Decoding the Gurus - Interview with Neil Levy on Intellectual Virtue Signalling

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Fellow decoders: a few weeks ago Chris and Matt were invited to virtually attend a lecture at Macquarie University that promised to be of interest for the podcast. And that lecture was presented by the philosophy professor Neil Levy on the intriguing topic of 'Intellectual Virtue Signalling'. That is the status-seeking advertising of what is commonly perceived as intellectual virtues. We found Neil's thesis extremely compelling, with clear applications to a lot of the stuff we observe week on and week out on DTG. So, naturally, we swallowed our pride and our eternal disdain for philosophy and begged Neil to grace our humble show with his presence. Neil kindly agreed and we proceeded to have an enjoyable conversation with our patented meandering waffle juxtaposed against Neil's careful philosophizing.Before the interview, we also spend a little bit of time spelling out our policy on being abusive to the gurus. Here it is in summary: Don't do it! Robust criticism, ok. Personal abuse/doxing, is not ok. Got it? Good!Prof. Levy holds a dual position at the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He publishes not only in practical ethics and moral philosophy but also across diverse topics in cognition, addiction, and pathology. Neil has also written a number of books, most recently:Bad Beliefs: Why they happen to good people (2021)Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (2014)'Bad Beliefs' is directly related to the podcast, and is available freely online!We heartily recommend this interview, and might even go so far as to say Neil has helpfully provided us with a bit of conceptual framework that undergirds some high-level stuff that's happening within and across the quantum circuits of the Gurometer. Thanks for that Neil!

Hello and welcome to the Coding the Guru's podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown. With me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh. G'day Chris. How are you doing today i'm all right you look rambunctious matt and i probably people can hear have the lingering vocal effect of uh post illness you do you got through it okay he got through the old covert okay though hey yeah yeah just like lingering what what's that word? A lingering malaise. Yeah, that's it. It could be long COVID. It could have long COVID.

Well, it's not long enough yet. So maybe it's just my natural feeling and I forgot about it. But yeah, I don't feel 100%, but I feel like 95% there. So, you know, that's all right that's all right yeah for everyone out there younger than me that's how i describe being 46 just a constant lingering malaise that's just normal that's my baseline i thought you were saying 95 of your peak wow that's optimistic. You know, that's all right. So, yeah, so, Matt, the term is upon us in Japan at least, new academic term.

Is that the same for you? I'm not sure. I've lost track. You should know that. I mean, that's one of your duties is to know if there is classes that you should be teaching and students you should be enlightening no i'm just i just respond to emails and if there's no emails coming in telling me i have to do things then i blot it all out uh no i'm busy supervising research

students they never go away they're with you always months a year. And what a joy it is to have them at all times. Always with the, like, I understand that they have questions. Always with the questions. But why do they come to me? Why do they always come to me? Yeah, it is one of those mysteries. Why people would speak to their supervisors. They never have good answers,

just demands for you to do work on your own. Imagine that. I've been watching Black Books with Dylan Moran and the first episode is like, you know, he runs a bookshop and he's getting bothered by customers. He's like, why are they always bothering me? Why do you need my books? Why? Yeah, yeah. like why why are they always bothering me why do you need my books why yeah yeah that's why you know working in a stock room which i have done on a couple of occasions actually find that

a quite enjoyable job because you know just well you're not really supposed to listen to headphones but you know you could and uh just moving things from one place to the other was was kind of satisfying but yeah so no emails just boxes if i could swap all the emails for boxes uh yeah i'd prefer that yeah yeah well before we romanticize low-paid jobs too much i think we should move on matt to the guru sphere what's been going there? Good things? Bad things? How's it all looking over there? Well, Chris, we did notice because the Guru's Pod account was tagged into an account that really doesn't like the gurus and seems to have been interested in a lot of people we've covered. Yeah. So like Matt said, we got tagged into some account uh like sending abuse i think it was

directed at jordan hall i can't remember now but in any case it was an account which was recently set up and was pretty abusive talking about the appearance of various guru figures and just like making weird sexual innuendos at them and it seemed as good a time as any just to emphasize that like we're not really done with that you know some of the people that we cover are are not great people they're promoting anti-vax conspiracism or they're hard right partisans or whatever but that doesn't mean that therefore it's cool to like make fun of their appearance and you know imply things about their sexuality and stuff like i don't, people can do what they want, but it's not something that we encourage. And in fact, if you're in, you know, our community, broadly speaking, like on Twitter, or if you happen to be a Patreon member, and you are being abusive, and if you were, like,

you know, Eric Weinstein has intimated that people were harassing his family or trying to and stuff and just to be clear if we have any inkling that people are involved with that within our community as far as we have the ability we will just like put your eyes right off the of the patreon or or god forbid block you on twitter but yeah i i just i i think it's important on occasion just to emphasize that yeah that's not something we want to encourage and so if you tag us in to being abusive to people we're not going to be like, yay, great job, carry on. Like, no. If people are doxing people and being abusive, I tend to report them.

So if you tag in me or the Guru's Poet account when you're being abusive to someone, then the chances are that I'm going to report it. So just advance notice to anybody who may feel the need to do so. Yes, yes. There's a big bright line between gentle mockery and robust criticism versus, you know, vaguely threatening and abusive stuff. So we know where we stand on that line, and we encourage everyone to stay on the sunny side of the street there. encourage everyone to stay on the sunny side of the street there yeah and i would i would also note that it it would be pretty hypocritical because i see lots of the gurus and conspiracy

prone accounts they implicitly deny encouraging that kind of behavior like people harassing folks are trying to dox them but they interact very positively often with the people who do it and their condemnation is often like this might make me look bad so you know please don't but i i just want to make it clear completely independently from how it reflects on us, it's a bad thing to do. And like, it doesn't matter if you're targeting the baddies. I just think going after people's families, doxing them, harassing them day in or day out, it's different than like robust criticism or highlighting how people are promoting disinformation or that kind of thing. I'm not saying you can't focus on accounts that are promoting misinformation and stuff and point out how they're doing it.

But there's definitely a dividing line between harassment, abuse, and robust criticism. And robust criticism, fine. We do it all the time. Harassment and abuse, not fine. Very clear. Unclear. So, Matt, go out, delete them, and stop tagging me with them.

And, yeah, I know what you're up to. This is an intervention, Matt. You've got to have the courage of your own conviction. Okay. All right. Point taken. you you gotta have the courage of your own conviction okay all right point taken uh i'll delete those uh alt accounts okay so that's that's that's sorted yeah we've resolved abuse in the internet that will never happen though so it's all done good we cleared that up and um today is not one of our decoding episodes, right? It's a interview episode, which we occasionally have. And we have recruited another philosopher, Matt. And, you know, whenever we have a philosopher, we need to justify why we've done this to our audience. So who is the philosopher that we'll be chatting to today and why are we inflicting philosophers onto the

public well yeah we do have a lot of philosophers on considering the general opinion that i've got of philosophers as as a group it's surprising so i guess that tells you something no no we've we've got neil levy on and he's great He's a professor in philosophy and I think he's got a joint position with Macquarie University, but also Oxford. He's a senior research fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. And yeah, Neil writes books and he's one of these interesting philosophers that works across a bunch of different questions. works across a bunch of different questions. And recently, you and I were kindly invited to a lecture he was giving at Macquarie University, we attended virtually. And it was such a great topic for us, because he was talking about this thing called intellectual virtue signaling. So most people are familiar with online with the idea of virtue signaling as a kind of a moral thing where

you show what a great person you are by having all the right opinions. But he's got the idea of virtue signaling as a kind of a moral thing where you show what a great person you are by having all the right opinions but he's got this idea of intellectual virtue signaling which is showing off in a different kind of way and as we'll see feels like it aligns pretty nicely with the sort of stuff that we look at with our gurus yeah so we'll not spoil the surprise any further. But one note is that I think that Neil's microphone for the interview might be like a standard laptop microphone. So the quality might not be that high, but we had to make his microphone slightly less good because his points were so excellent. That's why we've done it.

But yeah, so enjoy the interview and we will see you all afterwards so chris uh with us today we have someone to uh talk to us a little bit about intellectual virtue signaling um a topic which become clear is intimately related, I think, with the stuff that we are fascinated with on the podcast. And that person is Professor Neil Levy. So Neil is a philosopher, a continental philosopher. But don't hold that against him. That's okay.

That's fine. Many fine people on both sides. And it's fair to say Neil is a prolific writer, has written several books, including Bad Beliefs, Why They Happen to Good People, and many, many academic articles. In fact, in browsing through your articles on Google Scholar, Neil, I struggle to summarize the theme of your research because it's so broad ranging. So first of all, welcome. And yeah, tell us what interests you in philosophy mainly. Thanks, Matt. I don't identify as a continental philosopher.

I take that to be a fact about my background, really. I have two PhDs, one in continental philosophy and one in analytic philosophy, and I don't really see myself as doing either, because I'm not sure either really exists. I do philosophy these days and many of the people I was at grad school doing content philosophy would be horrified. These days I'm a naturalistic philosopher. I think philosophy has to be, no, too strong. I think philosophy benefits from being deeply informed by the sciences and deeply responsive

to the sciences. So I work with psychologists quite a lot. I do some empirical stuff. I'm not sophisticated empirically, unlike some philosophers. I don't have the maths. So instead I work with people who can do that, as well as be my intellectual colleagues on the non-formal side as well. And I'm interested in many things, but these days well and I'm interested in many things but these days I'm focusing particularly on epistemology I'll get it right in a second in it's more practical side I'm

not interested in an analyzing knowledge which has been the traditional focus but in how do we know how should we know, how should we make our minds up how should we gather evidence, questions like that So we crossed paths at Macquarie University I think it was, where you were giving a talk to the faculty, you've got a position there as well as one at Oxford and a friend of ours kindly invited me and Chris along virtually to sit in and listen to you. Rob Ross.

