Dr. James Lindsay

speaker
161 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2025 last heard May 2025

Dr. James Lindsay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast · 544. When the Right Goes Too Far | Dr. James Lindsay · 5 May 2025 podcast
Right, right. Now, okay, having established that, you can game it. Yeah, of course. Right. So we agree on so far, there's nothing in that that you think is objectionable? No, nothing.
It's transferable.
They tend to be very low in conscientiousness.
And so…
Partly that's an appeal to paranoia, too. Sure. And that's going to be more effective under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Yeah. Okay, so let's concretize this a little bit. I'd like to talk about, we can talk about Douglas and Joe. I think, let's amend our rule. We're not going to point any fingers at woke, right people. I'd like to talk about the current situation.
Well, you know, Douglas's point with regard to Joe was that it's troublesome. for those with the conservative bent to throw out, to throw away the idea of institutional legitimacy. Yeah. And that's a fair comment, standalone comment. Joe's rebuttal to that, insofar as he had a rebuttal, because I thought the conversation was actually pretty civil given how difficult it was, was that
the institutions have been so cataclysmically faulty in the last 10 years that the only possible antidote to their falseness is really unrestrained investigation. And Joe's been a master of unrestrained investigation, obviously, because he's allowed his interest to take him wherever it goes, which...
which allied with a certain amount of conscience is a pretty good orienting function as far as I'm concerned. And I'm at a loss to some degree how to reconcile those viewpoints because I think it is a cataclysm that the institutions have become unreliable, but let's walk through them a little bit. I think the universities are gone.
I think that Harvard is having this war with Trump and that Trump is 100% right. Yep, me too. The president of Harvard, in my understanding, said to the Trump administration that it was unfair to punish the researchers by withholding their research funds. But I look at that and I think those researchers have been filling out DEI statements for 10 years.
So as far as I'm concerned, they lost all their credibility. They're not independent researchers at all. And they could say and have said that they were just following the rules. It's like... That's not a very good excuse if you're a seeker after knowledge, right? If the rules have become pathological, you have an obligation to cease following them.
Harvard took its DEI head, I think it was Harvard, and kept the person and changed the name. Well, all the universities are going to do that.
Why wouldn't they?
More deceitful even, right? It's another form of mimicry. And I guess that's another thing we could point out about the psychopathic 5% is that they're masters of camouflage. What a psychopath does is mimic competence, right? That's right. And usually they can't get away with it because, not for long, because they... They don't create, they destroy.
And eventually that evidence accrues and then they have to leave and find another host, so to speak. Now online, that's a snap, right? Because you can just switch out. Exactly. You can just switch your identity. That's right. And you've solved the problem, or you can multiply it beyond. And then there's a bot problem online, too.
Yeah, yeah. We've tracked some of that. And for some of these discussions about the woke right, 30% of the comments are bots.
Right. So that means we're automating the psychopathy. I've thought for a long time, and I do think this may be the case, that virtualization enables psychopathy. And if that's the case, we're in trouble. We're in big trouble. Well, at least 50% of internet traffic is criminal, right? It's 30% pornography, which is close enough to criminal. So I think distinguishing them is not useful. And then
like old people are just scammed nonstop. Right, nonstop. Right, and so, and there's no policing and there can't be because you can hide so effectively.
So, and then it's, what it seems to happen is that the unrestrained psychopathy spills over into the public domain and everyone is mad, like in both senses, angry and insane because of it. Let's return just for a moment to the hierarchy idea.
So you pointed out one interesting mechanism of attaining status, which is to twist the rules slightly, create a new game and dominate that as its originator. So that's a transformation of a process that's actually creative and adaptive, right? Because if I wanted to make a variation of a business, I could do that.
And then if I served my customers well and so forth, I could climb to the top of that new business niche and succeed. This is the parasitical equivalent to that, right? It's to what? To generate a version that does nothing but attract unwarranted attention. That would be the narcissistic spin. And to use any means whatsoever to attract that attention.
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