“What Even Is the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Today?” with Dr Jamie Roberts
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- Опубликовано: 16 сен 2024
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Vaccine mandates. Wokeness in Hollywood. The female pay gap. Race protests. Diversity programs. Covid lockdowns. #metoo. The so-called intellectual dark web tackled it all. A loose grouping of dissenting intellectuals and commentators, they sought to buck taboos and open minds.
What happened? Who went down the rabbit hole to crazy town, and who maintained thier heads? And where is the space for sane dissent today?
Dr Jamie Roberts is a political philosopher and university lecturer who has ruffled feathers by openly admiring some of what the IDW was trying to do -- and even teaching college classes on it. His new book is "The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web: What Joe Rogan and his associates can teach us about political dialogue". He and Josh perform a real-time post mortem on a still-metastasising movement.
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Great to hear from Jamie. I listened to him on an episode of The Radical Centre a few months ago and was very impressed. Great to know there are still a few academics in Australia who will question orthodoxy.
Fascinating chat. Particularly enjoyed towards the end - wrestling with how these kind of conversations seem to be the first step for an algorithm wanting to push edgier content to you and you're two clicks away from then seeing all out Alt - right nuttiness thrown at you. I've been constantly trying to reconcile me being drawn to the conversations the likes of Josh, or maybe Weiss or Harris and then it seemingly lumped in with crazier ideological grifters. It was good to hear you guys wrestling with that dilemma. What it means when you create content in that space and how everything is pushed to the extreme / less nuanced world.
Really curious how Jamie always says it‘s about ‚truth‘ but never really bothers to actually engage with experts in the fields of moral philosophy, genetics, … that he‘s talking about. „I only read a few papers“ - every scientists should know that it doesn‘t work like that. How would you be able to assess a paper on population genetics and base fairly strong political opinions on it with no qualifications in that field whatsoever? How can one feel comfortable with that destructive behavior regarding scientific expertise (that built the West after all) while also claiming to search truth? Feels cheap and lazy
Does anyone remember that big public cancellation of lecturer at Sydney uni who made aboriginal jokes in private email with colleague and emails were leaked? I think he was fired for his private speech. Isn’t that a free speech issue.
Thanks for the discussion guys.
I think it's disappointing that someone so interested in nuance and complexity just sh*ts on Bret Weinstein or Dave Rubin all the time. Maybe they've been corrupted, as Josh seems certain, but maybe there's something else going on. Both always struck me as smart and decent guys, who deserve better than to be simply written off as grifters or nutjobs without a fair hearing. Really lazy thinking, to my eye.
Can equality of outcome be 9/1 male / female in one society and 60/40 in another society?.
Korea simply does not conscript women whereas Finland or Israel do. The population size and imminent or potential threat seem to be the key factors in deciding outcomes.
We mustn't assume racial differences are implied genetics. Environmental considerations will have a significant effect. And knowing that changes how we deal with that. Then surely best we know.( I got this knowledge from Eric Weinstein talking to Tom Bileau.)
Josh, were you annoyed by Jamie at the end of the interview when he said the show was sounding like the anti woke culture warriors? I laughed when you replied that he just wrote a book about the topic, so of course you’d discuss it.
Jamie absolutely has a point though; go take a look at the (admittedly sparse) comment sections for some of Josh's other episodes, particularly more lefty ones (the project 2025 episode with the lefty activist comes to mind).
The comment section is obviously negative, but some are even mad that josh had her on at all! A similar thing can be seen in some episodes on trans issues, where commenters are indignant due to josh using trans people's preferred pronouns (even though Josh has explained multiple times why he does this).
That is the type of audience/comment section that you attract when you lay heavy focus on culture war issues (which josh absolutely does, and there's nothing wrong with that to be clear). This is, then, precisely the kind of thing that leads to audience capture when you multiply the number of comments 100-fold and (crucially) have a podcast host who isn't as principled as someone like Josh. Josh has been very cool-headed throughout his decade+ podcasting career, so I'm not worried about him buckling to audience capture, but again, I think Jamie makes a fair point on that vis a vis audience capture.