Interesting article from Mickey Inzlicht
Added 2024-10-25 08:38:59 +0000 UTCYes it’s another Substack but this article is free and it is from an ex-guest and talks a little bit about how they see Decoding the Gurus approach and me (Chris).
Mickey is what I regard as someone in that (increasingly rare) very reasonable side of the ‘heterodox’ pool.
The interaction described in the article regarding Dave Rubin was also one of the interactions on Twitter that maintains my faith in humanity.
I thought people on here might find it an interesting article and might have some thoughts about the position he outlines. If you didn’t listen to the interview with Mickey I also recommend looking up that episode as I think he had a lot of value to share.
Comments
Just read the article, will listen to the episode with him! 👍
Dean Palmer
2024-10-28 04:42:06 +0000 UTCThanks for the link. The article really resonates with me.
KBDaxio
2024-10-27 13:30:34 +0000 UTCIn fact, looking at an article by Mounk in the Atlantic, he says as much about Foucault... "In book after book, he argued against modern societies’ complacent assumption that they had made progress in the way they punish criminals or treat the mentally ill. Doubting claims to objective truth, Foucault believed that societies had become not more humane but merely more effective at controlling their subjects....This paved the way for Foucault’s most influential argument, about the true nature of power. Power, he argued, is much more indirect than the top-down model traditionally taught in civics classes. Because real power lies in the normative assumptions embedded in the discourses that structure our society and the identity labels we use to make sense of the world, it is “produced from one moment to the next, at every point.”...Foucault left his devotees with a complicated legacy. On the one hand, they recognized that his philosophy allowed them to question the prevailing assumptions and institutions of their age, including claims to objective truth or universal validity. On the other hand, Foucault’s pessimism about the possibility of creating a less oppressive world disappointed them....Foucault’s legacy left postcolonial scholars with a second obstacle. In rejecting grand narratives, he had not only turned against the idea of universal values or objective truth; he was also arguing that identity labels such as “women,” “proletarians,” and the “masses of the Third World” were reductive. Such generalizations, he claimed, create the illusion that a hugely varied group of people share some essential set of characteristics; this misperception could even help perpetuate injustices. The oppressed, Foucault observed, do not need intellectuals to speak on their behalf." https://archive.is/LNh2C
Robert Andrews
2024-10-26 05:55:42 +0000 UTCInteresting that you mention Foucault. I have only read a bit of his writing, including Discipline and Punish, but I don't detect much in the book about identity politics. Some of it is interesting, and some of it is densely written and barely readable. He does a lot of what Jordan Peterson does which is to submerge what he means in a lot of overly elaborate verbiage. And when you try to figure out what he is saying it is either trivial or completely nuts (IMHO). If anything, he seems to be against identity politics, seeing it more as an overlaying on individuals by powerful authorities. I got a much stronger impression from the book that he's claiming that the "birth of the prison" went hand in hand with an increased quantifying and labelling of all society, and in fact greater "surveillance". I think it could be seen more as an anti-science polemic, His chapter on Panopticonism begins with description of how authorities would impose draconian measures on a town to prevent the spread of a plague, then later on how prisoners would always be in full view of the prison guard from his watchtower, but be unaware if the prison guard was watching, and that was seen as an efficient way of Surveilling or disciplining the population. To be honest, I think if Foucault was around today he would have been on Triggernometry about ten times by now complaining about identify politics, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, digital surveillance, Bill Gates and the WEF. In fact, he would probably have his own You Tube channel and podcast InfoGuerre.
Robert Andrews
2024-10-26 05:29:44 +0000 UTCCool, my podcast app has a search function! ;-) Episode 46 https://decoding-the-gurus.captivate.fm/episode/interview-with-michael-inzlicht-on-the-replication-crisis-mindfulness-and-responsible-heterodoy
Roland Weber
2024-10-26 05:17:09 +0000 UTCI listened to The Jim Rutt show episode 266 yesterday. In the second part, they discuss the term "woke", distinguishing between a reasonable woke 1.0 and an excessive, weaponized 2.0. https://www.jimruttshow.com/marcia-gralha/
Roland Weber
2024-10-26 05:12:15 +0000 UTCDue to our varying experiences (in person and online), I think the term “woke” has become a kind of Rorschach test that people project their individual interpretations onto, perhaps believing that it means the same thing to everyone else. Woke for one person may simply mean trying to create a more just world for all people while for others it’s a shrill, cancel culture, online and in the real world attack system out to take away their jobs or deny or defame their identities. I’m not online much, except for here, and open wokeness is neither celebrated nor enforced where I work, so I struggle to understand why it is such a bugaboo for other people. In addition, I’m much older, which means I’m pretty ignorant about what younger folks are experiencing. Each of us are experiencing this and other cultural forces from very different places and circumstances. Sometimes, I think we’d be better off understanding those differences in perspectives rather than fighting over words we may be defining differently.
Linda Sears
2024-10-25 22:25:00 +0000 UTCI posted this below, but here it is again for those who’d like to delve into the history of the word woke: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/08/heres-where-woke-comes-from/ I still favor the interpretation that blues singer Huddie Ledbetter (known as Lead Belly) used the term in a way that black Americans were using it during the BLM protests. Ledbetter’s song, “Scottsboro Boys” was a response to what happened to 9 black boys who were accused of raping two white women in 1931 in Alabama. The lyrics say to his black audience that they “best stay woke” if they travel to Alabama. Basically, he was warning them to be aware of racism.