Yes. I'm going to name and shame him. Rob Ross, an ex-colleague of mine from Oxford as well. So there you go, Rob. This is your fault. So we loved the talk. And straight away afterwards, we emailed you and said, please, please, please come on to Code of the Curious and tell, well, first of all, we'll do a couple of things.

I think we'll maybe get you to tell our audience a little bit about what you told the people at Macquarie University about what you've been thinking about with this thing that you call intellectual virtue signaling. And then afterwards, we might try to connect it to the sorts of stuff we've been observing out in the wild with the gurus. I was thinking maybe a good place to start would be not with intellectual virtue signaling, but with the sort of standard type of virtue signaling, moral virtue signaling. And this is a term that's entered the discourse, and anyone who's been on Twitter will know all about this.

But we do have some normies in the audience, so maybe you could summarise that for us, Neil. My sense is virtue signalling has jumped the fence and you see it discussed certainly in the right-wing press here in the UK, the Telegraph and the Spectator. So I think even the normies probably haven't been spared. So the basic idea is it's actually hard to know what people mean

when they accuse other people of virtue signalling. It's an accusation. It's supposed to be a bad thing. There must be exceptions, but I haven't encountered any in my experiences leveled by the right at the left. And at least part of it seems to be hypocrisy. So somebody on Twitter, social media more generally, generally speaking, somebody who's not in face-to-face interaction makes a moral claim, let's say, Black Lives Matter or defund the police or the Tories are racist or whatever

it might be. All of these, of course, be left-wing utterances. And lots of people respond, oh, you're just saying. and lots of people respond, oh, you're just too sick. The idea is they're trying to put the spotlight on themselves rather than the issue. They're trying to show that they have the virtues. Virtue talk is taken very seriously in philosophy, the idea being that we can analyze right action

in terms of what would the person with the right character do. That's virtue ethics. So the idea is I'm taking it seriously here. So when I'm analyzing moral virtue signaling, I'm asking what virtues is a person trying to claim they possess by making that utterance. If that's right, then in fact it would be a vice, because they'd be hypocritical. They'd be a bit along the lines of saying, I'm so modest.

Yeah. The funny thing is the asymmetry, you know, referencing to moral virtue signaling that you indicate, when it comes from the left i kind of see it more presented as vice signaling dog whistling right like you are you are signaling subtly to your audience something by expressing concern over birth rates or that kind of thing not so subtly in that case but um yeah it's also a rationalist version where you sort of buy signal by expressing the view or implying the view that morality is a facade and we're all just you know self-interested organisms it does take a sort of right-wing rationalist version

evolution shows that i i have to ask the that would that include like you know there are people who have strong views about determinism and will basically pepper any point that they make by saying well but anyway you know they they could do no other right because the the deterministic nature of things or it could be moral luck where that's just your luck that you were born in those circumstances maybe that's a type of determinism but um does that fall into that category of you you know, you're basically saying, well, but I realize there's a deeper thing, which means none of that actually matters. It's all luck or it's all atoms pumping in the night. Right. So now I'm slightly embarrassed because I wrote a book about luck and free will, in which I defend skepticism about free will. But I think it's just a mistake to say people aren't responsible

in the sense of deserving punishment for what they do. It's a mistake to slide from that to they don't do anything wrong. I mean, it's just obvious that some things are bad and you stop people doing them if you possibly can even if you have to incarcerate them to stop them doing it doesn't mean they in some sense deserve anything extra you know any extra pain beyond what's needed to stop them doing it yeah i mean we we covered a paper that's been a favorite of mine for years, a classic psychology paper called Beliefs Are Like Possessions, Abelson. And the basic thesis of that, this is long before virtue

signaling entered the vocabulary, but the basic idea is that people hold beliefs at least partly for the same reason that they like to acquire possessions, which is as a form of social signaling. And there's nothing controversial at all about that, I mean, for a psychologist anyway. The thing that we value as a social species more than anything is kind of the regard and esteem of the people around us. So we'd recognize virtue signaling in a Puritan religious community, being holier than thou, and so on. And it would almost be surprising to me that if self-presentation didn't affect pretty much all of us all the time in what we choose to communicate and how we frame things. And even myself personally,

when you think about it, it is clearly a phenomena. When you think about the things we don't say, like for instance, you know, many people donate to charities. I happen to be one of them, but that's not something that I would mention publicly except now, because it really is necessary to make the point for that reason, because it would be perceived as a form of virtue-sealing, and that awareness of it is kind of doubling back, and you avoid it. So, I feel like it is a real thing, and it does affect what people choose to say or not say. Yes, absolutely. I'm interested in beliefs

as maps we steer by. the leakage between beliefs as signals and beliefs as maps is a really interesting area because a belief as a map as we steer by is something that's going to have an effect on how if I really believe that we should defend the beliefs, then maybe I donate to organisations that pursue that agenda. If I am just signaling, then maybe I don't. I do it only to the extent to make the signal more effective.

But then, of course, I'm really skeptical that we have good introspective access to our own minds generally. And it's not at all clear to us on what basis we hold a belief. And I think beliefs move across this boundary with something that you might adopt for signalling purposes, becoming something that actually then guides your behaviour. So we can talk about causes, we can talk about its functional role. But I guess sometimes the beliefs don't necessarily, it doesn't necessarily have to be just a presentation signal to others. The belief could be something that is important for your self-perception and your identity.

Yeah, so you have very mundane beliefs. Like I think I parked the car on level C7, which helps you get by in your day-to-day life, but contributes very little to how you see yourself and how others see you. And then you have other beliefs, which I think this is what you're saying. Just correct me if I'm not paraphrasing you correctly. Then you have other beliefs, which don't really matter very much in the day-to-day, but can matter for social, psychological purposes. Yes, yes. So I donate to charity too, and not very much, I will admit. And I don't think I've told anybody that, at least in recent years,

but it's quite possible that part of the reason I do that, in fact, it's quite likely part of the reason I do that, is because I feel better about myself for doing it. Definitely. Slightly less guilt and shame. That's all I'm aiming about myself for doing it. Definitely. Slightly less guilt and shame. That's all I'm aiming for. My bar is pretty low. I contribute to academic reviews just to steer off the feeling that I'm not a charlatan.

Yeah. Even though they're very upset at doing that all the time. So yeah. Anyway, anyway, let's move on from the moral virtue signaling. It's a shame because in your paper, you mentioned some of the features of it, which I actually weren't aware of. Like, I thought it was really interesting. Like there was excessive outrage, appeals to self-evidence, ramping up and trumping up. And Chris hadn't heard of this either, but trumping up, that's something you see. Did you want to summarize that real quickly now?

So I've got to give full credit here. I didn't make up any of that. That comes from Tozi and Womke, who wrote the paper Moral Grandstanding, in which they very worked up about virtue signaling. They call it moral grandstanding, but they agree that it's at least, you know, there's a heavy extensional overlap between virtue signaling and moral grandstanding, if not a perfect one. So trumping up occurs when you, according to them,

when you try to demonstrate your fine moral discernment by detecting moral problems in things that other people think are fine. So, you know, some cartoon or book that looks innocuous, you don't say, oh, it's deeply racist, or even better, perhaps. And I do wonder if this, I take Tozi and Womky to task in that paper and also in earlier work, but I do think, you know, they're not totally wrong. Something that I do see on Twitter and wonder whether they're right about instances like this is when somebody seems like, you know, a sort of paragon of the woke virtues and people claim to detect hidden anti-trance feeling in them. Look, this sentence, they didn't want to mention trance.

They must really hate trance deeply, or they're not centering it. That's what's cramping up. There is an element of the preacher reeling against sin and vice that that one feels on twitter sometimes when reading about discourses so maybe the the technology has just enabled more people to see more examples of that but uh it's probably a long-standing behavioral habit that we're all guilty of to some extent. But maybe we're not all in-the-closet pastors reeling against homosexuality, so there is a spectrum.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, even in religious communities, you'll see people competing with each other. They might be kind of silly or really superfluous displays of religiosity. But yeah, the bar can be continually raised in that community where you'll get greater in-group status. So that all sounds cool, and most people would be familiar with that kind of thing.

So intellectual virtue signaling, obviously, I think, inspired by the moral kind, but very different from it. Different properties, different purposes. Tell us about this now. So as I mentioned, these days I do mainly epistemology at the practical end and virtue and more recently, vice epistemology has been a really big thing, trying to understand the properties of epistemic communities in particular, the properties of epistemic communities in particular in terms of the epistemic virtues of the community or more often of the individuals within them.

