Supplementary Material 35: Cult Leaders, Gurus, and Evil Economists
We face a disciplinary crisis as the twin pillars of Game Theory and Gurometry are called into question.The full episode is available to Patreon subscribers (1 hour, 35 minutes).Join us at: https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurusSupplementary Material 3500:05 Introduction 01:52 Matt's Apology06:55 Just Life...12:34 Matt's Foodie Corner 14:01 Dedunking Dan Richards finds Sabine16:37 Sabine cultivates parasocial defenders18:16 Ana Kasparian gets deeper into ZOG conspiracies24:44 Gary vs Game Theory40:26 Support the Channel to Save the World47:10 Bryan Johnson and Methylene blue51:52 Scientific Cosplay Online53:51 Keith Rainiere and Sensemaking Parallels54:57 High IQ YoungHoon Kim tweets about proof of God56:19 Guru and Cult Leader Parallels01:01:13 The Validity of the Gurometer in Question?!?01:03:03 Hacking Social Heuristics01:07:38 Cult Leaders vs Secular Gurus01:12:33 Anti-Democratic moves by Trump01:15:03 Dan Carlin on Trump01:18:30 Streamers Talking Nonsense: Hasan on ISIS01:21:24 Ideological Fixation and Motivated Conspiracism01:27:22 OutroSourcesThe Cushendun Sea Caves from Game of ThronesKingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is Boosting TourismDeDunking: Eric Weinstein's Theory — Real Physicist vs Pseudo PoserAna Kasparian tweeting about the “Zionist Occupied Government”Gary’s Economics: Game Theory is BrokenCritical Reddit thread on Gary’s Game Theory videoHenrich, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., ... & Ziker, J. (2006). Costly punishment across human societies. Science, 312(5781), 1767–1770.The Selfish Gene, Chapter 12: Nice Guys Finish First (Richard Dawkins)High IQ YoungHoon Kim tweets about proof of GodI was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerousDan Carlin’s tweet about TrumpBBC: National Guard troops appear in Washington DC as mayor rejects Trump's 'authoritarian push'Nathan Baker: Keith Raniere, Ringleader of NXIVM Sex Slave Cult, Interviewed by Allison Mack, Top Cult...
Hello and welcome to the Coding the Gurus supplementary material, the sister podcast to the Mean Coding the episodes.
It's the same podcast.
Anyway, it's an offshoot.
have with us Matthew Bryan the illifid of this podcast the mind flayer as he's sometimes referred to and I'm me Christopher Kavanaugh the psychologist slash anthropologist the gif yankee in this duo uh I slay evil mind flayers who are trying to take over the world that's my thing but um but not Matt he's a good one he's a he's one of the good ones so that's it yeah so you're an illifid uh you're the
tentacle guys and I'm a gif yankee that's um my geeky reference for us for it this is a warhammer thing isn't it yeah it's not a warhammer this is a uh dungeons and dragons but I only know it because of all those games so yeah so to be careful Matt with your slides right it's not
Everybody's in on that.
You're just not part of the cool kids.
That's your problem.
Hey, Chris, I want to clarify because I sort of was having a dig at Kingdom Come Deliverance.
Oh yeah, yeah.
That's right.
I actually didn't mean to have a go at it because, as I said, I think it's one of the best games.
It's mainly me.
It's not you.
type thing.
It illustrates that no matter how good the
It doesn't have that basically tragic, over the top Dungeons and Dragons stuff even then I don't like it which is a which I understand is a me problem and so that that's the point and because we had someone in our Patreon I think who who's a developer who worked on KCD2 and they were very they were very cool about it they were very cool about it that's right but they they thanked you even you know for playing the game even as you resmerged it perfectly it's just enough that he actually
you know we've put a lot of effort into it and it's nice to be tried it i can that makes it worse of that i know it makes me feel bad but that wasn't i wasn't having a go at the game it was me it's my tastes that are a bit of weird i know it's weird to only play dwarf fortress but you know but can you imagine just how much work goes into those games like it's incredible yeah well it's uh i certainly do understand what boulders get free method that that was done and like that was we made it an
afternoon no couple of napkins that was it you have a you have no idea matt you've no idea but yes you're right in in a lot of respects people making games modern games they just seem like a lot of a lot of hassle but i appreciate the effort that people put into them and uh and when I get to play them and enjoy them.
