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A Decoding the Gurus Christmas Carol (Patreon)

Published:
2020-12-24 03:26:19
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Hey everyone,

Since it's the end of 2020 we thought we would sit down an have a chat about the past, present, and future of Decoding The Gurus.

As it is a video and we have no ability (or desire) to edit there is also some 'fascinating' extended discussions about Japanese vending machine coffee, my unstable wifi, and bad psychology papers. These are the deep insights you miss with the edited episodes.

Any feedback on potential Gurumetric measures or any other topics is welcome!

Hope you all have a good Christmas break!

-Chris 

Files

Previews only

A Decoding the Gurus Christmas Carol

Matt and Chris discuss the past, present, and future of Decoding the Gurus in their usual concise manner. This means you will also learn more than you ever wanted to about Japanese vending machines, Gurometrics, and data dredging!

Comments

Julie

We’ve had hot drink vending machines for many years in Canada. However, they never ever improve them so they are basically shite

Daniel Thompson

It says the video is Private Brochachoes.

Liam Kofi Bright

wtf how is Matt such a fucking silver fox!? wtfffffff

Gretchen Koch

Matt suggests at one point that Trump is basically the archetypal guru in the sense of embodying the traits of the gurus discussed on the podcast. Before Trump was elected, the primary thing Trump supporters said was that they appreciated how he speaks for them. They found him relatable and would go so far as to say "He says what I'm thinking." After the election, we've seen a surge of racists, Islamophobes, misogynists, etc. basically out themselves, and in many cases they've experienced blowback for it. Some of them have been "canceled" in one way or another, such as James Damore getting fired from Google. It seems clear that they expected no negative consequences for it, because hey, Trump got elected president for voicing such sentiments. And not just that, but Trump got elected president while promoting conspiracy theories (he was one of the original Birthers, for example), and then surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists in positions of power after attaining office. Steve Bannon and Michael Flynn come to mind most obviously. It's no accident or real surprise that we saw a flourishing of gurus on the internet at this time, promoting conspiracy theories across the board. Discarding expertise and reality itself as "fake news" became an acceptable practice, and not just acceptable but marketable. It's also no surprise, I think, that many of these people decry the so-called postmodern left while simultaneously, in the next breath, promoting their own relativistic "trust nothing except what what I'm saying right now, and pay no attention to how what I say next week might openly contradict that" kind of outlook.

Gretchen Koch
>>50104443

Err, I didn't mean to imply that bigots and conspiracy theorists across the board consciously thought "Trump got elected on this stuff, therefore it's great for me to spread it." Rather, I think they consciously or unconsciously recognized a change in the cultural atmosphere such that it enabled them to spread it to a more willing and larger audience than they would've had before. (Also, editing comments on Patreon sucks royally.)

Evan

Happy holidays to you guys. I’m looking forward to the development of your new Guruhood construct, and all of the rigorous factor analysis that’s sure to go into it. Also I thought of correlating eventual gurumetric scores to YouTube play counts to investigate possible guru-susceptibility as another target construct. Look to the Beyond Yacht Rock podcast for an example of some funny dudes who coined a new term and discovered a previously unacknowledged musical genre for encouragement.

Decoding The Gurus
>>50114604

Hey it’s probably as, or more, valid as grit 😉. But I’m genuinely enthused about the possibilities here. There is plenty of work to be done on Gurometrics! - Chris

Decoding The Gurus
>>50104443

Agree on the dynamics you identify and the suckiness of Patreon’s comment software. It doesn’t even let you reply past one embed!

Gretchen Koch

Oh, also-- I would be very interested in episodes on Stefan Molyneux and Gad Saad. Saad because I don't actually know much about him, except that in early 2017 (maybe) he did an interview with Daniel Dennett to get Dennett to basically elaborate on every possible way in which postmodernism is not just wrong but a threat to humanity. Molyneux because he seems to be an actual, bona fide cult leader, and before he got booted off Twitter he went on extended rants about how young women must find a good man and marry him to pop out as many babies as possible while they're still fertile and forget about all of that career stuff because otherwise they'll end up old and alone and no one will want them. I did a cartoon about it: https://giantif.com/comic/not-buying-it/

Decoding The Gurus

Yes, the only thing stopping us from doing Molyneaux right now is that it's going to be so depressing, like Scott Adams.

Quintus Masius

Yeah, I think you need a formula to make it fun for yourself. As a listener I have had a good laugh with the Scott Adams episode. I am always interested in other IDW-members except Dave Rubin. And controversial left-leaning figures such as Zizek, Jimmy Dore, Sam Seder. And people like Timothy Ferriss (4 hour workweek), Wim Hoff (the Ice-man), Tony Robbins, Paul Stamets who often make such exaggerate claims that they either create die-hard followers or opponents.

Tom Allison

No idea if you are flagged to comments on old content or this is just a message in a bottle, but I just wanted to say: this is really great. I wish there were a good way to put this in front of new patrons as orientation. Having found you guys a couple of months ago, listened to most of the catalog and now joined your Patreon site, I found this a really terrific listen (sooo glad you just started publishing audio files, by the way, as I fight to keep my phone from sleeping and cutting the vid off ;)). I think this will even bear re-listening and maybe further engagement/comments as there is really just a ton of “project framing” content here. Nice job. Thanks for sharing.

Tom Allison

This is a total detour of a topic, but you got to talking about the problems of accurately assessing quantitative data (just super fascinating to me that this can be the sort of problem it evidently is at high levels within the academy - I come from a slightly more hard science background and would just think this would be such an obvious and damning critique - though Daniel Kahneman also describes a number of inner sanctum/super genius examples of unconscious biases/mistakes in analyzing data, so I suppose it shouldn’t be such a surprise…) but you went on to briefly discuss qualitative data and how to report/handle it well - I’d really love to read/understand more on this topic as the business world is likely even worse than the social sciences when it comes to spuriously drawing conclusions from data - and also much prefers pseudo-quantitative to qualitative data. Any pointers to add to my reading list where this subject (esp. re: qual data) is well covered in your opinions?

Tom Allison
>>69956968

Um, I see you do read this far back ;) -- so, permit me to shorten the above considerably: when you say that (paraphrasing) "qualitative data is valid but should still be reported with quantitative characteristics" my ears perked up. I would very much like to find a discussion of how qualitative data is valid and how it is best reported. That's it...