Truth Unrestricted

Send us Fan Mail Episode 58 - PsyOps PsyOps are Psychological Operations. They are instances wherein an organized institutional entity (like a government) attempts to influence public opinion via a false event. PsyOps have been used among conspiracists as a catchall explanation for any evidence that would otherwise counter their worldview. Examples of events that conspiracists have claimed are psy...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 57 - Critical Thinking with Jon Guy Jon Guy is an author of the book Think Straight: An Owner's Manual for the Mind. We discuss the concept of Critical Thinking, how it relates to our everyday lives, and where it sits in relation to other related things like "thinking outside the box." Some other topics that are brought up are: ghosts, UFOs, how to discuss r...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 56 - Currency How does fiat currency work? Should I buy gold as a "backup" in case the dollar fails? Should I invest in crypto? Some people will say that you should *definitely* invest in gold and crypto. When the idea that you shouldn't comes up, they often lean on the unknowable as a looming specter of uncertainty to push you to "play it safe" an...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 55 - Gender Yin-Yangism If you asked a person to make a list of all the words that would describe a "man" and then I asked them to make a separate list of all the words that would describe a "woman" what do you think are the chances that you would end up with a list of antonyms? Do we see "masculine" and "feminine" as opposites? Shou...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 54 - Consciousness and Memory with Prof Xeno Rasmusson Consciousness is a difficult concept to both explain and understand. In the simplest sense the word is synonymous with "wakefulness" or maybe "awareness" but it is so much more than that. It is an enduring mystery of neuroscience and how exactly consciousness occurs from the firing of many neuronal...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 53 - Grift Tactics Hijacking Occam's Razor: Escalate the level of complexity about a topic until it reaches a level which is unknown by the other party, then declare that the other party doesn't know what they're talking about. In the confusion, insert your own narrative that is always much simpler. The simpler narrative almost always fails to account for al...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 52 - Fame (Fandom II) Does fame give society the right to the famous? Peter Hotez is harassed at his home. Eminem is followed to the bathroom for an autograph when he's having dinner with his family. From a song, The Way I Am. This particular song seems to really hit the nail on the head for this topic. Eminem basically says "I appreciate the support from the fan...

Send us Fan Mail Juxtaposition is the placement of two ideas in very close proximity so as to imply a direct connection between them. At no point is it required that they be actually connected in meaning. Any conclusion that is false falls squarely on the audience and gives the person doing the juxtaposition an automatic out (I didn't *explicitly say* that). Some examples https://en.wikipedia...

Send us Fan Mail Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Countering_Digital_Hate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_F._Kennedy_Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Williamson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briahna_Joy_Gray https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041693/united-states-all-time-child-mortality-rate/ https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality https://apnews.com/article/fact...

Send us Fan Mail Decisions you make will consider the interests of some people but not other people. The people whose interests you wish to protect with your decisions are people in your community. The people whose interests you don't care to protect are not in your community. This definition makes it more clear that you can be in a community with people you don't know and you can be in...

Send us Fan Mail We have evolved as social creatures and for most of that evolution our social interactions were person to person. This is why we absorb the news better when it's a person we can see that's telling it to us. Our current world of mass media (this probably started with radio but television has been the biggest player for this) distorts these effects. We see people on screen...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 47 - Explicit Paradox I see a thing that happens with communication. When someone tries to make a point their point is less effective rather than more effective once they try "too hard" to make it. An attempt to more explicitly state a thing can sometimes make it less solid, real, or believed by the intended audience. If you had a person who was attractive but wh...

Send us Fan Mail Limited time offers are sales techniques that are meant to give the person choosing whether or not to purchase something less time to consider their decision. This is a calculated sales technique and should be approached with caution rather than with glee. Many conspiracy hypotheses include a set of dire consequences that are meant to make fear and override logic in their audience...

Send us Fan Mail I have a principle about rules: you only ever make a rule for something that you don't think people will do/follow if you didn't state the rule. This means that every rule says something about the people who are meant to operate by them. By explicitly stating the rule you betray something about the level of expectation of those meant to follow the rule. For this reason,...

Send us Fan Mail What is platforming? Why do we talk about it and why is it considered a good or bad thing? How does this interact with misinformation? How can we interact with bad information actors while still being careful about issues of platforming?  These questions and several others are explored in Part 3 of our extended conversation about Free Speech. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gu...

Send us Fan Mail Free Speech: Why would we limit it? First and foremost, you can't yell "fire!" in a crowded theater. This example is widely used mostly because it is both so succinctly put and illustrative of the point. Second, hate speech can inspire violent acts and is very often targeted against marginalized people for populist gain. We need to limit hate speech. If you don&apos...

Send us Fan Mail What is free speech? Why would we even want it? Free speech is about free expression of ideas. Ideas are the most important thing humans produce. They are what has allowed us to evolve past the other species into what we are now. The appropriate treatment of ideas has allowed us to create a structure for their creation. Ideas in a vacuum all seem good, therefore we need to weed ou...

Send us Fan Mail Thought experiment: if you lived in a world without mirrors (no reflective surfaces, no cameras for playback, no way to see your own face) would you be more self conscious of the way you appear? Or less self conscious of the way you appear? Would you eventually get to a point where you might be able to discover how attractive you were by comparing other people's reactions to...

Send us Fan Mail Perception is the act of observing and understanding a thing. This is a subjective understanding and can (and often is) inaccurate compared with objective reality but it *is* true to the perceiver. We can view perception as observations that are being subsequently interpreted. The "observation to interpretation" process is a common part of the human experience and is alm...

Send us Fan Mail Building a conspiracy is just like building a teddy bear. It will be unique, just like all the others. It will have all the same types of distinct features. We build a brand new conspiracy from a base set of principles that anyone could follow to make one of their own. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Build-A-Bear_Workshop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Barrington_Declarat...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we discuss how swapping two common metaphors could potentially improve how we see two common things: science and deceptive practices. The episode then dovetails into a discussion about science in which I get something wrong and then Jeff gets something wrong. We find the path to the correct answers in the end, though. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris htt...

Send us Fan Mail How does confidence affect the decisions of people around us? Are we regularly mistaking confidence for competence?  Are we trusting people more when they are confident and are some people taking advantage of that? Is this whole thing being further skewed as more of our social interactions occur online without the regular set of social cues?

Send us Fan Mail With enough data points it is possible to find patterns which do not exist. This is often done by picking certain data points that fit a pattern and arbitrarily ignoring the rest of the dataset. Outliers are a part of statistical analysis. They are data artifacts that don't appear to fit the rest of the dataset. Outliers can always tell us something important about the datase...

Send us Fan Mail Manipulation is the use of social power by one person over another person. It can be seen as "social cause and effect." We think of some people as "manipulative" but this is a messy thing, actually. Everyone manipulates in that everyone (generally) understands that, as individuals, we need the cooperation of other people to accomplish our individual goals and c...

Send us Fan Mail Links Cults vs Religions https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/bs-xpm-2011-10-13-bs-ed-mormons-20111013-story.html https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-religions-and-cults https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Science https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/30269417-terror-love-and-brainwashing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_theory 12:43 Cult of Personali...