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Why We Should (Not?) Think About Weird Things
157 Plays1 day ago
In this episode, Megan and Frank reflect on the mission of Philosophy on the Fringes. Why think about "fringe" topics, such as near-death experiences, aliens, and past life memories? Are these topics any weirder than what passes for respectable in mainstream academic philosophy? And most important, does taking fringe topics seriously make one a crank?
To investigate some of these questions, this episode contains a guest interview with Dr. Joshua Blanchard (Oakland University). Dr. Blanchard joins the podcast to discuss the "problem of unwelcome epistemic company", the problem of finding yourself in agreement with some morally or intellectually suspect sources.
Hosts' Websites:
Email: philosophyonthefringes@gmail.com
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Bibliography:
Joshua Blanchard, The Problem of Unwelcome Epistemic Company
Neil Levy, When Is Company Unwelcome?
Adam Piovarchy, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ignore Unwelcome Epistemic Company
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Cover Artwork by Logan Fritts
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Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/simon-folwar/neon-signs
License code: JY4SF4CQFTHS951X
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Philosophy on the Fringes'
00:00:04
Speaker
Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange. We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera. In this episode, we're talking about philosophy on the fringes.
00:00:16
Speaker
Why do fringe philosophy? What topics have we changed our minds on? And is it possible that we are cranks?
Success Reflections and Podcast Update
00:00:39
Speaker
Hey, everyone. Welcome back. It's been a couple months. I guess last month we dropped our Great Courses Audible audiobook, which was a lot of fun. We got a really, really great response on that from presumably many of you listened to it and reviewed And I was very pleased with the response. I was really happy with with how many people were listening to it and so yeah we didn't have an episode last month because there were two new episodes in the series things we hadn't talked about before so yeah we figured those would count for our may episode we didn't want to over overwhelm you all with content um just kidding we sort of used it as an excuse um to catch up on some other stuff but we're back with episode 32 title tbd i guess you're listening to this it has a title by now we haven't decided on one yet And there's a reason why.
Podcast Self-Reflection and Guest Introduction
00:01:31
Speaker
It's because this is a kind of unique episode, at least compared to what we've done before, in that we're not really talking about a specific weird thing. It's kind of like a meta episode.
00:01:41
Speaker
Yeah. where We're going to reflect a little bit on the podcast. We do have a specific philosophical problem that we want to raise that applies to our podcast, and we will get to that. And excitingly, we have a guest. Our first guest
Are We 'Kook and Crank Adjacent'?
00:01:55
Speaker
ever. First, hopefully, of many, um but our very first guest, ah Dr. Joshua Blanchard from Oakland University, is going to be joining us to talk about more or less, you know, whether the fact that the topics we talk about put us in the same arena ask some kooks and cranks out there means that maybe we're kook and crank adjacent or something. Yeah, something like that. we'll We'll get into the details soon. But yeah, this is kind of a meta episode. It's sort of like, you know, those sitcoms from the 90s where every once in a while they'd have like a clips episode. You know, producers kind of got lazy and they're like, we should have an episode where it's just a bunch of flashbacks. Yeah, the clip show. Yeah. ah it's not It's not actually going that, but we are going to be reflecting on why we're doing this podcast, specifically why we focus on weird fringe topics. What's the point of
Fringe vs. Mainstream Philosophy
00:02:48
Speaker
that? And i think doing the great courses, the the audiobook, that kind of, it became something that we started thinking about for ourselves. Why exactly is it that we chose this approach to...
00:03:01
Speaker
thinking about philosophical ideas as opposed to, you know, one of the millions of others. Why think about like fringe topics like we think about on the show. And we had some thoughts and some answers and maybe even some further questions for ourselves. Also, I think we were partly inspired by some of the reviews for the the great courses, some of which were very positive. And as these things typically go, some of which were not that positive. yeah But that got us thinking. and It did. It was humbly a humbling experience to read what, you know, Allie over there in, you know, Springfield, Illinois things. Frank made me stop reading reviews out loud. Yeah. He couldn't take No, it's just, what's the point? You know, you know some people are going to like you,
Origins of Philosophical Curiosity
00:03:41
Speaker
some people are not. That's life.
00:03:42
Speaker
So Frank and I got I mean, I think both of us independently were interested in, quote unquote, fringe topics long before we met, even like probably long before grad school. I think, Frank, you literally took a class yeah called like, what was it called? It was called How to Think About Weird Things. As an undergrad. Really, this that was my introduction. It was taught by philosophy professor. It was ah kind of a philosophy course. We learned about various patterns of reasoning, things like inference to the best explanation, which a lot of my work in philosophy has been about. But it was about weird things. We talked about aliens. We talked about you know the paranormal and things like that. It was kind of like a critical thinking course. But the the subject matter was the the weird stuff. And it was mostly a debunking course. Now, that the professor wasn't mean-spirited or anything like that, but he was a you know a good old scientific naturalist about pretty much everything. um But yeah, my introduction to philosophy, how I got into philosophy, was from thinking about weird things. and actually this book, ah yeah they have a book called How to Think About Weird Things. It's by Ted Schick, who was the professor, and Louis Vaughn, a mysterious figure who is prominent in the textbook world, but about whom we know little. you remember
Engagement with Strange Metaphysical Views
00:05:01
Speaker
this guy? He writes a crap ton of textbooks. Yeah, and he's kind of mysterious. So, yeah, anyway.
00:05:05
Speaker
So that was your first kind of like taste of doing something like philosophy about these weird Of course you're going to talk about weird stuff when you do philosophy. that's That's how I got into it. Right. So, okay. So after this class, did you think like, oh, I am really, because you said it was kind of like more structured as a debunking class. So did you come out of this class being like, oh, I'm really interested in thinking philosophically about extraterrestrial life or whatever? Definitely not. Definitely not. No, because then I took a bunch of philosophy classes in the standard curriculum where those are not the topics. Right.
00:05:36
Speaker
Yeah. So it kind of was on the back burner. i I pretty much adopted the attitude that my professor had about these sorts of things. Sure. Just be a ah a debunker. That's the whole. that's the If you're going to engage with these topics, you should adopt the the debunking attitude. Right. Skeptical inquirer. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, I mean, I think that that's really normal, especially as you were a freshman, right? Yes. Yeah. Especially as like a college freshman. um You're like, wow, I know so much more than these morons now after a mere one class. Yeah. In college. um I think I've always been interested in like strange stuff. I remember being maybe, i don't know, nine or 10 and being like obsessed with Amelia Earhart and the Bermuda Triangle and and those kinds of things, you know, just the weird like unexplained phenomena or events in the world.
