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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 20, 2025

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As soon as offputting woke types stopped going on live TV debates against him, the guy pretty much ran out of anything interesting or new to say. You can talk about bible metaphors on Joe Rogan only so many times. Also didn’t the guy go insane at some point?

The TV debates are what's really boring. His interesting discussion is in psychology. What I find most fascinating are his ideas of human perception, like such relating to the orienting reflex with error detection and novelty in the environment; how our value judgements shape our cognition not only in the decision making domain but in the very way that we perceive the world; and him likening such to modern AI where bottom-up approaches have triumphed over top-down manual programming of structure into ANNs because of the frame problem and such, where AI can't even see the toy environment without integrating an unexpectedly massive amount of information. I also find his ideas about the useful information narratives and archetypes to be interesting and gets me thinking about why humans find stories so entertaining in the first place.

As for going insane, that just sounds like more gossip by detractors. He did have his run-in with benzos, which seems more like an error with the medical establishment not properly advertising the risk of physical dependency that prescription use can induce. Then he tried to detox by putting himself into a coma in Russia which was also a pretty big error, and he seemed cognitively devastated for a little while, but his slump was nothing I'd say resembled insanity.