So, for example, understanding conspiracy beliefs as arising from a lack of epistemic humility or commitment to dogmatism, something like that. So I just wondered, my primary motivation initially was saying, well, let's start taking the epistemic or intellectual, more broadly, virtues seriously, and ask, do people signal those? What would it look like for people to signal those virtues? And I do think that it gives you an interesting perspective on what's going on, again, in

the same sorts of contexts, the same sorts of contexts where people are not engaged in face-to-face interaction. But that's really, that's, I think, not an issue condition. It's a common one. Because I can't check whether you really have the virtues. I can't compare it to your behavior. That becomes the kind of context, I think, in which signaling is particularly attractive. So I'm just asking, in that kind of context, what would we expect from people who wanted to signal those virtues and what kind

of motivations would they have were they to engage in that kind of behavior so again just attempting to paraphrase slightly i guess in this modern interconnected world that we're in where as you say it's generally not face-to-face communications and you're interacting with strangers and the world's a complex place and people are figuring out who to trust who to listen to to whom they should be giving their attention and there is understandably a competitive environment of of people who want their attention and yeah i guess it seems to me a pretty pretty clear. There is clearly incentives for people to want to send that signal to broadcast that you should be listening to me. I'm an insightful and an important voice and pressing those levers, right? You know, I do think it's something I didn't talk about in that Macquarie

presentation, haven't really thought about, but it is interesting to think about the audience. I think there is a demand and a need for informed voices. Stuff happens. COVID happens. The invasion of Ukraine happens. And there's this burning desire, I think, on the part of many people to understand it, maybe to have a sense of control over it, but also to decide what should I do? Obviously, I can't do a lot about Ukraine, but when COVID happens,

that becomes a pressing question for me. Should I wear a mask? Should I obey lockdown? Should I get a vaccine? So we are looking for sources of information, but not in a position to answer these questions for ourselves. I think we're just mistaken if we think we are. So we have a perfectly, not just understandable, but I think virtuous desire to get information. So there's a ready-made audience for people who set themselves up for whatever reason as a source of good information. Yeah, so clear connections already to the gurus and the alternative infosphere. But before we get into the red flags and stuff that might define what is intellectual virtue signaling, the red flags and stuff that might define what is intellectual virtue signaling.

Just a question, do you think it is at least partly a feature of the modern world? Because some of the stuff we're talking about are human constants, human universals, been around since the year dot. But I'm sort of thinking back to if it was the 1950s or the 1920s and COVID had come along. well, they certainly did have pandemics of their own back then. And I'm just wondering, I guess I'm guessing that your average person is not really going to have many options when it comes to epistemic sources, right? They've got a newspaper or a book or a pamphlet or something like that in front of them. So it's kind of new, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, I do think I'm interested in fake news, and I do think we tend to exaggerate the novelty of it. It goes back. Benjamin Franklin fabricated a news of Indian atrocities quite deliberately in the hope that he produced his own printed press, something that looked like a newspaper, in the hope that the legitimate press would pick it up. And it did. It actually worked. And there was competition in the days of so-called yellow journalism between papers that were quite ready to knowingly print information to attract audiences. I do think, you know, at some point, scale makes a qualitative difference to what's going on. I think this massive scale does mean that we're dealing

with a new kind of phenomenon. It has its analogues earlier, but I suspect that it's genuinely new. I did think when listening to your talk, Neil, that there's a tendency, especially amongst academic types,

even though they're all, not all, but a lot of them are addicted to Twitter, that they tend to dismiss Twitter or other social media networks as, you know, most people aren't using them, or we shouldn't really pay too much attention to what's on there. But it was refreshing in your talk. And I'm not saying this just because of my own Twitter addiction, but I do think that Twitter and the other social media platforms in their own way are something of a very unique environment. The nature of Twitter means, like you say, that you can broadcast messages to a huge audience, even if you're a small account, right? If you can mix sentiments that just happen to get picked up and there's all

the, the potential feedback mechanisms for people to become bigger accounts, if they garner attention and can sustain and all of that kind of thing. So although the dynamics that you're talking about, like intellectual virtue signaling or moral virtue signaling, they're going to all have analogs that go back way, you know, as long as our species have existed. But I think that there is something about the platforms putting everything so much on display and giving so much opportunity. You know, we look at gurus, but we also look at the communities that they gather around them. And there's plenty of scope within those communities for people to carve out

their own little niches and sometimes create their own following. So yeah, I often wonder what the analog is in, you know, the pre-modern era, like was it monasteries or universities branching off or less elite things just around villages. But yeah, so I think the stuff that you're talking about in the social media sphere is interesting and relevant. Yeah, I was reminded also of, I think it was one of the first instances of government censorship done by the English government in London because of all of the scurrilous gossip and lies that had been printed by the pamphleteers and

handed around the streets. And it was fake news, right? Like it was just like raunchy etchings or whatever of gossip and stuff like that, and mostly lies and propaganda essentially. But I agree with you now Neil, that I think that the network effects and just the sheer scale of information these days does mean that there's a qualitative difference. Chris and I have sort of likened it to a bit of a, almost like a petri dish, because it's so interconnected and the friction to dissemination and access is so low that there's basically universal access to everything all the time. And as well as that, there is a very fast, tight feedback loop

between a publisher and an audience. The audience can signal back to the publisher what is working, what they want to see more of, and it can be revised and adapted in real time, and they obviously learn from each other as well. So, yeah, I think we are living in a slightly different time, and maybe some of those conversations about free speech and censorship, they always seem to be using a mental model from the 19th century,

but I think it's a little bit different now in the 21st. Anyway, those are comments. We'll get back to the questions. different now on the 21st anyway those are comments we'll get back to the questions um i had did have a question related not to my tribe about social media but the um well i suppose it kind of is so in the paper neil you talk about the outpouring of hot ticks around the ukrainian war when it broke out right and that um it was something to behold how many people became overnight experts in Russian military tactics and Ukrainian history. And I think people probably experience that in their daily lives, let alone, you know, if they use social media platforms.

And I wonder, was that a catalyst in, you know, wanting to write more and talk about this kind of distinction between moral grandstanding or moral virtue signaling and intellectual virtue signaling? Or is that just one of very many examples that you noted? I was just wondering how much of a catalyst it was for you addressing the topic. My guess is, so my motives are inscrutable to me my guess is covid probably played a bigger role that some people some philosophers are talking about people who are sophisticated intellectually have respectable or better than respectable academic outputs and in some cases quite often actually quite quantitatively skilled as well as skilled at philosophy.

Some of them became kind of maybe their local gurus on Twitter. For the philosophy community, they were the people that you went to for predictions about how COVID was going to unfold and for assessments of various statements that epidemiologists had made and the like. And I was struck. Some of them, I think, became, they had this head start, they had these skills, and they became genuinely somewhat expert on these topics, but they seemed to move much more quickly than that.

The expertise followed rather than caused the confidence. And then you worry about confirmation bias. First, I commit to a position. Then I learn enough to be able to defend the position. So probably that was more influential for me than you claim. Yeah. It's funny. There's a very particular account I'm thinking of that Chris and I both know is a philosopher and not one of our gurus, a relatively normal person. But like you say, Neil, this person quickly zeroed in on the COVID thing, wrote tens of thousands of words, dissecting the minutia of various aspects of it.

And then when Ukraine came along, they shifted to Ukraine. And again, you could find huge amounts of sort of encyclopedic kind of backstory, like all very, very detailed. But the thing... Who, Matt? I'm not going to name names. Not this time. What? Oh no, you said me and Chris know.

I'm like, who the hell is that? Okay. It's a French PhD in philosophy. Oh, I know. I can name them. I've kind of... How do I know. I can hear him. I've kind of, how do I, okay, you Davey. Philip Lemoine. Lemoine, yeah. Philippe Lemoine, that's

the one, that's right. Yes. Somebody who temperamentally was very willing to take controversial stances beforehand. Yes. I didn't know him before that. Very smart. I didn't know he was a philosophy student, so that's why that piece of information

did not fall down. But like you say, Neil, very smart, very motivated, like a lot of good academics, maybe a bit of an obsessive kind of temperament where you dive into something and whatever. But I mean, again, this is looking at people's motivations and it's always subjective, but my suspicion with Philippe and people like him is that there is an attraction towards the contrarian take, to have squirreled out something that is not commonly known, something that all of the orthodox people on this topic with the expertise and so on haven't spotted and quite keen to share this alternative perspective with everybody. I noticed with COVID in particular that people that were prone, even if they started off with relevant expertise actually on the topic and and could be fighting back against anti-vaccine misinformation or so on that the thing which distinguished people is when they offered heterodox takes or showed kind of sympathy for that they could appreciate where

anti-vaccine people were coming from and the anti-mandate thing. And, oh, you know, there is some nuance around the relative risks per age group that people aren't highlighting. And of course, there is myocarditis cases and so on. And you're gradually seeing with those people that often they would start off from fairly mainstream positions and over time become like more and more into just focusing on vaccine side effects and mandate. But if they took the mainstream position, like they're just saying the same thing as the CDC or the WHO or the, you know. So like, where's the interest in that?

who or the you know so like where's the interest in that like that doesn't seem to give you any intellectual kudos to basically say oh yeah the authorities are you know basically correct in this or you know the it's better to point out uh the thing that everyone missed is uh this and that can be a very valuable role and And I think sometimes they were right. Yeah. I don't know where we've settled on lockdowns, but I think our confidence that long lockdowns, I was in Melbourne for the longest lockdown in the world, our confidence that that lockdown was justified,

I think is lower now than it was. And so perhaps they were right about that. So, you know, taking a step back, I think is lower now than it was. And so perhaps they were right about that. So, you know, taking a step back, I asked, suppose people are engaged in virtue signaling, why would they be doing it? And what would we expect from them? Both what kinds of content we would see and also what kind of virtues they want to, that they would, it would be rewarding for them to signal the position of. So one thing they're going to want to do, as you just mentioned, Chris, is they're going

to want to be different. Because why should I read the musings of Neil Levy? I mean, you know, maybe he's incredibly witty, but not everybody can be witty. And I've got to say, as an aside here, one of the eternal mysteries about Twitter to me is why my jokes don't get more loved. You need a profile picture.