00:06:26
Speaker
And i so so I think maybe part of me has always been like bent toward those kinds of things, not in like a necessarily like a credulous way or a debunking way, just sort of Like a spectator, you see something you see ah a car crash and you just got to look.
00:06:44
Speaker
And so too. Yeah. Your mom falls asleep and Unsolved Mysteries is on the TV and you just got to watch I'm just gawking at it. Right. No, exactly. That is kind of what it is. But I think I've also always had the sense, even being in the midst of academia and around lots of people who I think have a debunking... I mean, I think even in in academic philosophy right now, it's really common to encounter people who have a debunking attitude toward things that definitely fall like outside of, you know, weird stuff. Like they really want to, you know, debunk or whatever term you want to use, disenchant. I kind of dislike that term, but yeah um be like very reductivist about everything. and I've always not really been inclined that way. I haven't really been inclined in the other direction either, but I just haven't really understood why some things get a very negative vibe. Mm-hmm.
00:07:36
Speaker
And others don't. And for seemingly no reason, because, of course, in mainstream philosophy or in academic philosophy, there's a lot of weird stuff that gets talked about. Right. Yes. We use science like thought experiments. Like, what if you're a brain in a vat? And we think about that. We think about what if there's people walking around acting exactly like you or I, but they don't have any subjective, you know, phenomenal conscious experiences. Right. Yeah, I had a similar thought today, actually. So there's people, respectable philosophers who defend the view that tables and chairs don't exist. Right. That we don't exist. Yep. Consciousness doesn't exist. There's only one thing in the world. So all these sorts of very strange metaphysical views, they get prominent treatment in philosophy. You can make a career defending these kinds of There's an infinite amount of actual worlds. We live in a simulation. Yes. You can make a respectable career defending these kind of really, really
Fringe and Mainstream: A Critical Thought
00:08:29
Speaker
weird things. But then if you start talking about ghosts or near-death experiences or aliens, then you're the weird one. You're the weird one. Right. And I think I have always felt that incongruity. Like that just doesn't really make sense. Yeah. So that's part of, I think, why I felt...
00:08:47
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess like why we started talking about this, yeah besides the fact that you know it's it's cool and all of that. It's fun. And it's is ah if you're going to talk about like Hegel, like why not talk about ghosts? If you're going to go there and say there's only one thing or everything is spirit or whatever, we might as well just be talking about Bigfoot too. Why not? like Just open up the door to all the mythical creatures. If we made that into a t-shirt, would you guys buy it? Could that be our first merch? If you're going to talk about Hagel, why not talk about ghosts? I'd wear that shirt. um no i No offense to Hagel or ghosts. Exactly. And that's our point. yeah
00:09:27
Speaker
But i I think that's totally right. Like talking about stuff on the fringes of academic philosophy is a way, in part, I think of drawing attention to the fact that we don't really think that there's an in principle difference here. The world is full of things that at least are seemingly very weird. yeah And they all deserve critical. And and I don't mean critical in a debunking way, but they all they all deserve rigorous philosophical thought.
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, and we've done our fair share of debunking on our podcast, too. Sure. If we think it's BS, we're going debunk it. Yeah, yeah, not in a mean-spirited way. You know, we didn't really take Reiki that seriously. It's true.
00:10:01
Speaker
But we still got a really good discussion out of it. We did, right. Yeah, some things, I mean, you can debunk on one level, but still draw a lot of important philosophical insight from it. Another reason I like talking about the weird things we talk about is going back to Hegel and monism and there's no such thing as chairs. is that It yeah reminds us how strange those sorts of views are. It kind of reminds you that philosophy begins in wonder. Yes. think Aristotle said that, I think, right? And yeah, you you can you can kind of forget that if you're writing your papers and talking about these things with your colleagues, how weird and crazy it'll sound to someone outside of the seminar room. right It'll sound like you believe in Bigfoot. It really will. Yeah. and And that's good to remind yourself of. I think so, too. Yeah.
00:10:49
Speaker
And I also think like sometimes when we restrict philosophical discussion to like, you know, maybe like the blandest things like chairs, right? We do, we lose people who do see the world is not this bland. Yeah. um Who do, you know, they're like, no, like the world actually is full of like weirder, more interesting things than this.
00:11:10
Speaker
And it's good to acknowledge that to show that, you know, you're living in the world too. Mm-hmm. So maybe for all those reasons and more, we thought that this would be a cool thing to do. Also, you know, there wasn't already a podcast on this. Yeah. Topic.
00:11:26
Speaker
The free market. Right. But not really, because it's not like we make any money off of this. That's so true. read Yeah. We make no money or notoriety.
Evolving Perspectives on Paranormal Topics
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah. So our our loss is a couple of you guys' as gain.
00:11:38
Speaker
So, okay, so given all this, I think maybe something our listeners might be interested in is like, are there any ah any of the topics we've covered that we have like gone into the episode thinking one thing and come out of doing the research, making the episode, thinking a different thing, maybe finding it more or less plausible than we did before or more or less interesting, philosophically rich, Or just like maybe we we discovered that it's totally different than we thought it was. So I don't know, Frank, have you had any like experiences like that with any of the episodes we've done?
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think I had that experience when I was writing the scripts for The Great Course, some of the scripts, specifically the near-death experiences one and the aliens one. So when it comes to the aliens thing, i I became much more creeped out by the Fermi paradox. yeah So to remind you of that, right the Fermi paradox is where is, where are all the aliens? right if If the world is so big, or the universe is so big, well be have a a galaxy full of 100 billion stars, those stars have planets, why haven't the aliens contacted us? Why don't we see any indications of their existence?
00:12:48
Speaker
So, know, the the natural answer, or the obvious answer to that is, oh, it's too far away or whatever, they or they all died off or whatever. But there's certain facts about cosmology and the distribution of planets in the in the galaxy and their ages that really makes that kind of answer not that ah satisfying, right? the There's lots of Earth-like planets in the galaxy that are two billion years older than ours. The universe is really old. Yeah, really old. It would take a long time to send your probes out to colonize the galaxy, but it wouldn't take two billion years. Yeah, and even if even if these races have been dead for billions of years, they were alive. So why, you know, and presumably they built stuff. Why they all die out? Like, yeah why why don't they want to contact us? Right. Well, it's pretty puzzling. So some answers to this question are, well, there's actually not as much life out there in the universe than you might think a priori. The Earth is really, really special. But that also kind of seems unsatisfying. It also seems kind of like special pleading that seems to give up an assumption that seems really fruitful. The Copernican assumption that we're not special. this We're just a mode of dust suspended in the sun. Or it trades one surprising thing for another. Yeah. So like that kind of made me feel really puzzled. right Yeah, I think it really, really is a a big puzzle that we don't see any indications of extraterrestrial life given all those facts about cosmology and the age of the of the of the galaxy and the age of the stars and how many there are and how there's been so much time for the aliens to exist and develop interstellar travel and all of that. So where are they? Right. So do you have anything you lean toward or are you just like more mystified? No, I really am mystified. and And I remember when I was writing this one up, I was really creeped out.
