Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this episode, Nate is joined by John Cook, a researcher who has spent nearly two decades studying science communication and the psychology of misinformation. John shares his journey from creating the education website Skeptical Science in 2007 to his shocking discovery that his well-intentioned debunking efforts might have been counterproductive.
To live outside of one’s ecological context—and in fact where no ecology of any relevance exists—would require somehow creating a suitable ecology, or borrowing a sufficiently-complete subset of an existing one that can tolerate a completely novel setting for which the beings are not adapted.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate looks at how aggregate human behavior changes as groups scale from small tribes to large and complex societies. He uses the framing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde throughout the episode to illustrate how traits that once helped small groups survive can serve to destabilize complex societies when expanded globally.
An attack on Iran appears imminent. Here’s why I think it’s unlikely that we’ll see President Trump “TACO” this time.
Building an inclusionary common sense will take an understanding of the relationship between our social history, our experience of inclusionary social policies, and the opposing psychosocial dynamic that promotes a readiness to scuttle the gains those policies produced through a belonging based on fear and threat.
What forms of ecological knowledge have we ignored because they emerged from survival rather than privilege—and what would it require to center them now?
One thing is clear—when politicians invoke the phrase “national security,” they are never talking about security for the people who live in this country.
But if form is all there is, there is never justification for ever harming another body. And that is the light that will lead us out of this rotten, brain-damaged culture…Into a life of joyful hedonism…
The point is not to advocate a sudden new language, but to become more aware of the dualistic impositions deeply woven and perpetuated into modern life, through language. The point is to recognize the prison bars and the constant brainwashing rhetoric issuing from the speakers in the asylum of modernity… and to dislike the situation.
This week’s Frankly marks a new recurring segment on this platform where Nate poses questions about our shared future: Uncomfortable Questions in Unstable Times. In this edition, he explores what would change if societies shifted their primary goal from growth to stability.
We don’t really see the violence that historically underlay and still underlies the globalised ‘free’ trade that defines the modern world because a lot of effort has gone into forgetting it. Better, I’d argue, to embrace the role of the settled local farmer-householder (which in fact many of the Vikings were too) who knows how to produce their own livelihood from the land.
Currently, global breakdown is being accelerated primarily by an ongoing and worsening political calamity in the United States. In this article, we’ll go to the frontlines of conflict in Minneapolis to see how people are responding to a violent—even deadly—government-imposed crisis.