That's the first thing. I have a beautiful profile picture. It looks exactly like me um i have to remove all that um so they're going to want to show something different and they're going to want to do it quickly because there's a first mover advantage yeah in fact ideally you're going to want to be presenting your your, not following the headlines, but predating them so that, you know, this is the thing to look out for. You establish a reputation as someone who's predicting the trends. You want to say something new, interesting, different,

but you're also going to want to signal you've got the properties that make you worth following in this crowded marketplace. There's somebody people are going to turn to as soon as something hits and they think, well, what should I believe about that? How should I act? So you're going to have to back it up. I act. So you're going to have to back it up. It means you're going to have to work really hard to get on top of enough evidence that you look like you know what you're talking about. You're going to look passable, not just to people with no background in the area at all,

but you want to avoid being called out by those with some knowledge. You've actually got a difficult task here. And that, I think, predicts you're going to go for contrarian takes because they're going to be different. You're going to want to signal virtues like courage. I'm not going to be bowed. The pressure from the mainstream. You're going to want to signal your autonomy.

I think for myself, I don't just follow the herd. And you're going to want to signal your autonomy i think for myself i don't just follow the herd and you're going to want to signal something i you know i don't think there's a word for it in virtue epistemology interestingly but something just like quickness of mind i can master this literature really quickly i can synthesize it and then produce something interesting i do think i don't think everybody who does that is necessarily virtue signaling on every occasion. But I think those are good things to look for. Well, you'll be glad to know we've been looking for them and we've been seeing them. What you're describing, Neil, I can't help but, you know, like our mind is contaminated with the takes, long-form takes and the Twitter feeds of the gurus.

In particular, our account, the GurusPod account, only follows the people that we've covered on the show. And we had to dilute it by including the people we interview. So that makes it slightly more bearable. But when it was just the gurus at the start, it was so terrible to log into that kind, because it was just a deluge of hot ticks. And you know, whatever the topic of the day was, you had all of them cascade upon you and everything that you're describing, I can think of a thousand examples from each of the people especially the one about intellectual autonomy and courage like that you are you're not part of some partisan

or tribal group you stand alone and and often in some cases people will actually explicitly say that their only allegiance is to intellectual courage or free thinking. And therefore, here is my take on Ukraine or COVID. So that's, yeah, I think you really have hit the nail on the head of at least some of the attention economy that we are swimming in. So I do think there are people. and economy that we are swimming in.

So I do think there are people, I can think of philosophers, again, who posted takes on COVID very quickly. And a lot of these markers were instantiated. And I suspect they weren't virtue signaling. And part of the reason is having engaged in it, they kind of dropped out of the debate. It's not that they vanished entirely, but they didn't feel the need to continue to do that. And they didn't move on to new topics. So I don't think, you know, I think that history of as soon as something looks like it might be the next big thing, going and immersing yourself in a new literature and moving quickly onto it and producing something

that you hope is going to be controversial on it very quickly. I think that's a really important marker and it distinguishes people who might just have personality traits, but which express themselves in certain ways when a certain issue happens to interest them from the true signalers. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's right. I mean, part of this is it could definitely rise to a pathological level, I think. But I think for many people, there are hints of this kind of thing. And it's kind of human nature isn't it to shoot from the hip a little bit to have an opinion on everything i mean twitter is a hot tape machine

where everyone is drawn to edgelordism of some kind to be edgy to be hip because otherwise who cares no one's interested in it's not facebook you can't just post a photograph of your breakfast neil i i have a question related to that so do you have a theory for how this relates to the fact that like everything online including in twitter especially in liberal spaces is drenched in irony, like that, you know, having several layers of irony is a good tweet, or even meme culture, right, where it's memes upon memes upon memes to get the joke. So is that related to intellectual signaling? It's an interesting question. So Regina Reaney is a philosopher in Canada, used to be a colleague of mine here in Oxford, has argued that part of the reason why Twitter kind of produces so much bullshit is the norms of assertion unsettled. So she uses the example of

the retweet. It's not clear. People often say retweet isn of the the retweet it's not clear you know people often say retweet isn't endorsement but it's not entirely not endorsement either you know it could settle on I'm just pointing to this it could settle on endorsement but it hasn't and in the meantime you can kind of you got sort of plausible deniability when you're reaching somebody you can sort of say it and sort of deny you're saying it and i wonder whether irony doesn't allow for the same sort of plausible deniability to make braver but also you know less less well thought out takes possible. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like it is a way to solve that problem of, on one hand, the attention economy drives everyone to the edge of a hot take, right? And you have to go that way if you want attention. On the other hand, there's a risk involved always. And you might get called out by some moral virtue signals for harmful take or whatever. And the attention can quickly turn very nasty. I guess everyone has in the back of their minds that kind of protective mechanism where you can get called out for even a take that isn't that bad by people that are claiming that it is, you know,

it's very easy to present it in a very bad way. So the irony I could see, I mean, I'm called to irony. I feel like I have, I'm drawn to it. And I recognize that's probably part of it. Well, the funny thing is, Matt, the example that springs to mind for me is Brett Weinstein has a thing in his bio that says emoji equals irony,

but he often posts, you know, something about COVID and vaccines causing harm and just sticks an emoji at the end. And, you know, now he's quite an open anti-vax person but early in the pandemic if you made comment people would say did you not see the emoji so if you have that disclaimer it's kind of useful just like yeah this might be irony but sometimes it's not and of course the reverse happens when what i think is clearly a joke gets taken very seriously and something i mean that there's the famous early case of the woman who tweeted i'm going to africa i hope i don't get aids it's clearly a joke. She lost her job over it. And it's a Twitter pile-on with people saying that she'd be racist.

You're familiar with this, aren't you, Matt? Making jokes on Twitter and then having to deal with the consequences as people don't interpret them as jokes. People are so literal-minded, Chris. So literal-minded. But actually, yeah, Neil, this is kind of going back to the other topic. But there's a satire account, an American academic called, So literal-minded. But actually, yeah, Neil, this is kind of going back to the other topic, but there's a satire account, an American academic called,

what's his name, Tim McGill. Tim McGill. And so his brand, he satirizes the kind of 24-hour, seven-day work week of academics. It's been totally focused on publications that you have to put aside your whole personal life. And he plays the role of this extremely demanding academic and unreasonable demands on PhD students all the way. Also woke. Oh yes.

Exceedingly woke. Yeah. So, you know, he's kind of got one joke and he keeps doing it. So, and you people may or may not find him funny, he's he's clearly being satirical he does he does rope some people in he take him seriously and you know there are flare-ups where there'll be a kind of a mob generation of people going this is very harmful this is contributing to toxic and it's it's a long bow to draw to say that it's harmful, but it's somehow... I do recall, Neil, and this is Twitter minutiae, but I think it's a possibly interesting example of the part

where you're not really sure what's going on and what level you're operating on. The James Lindsay account, which I think everyone in our audience is familiar with and many people outside of it, particularly toxic account, happened upon this tim mcgill account who was goading him with various woke takes but it was but it's a parody account and james lindsey would quote retweet it and then his followers were attacking it sincerely. But it's a it's a parody account. And I was watching it going, this is a parody of a kind of woke academic being attacked by somebody who's become a parody

of an anti-woke conspiracist. And I'm not sure, like, who is the bad guy and who is the the audience in this encounter but it didn't seem like a something that people should be watching such as those i was morally outraged myself that i observed those encounters and um yeah uh shout out to another philosopher, T. Nguyen, who talks about context collapse on Twitter. Now, a tweet gets taken out of its context, as in that case, and it just functions very differently in a different context. It expresses quite different propositions. Yeah, very true. Yeah, we've had T. on the show. It expresses quite different propositions. Yeah, very true. Yeah, we've had tea on the show. It was great.

But coming back to your red flags for intellectual virtue signaling, as you could tell by Chris' expressions, with just like every one of those red flags, we see in virtually every case of our more toxic gurus. So this is just, I mean, I might just be able to just to quickly go through them and just point out what we see. So first of all, that confidence and certainty. I mean, take any of our gurus, but maybe let's just take one example for each. Maybe Nassim Taleb, if you've come across him, you know, all of the statisticians are idiots, right?

They're all stupid. They don't take into account black swans. They don't understand about long tails. They're trapped in this normal distribution land. Only he knows. And he's like a steamroller. He would never back down, never surrender. But yeah, he's just one example.

They all do that. But that signaling of quickness in mind and intellectual autonomy, the example that I think springs to mind the best is Jordan Peterson. I feel like most of our gurus become caricatures of themselves over time as they continually sort of ratchet up their presentation. And you can see it with Jordan, who in his mannerisms, in the way he speaks, the way he dresses, everything about the setup is intended to communicate that this is a deep and profound thinker. And, you know, most of the people who are good at this tend to be very loquacious. They're very good speakers.

