Tuesday, May 03, 2022

How We Learned, Then Forgot, About Human Intelligence... And Witnessing the Live Breakdown of Academia (podcast interview with Cactus Chu)

This is a long interview I did recently with Cactus Chu, a math prodigy turned political theorist and podcaster. (Unfortunately I can't embed the podcast here.)


Timestamps: 
3:24 Interview Starts  
15:49 Cactus' Experience with High Math People 
19:49 High School Sports 
21:26 Comparison to Intelligence 
26:29 Is Lack of Understanding due to Denial or Ignorance? 
29:29 The Past and Present of Selection in Academia 
37:02 How Universities Look from the Inside 
44:19 Informal Networks Replacing Credentials 
48:37 Capture of Research Positions 
50:24 Progressivism as Demagoguery Against the Self-Made 
55:31 Innumeracy is Common 
1:06:53 Understanding Innumerate People 
1:13:53 Skill Alignment at Cactus' High School 
1:18:12 Free Speech in Academia 
1:21:00 You Shouldn't Fire Exceptional People 
1:23:03 The Anti-Excellence Progressives 
1:28:42 Rawls, Nozick, and Technology 
1:34:00 Freedom = Variance = Inequality 
1:37:58 Dating Apps 
1:41:27 Jumping Into Social Problems From a Technical Background 
1:41:50 Steve's High School Pranks 
1:46:43 996 and Cactus' High School 
1:50:26 The Vietnam War and Social Change 
1:53:07 Are Podcasts the Future? 
1:59:37 The Power of New Things 
2:02:56 The Birth of Twitter 
2:07:27 Selection Creates Quality 
2:10:21 Incentives of University Departments 
2:16:29 Woke Bureaucrats 
2:27:59 Building a New University 
2:30:42 What needs more order? 
2:31:56 What needs more chaos?

An automated (i.e., imperfect) transcript of our discussion.

Here's an excerpt from the podcast:

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