00:14:35
Speaker
So one for me was the ghosts the episode on ghosts. And I am bringing this one up because before we started the episode, I was like i was like a hardcore ghost non-believer because i thought like any account of ghosts has to entail substance dualism, which I personally find very, very uncompelling. Like mind-body dualism for me is just like almost a non-starter. i find it really...
00:15:04
Speaker
The idea of the mind of the body are two separate yeah things, right? yeah Two separate sumstances, and they can exist apart from one another. But when we got into this ghost episode, we spent some time talking about time, and we did we talked a lot about like commonalities among ghost encounters and how they tend to like ah they tend to be like you know places. like you know Ghosts are attached to particular places.
00:15:31
Speaker
So I thought, well, what if... The B theory of time, sometimes called the block theory of time, the idea that every time exists simultaneously, that it's just kind of ah an illusion or a feature of the structure of human consciousness, that we perceive time as moving, that we perceive, you know, the only real ah happening as what we call the present, but really what we call the past, present future on this theory of time. they They all exist to the same extent. So what if that's right? And I think that this theory of time is the most popular among theoretical physicists. And it's also pretty popular among philosophers. um
00:16:12
Speaker
But I thought, well, you know, would it be like totally crazy to think that like when someone encounters a ghost, there's just like something that glitches. and they can become aware of things happening in that space in an you know another quote-unquote time, another point on the timeline.
00:16:28
Speaker
And so that's something that has just, like, continued to stick with me, and it's made me not find ghost stories so crazy anymore. Or so, I shouldn't say crazy.
00:16:39
Speaker
That goes against the whole point our podcast. and Not find it so ultimately implausible, as I had before. So that that was a big one for me that I've kept thinking about. And then i guess the second one that stands out to me was, well, I want to talk about two more, actually. Sorry. I know i'm talking a lot, but I want to talk about two more.
00:16:58
Speaker
um The second one that stands out to me is the past life memories. Yeah. Which I always, i kind of like had heard, you know, some of these anecdotes before. And that's why we chose to do the episode on it, obviously. But I didn't know the details of them. I didn't know that there was a whole institute at the University of Virginia. Oh, yeah, them. Perceptual studies, right? The department of perceptual studies. Yeah. yeah um Who work on this. And like, I think after doing the episode, I'm like, why isn't everybody talking about this?
00:17:29
Speaker
To me, that seems like incredibly difficult to explain such that I don't know, people should be doing work on this. It's extremely weird. and it really is weird. It's not something that seems less weird the more research that we did on it. And then the third one that sticks with me and continues to stick with me, I think, is um the episode that we did on prehistory. i mean, that's not the relevant question isn't like plausible or implausible there, but it's just like I didn't realize, i think, how fascinating it would be to think about prehistoric humanity. Yeah.
00:18:04
Speaker
And I don't know, it gave me like a greater appreciation for common features of humanity that literally go back to like the very beginning of what we would call humans. Yeah, we said this in the episode, but you think too long and stare too long at prehistory. It can also be creepy because there's lots of things we do and maybe things we're unaware of that are like the distant echoes of things that... our ancestors were doing 40, 50,000 years ago. And we just don't even know. Right. We're doing something. And that's that's just like an inheritance from them. Yeah. And it like and obviously has changed a lot. It's been culturally inflected based on different cultures and stuff. But it's like the same sort of thing. And it's kind of spooky. Right. Like how are our ancient, ancient ancestors, you know, before modern humanity, we're still doing things like making musical instruments yeah and making extremely beautiful art, you know, for its own sake. And that this is just like a common aspect of humanity that goes back like an unfathomably long amount. Our, you know, our love of open landscapes. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, they they like that for a reason. You can see the predators, right? ah
00:19:11
Speaker
Right. They're pretty. But also maybe because it's beautiful and, you know, it's a great place to learn to walk upright. Yeah. They saw the gods in the sky. Yeah. and the open past In the open plains. And we can still do that ah where I'm from.
00:19:25
Speaker
Yeah. So those three episodes, I mean, I love so many of the ones we've done, but I think those three stand out to me as ones that like really changed how I thought about things for one reason or another.
Unwelcome Epistemic Company
00:19:36
Speaker
Okay, so that was fun reflecting on you know our favorite topics and the ways they've changed our views and how the needle has shifted and and all of that. But let's introduce now like the the philosophically significant thing we want to talk about here and that the thing that we interviewed dr Blanchard about. um So this is the idea that he writes about called The Problem of Unwelcome Epistemic Company. Megan, do you want to introduce this to our listeners? We already sort of mentioned this, but let's let's delve into a little more detail before we introduce the interview. Yeah. Well, first, I guess I want to say a little bit more about why we started thinking about this.
00:20:11
Speaker
Because, you know, often when you think about many of the topics that we discuss on our show, you might most closely associate those topics with like, I don't know, The History Channel after 11 p.m. The guy with the hair from Ancient Aliens. Yeah, right. um Just, you know, the kind of ah magazines you used to be able to buy in line at the grocery store with, like, woman gives birth to alien. Like, you know, like weirdos. um People who have, like, conventions. And one might think, and in fact, we may have, we may or may not have been accused of in, you know, reviews of our, um of our audio book of maybe being, you know, slightly crankish. Maybe, maybe we're one of these people in a way because we are giving a voice to their ideas.
00:20:58
Speaker
um Maybe the mere fact that we think about these topics and give them serious consideration already is a sign that we are unserious thinkers. Yeah. I can imagine like a, I don't know, like a, yeah, a hardcore sort of science-y person like Richard Dawkins or something like that. Being, you know, not that into our kind of our podcast where we're we're platforming the irrational and the crazy. The spooky. The spooky, yeah. And the the fact that we are in the company of these sorts of folks, epistemically speaking, like we we sort of take seriously some of these views. Yeah. Maybe we don't take it as seriously as some of them, but we take it seriously enough to talk about them for an hour and research about them. That speaks poorly of of us or our views itself, right more more specifically our views. right We should be worried that, say, you're in the company of bunch of weirdos who also believe in ghosts or I'm in the company of a bunch of weirdos who take seriously near-death experiences or something. like That should give me pause. I should maybe believe less strongly in the the phenomenon because of those with whom it's associated.