That, I think, what do you think? Do you feel that people just interpret the facility with language and a decent vocabulary? Being fluent is just a signifier of intellectual profundity. So, you know, one of the things I talk about is in order to signal your intellectual value, you can manifest it. One of the differences between moral virtue signaling and in this kind of context where there's no face-to-face interaction and you just can't check up on the person. Talk is cheap and it's really hard to manifest your virtue. I mean, what are you going to do? Show a receipt of your donation to

the Black Lives Matter or whatever it might be? That looks like you're trying too hard. And so, you know, it tips over into something that's no longer signaling virtue at all. But with the intellectual virtues, you can actually manifest them. You can provide equations, you can provide links to papers, and you can talk about them in ways that seem knowledgeable. The original Guru Effect paper by Sperber actually says, not only are people impressed by these, but I think this is often missed about Sperber's paper. They should be impressed by this. Actually, quantifying, formalizing is making your work hostage to fortune and hostage to people who can check up on it.

I should take your equation seriously because I know if they're bullshit, somebody will call them out, even though I can't call them out. So you're going to want to back it up in one way or another. One way to do it is by some kind of technical language. You can talk about long tails and the normal distribution and black swans. Or you can talk in a kind of complex way, which sounds as though it's very carefully hedged and it's plumbing the depths of the ineffable nature of reality to reveal the true quantum interactions, whatever it might be.

That's another way of signaling your intellectual prowess. And even when you don't in fact know what you're talking about, it does require skill to do it. It is a self-certifying signal of some kind of intellectual value or intellectual power something that springs to mind there though neil is that you can have the case where like for example when i think about my own interest in the parapsychology field it It had an interest in the various topics there. And I still teach about a lot of the research papers there. And there's obvious effort that goes into conducting research in parapsychology. And I'm not going to throw all of the researchers

that engage in that into the same bucket. But I will say a substantial amount of the research in that area has the form of science and rigor, but some very fundamental lacking components. And you see the same thing on Twitter, where you will see somebody construct a massive thread about Ukraine or, you know, about COVID. And by all the external markers, it looks like a thread you can trust, and it's intellectual. It's citing studies, there's graphs, there's, you know, references to details in papers. references to details in papers. But if you know the area, and not just on COVID, but on anything, if you dig into it, you can tell it's empty, right?

Its intellectual calories are not there. It's kind of all surface, and often the references are to terrible papers, the statistics are just completely misinterpreted. And in that case, it feels like while there's a skill involved to constructing it, and it's definitely like an intellectual endeavor of sorts, it's a bit like a cuckoo masquerading as something which it isn't. And it feels like, particularly in the kind of stuff we do,

that there are intellectual charlatans who are very, very good at appearing intellectually sophisticated, but who have what are ultimately badly informed and very superficial takes on things. So I'm kind of wondering, you know, those skills, they seem like we should still distinguish between the intellectual nutrition which is at the base of them i yeah i think there are cases and cases i think there are people out there who are genuinely attempting to hone in on what they see as the truth

and using the genuine sorts of capacities you would hope would be deployed. And they're deploying them with ability. It's simply that they've cut themselves off from, they no longer take testimony of other, of, you know, people who are either their peers or their intellectual superiors because they know the area that the person's trespassing into. And they're not willing to take that testimony at all seriously. And so they're doing it all for themselves.

And it's just not enough to be smart and read a lot and to think hard and have lots of, you know, informal skills. It's not enough to be able to identify the truth if you're not willing to take anybody's opinion seriously. Yeah, we definitely agree with you there, that that disconnect from any kind of community of investigators, right, most notably the academic community, but it could be another community, community of journalists or whatever, they hold that up as a virtue,

that they are courageous. As Chris said, they stand alone. But as you say, it really isn't. That inability or refusal to engage with peers to figure it out together is a big red flag in my view. But I think your view might be a little bit different from me and Chris's. As Chris was emphasizing, one of the features of our tongue-in-cheek title there is pseudoprofound bullshit.

And we feel like we see that you know deepak shobra-esque language these these profundities lots of big words lots of complex concepts being put together mostly invented concepts neologisms technical language but used in a in a different context i mean and i'll just to make that concrete i'll give you an example that springs to mind because chris and i are currently in a little Twitter spat with a fellow called Jonathan Pajot, who is a bit of an offshoot of Jordan Peterson. We covered him in our last episode where he's essentially arguing that demons are real. Depends what you mean by real, Mark. But it depends what you mean by real and it depends what you mean by demon. So he walks a line between metaphor and reality.

In his sort of worldview, the metaphorical concept of the thing is kind of just as real as a material thing. But to put it in his words, he describes them not as like an invisible matter like in Ghostbusters, but rather, scare quotes here, a causal pattern which manifests in phenomena. And he also refers to demons as not guys with little horns and things like that, but rather agentic, transpersonal, distributed intelligences. And so you can get a flavor for his language there. There's big words, a lot of them strung together. It's all very complicated. If he criticizes, then you're clearly misunderstanding what he's saying. And it seems to us at least that being opaque, being nebulous is the point. It's not an accident. It is the point to not being sort of pinned on having to defend literal actual demons, but saying that they are actually really real, but in a deeper, more fundamental way than you can really understand.

So that doesn't seem like pseudo-profound bullshit to us, I guess. I guess. Yeah, so I'm trying to find the examples that Penny Cook et al used. Is it Chopra, that example that I've been with? I've got the paper. The one that he says is, consider the following statement, hidden meaning transforms unpar on parallel abstract beauty. Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of. Yeah.

It's really so hard to interpret. Obviously, meanings can be hidden. That seems pretty plain on the face of it. You could say something which has got a surface meaning and a deeper meaning that's only accessible to Akala. Maybe this is an example of something of hidden meaning, this very sentence. Can they transform beauty?

I think that's perfectly intelligible. Maybe once you grasp the hidden meaning of a poem, maybe a poem has a hidden meaning, then the beauty of the poem is transformed for you in some way. Abstract beauty, that's not hard to pass. People have talked about concrete and abstract music for centuries. Concrete music is music that has representational properties. So it represents a storm it represents fear abstract music doesn't have a representation it's it's music it's pure music music for its own sake so you know i think

if you want to take me make the effort of interpreting chopra's utterances you can you can find meaning in them in fact i think it's really hard to construct a sentence that animals like us, hermeneutic animals like us, can't find meaning for. I'm not saying it's worth your time to assign meaning to Chopra's utterances. I don't think it is, but you can assign meaning. Now, Chopra's doing things that I'm not at all sure that this Peterson acrolyte is doing. At least, well, Chopra might be trying to sell cures for disease. And when he gets into that area, then he could be trading on the ambiguities and apparent profundity to get you to buy stuff or to think stuff, which he doesn't have any right to get you to do or to think.

But if he's saying the world has depths which we're unable to grasp with our limited concepts, well, actually, I think that's true. I don't know what the hell's going on at a quantum level. And I do think, I mean, this is just Niels Bohr, straight out of Niels Bohr and actually I think Heisenberg. Human concepts, the only concepts we have, are unable to make sense of quantum phenomena. We have to understand them purely at a formal level or metaphorically.

So all of that seems like it's perfectly comprehensible. I suspect it doesn't make any real difference to how I should act in the world, but I can understand a sensibility, a religious sensibility, which thinks that the world has debts which can't be grasped in straightforward propositions and have to be expressed poetically. Lots of people think that about, even in a naturalistic worldview, lots of people think that's true of the aesthetic, for example, and maybe normative properties generally. So if you're limiting yourself to that kind of domain, I don't think you're necessarily bullshitting if you think you're producing utterances like that.

And I also think that the disposition to find bullshit too quickly can manifest harmfully i think people are saying things that are you know tolerably clear and propositional and not about the ineffable and people i think this is this is true about lots of people's reading of continental philosophy they're trying to say things which they could have said a lot more clearly and then maybe there is some trading on ambiguity going on which deserves to be pulled out but i think we too quickly move from oh this is this is pretty ambiguous uh and there are two ways of reading lists and sometimes the ambiguity really matters maybe there are two ways of reading something and it seems plausible but on reading one it's false and reading two it's false

so that can matter but i think too too quickly we move from this is ambiguous to this is bullshit and dismiss it. I think, Neil, you make a good case in the example of hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. I agree with you that the kind of summary that the statement is not merely nonsense uh it doesn't it doesn't mean anything right like because meaning is in the eye of the beholder and and people can extract meaning from abstract art and that kind of thing but i i think one thing i'd

push back a little bit on is that i think that one of the aspects of pseudo profound bullshit the concept is people using jargon and opaque obscure technical language in order to make points which are either mundane or which are themselves contradictory or have some logical problem in them, appear profound. And what we see in the content, there's a lot of that, like a lot of, it's not just poetic language, but it's kind of language signaling that you know a constellation of thinkers. And often if you know the thinkers, it doesn't really apply, you know, it would be like saying, just somebody saying, yes, like Derrida said, and if you've read Derrida, you know that that doesn't fit at all what he would have said. So

there's a, there's like a level of that, which seems pseudo to it. But then the other aspect which we see in the content that we look at is often that people will take a point, say something like, you know, the world contains mysteries, right? A point which you may believe to varying degrees, or it's obviously true in some respects, all depends on your interpretation. But they will kind of then say, okay, to express that, let me take the example of a soccer team. And from the soccer team, they'll leap into other metaphors, and other people will join in the metaphor about the soccer team. And you know, that's just a faculty of language, but it ends up that you have a 10 minute free-for-all with various theorists being thrown

in and out of the mix around a metaphor. And when you boil it down, it just says something like, you know, the word is mysterious. And I know that is an intolerance for wordiness, but it also feels that there's definitely an element where people can dress up points which are mundane in the kind of emperor's clothes and that it doesn't seem that calling that pseudo-profound is inaccurate it kind of feels like that's that's what it is um yeah i don't know. That might be defensive, but I'm curious your take. So maybe I accept all of that, and it's the pseudo-profound I'm with you on and the bullshit I'm not.

