Lacking that kind of foresight (to forestall audience collapse with responsible research rather than clickbait) is why these people are doing this in the first place, though, so it is a death-loop.

If they were just grifters, they would either not depend on audience bases but just clickbait new eyes constantly for sales conversions, or they would stick to subjects they can maintain the appearance of authority in (and know how to couch everything they say to avoid undeniable falsification). But rather, people like Musk actually think they know everything and are good at this; so they cannot foresee that they will fail, and thus certainly cannot foresee the consequences of failing. And those who are untouchable (like Musk or Trump who can never become “not rich” no matter what disastrous decisions they make or outright crimes they commit) will never learn, because they can just burn a base they have lost and walk away, and not care.

Meanwhile, the things you and I are talking about, regarding their strategically inconsistent skepticism and claims of doing their own research, can be umbrella’d under a common strategy: cranks and the delusional (as well as grifters emulating them for cash—which is why these are often hard to tell apart) will trade on “respectable” modes of argument (to gain the prestige that attaches to them), fuck up the argument (use it fraudulently or incorrectly), but convince themselves or others that simply because they used a respectable argument, that therefore they have successfully defended whatever claim.

For example, ad hominem.

Accusing someone of ad hominem can be a valid critique and has prestige as such (even if they don’t know what it’s called, people recognize that ad hominem is a fallacy and why it is a fallacy); so cranks will mis-use the accusation, to claim the prestige of the argument without having actually used a valid form of the argument.

For example, they will be caught being incompetent and lying, and then accuse their critic of an “ad hominem” fallacy, for having “disparaged” them as liars and incompetent. But that is not the fallacy (catching someone relevantly lying or not knowing what they are talking about are pertinent critiques). But because it “looks” like the fallacy, they can falsely claim it, and thus convince themselves (or any ready dupes) that they have made a valid point and thus defended themselves.

The same thing happens when a target is a woman and any criticism of what she says is labeled sexist for “attacking her because she’s a woman” (without any evidence that that is why she was critiqued at all). The prestige of “that was just sexism” or “her critic is just a sexist” still attaches, yet without having been earned.

Likewise with “doing your own research,” which is a valid criticism (e.g. people who blithely remain ignorant of corporate or political or media manipulation need to “do their own research,” which is the whole basis of the actual concept of “woke” as waking up to what’s really going on), except when it isn’t (when the “do your own research” requested or completed is bogus). But the prestige of the argument still attaches even when it isn’t earned. This is why cranks resort to arguments like this.

This is also why they are inconsistent: they switch to whatever position they need to take to defend themselves, and as long as the resulting contradiction is more than two steps of reasoning away, they are immune to noticing and thus acknowledging it. If it’s ever called out, all they have to do is change the subject or move the goalposts or gaslight. Because it takes too many steps of reasoning to make it “plain in one go,” many “exit strategies” exist to rescue them psychologically. That none of them rescue them logically is irrelevant to maintaining the delusion or grift.

Notice that all crank “red pill” style language is under the same umbrella. Literally in the manosphere (who actually say “red pill”), but every conspiracy and crankery has some equivalent notion of “going woke,” and thus how everyone else is asleep and thus ignorant of “what’s really going on.” Hence every crank, even misogynists, invents their own version of “woke” (and doesn’t get the irony).

They do this because it is a respectable argument. The actual original woke folk were right, and as such, their idea spread across entire populations, to the point of becoming a threat to the cranks, grifters, and delusionals, who thus had to attack “the undesirable” woke while defending their own—which they can do by calling it something else (like becoming “red pilled” instead of “woke,” another example of hiding a fallacy behind more than two layers of reasoning so the average delusional won’t find it).

In this way cranks and delusionals (and the grifters mimicking them) can trade of the prestige of the “idea” of “going woke” without actually earning it (because real woke is based on a critical investigation of reality; whereas theirs is not, it is only constructed to look like it is).

They act like they do, but in reality they use all sorts of horrible heuristics: in-group biases, accepting anecdote, overtrusting their own reasoning and senses and those of other people, etc. They gullibly accept many who pose as a non-authority, not realizing the hilarious irony that, therefore, to them those people are authorities , but they won’t even do that consistently, as one can realize the moment one sees conspiracy theorists of different stripes and ideological backgrounds debating and throwing word walls at each other when both loudly insist they are independent thinkers. They would be better off being total skeptics. Yeah, maybe they wouldn’t leave the house out of fear the car would explode, but they wouldn’t be getting absorbed into cults.