So I like that that part of Chechnya or Chechnya, what I think it's called Czechoslovakia.
Yeah, like it's called Czechoslovakia.
Okay, carry on.
Like that's where it's kind of set.
And I think like various castles and the countryside and stuff.
is kind of from that area.
So it's instigated all of this tourism.
All of these people who like the game are going there and like looking at the scenery and looking at the castles and going, I remember this.
And the locals really like it.
They're like, the people who play the game are very respectful.
They're just very interested in the history and stuff like that.
They're like model tourists.
So it's feel-good vibes all around, I think.
Like, it's doing for Chechia what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand.
Well, oh, well, Matt, you can go a little closer to home with that.
Do you remember this little series called Game of Thrones, which filmed quite a lot of its stuff in Northern Ireland, if you didn't know?
There were various locations.
I was confused there for a second.
He's like, close to home.
I'm thinking, they filmed that in Australia?
What?
No.
What?
They did that in Northern Ireland.
And actually, there were a whole bunch of tours.
You could go around and see, you know, locations.
And in one case, Matt, my parents have a little village, second house that they bought, Gary style.
Oh, my God.
It was my dad's retirement project.
A second house, Chris.
Oh, my God.
That's it.
They are part of the capitalist class, Chris.
No, no, no, no, no.
They were allowed to do this because this was a house where they had that, like, it was, you know, my dad pulled up all the ground and knocked walls down and built it.
It was a retirement project, right?
Like, that was all he did.
And he did a very good job.
Like, he's a handyman.
But that particular house is in a little village called Knocknackary.
And Knocknackary, a beautiful place along the coast.
Very nice.
You know, like, kind of the picturesque image people have of Ireland, sheep and pubs and whatnot.
But the sea caves there, Matt, the sea caves are part of the filming for the whatever, you know, the sea people in Cabe of Thrones.
So, um, what, what is, what is drawn will never die or something like that.
Those people.
So, you could go to the sea caves and you would recognize it from the show.
And I've actually been to the sea caves.
So, when I saw Game of Thrones, I was like, I know that place.
So, there you go.
That's it.
So, I understand because Northern Ireland benefited from the tourism of, yeah, Game of Thrones being filmed there.
that makes sense that makes sense i remember a lot of mud and it being very wet in game of fronts a lot of murder a lot of betrayal a lot of unhappy people chris a lot of unhappy people yeah um well i know we're we're going over the intelligence limit map but i i just want to mention that like No, there is no limit, Chris.
You forget.
This is supplementary material.
No, that's right.
There's anything goes.
Anything goes.
It's all right.
Yeah.
Well, I, at the weekend, I went, like, I went bouldering.
That's shocking, right?
But I went for.
Right.
But I went for a long bouldering session with my kids and his friend and family, their family, like four or five hour session.
And the next day, I took my family and other kids.
We went to like an indoor sports center with lots of kind of activities.
I know they have similar kinds of establishments in other countries, but in Japan, they do these.
quite well right like they have a bowling alley they have archery they have trampolining they have rock climbing all the things are in the same location and in this case matt there were two things that were quite enjoyable, right?
One was they had a nine meter lead climbing wall, the one where you hook yourself into a rope, which I've never climbed, right?
But in here, you could do it like quite straightforwardly and it was a 15 minute thing.
But because I climbed for four hours the day before, my hands and muscles, you know, for climbing were quite worn out.
And I don't normally climb lead walls because they're much higher, right?
Those are the ones where you have to.
you know, like be strapped in because if you fall off, it'll be bad for you.
And I went up climbing it.
And one thing I found out, like I'm not that scared of height so maybe i can do lead climbing but the other thing is because it was like in a you know kids sports center kind of thing the the holds were not clean you know they've never been cleaned so it was like all extremely slippy and then my hands were very thorough and there was a bunch of people around you know just watching people climb up so it made it much harder than it normally would
be.
And after 50 minutes, I was fucking dead.
I was just completely physically worn out.
So that was good.
But the other thing that this place had, which you would appreciate, or maybe you wouldn't given your stance on these gaps.
Yeah, I'm hoping this story gets better because so far it's followed the same structure as all of your climbing stories.
Well, no, I love it.
It was my double wall and it was hard.