00:22:05
Speaker
so what So that's the problem, right? Yeah.
Agreement from Unwelcome Sources
00:22:08
Speaker
Yeah. So I guess let's define this problem specifically as Joshua Blanchard does in his paper. It's basically the problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from an unwelcome source. That's how he defines it yeah um verbatim. The problem of encountering agreement about the content of your belief from an unwelcome source. And the most maybe prominent way that we encounter an articulation of this problem is in what, Frank?
00:22:36
Speaker
Politics, I think, right? we Yeah, but what's what's something specific that people like to say? Oh, like they'll say, you know, in political context, like, you know, that's something Hitler believed. Yeah, right. Right. Hitler supported that. Yeah. We we made that kind of joke in high school even. Did you because you know Hitler really liked highways and he expanded the Autobahn. And so we'd be like, oh, you like highways? You just like Hitler.
00:22:57
Speaker
ah ah Yeah. and And it's a joke. It's not really that funny in retrospect. know, we were honors kids nerds. So yeah that's the kind of jokes that we've talked about. it's funny. Yeah. I used to make that joke about myself when I was bad at at art. Yeah.
00:23:11
Speaker
um Right, right. But the comparing something to Hitler is like a meme at this point, but it is a good illustration of the basic idea of this problem, which is that there are at least some instances where we think that, or at least most of us would tend to think that agreeing with, you know, someone or some group about something is at least some negative evidence about the quality of your belief. Yeah. As I said, this comes up in politics a lot. People do get worried when they support policies or claims that their political rivals do too. They find themselves investigating some issue and they come to some conclusion about the issue and then they learn that their political rivals support it too and then they get they have an existential crisis. right Right, right, right. This problem is usually asymmetric in nature, meaning like we love to issue this charge, but we don't often think that it applies to us. Right. because i have my special reasons, you know. Right. No.
00:24:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, right. I thought of a great example of this kind of thing. So but ah Blanchard, as you'll see when we get to the interview, has a bunch of examples he talks about. But what I really like was the, I call it the exam case, right? So you're an A student and you're doing your exam and you go, you you walk to the bathroom and then on your way out of the room, you glance at some D student's exam and you see that he has all the same answers as you. right That might give you pause right now. Maybe you're so confident in your you know, your your studying that you're like, well, I guess he studied so well, too. I guess you Byron really studied for this one. Yeah. But you might worry. You might worry that you have the same sorts of answers as as he does. And that's an illustration of this problem. Right. This problem unwelcome epistemic company. Yeah.
Epistemic and Moral Concerns
00:25:02
Speaker
So should we just get to the interview then? Yeah, let's let's get the interview. And then we'll say a few things. There's an and a good back and forth in the interview. Blanchard does most of the talking, which makes sense. Yeah. It was a really, really fun interview. was really fun. Yeah. He's a great guy and really enjoyed it. So yeah, let's- Without further ado. Turn that on.
00:25:19
Speaker
We're really excited to have our first guest on the podcast today that we've ever had over 32 episodes now. We've been talking for years about having guests and it just like never happened and it's happening today. So we're saying welcome to Dr. Joshua Blanchard, who is a special lecturer in philosophy at Oakland University in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Joshua, do you want to say a little bit about the kinds of things that you're interested in in philosophy, the kinds of things you work on?
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I, my general kind of three areas are philosophy of religion, epistemology, and metaethics. More particularly, my philosophy of religion interests tend to be from a sort of Christian slash Jewish perspective and sort of drawing out philosophical lessons from traditional sources and a kind of ground up philosophy of religion as I like to think of it and in epistemology, which we're talking about today, I tend to be more interested in like social epistemology, that sort of side of things. And in edit metaethics, um I'm a fan of the popular within philosophy, but fringe view of robust moral realism. So those tend to be my by areas of sort of research interest.
00:26:32
Speaker
I love that. I love that it is both like fringe view, but also it's like growing in popularity now. Yes. Yeah. Simon Blackburn once called the rise of, and and he was talking about like intuitionism as comically retrograde ah and in an interview once, I think for, for that philosophy magazine.
00:26:51
Speaker
but That probably sums up the impression people have of a lot of our topics. Comically retrograde. yes Yeah. Yeah. So that's what I like is comically retrograde positions. That's you're the perfect guest. You're the perfect first guest.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah. So actually think so this this episode that we're doing here is kind of like a reflection on this podcast. And we thought that your work on the problem of unwelcome epistemic company was absolutely perfect for our episode. In fact, we both independently around the same time had the same idea that we should invite you on the show to talk about this this problem. I guess you shouldn't sit you should say what the paper is, where published. Where is published? It's Episteme, right? but Oh, yeah. Episteme.
00:27:30
Speaker
Social Epistemology Journal. All right. So, yeah, we're going to talk about that. So my first question for you, Josh, is what is the problem of unwelcome epistemic company and what inspired you to write about this problem? And as you know, in your paper, which both Rem both really liked, ah why do the problem is kind of ignored a bit in the epistemology literature. It hasn't really been discussed too much. ah There's and only a handful of papers on it and you coined the term that that people are talking about now. So why do you think it is that it has received such little attention in the epistemology of literature?
00:28:01
Speaker
Yeah, so first, in a kind of one-sentence definition, the problem is the problems that you may encounter in your beliefs via discovering that your belief is shared by some sort of unseemly source, where that source is unseemly by your own lights. I became interested in it via a couple routes that kind of just sort of came together in graduate school at UNC. So like one was the sorts of quotes that the paper opens with. I was very tickled by finding Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump sort of saying the same thing. ah Noam Chomsky said, you know, who cares if I agree with the mainstream media about the Soviet Union because he had said some negative things.
00:28:40
Speaker
But the Soviet Union and ah and a very ah staunch pro-Soviet woman in the audience ah objected to him. And he said, who cares if the mainstream media sometimes says something right, you know? And then Donald Trump got in trouble for reposting or something like a Mussolini quote. And he said something like, it's a good quote. Who cares if it if it was Mussolini?