Insofar as progress can be possible with some of these people, starting there, and pointing out that they have non-critically swallowed huge swaths of data from people motivated to sell them something (literally and/or figuratively), is a tactic. It quickly prevents them from constantly pivoting to the “YOU DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU’RE TOLD, SHEEPLE” virtue signaling. It makes them justify their epistemology, which some can quickly realize is full of holes. And it forces them to recognize that, in most situations in the real world, “It’s not the ‘official story'” goes not a whit toward telling you what “it” is, because there are countless mutually exclusive alternative scenarios.

A point I like to start with conspiracy theories is something that Chomsky inoculated me with: Institutional analysis.

“Okay, let’s say your conspiracy was true”, I’ll say. “So why did that happen? What vulnerabilities were exploited? Why did those people go that bad?”

As an anarchist, telling me that the government or a corporation or some other official source could have done something bad is no news. It’s just another bit on the pile. I pointed this out frequently to 9/11 truthers: Why did they care so much about whether Bush did 9/11 when Bush was committing a hundred 9/11s on the planet, in plain sight?

Any honest institutional analysis pretty quickly dispels most conspiracy theories. One quickly realizes that the proposed theories depend on capabilities that are actually unavailable to those institutions, acting in ways that go against their incentives, depending on a unity of interests that never actually accrues, ignoring how individuals could defect in the prisoner’s dilemma to immense advantage. For example: All moon landing conspiracy theories fail immediately when you just ask, “Why didn’t the Russians say it didn’t happen? They could prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt with radar data and their own astronomers. They would have had an immense interest in disproving the US government’s claim to go to the moon”. Responding to this requires irrational epicycles about collusion between every major world power for no gain.

An important thing to do with conspiracy theorists is to get them off their script. These are often actually people of at least moderate intelligence who went down a rabbit hole and had a series of facts given to them in conjunction that seems to make sense. They will keep going back to those facts if they are off balance. In this case, even the flat Earther who is so brazen as to insist on a global conspiracy that makes the fake moon landing conspiracy seemingly make sense doesn’t actually know their history all that well. So you can pressure them on all the other times that the Soviets visibly didn’t cooperate with the Americans. “Okay, so you’re saying these global elites collaborate on lying about landing on the moon, something that they didn’t even need to do because you’re saying that the landing on the moon is just to sell the flat Earth but you also insist that they already did that, but they couldn’t collaborate to not have a Cuban missile crisis, or a Vietnam war, or the Soviet’s invasion of Afghanistan which then helped to produce al Qaeda?” They’ll usually insist that all the history is lies at that point. “Okay, prove it. Where’s your evidence?”

(Of course, that can activate an irrational fear response in them based on their ignorance and an annoyance that you “keep changing the subject”, a great irony as they will do that instantaneously if cornered, but that can at least be a bracing jolt that may get them actually thinking once they calm down).

More apropos to the core point of this article, doing those kinds of tests on yourself also helps. Use another area of expertise that you have and ask, “Does this make any sense?” HBomberguy’s flat Earth video does this really well: He instantly knew what JPEG compression was so he could instantly see, and then effectively demonstrate, a flaw in an argument. A ton of conspiracy theory people and sellers of bad information actually quickly lose critical sectors of their audience when they pose as if they have knowledge that they don’t in a field the audience knows about. We’ve seen that with Elon Musk recently with his posturing to gaming knowledge that led even alt-righter and alt-lighters like Asmongold to go after him, and with Illuminaughti who kept on losing audience after audience when she made lazily researched videos on niche topics and the people in those enthusiast communities immediately saw she did incredibly poor research. Using one’s own areas of expertise to sanity check particular claims can be very useful.

It should.

It should still all work. The Amazon site tags the carry-through URL to track you as a customer. You can check that by looking at the URL of the page you land on after logging in: it should contain a unique identifier (a temporary tag) that its servers use to tell that you are the same person who followed an affiliate link to the login page.

If it doesn’t (if the resulting URL is stripped clean), then yes, it is dissolving that information. The way around this is to go back to my site and click through the same link again, while you are still logged in at Prime.

I think you are confusing will with freedom of the will. What your will is is not the same thing as whether you are free to enact your will. This is a common mistake people make, including scientists and even philosophers: they confuse these two things. But they are not the same.

It does not matter why you want what you want. If you are free to do what you want, your will is free. Because that is what your will is: what you desire.