Well, it was harder than usual, Matt, in this case.
Harder than usual.
Right.
But the other thing it had was it had arcade machines, you know, like the video game arcade machines.
And they were all free.
Like, they're all set to free play.
You could do the ones where you were, like, arm wrestling a robot.
But it also had, you know, Mario Kart and all this kind of thing.
And it had a huge hit one that was Space Invaders.
But it was, like, Space Invaders played holding, like, a machine gun that, you know, reacted.
And it was a big, like, projection screen.
So me and my six-year-old sat on it.
And this was the main thing in that arcade section.
And, yeah, we played a joint machine gun version of Space Invaders for, like, 15 minutes.
And I deeply enjoyed it.
I like this concept of, like, free-to-play arcade machines.
This is the way it should be.
But they were all arcade machines from, like, 10 years ago.
You know, so, yeah, I enjoyed it.
Yeah.
Arcades, I remember when.
I'm old enough to remember when they were a big deal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And expensive.
Expensive, that's right.
I never really played them because I did.
was too cheap i didn't i didn't have the money yeah i they're a big thing in japan as well right like you know there were people the fighting games and all that kind of thing they still are to a certain extent but it's gone down but anyway that whole place was an an impressively well-organized Japanese machine.
was thinking that like in the uk most of these things would have been destroyed within within the first year of operation but you know in the
right?
of differing More than a thousand.
There's nowhere to go in a little town.
You could go to the beach or you could walk around the block.
Sea caves.
Go to the sea caves.
Go to the sea caves.
Sea caves.
You know, when I was living in the north of Japan in Hokkaido, at one point I lived on this place called Makomunai, which was out in the, like, it was the last stop on one of the train lines, right?
And there, Matt, there was only really one restaurant in the local vicinity.
You could still get the other ones, you know, but like with a young kid, no car.
It was a P-In.
And there was a KFC.
I was at a KFC and that one restaurant.
And the quality of the restaurant wasn't very good.
just like it's actually worse living in Japan and having that feed the situation because you're like aware that there is lots of good food around but you're stuck with like this mediocre restaurant so I I did live that in Japan in in a small way and when I lived in Makumanai.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay, it's good to know.
I know you're being.
I know you're being.
So, um, you know me, I deal with it by cooking.
And a lot of people, a lot of, a lot of Dakotas, the Petrian, we got our own cooking channel.
They, my God, Chris.
I mean, not to, not to butter them up, but they are good at cooking.
They are so good at eating and drinking, just the photos that everyone's posting.
There's people making craft bread.
I know the bread photo was the one that got to me.
Goddamn.
I mean, there's lots of nice photos, but that was a good idea, Matt.
That's a wholesome nook of the online space that you've cultivated, right?
Which is, you know, all our creators, Matt, they're engaged in their various dark.
parasocial perversions right but you're like share pictures of our food yeah food pictures and dog and cat pictures that's pretty much uh yeah um well i i think i'd like to, I bet, yeah, and they seem to be a good bunch of people and not internet crazies, which is what I assume people who like the Weinsteins, I assume that's what they get up to.
That's right.
Well, oh, speaking, speaking there, you mean we just think about gurus and whatnot.
That's what we're here for, isn't that?
That's right.
Yeah, we're glad to hear about your rock climbing adventures tell me something awful oh well um which one will i pick well okay this one does relate to somebody that we covered recently so you remember the beauty man dan richards the d-dunking guy the one that hits flint dibble and is like a bit of a horrible character yes yes he's definitely one of those weird internet people he is a weird internet person in in
many respects but um the thing that impressed me is that he released a video recently and the title was eric weinstein's fury real physicist versus pseudo poser okay but it's not directly about eric it's actually about sabina's video about Eric.
So Dan Richards is taking Sabina's criticism to validate his view that, you know, that physicists are all liars and the scientific community is refusing to acknowledge out-of-the-box thinkers and whatnot.
So this is like the terrible people on the internet always manage to find each other.
And it does speak to the point that Professor Div and others have made that she feeds into these anti-science channels and communities by producing these kind of videos.
So yeah.
That's a nice crossover.
Yeah, yeah.
So just remind me, so he was the Flint Dibble hater, big fan of pseudo-archaeology and Graham Hancock.
Yeah, and produce some pretty nasty attack material.