It's not literally meaningless. So, you know, I think comparing this stuff to poetry is appropriate. There are good and bad poems. There are poems that have depth and poems that don't and that may not be apparent on the surface maybe i have to do a little bit of work interpretive work and thinking about it before i start to see this is a poem that's worthwhile and this one isn't it's just uh it's images just uh images that are thrown together and don't amount to anything. That things are hard to interpret doesn't mean that there are no bad interpretations,

because there certainly are. So yeah, I think we can use this kind of language or this kind of ambiguous metaphorical language to give ourselves an appearance of depth which we don't deserve. But for that matter, we can use, you know, going back to the Sperber, but we can use graphs and formulas to give ourselves an appearance of depth that we don't deserve. I think you see that all the time, actually, with people claiming to get an unwarranted boosting credibility

by throwing in terms like, I don't know, stochastic or inclusive thickness or whatever it might be. Yeah. A neuroimaging picture. Yeah. I mean, one of my bugbears in psychology is the way in which the form of a rigorous quantitative psychology paper is followed. And sometimes that involves putting in a lot of statistics that really don't need to be there and complicating things unnecessarily. But it all, it looks the part, right? It has the tables.

It has the little Greek symbols every now and again. And, you know, that is, I would put that in the same category as this signaling, like unnecessary complexification that is just redundant and doesn't serve a purpose except to give a false sense of, what's the word, certainty that they know what they're talking about. I mean, I also agree, too. I mean, I was looking at some of our Deepak Chopra quotes here, and this supports your point, Neil, which is that it's, it's pseudo profound, but it's not bullshit.

So one here is to think is to practice brain chemistry. Okay. So that's, that's a good one. That's, that's true, right? It's true. That's not bullshit, but it is mundane, right? I would say. And I think, I think statements like that, I mean, there's other ones here.

It is the nature of babies to be in bliss. I mean, I think statements like that encourage people to think that there's something more in it than there is. Yeah. Babies are happy. than there is. Yeah. He'd be so happy. You know, in the right context, the completely mundane statement could count as pseudo-profound bullshit.

Can you imagine in the middle of his hour-long, I don't know if he does that, hour-long lick on how attention manifests in the quantum soup, Chopra were to say in a voice which indicates that this is the kind of statement that's lovely to be taken on a Monday.

Milk is served cold. Wow. Yeah, I never thought of that. Yeah. Just this morning, Neil, we were digging into some content. And it's highly, like, in line with what you're saying, it's these three guys and they're riffing on,

they're actually doing a meta thing of, it's called making sense of sensemaking. They're doing a meta discussion about the endeavor that they're doing and the there's a real like the thing they compare it to is jazz uh like a jazz session where they're throwing ideas and they have this rule called the omega rule which is all ideas must be kind of you must hunt for the good interpretation you shouldn't reject you should seek not to you know put down just seek to accept any idea that's thrown and and it leads to some in crazy places but there's a part in that conversation where somebody offers an analogy about some point and they relate it to the wizard of oz and they're kind of off in their analogy and then they say at the end and you know there's no place like home and everybody kind of goes that's it that's it that's that's the key yeah

part of part of what we're rubbing up against though isn't it is it's just that traditional tension between the humanities and the poetic allegorical way of doing things and the buttoned down closed- closed-minded, reductionist materialists like me and Chris sort of prefer to do things. I mean, we have hearts, we have souls. We go to art galleries, but we sort of... Do we? The royal we should not be exercised in such ways.

I do, I do. I'm just trying to defend the pseudo-profound bullshit thing and try to reconcile it with your more charitable sort of view of poetry now. And like, do you think, is there maybe like a domain conflict? You know, like there's a place for poetry, there's a place for interpreting literature and talking about abstract expressionist art. And to my mind, there, all bets are off. You know, go crazy.

You know, I'm fine with allegorical language there. But when you're talking about the material world, you're talking about whether something happened or didn't happen. You're talking about COVID. You're talking about vaccines. You're talking about climate change, like Jordan Peterson often does these days. And they use the language of poetry and the humanities. And maybe, I don't know, I'm not familiar with continental philosophy, but it's pretty dense sort of stuff that they do here. It just feels totally inappropriate, like an inappropriate application. If there is sense in that kind of language, if there is meaning in it, it seems to me

an inappropriate application of it. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. We should, as a naturalistic philosopher, I'm trying to, you know, to some extent, reach both sides. Things should be said as clearly and as precisely as possible, but we should recognize that everything can be said clearly and precisely. I think we should quantify as much as we can. And even in domains in which it seems like you're beyond the quantifiable, it's worth trying to quantify and see how far that gets you. It might actually be quite illuminating to do a quantitative analysis of poetry. And in fact, it's being done. I'm just reminded of the quote from Douglas Adams. I don't know, you remember Douglas Adams?

He has the... My handle, Neil, before you tell us, my handle on Twitter is Arthur Dent. So anyway, go on. So he has the deep thought thought i think it is the computer is going to produce the the answer to the question of life the meaning and the answer life the universe and everything and the philosophers are very upset about this they don't want a precise number uh answer which turns out to be a number. It's 42. And they come to the people

running the computer and say, we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. I don't think we can have rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty, but there are spheres in which the quantitative, at least for the moment, runs out. But, you know, I don't even want to defend that. I don't get a lot out of reading more metaphorical language. I don't have a religious sensibility. I do experience feelings that maybe I don't, you know, feelings of awe. I get them sometimes from reading science. feelings of awe. I get them sometimes from reading science. The idea of deep time, when I was reading evolution quite seriously, seriously enough to get a grip on some of the concepts, deep time is

mind-blowing to my little mind. Yeah, vertigo. It gives you a feeling of vertigo, doesn't it? We can actually get to all of that without ever venturing into the merely metaphorical. So I don't want to defend it too strongly. My main aim really is that the disposition to call bullshit can easily itself become a vice. I mean, partly there's somebody who kind of predated me in making something of the transition from continental to analytic philosophy, and that was Jerry Cohn, who wrote on bullshit, I think possibly before Frankfurt, but anyway, he has a different take on bullshit.

And he says, all that continental philosophy I used to read, it's bullshit. And he founded a group. He was a Marxist. He was a Marxist here at All Souls in Oxford. He founded a group called the Non-Bullshit Marxism Group. called the non-bullshit Marxism group. I actually think that the people he meant, the continental Marxists,

I don't think they were without value. I think they had some value in what they said, and I think he had the disposition to call bullshit, had kind of metastasized in him, and he saw it too easily. Here's the example that Cohen gives in his paper on bullshit. This is a wonderful example of bullshit, he says. It's from Etienne Balibar. This is precisely the first meaning we can give to the idea of dialectic, a logical form of explanation

specifically adapted to the determinant intervention of class struggle in the very fabric of history. I don't think that's particularly hard to understand. I don't think it's particularly profound. Maybe it could have been said more clearly. Maybe it should have been said more clearly, but it's not really uninterpretable, as Cohen claims. Yeah, Neil, I think I'm meeting you here halfway because you reminded me of when we covered James Lindsay and he was talking to some crazy person about all the evils of the Frankfurt School. Michael O'Fallon. all the evils of the frankfurt school and michael o'fallon michael o'fallon and citing all of these

people whose names are now forgotten it it inspired me to go off and actually check some of read some of the stuff that they were referencing and i've unfortunately forgotten the name of the philosopher that i think that i did christian mar Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I only read a bit of it. I read, I don't know, 20 or 30 pages, something like that. And it was heavy going for me, I have to admit. But I have to say, like I got it. Like it made sense. It was dense.

It was full of ideas. And none of it was substantiated apart from sort of sounding good if you know what i mean but there were like i recognized the points that were being made i think it was something about that atomization of individuals and a neoliberal kind of thing and defining ourselves by by you know consumption and and so on and and dehumanizing aspects and you know it it wasn't it wasn't science but it wasn't wasn't bad i like and you know that contradicts what i said before which is like that wasn't that's not art right it's not poetry it it's it's it's talking about people and society and the economy and stuff it's not really falsifiable or anything like that,

but it isn't meaningless either. So, yeah, I guess I'm just saying. I think I can meet you halfway on this. Just as an aside, I think it's a huge mistake to talk about continental philosophy. When I was doing continental philosophy, I was largely doing the French side, which is Foucault, who certainly has ideas which might be true or false. It's also true that he buries them a bit deeply. But, you know, he makes claims about history,

which are clearly the sorts of things that is the province of historians to verify or to falsify. Which isn't to say we can have crucial tests. Crucial tests are hard even in science. And I think some of them turned out to be true and some of them didn't. But, you know, at the same time, I was aware of lots of people doing German philosophy, and I read some of the Germans too, and they didn't dislike the French any less than people in, you know,

Anglophone culture. They thought they pulled it. And they were often trying to be much clearer and more lucid and make more precise claim than the French. But in fact, even that's far too rough ground. You find that there are different schools within these countries and even over the lifetime of particular thinkers. I think Frankfurt School, large pre-war, is pretty straightforward.