And you are being judged on what you desire, because that defines you as a person. It tells us how you will act in future. It tells us whether you are dangerous or not. It tells us whether you can be trusted or not. It does not matter why you ended up that way. It only matters how you ended up. Because that is what we need to know when dealing with you.

The question of why you ended up that way is of interest to culturalists and social engineers, since it tells us things about how we can change the system to produce better people. But that has nothing to do with whether you acted freely when you acted.

Now, one can take a step of analysis back and compare degrees of freedom beyond individual choices to, instead, the causal history of your character. People who question their desires (question their own will) and thus endeavor to make it more rational (e.g. less self-defeating, and more successful at achieving higher-order goals) are more free than people who don’t (because they are less guided by errors and assumptions). And that every human being can do this if they want to is a scientific fact.

But that has no bearing on whether your individual choices are free. For example, in a court of law, you cannot argue that you neglected to question your criminal desires, therefore you did not freely choose those desires, therefore you did not freely choose to commit the crime, therefore you lacked free will. The reason that is a non starter is that the only question at law is whether you did what you wanted to do when you did it—not why you wanted to want to want to do that.

Knowledge and intent entails guilt. Free will defenses in law only work when they apply to the act itself, e.g. if you lacked a criminal will to begin with (e.g. someone tricks you into thinking they are attacking you and you kill them in self-defense: you will be acquitted, because self-defense does not imply a criminal will) or if your will wasn’t even allowed to be enacted (e.g. you had a gun to your head or were chained to a wall).

But even at the level of character responsibility (which is not an interest at court except perhaps at sentencing), if the brain were so unreliable as to negate all useful knowledge when making choices, we couldn’t even find our way to the bathroom. We’d starve at our desks. Obviously the brain’s cognitive biases don’t cripple us so completely, or even a majority; moreover, we can choose to deploy tools that control for those biases and thus help us make better choices on better information.

That we can do all this proves we are free to. No one (but the literally, clinically insane) is so “puppeteered” by bias that they can’t choose to do better. We can causally explain why someone is delusional or lazy. But they are still delusional or lazy. That is an objective fact of them. And it is an objective fact that they could own or escape either—the physical means is available to them, they just have to choose it. No one is “keeping” it from them. And they are constantly reminded it’s available. So they have to own that, in a way someone actually physically kept from it doesn’t.

Since we can’t force them to do (or not do) this, they have to be judged on whether or not they do. Because that tells us what sort of person they are. “But I was born that way” doesn’t work as an excuse. Because it doesn’t change who you are, and you are to be judged by who you are, and not who you failed to be. Which fact, of course, becomes a causal incentive back up the line, causing people to do better for fear of being treated like someone who didn’t.

Determinism changes nothing about any of this. Nor would removing determinism change one single thing about any of it. There is literally no physical way to change any of this that has anything to do with whether causal determinism exists or not.

This is why you have to address free will in the real world (the point of the article I suspect you didn’t actually read yet commented on anyway for some reason), not some imagined ivory tower thing that isn’t what matters in any real world context (like courts of law or personal relations or self-realization or sexual or medical ethics).

Quote: “The prefrontal cortex (PFC)—the most evolved brain region—subserves our highest-order cognitive abilities. However, it is also the brain region that is most sensitive to the detrimental effects of stress exposure. Even quite mild acute uncontrollable stress can cause a rapid and dramatic loss of prefrontal cognitive abilities.”

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2907136/

Keyword being – can, so what likely determines that rapid decrease in cognitive ability, genetic disposition.

None of which there is any control over.

So if the most important part of our brain, the part that seemingly gives the perception of “choice” is so subjective to influence, what exactly is “free” about that?

As I see it neuroscience (also mental illness) squashed the notion of “free will” long ago.

…it is almost impossible to prove that all possible civilizations will not run simulations…

You are not reading my article. Nor do you even know what Bostrom’s argument is. Neither of us is talking about whether “any” civilizations will do this. Bostrom’s argument requires “almost all” civilizations to do this, and not only that, but do it millions and millions of times. Read my article for the explanation of why Bostrom needs this to be the case and my reasons why it cannot be the case.

Then respond when (and only when) you understand what we are talking about.

…70 percent said they would want to create a simulation with sentient beings…

You are not reading my article. We are not talking about just running sims. We all agree all civilizations (once able) will run sims, indeed countless sims. What we are talking about is specifically ancestor sims (that is what is required to get Bostrom’s argument to work). It is ancestor sims that are wasteful and evil and not what any civilization will burn clock on. Read my article for why.

Then respond when (and only when) you understand what we are talking about.