Linda Sears
2024-10-25 21:44:34 +0000 UTCThe term woke has a long and interesting history: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2023/jan/08/heres-where-woke-comes-from/
Linda Sears
2024-10-25 21:42:27 +0000 UTCI think there is an accepted common definition of the type of wokeness that traces back to critical theory and postmodernism by thinkers such as Michel Foucault: Wokeness interprets inequalities between people as a result of power differences between population groups. These population groups can be defined by demographic factors such as gender, race, body type etc. According to wokeness, the more powerful groups suppress the less powerful groups to stay powerful. There are plenty of books on this. I guess one of the more sensible ones is "The Identity Trap" by Yasha Mounk
Andreas Singer
2024-10-25 21:22:19 +0000 UTCTrue. I think instead of "woke" and "anti-woke" the terms progressive and reactionary are the more obvious. The IDW is ultimately purely reactionary politics with window dressing. I think the most astonishing thing is that Dave Rubin ever made it into a club with the word "intellectual" in its name.
Robert Andrews
2024-10-25 19:56:54 +0000 UTCThe only people I hear talk about woke is crazy right wingers that scare each other with the word. Never hear left people in my life talk about it.
Tobias nilsson
2024-10-25 18:56:58 +0000 UTCWhich episode did you interview him in? I don't recall the name
Paul Bowman
2024-10-25 16:37:21 +0000 UTCGood article, but it is kinda just saying it's good to critique arguments, or have them critiqued, even ones you happen to agree with (or yourself make, for that matter). It makes you think, keeps you right. In an ideal world that wouldn't need saying, but here we are, and it does, so on himself for saying it. Good. Stuff. 🫡
John S Durst
2024-10-25 15:33:42 +0000 UTCRe listening to the interview now. It starts with Matt sharing that he has lost 5kg, and Chris saying he will lose 6kg in competition. I really hope Chris is signposting this article simply as a ploy to reveal that he has in fact now lost 6kg fat and gained 10kg muscle. Carnivore style 😁
Jonathan Southern
2024-10-25 14:43:17 +0000 UTCInteresting article but I gotta say when I read an author present the word ‘woke’ as any sort of clear term that you can use to take a position on - like saying ‘I hate woke’ - I find myself checking out on the rest of what the author says. I guess kind of like how folk talked about PC in the 80’s and 90’s. It seems I. can see the people who use the term confidently as a descriptor are not whatever they mean by it, they are ‘anti-‘ it, but I am not sure what they mean by it, so can’t be sure what it means to be against it. (I’m guessing it’s not anti- anti-racism, or whatever.) I do have another thought about the word ‘woke’, which I’m not sure fits here but anyway I’ll say it. The history of the word in political use is kind of interesting. It seems to have many originally aware of the particular way a minority encounters the world and also being supportive of hearing that (i.e., awake to that, woke to it). I guess if you’re morally serious becoming that will change your behavior toward people, in and outside that minority. Not sure what’s wrong with that. And when I first heard it used it was presented as a pretty good thing, which people happily called themselves. But I usually now only hear it as a pejorative, without anything more. And that reminds me of something I noticed as a Gen X’er in the mid-2000’s when I went back to college and found myself around millennials. ‘Gay’: when I was in college, ‘gay’ meant a form of sexuality. But my millennial classmates and roommates used it to mean ‘stupid’. Huh. But they explained it had nothing to do with the other term…. (Anyway, that ‘stupid’ meaning seems to have stopped. Probably coz of woke or something)
Sean Power
2024-10-25 14:28:30 +0000 UTCI like Mickey Inzlicht! After your interview with him I checked out his podcast 2 psychologists 4 beers, very interesting show
aneladgam_varelse
2024-10-25 10:24:18 +0000 UTCInteresting to hear that Jordan Peterson was once genuinely concerned about the environment. I get what Inzlicht means by “anti-anti-woke” but not sure if it is that useful. Ultimately both those derided as woke, and those who are anti-woke, base their ideas on often dubious premises. I think for many who could be called “woke”, this might just be because there are genuine inequalities that they are trying to address, but sometimes in ways that aren’t that principled or well-thought out. As for the “anti-woke”, even when they have some valid criticisms of the woke, they often rely on bizarre rationales such as that it goes against their religion, some assumed national character, or – in the case of Peterson and Weinstein – they try to conjure up some prescriptivist morality that they claim is evolutionarily derived. As for Bari Weiss, I see that she now has some conversation with Gad Saad. I can’t bring myself to listen yet, but I am sure you will, Chris. Can you confirm whether Saad has gone right through to the other side of the woke-anti-woke horseshoe? Whereas once he and others may have laughed uproariously at claims that women or ethnic minorities may have felt unsafe on campus because of violent words, or because of costumes, or ideologies that they did not want to be voiced on campus, Gad Saad is suddenly claiming the same thing, although naturally not speaking up for the people who may have made the claims in the past? In other words, is there a hint of hypocrisy in the conversation on the part of Saad and Weiss?
Robert Andrews
2024-10-25 10:10:54 +0000 UTC