I mean, it's hard. It's hard in the way that German philosophy is very dense and it's hard reading. But there's no question that it's trying to make truth claims which are at least to some degree testable. And then after the war, and as a response to the war, some of them get much more aphoristic and harder to assign a meaning to even after a lot of work.

There's many different schools here. There's an irony, Neil, that we've noticed and our researchers like, is it Anna Kata, Matt, who talked about that there's something of an irony that many of the kind of hunters of postmodernism as a kind of boogeyman, right, and continental philosophy is a dirty word, that they now kind of peddle,

especially on the conservative side, a very contingent view of what is true and what facts are, that, you know, it would give any French philosopher quite a good run for the money. And then I also have to say that I think part of the reason which is unfair to your discipline really is, for example, I studied social anthropology at SOAS and did various courses about, you know, classical anthrop anthropologists malinowski and levy and all so on so forth but the second half of my introductory theory course was tricot and bordeaux

and derrida and like kind of the smorgasbord of the you know the named kind of French philosophers. And I think, and I can say that I didn't find, I liked some of them more than others, but I did find that turn in the, you know, the introduction to the anthropology discipline to be quite surprising, because the majority of them are not anthropologists. But the, I think that the arts and humanities,

some of them have kind of consumed that that canon very superficially and regurgitated and that is a little bit what i think the critics react to i'm not sure but i i i suspect that that's that's part of what is happening um i think you know to a first approximation, what we think of as paradigm continental philosophy is American rather than French or German or Italian. Yeah. We'll let you go on a second, Dale, but my final thought was yes. I mean, that's the thing.

I think people are reacting against a much simpler, almost two-dimensional version of it. I mean, because we have it imported into psychology as well. You can open up a textbook on critical social psychology, for instance, and all of those thinkers will be mentioned. And even me, with no knowledge of what the real thing is, or very little, I know that it's a really dumbed-down version of it and being applied in just a

almost a sloganistic kind of way. So anyway, but this is all way, way off topic. I just want to, what I want to do is summarize the things that you've told us in the lecture and you told us again, and I've read about it now too, because it's been extraordinarily helpful for us now, which is, you know, I mean, you've called it intellectual virtue signaling. We've captured aspects of that in various parts of our garometer. But, you know, for us, it was really helpful for someone like yourselves who's coming at it from an independent direction, but to identify similar kinds of things. The motivations are unclear, but, you know, seemingly around a kind of status seeking and thrusting themselves into the spotlight. And those red flags that you identified, we are going to refer to again with confidence and

the certainty, the signaling, the quickness of mind and the intellectual autonomy and the intellectual courage and the critical importance of being the opposite of whatever the mainstream is, to have that outlying contrarian take. But the final thing that I'll ask you on before we wrap up is, you've hinted at it, but you've really mentioned how it's different from moral virtue signaling, because you can do moral virtue signaling in a very quick and non-effortful way. Yeah, you can tweet up Black Lives Matter, you can put a Ukraine flag on your bio, you can do various things like that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, but you've mentioned how to do the intellectual virtue signaling, you enact it, you manifest it, and it takes a lot of time and effort. And is there anything

further you wanted to say about that before? So just quickly, you know, I'm inspired here by, I guess, work in the cognitive science of religion. A good signal is going to be credibility enhancing, and that's really hard to achieve. Credibility is really hard to achieve online. You can make a signal credibility enhancing by making it costly or hard to fake. But for most of us in our social media context,

it's hard to do a costly signal because people, you know, our friends tend to have similar views to us. And it's very easy to fake, you know, very easy to fake a profile picture or your commitment to trans rights or whatever it might be. So I don't think people pursue credibility very strongly in social media simply because there's no point in trying to pursue it, at least when it comes to moral signaling.

There's no point in struggling because it's unlikely it's going to pay off. But with intellectual virtues signaling, you can manifest your intellectual virtues, at least some of them, in the kinds of ways we've talked about, by using difficult language, by mentioning difficult thinkers, by using jargon, by using citations, or simply by going on at sufficient length. that itself, insofar as you manage it, make it coherent, that itself manifests some sort of intellectual capacity. So I think we should see people pursuing, insofar as this is a competitive environment

and they want to stand out, they should be putting effort into making their signals credible. putting effort into making their signals credible. They're hard to fake. They're costly in that it takes effort to master the relevant literature and get the jargon under your belt and use it more or less appropriately. But they just self-certify in that they actually manifest intellectual complexity. So I think that's a difference we should expect between intellectual and moral virtue signal. Yeah.

Just going on the untold hours of long-form podcast content that our gurus do, it pretty much supports your point there. Us too, Matt. Us too. Nobody's innocent here, Chris. But Neil, thanks so much for spending a couple of hours with us.

As I mentioned to you before we started, I'm starting to read your book, Bad Beliefs, Why They Happen to Good People, which I'm enjoying. And I think people can, we might link to that in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to share with listeners about what you're currently working on or what's coming up next? Bad Beliefs is the center of my work. I want to mention that book is open access, so you can download it for free on the OUP website.

I'm continuing. You mentioned Rob Ross earlier. on the OUP website. I'm continuing. You mentioned Rob Ross earlier. Rob and I are working on trying to measure sincerity in belief we're interested in, the extent to which people actually believe some of the more bizarre beliefs that they espouse,

like the big lie, which of course is going to be relevant to your topic. It may well be that, and I suspect this is something I'm working on independently, I suspect there's a lot of entertainment value for a lot of people in playing with the idea that reptilian lizards are running the world or that moon landing was faked or climate scientists are all in on a big hoax. They don't believe it, but it's really fun to play with it because it makes the world a more interesting place

and they're peering behind the curve. You might get lots of the same effects of people following gurus for entertainment value without clearly disbelieving them or without quite believing them either. And I'm also interested in how harmful that is. People don't really buy it. Are they nevertheless? Is it something we should be condemning on epistemic grounds

as well as political and social grounds? Yeah. Well, we're living in an age where you have Republican politicians talking about fighting the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset. And, yeah, you do have to wonder to what extent they believe it. I guess it's like they don't seem to be happy about these beliefs generally. Yeah, they're worried about them. But maybe that itself is a bit like a horror movie. Like it's, it's enjoyable to be, to have an enemy and to be scared and to feel that you can be part of a

movement to save the world. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Well, Chris, final words from you. You're unusually quiet.

My evening brain has kicked in without coffee. I'm, I feel like a shell of a mom, but yeah, Neil, I really enjoyed the lecture and your kind attempt to make us see reason in this discussion. And I would just add as a final note that I definitely do think, and we talked about this with T. Nguyen as well, that everybody online is engaged in their own little world of creating positive strokes and in-group virtue. And there's nobody that escapes from that. a critic of other people engaged in like gurus for example it does not make you immune from all of the processes that you might be criticizing in in other so it's it is a good thing to point out and also to note that even where critiques are valuable there's something think, to the notion that we were disparaging it, but it always depends on how far you take things.

So, you know, the notion that you can take profound things from things which, you know, other people might regard as bullshit or that people might approach the world with a whole bunch of different metaphysical assumptions that ultimately you can't say which one is right ultimately we don't have the evidence to to say so yeah i i think it is always useful to turn the lens back on yourself when you're critiquing things and i i think your papers do a pretty good job of doing that without being too mean about it whereas we on the other hand don't mind being mean so yeah so just thanks for the conversation and the interesting papers thanks Chris thanks Matt I've enjoyed it thanks now yep and we definitely promise we'll resist the temptation to just call bullshit on things, call people gurus, just slander them.

No promises. No promises. We'll try to be good. I should mention my forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press on philosophy, peer review and bullshit. We've had a fair bit to some extent. Right. We'll be putting links in the show notes, by the way, for all this good stuff.

Yeah, they will also be interesting, Neil, if your intellectual signaling ends up just plastered over right-wing media. That's your legacy. Hopefully not. Hopefully not. When we see you on Fox News, that's when we'll know you've jumped the shark. All right. Thanks, Neil. Bye.

Bye. Cheers. Well, Matt. Done. Another interview in the can. Is that where they go? They're in the pipeline. The content pipeline.

I don't know. We had a nice chat. We did. It's good to see academics approaching the stuff we're looking at informally in a nice academic kind of way so we'll be we'll be citing now when we when we get around to eventually when we ever write anything yeah and and yeah and you know it's it's also very brave of us to have these kind of conversations with people. You know, we're just, you don't need to thank us. We just do our duty.

We're just brave for having all these, you know, hard-hitting conversations with academics who we broadly agree with. It's impressive, I know. So no need to say. We know. Neil was brave. You were brave. I was particularly brave. Yeah, who's the bravest?

Who can say? Who can say? But we're all very brave and all very important discussions. by peeking into our reviews and how people are doing with their reviews in our reviews of reviews. Can't wait. Can't wait. Yes. Okay, what have we got?

