June 2, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:44
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| And so, let me see if there's other things that I have stored for y 'all to get a hold of. | |
| What do I have stored for you? | |
| Only 49% of web traffic comes from humans. | |
| The other 51% are bots. | |
| 37% are malicious, powered by AI and designed to manipulate what you see, think, and believe. | |
| Yeah, they flood comments. | |
| So one of the things that happens... | |
| Unfortunately, I didn't need a lot of goading. | |
| But yes, there's definitely this goading thing. | |
| So if they target someone, what they'll do is they'll flood them with bots saying, well, why don't you talk about this, you chicken, you coward. | |
| And here's the other thing that you should talk about and blah, blah, blah, right? | |
| And be careful of that. | |
| Thank you. | |
| The Zed blog wrote yesterday, I've written about modern sophists and sophistry quite a bit, using people like Stefan Molyneux as a good example of the type. | |
| Jordan Peterson is another useful example of how they operate. | |
| Notice that he relies heavily on weird facial expressions and body movement. | |
| Yeah, so, I mean, this is interesting. | |
| This is interesting because to be animated, because, you know, I mean, I'm fairly animated. | |
| I mean, I'm halfway towards a Jim Varney cartoon, right? | |
| I'm very animated. | |
| That's not fake. | |
| I am generally animated as a whole. | |
| When I tell stories or when I talk, I'm animated. | |
| My voice is animated. | |
| My gestures are animated. | |
| I wear my heart on my sleeve and all this kind of stuff, right? | |
| So what happens is, and the Z-Blog, if anybody has... | |
| I mean, I could be accused of a lot of things. | |
| Sophistry is just not one of them, because sophistry is making the worst argument appear the better, and I've built my arguments up from a blank slate first principles, right? | |
| I've got a whole, was it 19-part introduction to philosophy series where I build things up, assuming we know nothing, like Cartesian style, the Descartes style, meditations. | |
| Sorry, the sort of Descartes style, right? | |
| And so, given that I have built all my arguments up from first principles, you can't call that sophistry. | |
| I mean, you could disagree with my arguments, of course, and, you know, I'm sure that some could be improved, but with regards to ethics, you know, I start with, we know nothing, we have no virtue, there's no such thing as virtue, how do we build up a system of ethics from nothing? | |
| That's the opposite of sophistry. | |
| So, building things up from first principles is unassailable if the first principles are valid and the arguments are valid. | |
| You can't do better than that. | |
| You cannot do better than blank slate building things up from first principles. | |
| Somebody says, I can't claim to be looking at you all that much. | |
| Honestly, I mostly pay attention to audio and podcasts as a whole. | |
| I'm talking to a lot of people. | |
| Yes, but I, but me, but I, but me. | |
| See, there's an example of the animation, right? | |
| I mean, this is a lot of women, a lot of women talk about their personal experience rather than generalized understanding. | |
| And a woman says, well, I'm a woman and I don't do that, right? | |
| Wow, that was nasty. | |
| Oh, Dave, Dave, Dave, please spend some time around men. | |
| I'm sorry that you were raised without a father. | |
| I'm sorry that you don't have much male influence. | |
| But if somebody's just talking about, I'm making a sort of general case about being animated and somebody says, well, I don't really look at you. | |
| I only listen. | |
| But I said, my voice is animated, right? | |
| So, I only listen to you. | |
| But it's somebody, I'm making a case in general. | |
| And this is somebody talking about their own particular personal experience. | |
| Assume that's common. | |
| Perhaps that's a bit narcissistic of me. | |
| Well, I'm not saying it's narcissistic. | |
| I'm just saying that try to listen to a general argument without inserting your own particular experience. | |
| Right. | |
| This really is... | |
| So, the Z block's interesting. | |
| I don't know anything about them, but why would you analyze facial expressions rather than the argument itself? | |
| Because it's interesting, because what's being said here, And I'm not saying this is, I'm not going to read this guy's mind or whatever, but I think that the effects of that is saying, well, if you're animated, if you're entertaining, if you're engaging, if you make some jokes or you roll your eyes or whatever it is, right? | |
| If you're animated, then you're a sophist, right? | |
| Well, that's disarming effective communications because then, you know, you really can't be animated. | |
| You have to pull a full Novocaine on the brain, Sam Harris. | |
| Kind of approach. | |
| Sorry, I moved my head a little. | |
| Let me get it fixed back a little bit there. | |
| And you have to be a droning monotone ostrich egg of barely perceivable rational arguments. | |
| And maybe you'll be right. | |
| And maybe you'll have something effective to say. | |
| But the way in which you don't want to be a sophist is you just don't want to be animated. |
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