And just like just encourage people to target Flint at his work and all this kind of thing.
Yeah, he's a bad guy.
A bad guy and also, you know, delusional.
These things often go together.
Okay, so now he and now he's a big fan of Sabina because she's having a go at.
Yeah, institutional physicists.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, so just, you know, more evidence in the column for the impact that Sabina is having on the discourse you know those are the kind of things that might make you notice what you're up to yeah like i just i think so too like if people were relying on us to do stuff that was objectively really quite bad and we're also doing other bad things in a similar tangent then i would stop and
think hang on what are we doing this is not who we want to be appealing to you want to be appealing to people who know how to cook like dogs and cats.
That's who we want to appeal to, not these people.
Well, but the thing with Sabina, I've noticed this as well.
You can tell quite a lot on occasion by the way that people interact with the feedback they receive.
And when Sabina posts anything on Twitter, on YouTube, she will like all of the comments which are praising her or talking about the evil establishment or whatever.
And any of the ones that give pushback or critical commentary, she just ignores.
So it shows what she wants to encourage and what she likes and what she does not like.
So yeah, I think she does know what she is cultivating.
That's right.
Because the comments usually are like however strong the OP stance is, Sabina in this case, the comments are generally, they take it further.
You know what I mean?
They connect the dots and they say the quiet bit out loud, that kind of thing.
And they generally do more extreme.
And then so you can go through and like or encourage or retweet those sorts of things.
You know, like you're not saying it.
It's just, you know what I mean?
But you've incited that.
And Eric Weinstein and Brett do that a lot too, which is, especially Eric, he'll make a vague.
Ladlik people.
Yeah, ladlik people.
That's another good example.
They'll make it insinuating, you know, vague posting kind of thing.
But it's obvious what they're pointing to.
All of their fans know exactly what they're saying.
And they say the extreme ugly bit out loud.
And yeah, I mean, they know what they're doing.
Yeah.
Well, so there's that, Matt, that enjoyable crossover.
another follow-up from something we covered last time was uh anna kasparian you know from the young techs that it's that great network that that pumps out really good critical thinkers so she's been on a bit of a tear as you might expect given you know her political leanings and whatnot she's no fan of israel right and the current activities in gaza with good cause, I think.
However, she also, as we saw from the conversation with Tucker Carlson, goes a bit farther than that, right?
So she tweeted out the following.
Our country is occupied and controlled by the Israelis.
This is our fight.
They're using our money and our bombs to slaughter innocent people and steal land.
And then our media tells us the Muslim world hates us for our freedom.
And people believe that slap as they lose public services because their resources are being sent abroad.
The jig is up.
You either love America or the country occupying it.
And she followed this up a couple of days later.
I meant every word.
I'll say it louder next time.
Israel's occupation of the U.S. government needs to end.
Look at all these pathetic GOP lawmakers on their hands and knees sucking up to war criminals in Israel today.
Disgusting.
Americans don't deserve to have their hard-earned money taken from them only to be used for Israel's genocide and law.
land theft So there, Matt, there's two things that I see being conflated here, and they really should be separate.
One is criticism of America's foreign policy and support for the Israeli government and Netanyahu supplying of military support or resources.
That's one criticism, one which I think is a perfectly legitimate criticism that you can level.
The second part, however, is that the country is occupied and controlled by Israel.
Essentially what she's talking about here is the so-called Zog thing, Zionist occupied government, right?
Yeah, and in fact, occupied and controlled not by Israel, but by Israelis.
Oh, yes, an important point here.
Yeah.
Now, you know, if you substituted, like, okay, it's not fair to substitute words, but I mean, there is other stuff, not saying Anna Kasperian does this, but there is a lot of other stuff that goes on where straight up documented anti-Semites just simply replace Jews with Israelis.
The trend is equivalent.
Now, the charitable, it
The counterpoint is that there's lots of reasons why America has a generous policy towards Israel that have nothing to do with Jewish or Israeli lobbies in Washington, right?
Yes.
But that type of language of talking about your country being occupied and controlled by the Israelis, like one, it's over the top.
There's no sense in which America is literally occupied or controlled by Israelis.
And two, that is exactly the same kind of language that straight up neo-Nazi anti-Samites use to describe the way in which the Jewish cabal is taking control of your country and secretly controlling everything behind the scenes.
