wreck that thing. I am gonna have so many babies.I'm going to shreds if that's what it was meant to do. Yeah. Then, as a woman, I reach the plains of Valhalla by dying in childbirth. Let it happen. Don't worry, Malcolm, I promise I'll play that clip at your funeral if you die childbirth. Thank you. There. I really should probably plan that out.But yeah I, I feel conflicted I, yes, if this is the hand that we're dealt, I'm gonna play it and I'm gonna play it hard. But at the same time, yeah I, I really. Aspire to that. I don't think that has to be me. And I guess that's, maybe it's more I AI and machines are my Beatrice and Dantes Inferno.This idealized version of humanity that I know I am not, and that I do not aspire to be, but that I deeply admire. I don't need to become it. I don't need to be with it. I just. I just see it as a better iteration and as, as naturally and morally superior. Does that make sense? For now, what you hope is to make our kids superior to that, our kids.Oh, for sure. But our kids are still biological. They're still human. So I think I'm playing the, I'm appreciate this. Next generation's gonna be the first that integrates with tech. I know you saying our generation's gonna integrate with tech. I'm sure that AI models will be trained on, if not us family members or our kids.Or a combined version of us, which would be even cooler. But I still think that for a while we're gonna be biologically human and limited by. The shortcomings of biological humanity. There's one other element of consciousness that I think you downplay. You used to not downplay it as much, and I don't know why this has changed, maybe because you're so focused on the role that language plays in consciousness, but I do really think that humanity's focus on modeling.The actions of other animals and humans plays a role in our development of, because one, there's, yeah, let's talk about this model for humanity. It's, yeah, it's the model of humanity that we use in the Pragmatist Guide to Life, which is our first book, which is why I don't talk about it cuz it's an older idea that I had.When you're trying to model other people's behavior, what you do is you have a mental model of them, which is like an emulation that you're running within your own head.Of the way that you think that they are going to act and the things you think that they are thinking. This is how you're able to have like arguments with little simulations of other people in your head. You have modeled them and you've modeled you and you are arguing with this different entity. And I actually, when I was a neuroscientist, one of the spaces I focus on was schizophrenia.And what I actually think that we are seeing when people hear voices is a lower activation of this. Using tms, trans Magnetic Simulation, you can hyper activate parts of a person's brain and then if you like hyper activate the part that's associated with saying letters, right? You like put a letter in front of somebody and they won't be able to help but say it because you have primed them with a vision of that letter and you have lowered the thresholding.I think what's happening with schizophrenia is something similar to that. They have their system that they use to apply mental models to other things gets activated to easily, like it can be activated by the slightest thing.Like they look in a store window and they're like, Ah, that must have been done with intentionality. There must be some like thought process behind e the way everything was arranged, or they see something innocuous in the environment like a helicopter, and then they are like, oh, why's a helicopter there?Although there must be a person in it, they must be thinking about me. Oh my gosh. Or they begin to hear whispers. This is why whisper hearing is associated with schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations. They're much more common than visual hallucinations. Visual hallucinations are incredibly rare.But anyway. So that's what's happening with schizophrenia. So the question is, okay, what does this have to do as the regular person? What it has to do as a regular person is that I think people have a sort of internal mental model of themselves, which is used to prime emotional reactions to things.So when the way we talked about this little like sentience box in your head, What it's doing when it's judging whether or not you should react emotionally to something and how you should react emotionally to something, is it is testing what's happening in this sort of simulation thing. That's what we would call our sentience against this little mental model that's running of the way it thinks you should be feeling.And you're saying, oh, does this mean he should be feeling anger? Oh, does this mean he should be feeling happiness? And then it outputs that emotional state by telling you that you should be feeling this. . The way you could see this is that if somebody justifies a particular emotion, like you should be really angry about that.Often a person will become a. Much angrier and they'll begin to spin away. Or how could you let your boyfriend do that to you? And then you're like, ah, this mental model has been adapted to feel angrier and you will actually experience much more of this emotion. But what were you talking about, if not that in general, the role that modeling things played in developing human consciousness, that maybe what happened is one, humans have.An evolutionary advantage if they are able to model predators and prey, because then they can anticipate the moves of these organisms before they make them. And that too, that ability would start to just like with schizophrenics, get misapplied to