You got some friendly ones for us today? You got some nice ones? Yeah, I've got a mixed bag. Mixed bag. I'm going to... I have to mention this one. This one is from Griffin Mills, and it's short. It's directed at you, Matt,

as much of the feedback has been recently. I was reminded by that one-star review that Matt slagged off Robocop. He didn't even make a good case or defend himself when confronted. One out of five stars. The Robocop reviews continue you want to take this opportunity to just clarify how much you actually like robocop i know i'd like to just wholeheartedly apologize for my comments regarding robocop i appreciate that they were

insensitive and deeply harmful and i i want to take them back i'm going to spend some time listening and learning for a little while about robocop and i'll be releasing a full statement in due course and that's good i'd buy that for a dollar robocop reference for you there fans of robocop. Now, I'm going to go an odd route this time, Matt. I'm going to go for a five-star positive review. Then I'm going to weave back the negative review because it will set us up for our forthcoming episode. So here's the positive review.

Again, they may have some comment about you in there, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. So let's see what they're saying gene barrett listen for much needed antidote to fence making other than matt referring to the matrix often as the matrix this is a five-star show and a public service a much needed deflation of galaxy brains down to at least the size of humble solar system cortexes thanks guys that's all right but don't they're shaming my accent chris not the only person to mention this matt several people in other contexts mentioned does matt think the

matrix is called the matrix and you do right you do believe that i do i do believe that in my soul so you say it again the say it again matrix the matrix matrix matrix it's matrix okay is it is it well yeah well and there's another review but i'm gonna save it for next time which is like it's actually lists quite involved deep reflection from somebody who gives us five stars, but isn't sure if our podcast is good for them. I deeply appreciate that, but we'll get into the nitty gritty of that next time because it's long and it takes an intellectual journey. And I think they've got good points. On the other hand, we have a one out of five review from someone called Storm D in Australia. And the title is weird.com more institutionalized racism. So not a good opener.

not a good opener but two white cis wealthy old men celebrate their diversity by not having american accents and tell us how and what to think don't let their thinly veiled description of their objectivity and self-titled skeptic position fool you they are not allies and use their privilege to claim black people are just plain victims. Their analysis of Abram X is primarily a character assassination and woeful bias. Ever heard of ad hominem? You can talk down to black people all day from your ivory towers. Notice how their blurb boasts about tackling Robin DiAngelo. Can't seem to locate that one. Hmm.

Perhaps it is not too easy to use your, quotation marks, brilliant objective minds to laugh at real science and common sense. This blend of biasness and harmful material needs to be stamped out. If these two are lecturers at universities spreading this type of poison,

they must be removed. No one cares what you weird combs think anymore i wish they'd just go away now i i wasn't too mind about reading this matt not because of the deep cuts but because i'm not entirely convinced it isn't a parody because the kind of endorsement of robin d'angelo as being you know too intellectual to address too intimidating and the call for our removal from university it all felt a little bit or you know white cis wealthy old old man how dare they one of us is old and wealthy. The other is on the bread line, scraping along. But yeah, so, you know, it felt a little bit like this could be somebody, you know, kicking the piss.

Like a parody account. Yeah, it's a post-law, isn't it? It's hard to know. And Abraham X. Kennedy. Oh, sorry. X. Kendi, not Kennedy. isn't it it's hard hard to know and abram x kennedy oh sorry x candy not kennedy that is a perennial complaint uh from people that we went too easy automatically don't tend to get that we were unduly harsh on him so that also struck me as yeah and it's from years ago now yeah so it's unlikely the whole thing is a little bit improbable but anyway whatever um it's from years ago now yeah so it's unlikely the whole thing is a little bit

improbable but anyway whatever um it's all good parodies real reality who could say it's it's all post-modern irony but chris well yeah so we mentioned this in part because be careful what you wish for because they they mentioned that our blurb mentioned that we'll look at the angelo and it does and we never have and mainly because it seemed a bit redundant like the angelo was a bit of a punching bag for everyone on the left and and right but but she's not really in the news recently and we wanted to look at some lefty people so we've decided to take a little break from tech season to have a look next at some d'angelo content so so there you go we will get there and it's funny is that the other people that complained about us not covering d'angelo

are like you know the idw right wing who think we're avoiding it because of how much we agree with her ideology that it would be impossible to distinguish. We'd just be praising all of her insights. Well, this is what it's like to be a moderate, you know, you get it from all sides. Who are the real victims here? Who is the real oppressed group that's what i white cis wealthy old man yeah that's the victim so but but yeah we we will be covering d'angelo and yeah as you said we ended up not doing her like early on because it did feel a bit redundant it felt like everyone on twitter even the you know progressive left progressives she was kind of on the nose for everybody sort of viewed by all sides

as being a bit maybe like a profiteer you know so it felt like us putting the boot in would be superfluous and would look like too much of an easy goal if you know what i mean but you know but now we've got no standards now we're scraping the bottom of the barrel there is nothing to which we will not stoop no no she she's out of the news cycle now and we can revisit her now the dust has settled yeah and we wanted to do some left-wing guru type so she still still comes up although primarily in my circles comes up with people still dunked on her in the heterodox sphere.

I don't know that she's actually, you know, issuing hot ticks or whatever, but whatever, we'll look at some content and see what's there. So that's what's coming up and our position as allies or otherwise is, you know, for each person to decide as their one.

And I don't think we tell people what to think. We tell them what we think. And then just to be clear, everyone can believe whatever the hell they want. You want to be like a lab leaker that thinks vaccines haven't been safety tested? Knock yourself out. You know, go ahead. tested knock yourself out you know go go ahead or you you want to be you know the most woke eating noodles as cultural appropriation whatever the hell great go go ahead and if you want to be an idw scratching at the institutions tearing down the foundations to rebuild them great

let a thousand flowers bloom that That's what I always say. Yeah. You can believe anything you want, but if you want to be correct, then listen to us. Believe what we believe. Yeah, of course. That's what I say.

You know, but you could be wrong in lots of different flavors. It's up to you. I don't care. You know, like whatever flavor of bad ice cream you want.

That's yours. Pick your poison. You know, there's a bacon. Have you ever had bacon flavored ice cream no why would you it's it's terrible you shouldn't yeah i'm out in partial my son introduced me to blue hawaii that's a good flavor blue hawaii is that one of those ones that tastes like chemicals it's it tastes like blue hawaii it's popular in okinawa so there you go i think the best ice cream would be macadamia nut and toffee chunks would it no honey bear honey bear is the best that's like the honeycomb one inside the vanilla yeah so so you know look that we're just saying there's different ways you could be wrong there's also different flavors of ice cream that you can like and they're all equally equally you know opinions

everyone has them be the political equivalent of bacon flavored ice cream or honey and macadamia it's up to you it's up to you that's right that's right so matt we we need to give a shout out to our patrons and you know people are sometimes wondering about the what the criteria is for getting a shout out and i'm just gonna say sometimes it follows a a time format you know we try to do the oldest and other times it's a bit random. And today might be one of those random days. So shout outs for conspiracy hypothesizers. We have, pull that up, Jimmy, Danny White, Evan the Wrestler, Loopy Doopy Doo, and Finn Roberts. That is our conspiracy hypothesizers for today thank you

conspiracy hypothesizers thank you very much every great idea starts with a minority of one we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses that we will and i just imagine the patreon content this month has been a bit slow because of health related issues so i appreciate everybody's patience we will get back on top of things like the coding academia and whatnot but just you know health crises come this is this is the nature of humanity sorry sorry about that we are human now revolutionary geniuses we've got patrick arthur justin hurley lay elizabeth calvert danny dyer's chocolate homunculus um yogi jaeger stanislaw prastronkonski and erica davis revolutionary geniuses matt i'm constantly surprised at how creative people are with their pseudonyms i like danny dyer's

chocolate humongous do you know who dann Danny Dyer is? No. Good. Keep it that way. I do. I was thinking of Stanislaw. I mean, you know, who could have imagined that? That's not a – what wild imaginations people have to think of names like that. Maybe that's his name. Of course it's his name, Chris.

Isn't that Malinowski's first name? Stanislaw Malinowski famous anthropologist which of course you know when i think of stanislaw i think of stanislaw lemma fantastic polish science fiction writer see you wouldn't know him chris because you're um philistine but you would you would know the movie which was oh god i've forgotten what it's called uh damn it old brand solaris solaris there you go i know solaris yeah yeah yeah yeah it's pop culture pop culture no i'm not from pop culture to our galaxy brain gurus the shining beacons in the night sky. For this episode, they are Patrick Pursley,

Healy S, Otis Sanford, Otis Sanford, Dean, and Derek Vaughan. That is our Galaxy Brain Gurus for today.

Galaxy Brain Gurus, the best kind of guru. Thank you, guys. Thank you all. You're sitting on one of the great scientific stories that I've ever heard. And you're so polite. And hey, wait a minute. Am I an expert? I kind of am.

Yeah. I don't trust people at all. there we have it matt i don't trust people at all i don't that's just scott adams and we know he's actually somewhat correct there yeah he's had some developments with his comics but we'll talk about that next time so we'll let everybody go get on with their days have a productive little time and thank you for listening to the episode look forward to our forthcoming cancellation as we delve into american racial politics with robin d'angelo and have a wonderful evening noting the disc and recording the jet thank you everyone ciao see ya Thank you. Oxford, Chris? I didn't have...

Yeah. Yeah. And... Hmm. Carry on. Yeah.