00:29:00
Speaker
So that was like one sort of, you know, kind of anecdotal thing that inspired me. And then second was just that in our discourse, there's many issues that I'm interested in or aspects of my own identity where there's a certain level of discomfort. So like, for example,
00:29:18
Speaker
you know, having kind of a left-ish position on, like, Israel-Palestine topics, there's the constant accusation that, like, look at all this, like, anti-Semitism within, like, the, you know, the pro-Palestine movement or whatever. And I always felt like, you know, on the one hand, I don't think of that as, like, defeating my position. On the other hand, like, this is kind of, like, there's something that's bothersome about that, you know?
00:29:41
Speaker
And then the other aspect would be, um this is going to really confuse your listeners, ah in terms of fringe positions. I come from like a kind of Jewish Christian background. So having a kind of like Christian identity, you know, the history of like oppression in the church and and all kinds of crazy stuff that goes on in the Christian context. You know, you're kind of like co-religionists with a lot of like stuff that you might not want to be quote unquote associated with.
00:30:07
Speaker
And I always felt like there is some kind of discomfort about like so somewhere in the realm of like discomfort with the beliefs that you're sharing with, uh, with people. Um, and actually, um,
00:30:20
Speaker
Helena Cruz of blessed memory um once had a blog post where she talked about having this feeling about Christianity ah that, you know, um a kind of unwelcome epistemic company feeling. So those would be kind of the two like personal life inspirations for being interested to the topic. And then it had an obvious connection to the problem of pure disagreement. It's sort of like the opposite or the inverse or however want to look at it.
00:30:45
Speaker
And Yeah, so that's how I got interested in it. And then to answer your final question about why it's neglected, I mean, I think the uphill battle for me is that the problem has such an obvious similarity to something everybody knows is a fallacy, which is like guilt by association, right? And so anybody who's, I mean, I guess that's not a common fallacy to to discuss necessarily, but, you know, in a basic informal logic class or critical thinking class, you might even have that as an example, a kind of like guilt by association, you know?
00:31:15
Speaker
And it's kind of a joke like, you know, that, you know, who also thought that Hitler, you know, that sort of thing. So and there's the meme, ah the the worst person, you know, just made a good point, you know. um So so anyway, that sort of cluster of things is why I'm interested in it and also kind of why i think it's a little bit of an uphill battle to defend it.
00:31:35
Speaker
Yeah, i remember. i mean, i think we both found this topic really interesting. But I mean, I've had several personal experiences with this kind of thing. I remember I was lecturer at a university many years ago. um and there was like some, you know, department event. People were just kind of like yakking about their political beliefs and i don't really have any, but I was like, oh, you know, I'm kind of like, you know, there's some parts of like communitarianism that I'm kind of drawn to And the person I was talking to was like, oh, wow, I just like associate that with, you know, with ah with like fascists. And I'm like, I was like, oh, yeah, okay. I feel you know like i could see i could see what she meant.
00:32:14
Speaker
um But, i right, so at first, i my first thought was like, oh, well, that's like an obvious fallacy. but then ah But I think reading your paper made me kind of, I think I would have been more inclined to just say that's an obvious fallacy. And now I think after reading your paper, I'm less inclined to just say that automatically.
00:32:30
Speaker
But in your paper, you distinguish four ways or four iterations in which this problem of unwelcome epistemic company arises. So, for instance, epistemic versus epistemic problems versus moral problems. can you Would you want to talk about that for us? like To what extent are these iterations of the problem related?
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, so i was when I was kind of you know trying to do like a taxonomy of of the problem or the parts of the problem, it seemed to me, and this is something where I could imagine people having very different ways of cutting things up, but that sort of divides into sort of epistemic and moral versions, meaning epistemic versions where the problem you have might might relate to the truth or rationality of your belief, and then the moral problems involve some sort of moral character flaw that you were you might have or this other kind of almost quasi political concern of like maybe there's some implications of your belief ah that you weren't thinking about. That's that explain why they appeal to such unseemly folks. um So the two epistemic problems were sort of most most simply the one I call falsity, which is the idea that you might just worry your belief is false. You find yourself in agreement with with a person or with people, a group of people or whatever, or you find that your belief is commonly shared by people who you regard as
00:33:51
Speaker
as often or frequently or maybe more often than not getting things wrong in the relevant domain. um You know, and that is squishy a little bit, how you define the relevant domain. But it would be like, you know, you have some belief about crime statistics or something. I have an example like this.
00:34:06
Speaker
And you find that that belief is shared by a group that you think is like systematically unreliable regarding that topic. Then the next one I call malfunction, but you could call it like irrationality or something, which is the idea that you find yourself in agreement with with folks who you think tend to reason in a fallacious or otherwise kind of faulty way. Some of the topics of your podcast may relate to this in some ways. You know, you find yourself agreeing with the conspiracy theorist, um...
00:34:36
Speaker
And I mean that term in its, ah you know, propagandistic sense, you know, obviously there are real conspiracies, but, you know, and you find yourself in agreement with, you know, the person who tends to have fringe positions, they overestimate skeptical arguments and they underestimate kind of mainstream arguments or whatever.
00:34:52
Speaker
And you worry that maybe I'm, uh, There's some flaw in my reasoning as well, which of course doesn't necessarily mean your belief is false, but you know we don't just want our beliefs to be true. We want them to be reasonable and well-grounded.
00:35:05
Speaker
Then the moral concerns I divide into what I call vice, which is the idea that you know you might worry that you have a similar, i use the kind of popular example of like some kind of bigotry. You might have deep down some kind of bigotry that leads to your belief like the unwelcome company that you're keeping.
00:35:23
Speaker
ah Which, again, doesn't necessarily mean your belief is false, but it's a legitimate thing to worry about in yourself. And then finally, the implication one, which is the one I hesitated the most on including in the paper.
00:35:34
Speaker
but that's the idea that, you know, you worry that maybe your belief or your, you know, the principle you endorse or whatever has some use or and or maybe implication or or application or something that appeals the the unwelcome ah folks that you find yourself in agreement with. And what that means for you is debatable. There is a view and in epistemology, as you guys know, called pragmatic encroachment, which tries to make a connection between the the the practical stakes of a of a belief and the amount of evidence you would need to justify it. So one
00:36:12
Speaker
option I consider in the paper is that if I discover that my belief, if true, would justify some political project that I find to be horrendous, if I'm an i impression a pragmatic encroachment person, I might think that, oh, the stakes of this belief are higher than I thought originally, so I actually don't have sufficient evidence for my belief relative to the stakes. um So happens that I'm not a pragmatic encroachment person, but, you know, but that I was making that connection to the paper.