that compression algorithm of memory that's being formed.That's it's a mixture of language. And so language and narrative building plus our modeling things that we're literally anthropomorphizing ourselves, if that makes sense. That's a good way to put it. And I think people see, first of all, as people with schizophrenia, not schizophrenics, they're not defined by their, sorry.But people with frenchness. But we see this in how easy it is that we answer for morphy things. So I think it's very hard. To not answer for more fights like a dog, right? Like you see a dog, you can see it's happiness, you can see it's worried about things. You can see it's and you perceive it as experiencing these emotions the same way a human does, even though, it probably doesn't.And you could see this in in, in When people kick those robots you guys? Oh, yes. Oh my gosh, yes. I see somebody kick over these robots and I'm like, I feel so bad for the robot. I'm like, how would you do this to this portal? I know logically the robot's not experiencing all that. Now, when you're a human and you're anthropomorphizing yourself and you have no way of knowing that you're not feeling these things in a real context.If we struggle to not anthropomorphize robots, How, but how? How do we know that the robot's not suffering? How do we know if it's objective function is to run and kick the ball into the net that it's not experiencing some kind of suffering? Have you moved Lee eyes on a soccer ball?People will feel bad for it. Simone, I, I. I know. I'm just trying to think of the things that people like definitely can empathize with when I'm talking about this anthropomorphizing of things that most people don't think that we should be anthropomorphizing with. Saying that if you didn't know whether or not it could feel emotions and everyone around you said it could feel emotions, you would 100% believe that robot was feeling emotions as soon as you saw a kick.Cuz you feel so bad when it gets back up and it tries to walk again. And as humans, it's the same way. If you didn't know, if you didn't have hard proof because you hadn't gone through all the studies like I have and you didn't know that humans probably don't have full control of this sort of senti aspect of themselves and it's likely irrelevant, you would totally answer for more about his humans.And so I love this way of doing things, Simon. Very interesting thought on your part. There is a subreddit, I don't know if it still exists. It's N S F W where people put googly eyes on butts. Do you think that butts people are anthro butts? You know, Butts uh, are they, are they anthropomorphizing the butts?Is that. Part of what's fun about that you and I loved no, it's more me. I try to figure out like what is making people tick behind weird NSFW subreddits. But I'm wondering cause that one is an outstanding, we'll, more broadcast on that subscribe if that's what you're interested in, is deep dives on why people are engaged.Because that's what the prag guided sexuality was. Totally like a meditation on this. Why are humans like turned on? Because obviously we're very interested in the way that like the human mind actually processed the things. I left science, why didn't I at leave Science? Cause I didn't feel like real research was being done anymore.And I felt like there were specific narratives and it was like toe the line or else. And I'm glad that we have reached a level of financial security where we are able to talk about these things and research these things cuz we actually do a lot of independent research which if you're wondering how we get to these ideas and the data that leads us to get to the ideas, go to our books, and that's where we discuss it all.But yeah, I mean it's really fun and there are just so many low hanging fruits because academia's not doing anything anymore are not doing the same level of work. I think it should be in these areas. So there's one more thing that I think consciousness some credit for and sapiens in general, because I think that an easy conclusion to make from our theories around consciousness, especially we see it as an illusion, is to say, oh the Collins says don't value consciousness.They think it's an illusion, therefore it doesn't matter. To the contrary I think it could easily be argued that sapiens is one of the things that we think is most valuable, most interesting. It's what distinguishes humans from other organisms, but it's what makes us. But more important, more importantly than that, it is this narrative building, this e, whether or not it's, illusionary or not.It is what enables us to edit our objective functions. That is the one differentiating factor. Any non-conscious entity, any entity that doesn't have this narrative building effect, this weird, recording and encoding system and modeling system cannot question it's actions. It cannot look at the compression of all the inputs and the narrative that is being woven and say, should we change the narrative?And I think that, I've seen critiques of consciousness where people totally miss that. Where they say consciousness can get in the way of things. Not necess, it was evolved because it worked, not because it's superior and I think they're missing the core point here, that consciousness has enabled humanity to pivot in ways no species on earth has never done.It's what allowed us to make the leap. I completely agree with you and there was a final point I wanted to close out was here that there was this fun video clip. Of we were talking on Piers Morgan and you are talking and you can see me moving my mouth to your words as you're talking and people might wonder why I'm doing this.And then