In this episode, I talk about my background in studying irrationality, the parasitic mind, and suicidal empathy, and how they are related to political correctness. I also talk a bit about my new book, "Suicidal Empathy: How to Kill Your Emotions" and how you can do the same.
00:00:00.000Guys, so I'm currently at the Old Miss, so I'm no longer in Canada, I'm a political refugee from Canada.
00:00:10.160So first I wanted to say that it's great to be at the University of Chicago because I'm reading right now a book by a biography on Thomas Sowell.
00:00:20.720Of course Thomas Sowell was at the University of Chicago, so it's wonderful, it's serendipitous that both these things would be happening.
00:00:27.120So I want to give you a bit of a background to how I got into studying rationality, and then parasitic mind, and then suicidal empathy.
00:00:36.360My doctoral training is actually in studying axiomatic rationality, a la Kahneman and Tenerife, for those of you who, and as a matter of fact, one of my former professors at Cornell, who then won the Nobel Prize in 2017, was Dick Taylor, with whom I studied all of this stuff.
00:00:55.920So axiomatic rationality would be, if I prefer card A to card B, and I prefer card B to card C, it has to be that I prefer card A to card C.
00:01:04.120If I don't do that, I'm being intransitive, therefore I'm being irrational.
00:01:07.780Or, if I tell you that a hamburger is 90% fat-free or 10% fat, they are isomorphic statements, and yet people will judge them as being different.
00:01:18.640And the third example, if I ask you to evaluate options A and B separately or together, it should still yield the same preference.
00:01:29.100So if I prefer A in one version, I should prefer A in the other, and yet people have reversal of choices.
00:01:35.820And so my original training was in studying rationality within this very restrained sense of rationality, axiomatic rationality.
00:01:44.240But then how do you explain the irrationality of saying that women too, and men too can menstruate, men can bear children, mathematics is white supremacy?
00:01:59.660There must be something else that leads otherwise reasonable people to have such insane beliefs.
00:02:05.840And so this led, I want to give you sort of a background first, like a 30,000 page view, this led to two books.
00:02:13.440This is not the actual book cover of Suicidal Empathy, but I like it because hashtag sheep for wolves, hashtag queers for Palestine, hashtag geese for foie gras, right?
00:02:25.640And so the reason why these two books go well together is because this book, the yellow one, speaks to what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized, whereas the follow-up looks at what happens to our emotional system when it is parasitized.
00:02:44.240For me to be able to completely hijack your ability to reason, I need to both parasitize your cognitive and emotional system, and then I've got you.