Sydney and I were listening to an episode of the Lex Fridman podcast[1] today as we were driving through the valley. The guest was going on about freedom of thought, the potential of cryptocurrencies, power, social media, on and on. It was getting a bit monotonous, and Sydney then pointed out that this guy's point of view was pretty predictable. Predictable in the sense that he wasn't saying anything particularly new or interesting, just sort of echoing the same points about these topics that have been made before.
But surely, it seemed to me, if these podcast guests were all saying the same thing, arguing for the same thing, then there was a reason. They certainly seemed to feel their perspective was worth holding, likely that they came to it themselves.
But the problem is that to us their perspective didn't seem that novel; it just felt like another version of the same. Derivative.
So maybe the real problem is on Lex, and on us for listening. Our worlds are limited to these same sorts of perspectives. A bubble, as is said. These guests all come to the same conclusions about things, and because these conclusions all sound sort of the same, we're not really hearing a full spectrum of opinion on a given topic.
But there's another possibility too. That there aren't really any other strong perspectives otherwise among the sort of guests that would be likely to be on the Lex Fridman podcast. That there's a sort of a heterodoxy among academics and researchers in regards to certain topics. Social media networks, for example, seem to all be the focus of a lot of similar sorts of critique. But are there academics and researchers that are willing to argue for its many benefits? Maybe not.
I'm not sure what that means exactly. Maybe that there's a sort of "intellectual establishment."
Last updated Wed Dec 15 2021 in Walker, CA