You don't need to use that kind of language.
No, no.
But I think it does speak to what we talked about before with the horseshoe.
And there's nothing.
different here from Anna Kasparian's presentation to Candeswans, right?
It's the same point of view that the American government is occupied by this foreign entity which is controlling all of its actions and it's not in the interest of the American people.
It's all because of this secret Illuminati that actually controls world governments and it's all Jews.
that's what she's suggesting here.
So she didn't use the word Zog, but she did say our country is occupied and controlled by the Israelis.
So yeah.
There's like a hair's breadth difference between that and what the straight up far-right conspiracy theorists are saying.
So I don't approve and I don't give a pass to people just because they're nominally on the left-hand side of politics.
And just to be clear, it is nothing to do with whether you should be making legitimate criticisms directed at the Israeli government and the actions in Gaza, right?
There's various things at the minute around the humanitarian crisis caused by their attacks on, you know, people that are accessing food convoys and all that kind of thing.
All of that deserves legitimate criticism.
But again, it's just...
People like Anna Kasparian and Candace Owens are conflating those two things, like the kind of anti-Semitic Jewish conspiracism with criticisms of the Israeli government.
And no, they're not the same thing.
You can do one without the other, but some people don't seem to be able to do that.
Yeah.
I mean, there's now so much evidence about what's going on in terms of that almost deliberate conflation and that I don't think there's really any dispute about the dynamic that's happening.
So yeah.
And the fact that Anna is there playing footsie with Tucker Carlson and is you know again just points to this yeah red brown populist horseshoe stuff it's not it's not a good trend no not No, not a good trend.
Well, Matt, there's another guru that I know that you like to cover.
You're a big fan of his, and you're always happy when we get down into his content.
I promise you that I have not produced 65 clips for you this time.
But our friend Gary Stevenson, I saw that somebody...
It's from a video a year ago, but I'm interested a bit in, you know, Prisoner's Dilemma, iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and so on.
So I was interested to see what he'd said there.
And I thought you might enjoy it too.
So can we have a little paddle in the Gary pool today?
Oh, God, Chris.
The Reddit threads will continue.
All right.
Just a quick one.
And morale improves.
That's right.
Well, OK, so Gary, like I said, he made a video which was discussing the problems with theme theory.
uh he he did a actually a reasonable job of outlining you know the the basic logic of the prisoner's dilemma set up, right?
The matrix about, you know, this little scenario around where individual selfish motives might reduce cooperation, right?
This like little illustration of your interest versus another person's interest, right?
We have discussed the prisoner's dilemma on other occasions, but he does a reasonable job of covering that.
And then it's, So after he's outlined the prisoner's dilemma, he then goes on to explain the following.
There are many situations where this game has been tried out in game shows or in economist experiments.
And what you find is actually a lot of people in this kind of situation, they won't betray their friend.
They will stick with their friend because they like them or because they trust them or because they think they can get the better outcome by sticking together.
So actually, the people who have kind of proved themselves to be selfish in this analysis are the economists themselves.
It was the economists that said, you will definitely betray your friend because the only thing you care about is your prison time and that analysis is correct.
If the only thing you care about in the whole world is reducing your prison time in this game, you should definitely betray your friend.
That is true.
But the analysis that we did, that we will both grasp, that answer, that equilibrium, that response, only becomes correct if we make that assumption.
So if we assume selfishness, we get selfish outcomes.
which may be bad.
In reality, this game does nothing to tell us whether people are selfish or not.
It only tells us that here is a game where the correct strategy, if the only thing you care about is reducing your prison time, is to be selfish.
So this is my first conclusion here.
Anyone who ever says that game theory suggests that people are selfish basically doesn't understand game theory.
Game theory can tell you what to do if we know exactly what you want.
If we know what you want, we can tell you what to do.
If we know that you're selfish, If you're not selfish, if you care about other people, then you can probably work together and you can probably get towards this good outcome of only getting one year in prison each.
But that only works if you have a degree of non-selfishness.
Now I want to get on to the reason I've been thinking about this a lot recently.
Okay, that's Gary's take on game theory.
Probably anyone who knows anything about game theory's brains are hurting right now.
Yeah, okay, so I guess there's a couple of things.
He seems to think that the game through is making some sort of moral claims about what people do.
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