00:36:37
Speaker
But you think the epistemic, the moral problems are related to some, sometimes at least. i So is the idea, is was one way they're related kind of like, this is what I was in and a paper that, you could The fact that you agree with, say, you know the white nationalist about a certain crime statistic could indicate have a moral vice, but that also could be an epistemic problem for you because maybe your belief is generated by the vice. And of course, racism is not ah a reliable belief-forming process. So is that is is that sort of your view about how they're related sometimes, or are there other ways? Yes. If if it turns out that your vice is connected to a vicious, as it were, reason like like your bigotry turns out to be a reason why you overestimate anecdotes or something or you you um unduly infer from anecdotes, you know, of a certain kind, then those be like related. You would face like both problems. Yeah. um
00:37:32
Speaker
But it is important, I think, to recognize that they come apart. So like I have an example in the paper of like, imagine you're a scholar in 1930s Germany and you have a colleague who is just has an exacting critical attention to Jewish to flaws in Jewish scholars works.
00:37:48
Speaker
and But what i imagine in the anecdote is imagine he he he gets it right. you know He's like really good. at But he has complete selective attention to those particular flaws. That's an example whereby – bye ordinary epistemic lights, there may be nothing false and nothing irrational in the epistemic sense about the judgments or even the reasoning, but it's the pattern of attention that is getting the person into trouble. And this, again, relates to some extent to people who focus a lot on conspiracies and the like, is that a certain pattern of attention can, you know, be a problem for you, even if you're within that pattern of attention, as it were, you know, crossing your T's and dotted your I's, epistemically speaking.
Self-Reflection through Unwelcome Company
00:38:34
Speaker
So this concern about unwelcome epistemic company, is it primarily, would you describe it more as an intrapersonal or an interpersonal concern? So basically, to what extent do you think that the charge is a legitimate dialectical move in a debate or is the primary concern more self-critical?
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah, this is an interesting question and not one that I think I sort of totally clearly was thinking about in writing the paper, but it does relate to something as I've thought about writing again about it and responding to this one paper um that critiques my paper.
00:39:08
Speaker
I'm thinking of it largely, I think, in a self-critical kind of way. there there And I might want to distinguish between, you know, when you make an accusation against somebody that is like accusing them of guilt by association or whatever, you know, that's where...
00:39:24
Speaker
it can start to sound fallacious or it may overlap with the official, you know, informal fallacy. But part of the overall context in which I'm thinking about this is again, like it's within social epistemology. It's the idea that our beliefs, our belief practices, our, you know, patterns of attention again, and all these things are very social. You know, we are affected by other people. We,
00:39:48
Speaker
And there's an extent to which other people can be mirrors of our own epistemic life. And that and I think, you know, I agree with many that, you know, we're not totally transparent to ourselves and so on. And so I am thinking of it as like an occasion for self-reflection.
00:40:04
Speaker
um And so instead of just saying... instead of just pointing out the logical consistency of the unwelcome company and your belief still being true, reasonable and so on. um It's like an occasion for self-reflection. You know, one kind of analogy I was thinking about that I haven't written is, you know, like the VAERS system for side effects for, you know, vaccines and other medications um or for for vaccines that big that everybody learned about during the pandemic.
00:40:31
Speaker
Well, the standard approach to VAERS, people make a lot out of it, of course, you know, but the standard approach is that it's a good hypothesis generation tool. So it's like you find there's, you know, ah ah a surprising number of side effects of a certain kind that is improved that that's an actual side effect of the vaccine, ah whatever vaccine you're looking at. But it's a good it's a good tool for like, you know what?
00:40:53
Speaker
I got to look into something. ah Why don't we look into that one? The one that has the side effect that has all these like effects. So I was thinking, we can't be evaluating our beliefs all the time in every way, right? We can't be like constantly self-governing, you know, in a kind of active sense epistemically.
00:41:09
Speaker
But for those beliefs ah where we find ourselves in unwelcome epistemic company, that may be a good tool for like, you know, that's a good place to look, you know? And so that's one way I was kind of thinking about it. But it's also like, it still is a very self-critical self-critical tool. Does that make sense?
00:41:28
Speaker
There's like a lot of moral issues that I think track this kind of, or like function this way. I mean, I was thinking about, you know, whenever I'm talking about generative AI use with someone, you know, move that people will, my brother does this all the time. He'll be like, well, I, you know, use it to,
00:41:46
Speaker
um You know, i just use it to get a recipe today or I just use it to, you know, and he'll like start listing all these things he uses it for. And each one individually seems like maybe benign or fine.
00:41:57
Speaker
But like this like larger phenomenon that arises from this is like this life full of constantly, you know, pinging this artificial agent for, you know, ease of accessing something. And you might think that it's this larger phenomenon that should be like questioned or, you know, looked at skeptically or,
00:42:14
Speaker
that kind of thing, rather than like the individual instances that that comprise it. Yeah, I like that analogy. Right. Interacting, using the creatures in Pluribus just once may not be a problem, but, yeah you know. Yeah.
00:42:29
Speaker
yeah Did we ask the big question? Yeah, it big question. So, yeah.
Open-Mindedness and Skewed Perspectives
00:42:33
Speaker
So do you think we on Velocity on the Fringes ah face something like this problem of unwelcome epistemic company? We ask this because for very pretty much every topic that we have tried to take seriously, there are cranks and hoaxers whose epistemic company might find unwelcome. So several topics on the podcast we are a little bit unsympathetic to. I think, you know, the Reiki, we didn't really give that too much sympathy. But some of them were a little more sympathetic, too. I think, you know, the aliens and all of that. i was very taken by, know, the Fermi paradox and all of Near-death experiences? Near-death experiences are kind of weird. If you really read the anecdotes of people who've had any experiences, they're kind of weird, right? And, the you know, the surgeons and doctors involved in those experiences, you know, they're at a loss to explain what went on in some of those cases. And we try not to approach the topic with our minds already made up. We we try to be, you know, not credulous, but also not overly cynical. So, yeah, we've wondered if, like, we face something like this problem because, know, you're going to find people who are wacky when it comes to pretty much all of these topics. And i I think our case is interesting, too, because it doesn't really intersect with a lot of the the morally valence topics. you know Whether you believe happens or not, it's not really like a moral issue or whatever. So really, all the cases, if they are cases of unwelcome epistemic company, they're like pretty much purely epistemic cases. Yeah.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yes, I want get any more thoughts about that, how you might how we might navigate this issue or think about it. In your next season, you're not going to have like Holocaust deniers on and stuff like that. No, no. But that finarily speaks to your point though. We wouldn't even want to take that seriously if we want to be an unlobbed and understand a company, right? Yeah. Yeah, so one thing, i I think in some ways this involves a sort of a extension of the problem because you're not necessarily coming to a belief in these cases. um The Fermi Paradox and Near-Death Experiences are really good ones. I think those are like, because those are sort of of fringe positions, quote unquote,
00:44:27
Speaker
they're kind of like more in the respectability in like the respectable camp because of like the sorts of people who, you know, they've like made an entry into the mainstream in various ways. The worry that I would have is that it actually relates something you said. You said i we would try to keep an open mind.
