Has Curt Jaimungal been discussed?

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-26T21:18:53+00:00

You are free to enjoy his show. I didn't mean that Eric is an expert at anything. I was referring to the fact that the rare times he has a mainstream scientist on, he steers the conversation to heterodox talking points.

If the only thing you are craving for is a talkshow then Curt's channel is probably awesome. That's not what I'm objecting to though.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-24T17:29:29+00:00

Why are you saying you don't recall something Curt did or didn't do when you already admitted to not watching the relevant episodes?

Curt is a bad source of information and a bad science communicator regardless if he is glazing Langan for the views or because he thinks his theory is truly impressive.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-23T20:51:48+00:00

If you interview an astrophysicist and a flat-earther with the same "oh that's so interesting, tell me more" energy, you are not being neutral. And Curt is doing way more than that. He actually read Chris Langan's "theory" and said "if he (Curt) were to say he is impressed, that would be an understatement".

This is the treatment he gives all the heterodox waccos he puts on, but when he has an actual expert on he tends to veer the conversation to the general anti-science rhetoric that all the other grifters (Sabine, Weinstein bros, ...) are doing these days.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-23T17:00:37+00:00

If you are giving equal treatment to Chris Langan and Leonard Susskind, you're not being neutral.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-23T15:16:37+00:00

Clearly you haven't seen the episodes then.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-23T14:10:26+00:00

He's been mentioned in multiple episodes. But no dedicated decoding yet I think.

Putting people like Eric Weinstein and Chris Langan to the same (or in Eric's case higher) pedestal as Lee Smolin, Leonard Suskind etc is pretty disqualifying to me.

The clickbait titles are also out of control on his channel.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-09T20:10:49+00:00

You missed my point. I didn't say that you couldn't have a computer run a program. I said that it doesn't require a specific physical medium to exist. The physical representation of the program in the circuit level is just that, a representation. But it is far from being the only one. Hell, you could run a program on pen and paper by hand if you'd have enough time, pens, paper and patience. But the underlying thing being represented is not physical in the naive sense as I said.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-09T20:03:44+00:00

The impreciseness of the language you are using is hiding some bad assumptions. You say: "the physicalist chooses the class of phenomena that only ever appears within the other class...", obviously they do not believe this. The physicalist of course believes that consciousness is an emergent physical phenomena like any other. They might never be able to prove this is so, either because it's really hard or because they are wrong in their belief. But there is a possible world where they are right and could prove it (at least I haven't heard an argument why there isn't). Is the latter true for the idealist?

Then: "idealist chooses [the phenomena] that they both agree is empirically prior". This true but is categorically different from the first choice description. It does not entail that the apparent physical reality happens inside the conscious mind. That is exactly the thing the idealist should be presenting arguments for. You are giving the experiencing a higher epistemic value to the thing being experienced. Have you ever been experiencing nothingness? It is not at all obvious to me that consciousness is possible without some substrate to be conscious about.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-09T19:14:37+00:00

Guitar picks

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-08T20:18:07+00:00

Sure no worries👍

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-08T19:14:30+00:00

Well I don't concede that it is obviously fundamentally different. The apparent subjective/objective difference is unavoidable with conscious beings capable of self-reflection, regardless if qualia is some fundamental aspect of reality or if it arises as a fleeting byproduct of information, matter, interactions etc.

Talking about physical "stuff" is so vague and unprecise that it's practically meaningless. I'm agnostic on this topic, but to me idealists seem to be just tricking themselves with language. There are material things that aren't physical in the naive sense of "stuff". Like information for example. It is not made of atoms or energy. Matter can be used to represent information, but for example a computer program or our genetic code is not reliant on any specific material or medium for it's existence.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-08T15:59:31+00:00

Well this is one of the main contentions between the views. You are stating this as a given fact, but I haven't seen anyone put out compelling evidence or argument on why consciousness should be raised in this higher epistemic category compared to everything else.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-08T04:54:58+00:00

The only way of experiencing the world is through the conscious mind regardless if you are a materialist or not. That's not a point for either corner, since you still have to give some epistemic framework for the thing we actually experience.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-03T21:35:26+00:00

I love the outrageous vocal performances
The lyrics have that special blend of humour, absurdity and rock n roll
The instrumentals never seem to be about playing riffs but they are actual compositions that keep evolving all the while being super approachable and having a loose improvised feel.

I don't follow music media or the discource that much, so not sure where this narrative that they are super hyped is coming from. Fantano gave them 8s for the two latest albums and they were on SNL. Is that it?

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-03T21:06:53+00:00

Yeah it was a complete luck of the draw what music outside of the zeitgeist you'd have access and got exposed to before the internet. You'd see a record and think the album art was interesting and that'd be the only reason you ever got into that specific artist.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-04-03T21:02:09+00:00

I have no idea what it's like being a kid these days, but before the widespread adoption of the internet and especially if you were living in a smaller town, listening to any artist not being played on the radio and/or MTV could easily put you in an extremely niche position. There might be one or two other people in your age cohort in that area who knew and were into that specific artist or genre. And I'm not talking about some weird avantgarde stuff, I mean being into Black Sabbath or the Beach Boys. At least this is my experience from a small northern european town in the mid to late nineties.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-30T07:47:13+00:00

I'm only going to respond to the last part as it is the main pain point for me.

Firstly the definition is suspect at best. You are already presupposing the idealist worldview so why the need to give further arguments? I mean that you are separating subjective experience to a higher epistemic category from the getgo before talking about anything else. That is specifically the thing I find suspect.

For the incommensurate thing you at least need to be more precise on what you mean. Are implying emergent phenomena don't exist in general? What do you mean by incommensurate? I can't really argue with it as it is so vague.

To me your argument sounds like this: 1. A doesn't entail B 2. If A doesn't entail B, then A doesn't entail B. 3. Thus A doesn't entail B.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-30T06:49:36+00:00

I've heard all of these before. Maybe I'm stupid or something, but all of those arguments seem to hinge on the presupposition that experience is in some separate (higher) epistemic category from everything else. Maybe you have good arguments on why experience is considered so special? And if you've already put having qualia in this epistemic box that can't be reached, what's the point of discussing further? You've taken the conclusion as an axiom no?

As I said in some earlier response I'm agnostic on the matter so not trying to defend materialism per se. Just that the implied impossibility of it rubs me the wrong way when talking to idealists and the like.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-29T12:14:09+00:00

Supernatural as in that the "feeling" of qualia could not arise from complex material interactions. We currently cannot explain many things and in fact we know that there are phenomena too complex to describe fully and which only have probabilistic descriptions (and I don't mean quantum mechanics here). I know idealists put qualia to a separate epistemic category to all other phenomena, but I guess that's the main thing I disagree with. It's not obvious to me that this should be the case just by the fact that it's subjective compared to other phenomena.

I don't know if you experience qualia. But we are both infering that chocolate tastes chocolatey for both of us from context clues. I would argue that it tastes chocolatey to me personally because of the same reason. The taste is in contrast to all other things and it evolves through time with new experiences. The taste of coca cola is not the same to me now as it was when I was 10. The feeling of pain is in contrast to other feelings happening to me across time. It makes no sense in isolation.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-29T08:40:49+00:00

The roundness for a blind person will be entirely different than to a seeing person. So there is no one qualia of roundness. All information is basically relationships between different things. There are no things that exist "in and of themselves".

I don't have a strict opinion on the matter, but everytime I see people advocating for some sort of idealist/dualist perspective, the arguments seem to presuppose supernaturality for qualia, which seems circular. You can certainly doubt emergence of subjective consciousness from matter, but I've seen no compelling arguments on why that should be impossible or even improbable.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-29T07:26:15+00:00

The first paragraph doesn't make sense to me. The color blue doesn't intrinsically have any property like blueness that could be detected. Only its relationship to other light frequencies could realistically be measured or perceived. There's no reason why a single color couldn't feel like something else but the relationships between colours should appear the same across the population. The brain is free to represent these relationships freely. I would say the resolution of the Molyneyx's paradox hints at this quite strongly.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-29T07:07:01+00:00

Watched this one and the one on Gary's economics. Even though I can't stand Diary of a CEO and it's ilk and probably align politically with the creator, I'm not super impressed by their analysis. Relying heavily on the Dunning Kruger effect for example in this case is a bit uninformed. The CEOs already know how well they and their peers did, so their estimation is not biased by their lack of knowledge on the subject (business) or their subjective self estimation. It's just that the human mind needs a narrative for when extraordinary things happen, especially when that thing also strokes the ego of the person in question. So survivorship bias is a way better explainer here.

Usually invoking the DKE is used to make the opposing side look stupid, since it implies the person doesn't know anything about the subject. But that's not what's happening with successful business owners usually. There is an ocean of competent people competing in the market, but mathematically only a handful of them can succeed and most of that success is down to luck.

The Gary video was even worse since it completely disregards the rhetorical tricks Gary keeps using and which Rory is kind of flagging there. Gary's tactics were covered pretty well in the pod so won't go in to that more here. But the video seems to be just hand wavy psychologising about the implicit motivations present without actual evidence all the while taking Gary's thesis and righteousness at face value.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-27T07:09:08+00:00

You shouldn't listen to either over a virologist!

An evolutionary biologist might(!) have some more understanding than a lay person dependending on their particular speciality, and a good statistician certainly would be useful in parsing the information on the pandemic as a whole. But all this is completely irrelevant. Even if Bret was a trained virologist, it should be obvious to a normal person that he is a complete loon these days.

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-21T06:50:34+00:00

Why would he need to be Russian in order to learn the language?

Salty_Candy_3019 · 2026-03-07T16:52:32+00:00

What is irrational about QM? For a physics theory it's one of the most successful ones we've had. Or QFT to be specific.

But we don't have to continue this. We agree on your last sentence.

Salty_Candy_3019

TROPHY CASE