r/DecodingTheGurus

Peter's quest to destroy journalism

Is this just standard click bait or is this guru territory? I've thought for a while that Alex O'Connor has verged into the guru realm. He has gone from militant vegan, to rising atheist, to heterodox staple.

Is he a guru or is he just a normal youtuber?

Also - I have no way to assess the claims made in the video. However, it is telling that Alex's guest is the co author on yudkowsky's newest book "If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies."

Who are you interested in discussing?

My last shred of interest in Sam's "truth" is fading.

Yes, Mamdani is no saint, and will make some stupid mistakes, but to say he is the SAME as Trump but on the left, is Fox and Friends' level of BS.

Main predictions are 1. As VP and then president abdicates or 2. We are at war and he stays in office via presidential war powers.

1. The 12th amendment doesn't allow the first option

2. There is little chance we will have a war that prevents elections (elections happened during the Civil War and WW2). Even if Trump did use war to cancel an election, the constitution still boots him from office at the term deadline (the 20th amendment defines when a term ends and the 22nd allows no exceptions for the 2 term rule)

In summary, professor Jiang is an idiot.

I don't like Hasan, but framing him as "the same" as fuentes is ridiculous.

Within the first minute Sam says "the Democratic party is unrecoverable." Who still thinks Sam is a democrat? He spends so much of his political energy shitting on the democratic party - and even said, before the 2024 election, that he would rather vote for Romney than Kamala.

I think this should be a guru attribute. Pretending to be in a political camp that you truly arent in.

It's now coming up to a year since Jordan Peterson disappeared from public life due to a mystery illness supposedly caused by toxic mold. It's unclear if he'll ever return, and I wanted to share a thought (and it is a thought to quote the man himself) I had about the situation.

This is now Peterson's second disappearance from public life. The first was during the Covid pandemic when he began suffering the effects of Benzo withdrawal and associated complications. Although he did return after that first time, it was clear that he wasn't the same man he'd been before. His commentary became a lot more combative and inflammatory, and he also joined the Daily Wire, which destroyed the thin veneer that he was anything other than another conservative hack. The Israel-Palestine conflict also forced him to come face-to-face with the rank antisemitism that had been festering in his audience, and when he tried to confront it openly, it never went well for him. That's not even to mention his disastrous Jubilee appearance.

Even before his second retirement from public life, I think it was obvious to most people who weren't total sycophants that his moment in the sun had well and truly passed. The monster he'd helped create with his rhetoric and activism had escaped its cage and was eating him alive. The timing of his second retirement was therefore very convenient, coming after months of increasingly embarrassing crash outs. While I'm sure he's not a well chap, part of me wonders whether this second withdrawal might not have been a calculated move to allow him to retire from public life with a measure of his dignity intact before the heat gets turned up even more and the consequences of his actions continue to come back to bite him. If he just said he was done and walked off, people would take that as a signal of defeat, but if his retirement is supposedly due to illness, that shields him from a lot of criticism he'd otherwise receive. Better to die a hero than live long enough to see himself become the villain.

If that is what's happened, it's pretty rank. You can't just lead people into a Christofascist hellscape and then quietly slink off, knowing you won't suffer any consequences from the mess you've created because you're not a member of the groups that will be impacted by your activism.

But like I say, just a thought. I don't really know.

I don't know who this guy is, but I listened to the second episode about him. This is at 1 hour 50 minutes.

He compared consciousness to "water that falls on the land". So, water is not the same as land, but they interact. Land allows the water to flow in some places and not in others. This would translate into the idea that consciousness exists in some places, where matter allows it to exist or funnels it.

It's a nice idea in some ways, but problematic from a rigorous panpsychist viewpoint. It implies that consciousness moves through the world or even has a destination or cycle, like water. That might make sense if you believe that consciousness is divided into souls, but there's no evidence for that.

I mean the idea that consciousness moves either through matter or through space. If it exists everywhere, then where does it come from and where does it go, if there's movement? Are there different concentrations of consciousness in different places?

If your consciousness moves along with your brain when you move through space, if it's attached to matter, then again I think that's basically assuming there's a soul. But the simplest, most rational model is that consciousness exists everywhere.