00:44:41
Speaker
And the worry I would have, which I don't think is necessarily original to me, ah you know, the conspiracy literature, or sorry, the conspiracy theory literature, It's something that interests me, though I've never actually written on it. But one thing that concerns me is that there's what I would call like an epistemic asymmetry between people who hold what's called the mainstream beliefs and people who hold, i'd like to call them like epistemic minority beliefs.
00:45:06
Speaker
And the asymmetry is that the people in the epistemic minority often have on paper far more information then the average person. person who's in the mainstream and they've thought several steps ahead, you know? So any question you're going to ask the advocates of NDEs, the near-death experience people, they've thought of that question, you know, and it's very few and far between the number of mainstream people who who devote like the amount of attention you have to devote to a topic to basically become an expert in it when it's like a fringe topic.
00:45:40
Speaker
And do you see this in like 9-11 conspiracy stuff, like the the collapse of the towers being like through controlled demolition. Certainly saw it in COVID. You know, i mean, the sheer amount of information that some of the non-mainstream people have and can throw at you and the number of steps in the argument ahead of you they are, you know, is something you could all you you like you can't match as a podcaster who's canvassing topic after topic and not really specializing in one. And so so, put that to one side, then back to your open mind thing, part of engaging a person in like a respectful way and like treating them as an epistemic person and, you know, and so on, uh, treating them as a person epistemically speaking is to have a kind of open mind. You're not like being a missionary to them or something like you're trying, you just have them on like the podcast. You can berate them or convert them or whatever.
00:46:31
Speaker
But part of being an open mind having an open mind is like taking seriously, treating as a live option that the stuff that the person is saying. And when they have such an advantage epistemically, I think that we should have enough epistemic humility to understand that we could be unduly influenced. Yeah.
00:46:51
Speaker
Unduly influenced, you know, not in the narrow sense of like you're going to make an obviously fallacious inference or something, but unduly influenced by something more like the pattern of attention and then also just the epistemic appearance of an overwhelming case when nobody has even made the opposite case, you know.
00:47:14
Speaker
Not to introduce too many novel metaphors, but I... ah Another thing I've thought about and haven't written about is like the ethos behind like due process and like the concept that both the innocent and the guilty should have equally strong like positions or defenses rather.
00:47:31
Speaker
i think there's something like this that's true in epistemology as well. Like you you want there to be like the strongest case for each position and then to kind of make a judgment based on that. And when it comes to these fringe positions, the amount of people providing the strongest case on the mainstream side is are very sparse.
00:47:48
Speaker
So so that's kind of how I feel about it. You know, on the other hand, I am someone who likes to like read about these things and stuff. And, you know, so, yeah, but that it's a concern. I wouldn't say it's like, a you know,
00:48:01
Speaker
I'm not condemning your podcast, but it's ah it is a
Intellectual Vices and Desires
00:48:04
Speaker
concern. And I will say, if you avoid the morally salient ones, you know, I'm also a fan of like moral overriding this theses. It's not as bad to get into a little wacky epistemic territory if you're not getting into bad moral territory, you know.
00:48:17
Speaker
But one thing I your your paper inspired me to think about ah with respect to the vice issue is that maybe, you know, maybe we are the fact that we're interested in some of these shows some kind of epistemic or intellectual vices. So I don't think I kind of up too much in your paper. but Maybe, you know, that this. oh right. what but You know, I've actually desired for like the world to be enchanted or something like that. Right. Well, it's or it's like, um you know, sometimes they can correspond, you know, like ah take um ah what's the phrase? It's a New Testament phrase, ah but it's about gossip. It's like the the tickling of the ears or something. It's like the ah there's a phrase that's like, you know, people who want it. You you enjoy hearing gossip, right? that That's both intellectual because you're getting information. It's like, you know, you're learning things, but ad it's obviously kind of vicious. So like, yeah, the.
00:49:01
Speaker
The vicious in the in the moral sense. And so, ah yes, so there would be that kind of concern, like overly overly into the occult or the um paranormal stuff or whatever, you know, could kind of bleed into that territory, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I mean, i this is just so interesting to me. the The kind of like overwhelming case on the pro side that you were talking about. i mean, that it with the 9-11 conspiracy theories, I remember long ago talking to someone who was like, obviously spouting all this stuff that he heard probably from YouTube video on, you know, like steel beams and stuff.
00:49:40
Speaker
And like, I'm not a chemist. No, the slow jet fuel can't melt steel. That's the same. chemist so who knows but uh i i guess if you didn't know anything like so so you know about like society or whatever and you just saw this debate like completely removed from context you might be like oh this person obviously has a stronger case um right so i yeah i guess that is pretty compelling to me i don't know of this we do manage to find quite a bit of like really skeptical stuff to read about most of these topics yeah
00:50:12
Speaker
But but I do think that that's right that that is that that's a danger. And probably i would at least hope for our sake if we ever ran into that situation where they're like, was only any kind of attention paid on like the pro side, that we would just maybe not do an episode only.
00:50:28
Speaker
I don't know. Yeah. Well, it it yes. no you can rely on, you know, especially in the era of the Internet, finding like debunkers and people like that who have who are also weird, but they're like weird on the other side. So they devoted this attention to it. It's just that for yourself to be able to, in your own terms, challenge the views. It's like you're always going to be at a disadvantage. You know, it's a bit like it's a bit like just the ordinary relationship to an expert and a layperson. Yeah. Except here it's like autodidact, you know, at a layperson, and there's just that, like, asymmetry without yourself becoming—so you can, like, you can parrot the debunkers you've read and throw that at the person. You know, they're likely familiar with that stuff, you know, but, ah but yeah, so— you know It reminds me a little bit of the theory that comes out of feminism and philosophy of race, the idea that people in oppressed groups will have better knowledge, both of their own you know practices and lives and world and the oppressors' you know knowledge and world, and it won't work in the other way around. I think this is kind of like that for epistemic minorities, that like...