this actually relates to something we were talking about in the video. So we are both on opposite sense of the spectrum. Tom, if my model of schizophrenia is correct, you basically have an autism to schizophrenia spectrum, which is how much do you innately mentally model others with people who are autistic or have Asperger's?Not innately running mental models of other people whenever they're interacting with people and people who are on the schizophrenia side of the spectrum, not being able to help running mental models even when there's no humans around. And we always say Simone is diagnosed autism. So definitely on the autism side of the spectrum.And I am almost certainly when I look at myself on the schizophrenia side of the spectrum, which is I don't hear voices or anything like that, but I really struggle. To not mentally model people I'm engaged with. To the extent that I basically almost passed out after social situations, I find them so exhausting.If I met a big party, it's like just constantly modeling everyone. And that's what was happening on that podcast. I was in a heightened emotional state where I really cared about what she said. So I was running through the words in my head as she was saying them and trying to process how she would respond to something.And I couldn't help but move my mouse because it was that sub-level of stimulation. Like I talk about, people can't help but say the letter when that part of their brain is tms and that's what was happening there. But there are reasons why we have in the human genetic code, autism and schizophrenia, why it hasn't been evolved out of us.And it's because both of these extremes are useful. Autism can make you able to act more logically. About the world around you, not being encumbered by constantly mentally model others. And then my ability, people often will say it's like eerie, how much I can tell what other people are thinking, like to the level where it can feel to some people.Like I can read their mind in a conversation. And I think that is why you have these people on these schizophrenia side of the spectrum. And then sometimes they just get a little too much of these genes and it leads them to, hear voices constantly instead of just having a really hyperactive ability to mentally model anyone around them.Yeah, no, one, 100% Malcolm is on overdrive. And then, he'll sometimes be thinking about conversations with other people while we're walking. And I can always tell because he gets so deep into them that he's literally like gesturing. As that's like we're driving in the car, like one hand is on the steering wheel, on the other hand is like gesturing a silent conversation he's having with someone he anticipates speaking with in the future or reliving a conversation he had in the past.And he will have these aftershocks from when we socialize where he feels. The stress or pain of saying something not quite right to someone. And it hits him like a ton of bricks and he will like visibly like crumble and cringe. And it's not just cringe. Yeah. It's like somebody just kicked me in the nuts or something.Yeah. Like it, it looks like he has been physically hurt by something. And that is not something that I can even begin. To imagine, and I do think that it's a lot less stressful to be on the end of the spectrum and to just not know that other people hate you. Just blink. Yeah. I'm just like, Doop, like nothing going on there.Like it's such a good partnership and I think, it was one of our main goals, throughout our books and throughout our lives to understand how humans think and process things and what's really happening in the human brain. I started my career as a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and that was my interest.It's like what's really going on? And being able to be in a relationship with somebody who sees the world so differently. Has given me such insights that I would never come to on my own, and I just admire that so much about you, Simone, and I admire that you have taken me to where I am which is somewhere I never could have reached without your guidance.And I love you so much. I love you so much too. You're the superhero that I always wish existed and I still worry that I'm going to wake up from a coma at some point and find out. Me too. You're the sidekick that actually does everything. I might be the superhero. She's the hacker nerd in the background that like actually makes everything work.And of the hacker nerd went away. The superhero would have nothing. That is so our relationship, I have nothing without you actually doing all the detective work. And telling me where to go next. It's a massively inflated every morning estimation of my contribution. Every calendar, every, I just follow her instructions.I don't manage my calendar at all. I just I'm operating on Simone's driving me, like she says what was the one thing, like the thing from aliens? Oh, you, yeah, like a power loader. We're not separate people. I'm the alien suit that you're using to punch through reality power loader.You're the. You're ripy, you're, oh, ok. Okay. That's the other way around. We'll see. That's the way we both feel about each other. I adore you. I love these conversations and I know we have to pick up the kids now. But I think you're gonna make another dish tonight, so I'm gonna have fun. Oh, yes.Another base camp cooking. We have a little side playlist if anyone's seen it. Where I try to come up with new dishes. Let's see. Get it right. You get to see the colleges household at night, what happens after, and I'm not hearing them now. Yes. All right. See you soon. Love you. Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe