Today we discuss “gender affirming surgeries”, AI and the future of cognition, and wild foxes. Kaiser Permanente is pausing surgery on trans-presenting children—we discuss sex and gender, meaning and identity, delusion and madness. Then: unlike the physical multiverse, mental multiverses are common, and becoming more so, as AI makes it ever more difficult to know what is true. We discuss grief, and how our worlds must fork when we think, but do not know, that someone has died. Similarly, when events are unclear—who was responsible for the death of President Kennedy in 1963? Are aliens visiting Earth—we must keep multiple mental universes alive in our heads at once. Correctives to this include meeting people in person, and embracing belief systems that have timeless value. Finally: more wild foxes, this time trying to eat a raccoon carcass. Included: discussion of the evolution of territoriality, parental care, and animal behavior more generally.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Kaiser Permanente pauses “gender-affirming surgery” for minors: https://x.com/BillboardChris/status/1948119275094552610
Do not affirm, do not comply: https://darkhorsestore.org/products/do-not-affirm-do-not-comply-t-shirt-unisex
From Myths to the Multiverse: How Knowledge Evolves w/ Bret Weinstein & Brett Hall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp8DevWKCic
Malaysia Airlines 370: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/search-missing-malaysia-airlines-flight-suspended-end-year-rcna199653
00:00:00 Holding Screen
00:05:03 Tsunami Update
00:18:43 Kaiser Permanente Pausing Gender-Affirming Care for Adolescents
00:28:55 Searching for Identity vs. Meaning
00:36:43 No Dude, You Don't Have a Period
00:42:47 Male to Female Transitioners are Reestablishing Grotesque Stereotypes of Womanhood
00:45:42 The Mental Multiverse Dangers
00:50:34 Grief and Closure
01:02:25 Cartesian Crisis: Certainty is Low Quality
01:06:32 The Punch Line: AI Will Cause Paralysis
01:10:18 The First Remedy: In Person Meeting
01:11:55 The Second Remedy: Religious Faith, Coercion, and Anchor Points
01:16:48 Grisly Fox Talk: Predation Observations
01:31:19 Parent Offspring Conflict
We have "cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints." - @bretweinstein
WEINSTEIN: I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime.
So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
HEYING: It's it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president.
Bret Weinstein discusses the Trump administrations "back to the stone age" recent remarks in the latest episode of The Evolutionary Lens, Episode 320 "Are we back in the stone age?" on DarkHorse.
Bret Weinstein explains, "If you stop businesses from starting here, and if you drive people so that they move elsewhere—even though it's difficult to do—then the point is the tax base dries up, which then forces you to become even more predatory for the people who stayed.
And that's really the thing, right? They're setting themselves up so that they have to go after more and more people, because the people who are starting new businesses are not going to do it here."