00:51:33
Speaker
You know, if you're a young earth creationist or you're a nine eleven conspiracy theorist or whatever, you're surrounded by the mainstream view. So you're very familiar with that. But most people in the mainstream view are not going to be super familiar with the with the fringe view. They're just going to dismiss it on the basis of authority or whatever. So anyway.
00:51:50
Speaker
Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's and i i think that's a great point. Yeah. um This has been a really great conversation. i really feel less sure of, of ah I really feel less sure that we're not cranks than I did when we started the interview, but I take that to
Conclusion and Gratitude
00:52:07
Speaker
be a good thing, right? yeah You want to be challenged.
00:52:09
Speaker
So, so to me, that's exciting. But I want to thank Dr. Joshua Blanchard for coming on the podcast for being our first guest. I hope that this was a good experience for you.
00:52:20
Speaker
And we, we really had a good time. And, um, Look forward to seeing more work on this topic. Absolutely. Please keep writing about it. Yeah. Thank you very much. That's ah that's good encouragement. We had a really good time with that interview, and I think we were able to have a lot of good back and forth with Dr. Blanchard during the interview when we were taping it. But Frank, do you have any more thoughts on it right now? Yeah, I wanted to ask him a little bit more about you know objections to his views or biggest challenges to his view. We kind of talked about this off the record a bit. He has gotten a lot of responses to his paper. Yeah, yeah and he's still thinking about wrote this like five years ago, and he's thinking about and making a response to a response paper. But yeah, when when I was reading Blanchard's paper, I did think of some kind of worries I had, or at least ways which he might be misinterpreted. Like, as I said in the interview, I don't think he supports, like, you know, further polarizing yourself, right? Not listening to other people and just sort of retrenching in your own worldview and ignoring evidence that might contravene it. But that's kind of the worry that you might have if you take the problem of unwelcome epistemic company too seriously. ah You're not even going to listen to the the reports of the near-death experience people because you have your worldview where you can just you know easily apply that to to the case. right So yeah, it it does the worry the worry does seem to me that you you might prevent yourself from learning new things because you're so worried about who those things are associated with, and which ultimately I think for many people,
00:53:49
Speaker
ends up being a kind of just tribalism. They just don't want to, you know, they don't want to be associated with those folks. But, you know, you shouldn't care too much about that if the goal is to get to the truth. Yeah. And I mean, we also know just like psychologically that a lot of tribalism comes from, you know, maybe like less than epistemically relevant factors like class divisions. Yeah. yeah Stuff like that. So as we said as I said in the interview, I i know he doesn't support that kind of thing. Right. Right. But that that's the worry you might have and the way some people take it. On the record, Joshua Blanchard is against polarization. Yeah. yeah He wants unity among all. I'm sure. I don't know if that's true, but I'm i'm sure that is. He seems like a pro. He seems like he would. yeah. Yeah. Yeah. actually tend to like when I ah find myself agreeing about something independently with you know my political rivals, for instance. i'm like, oh, yeah, now we're getting closer to unity among all. ah you know it's of it's almost like a a religious sentiment. Like, oh, yeah, we can agree on something now. I've definitely seen stuff like, okay, so here's a good example. So recently, I guess in like the last year or so, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to be, I guess, like on the very, very, very far right, right, of the political spectrum, has been like, some of her views on a lot of things have been changing to be much more in line with like the political left.
00:55:09
Speaker
And I've definitely seen sentiments of like... Like people having like conflicted feelings about this. Right. Yeah. like Oh, I never thought I'd be retweeting Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's kind of like ha ha. But it's also kind of like, hmm. Yeah.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah. So they they must they feel this problem. then Right. Yeah, I think it's really easy to feel like the emotional aspect of this problem, even though it's like really hard to get a grip on if there's anything there. Yeah, and and Blanchard tries to say, no, this is not just like an emotional thing. It's not just a fallacy. right there's There are reasons, like good and epistemic reasons, good moral reasons to care about it. yeah yeah another Another kind of worry I have is just it just seems too easy to find. you know like We're all in unwelcome epistemic company with each other. yeah i just think it's just it's everywhere. If you think too hard about it, you could find some reason why you'd find this person's company to unwelcome. And it's just so easy to find that maybe it's not worth worrying too much about. Yeah, yeah. yeah
00:56:08
Speaker
but But yeah, it does it does it should give you pause. I think that's ultimately what he wants to say. that it it's not he doesn't think you should... isn't that you should like necessarily change your mind just because you find yourself agreeing with someone who's different from you. But it should make you re rethink it or double check it. and that's yeah nothing objectionable about that. Sure. I'm on board with that for sure. So the ultimately ultimate question, a I mean, what do you do you think we're cranks?
00:56:36
Speaker
Well, I think you are, but I'm not. I knew he was going to say that. We did not plan this out, but I knew he was going to say that. um You know, i appreciate that he wasn't just like, oh, no, you guys...
00:56:49
Speaker
But you guys have gotten to enough like, you know, Twitter. yeah Jests. and Yeah. Banter is that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He had he could have he could have even, you know, leaned into it a little bit more. um But I do think he's right that like there's definitely the potential to, you know, just only happen across like sensationalist kind of things. literature on some of these topics or um have the evidence, like he said, the evidence be like one-sided. yeah yeah ah Just because there's maybe a dearth of evidence on one side that's out there and that that could be epistemically risky. Yeah. And I appreciate that point. And I think i think that is something that we do try to pay attention to quite a lot in the show, but it's always a good reminder that, you know, you can't just like, I don't know, like we're not just like, you know, X-Files-ing this. I think in our deciding what topics to do, we do take into account something like the problem. bla Yeah. I mean, we're not doing an episode on like lizard people or something. Right. Yeah. So we're super out of time. Hopefully it was an interesting episode. We had a good time thinking about just this project of ours and what it's done so far and what it's doing and what we want it to continue to do And hopefully you guys enjoyed it. um Definitely go read. Dr. Blanchard's paper if this is something you're interested in we're going to link it in the description and it's a really nice easy quick read um so and it's such a a novel it's a good paper because it's just like here's a new problem like yeah it doesn't like you know try to situate it in the literature and like here's ah here's Jones's response to Smith and it's just like here's a new here's a problem yeah and and like that yeah that's cool yeah yeah it's really refreshing
00:58:32
Speaker
Yeah, agreed. So definitely check that out. And we will be back next month with a cool topic and hopefully another guest.