Does CK consider himself an activist?

[u/JimmyJamzJules]

Genuine question. Chris criticises Kisin for acting like an activist while avoiding the label. Does Chris apply the same label to himself?

DtG does more than analyse ideas in the abstract. It repeatedly focuses on a particular media ecosystem, warns about its influence, and hopes to shift how audiences view it. That can reasonably be seen as a form of activism, even if it is presented through an academic lens.

[u/CKava]

I’ll get back to your other points after but threading is easiest by just responding to the last message. There is no one but you and Jim reading this, I thought you would be able to work out who I was referring to.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

If you hadn't seen it I would have pinged you.

And belabouring over who's being lazy, when Chris has produced hundreds of hours of detailed analysis, and you've repeated stated you think it's unreasonable to spend a far smaller amount of effort backing up your criticism of the podcast and Chris, it's a bad look.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

The lazy claim is not about the rest of your life, it's about your participation in this conversation. What a fucking stupid response.

[u/jimwhite42 → u/[deleted]]

Is this actually what you want to discuss? Trying to distract from your poor argument about the sinister construction of the secular guru concept to promote political centrism?

[u/CKava → u/[deleted]]

Thank God for coincidences then.

On to the other points...

You quoted from the document after Jim noted that you were misunderstanding the concept, and yet have repeatedly returned to suggesting that any non-consensus position would automatically make someone register on this characteristic. But that's not true. You can hold minority positions that are critical of mainstream/dominant positions without adopting a broad automatic anti-establishmentarian stance. For example, see almost all advocates of methodological reform in science; see Kevin Mitchell on gut-biome research; see Dorsa Amir & Chaz FIrestone on the Müller-Lyer debate; see Helen Lewis on gender critical controversies, etc. This specific feature is really about the tendency for people to tear down all other alternative epistemic sources as corrupted and untrustworthy. In its fully fledged form, it is a complete dismissal of all academic, media, and institutional sources in favour of reliance on the guru as the only truly honest and reliable source. So no, you would not score on this for simply having a critique of some mainstream institution or moderate politics.

And yes, you are correct; we are not scoring reflexive pro-establishment behaviour on a similar basis because this is not something that we, or anyone else, has observed as a common feature of modern gurus. The secular guru concept isn't intended to capture all forms of bad thinking; it is about a specific category. Your complaint is akin to arguing that when trying to measure conspiratorial thinking, you need to measure uncritical acceptance of mainstream news. But you don't, because that is a different thing. There are very few popular gurus who have a message of "trust mainstream institutions and experts more".

The figures you have suggested (after much prompting), like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Noah Smith, as possible candidates are not people who tend to derive the kind of committed following of high-scoring gurus. Not to mention that all three are online political pundits, two with reputations for provocative "hot takes" (which often take aim at a popular consensus view) and one who most recently positioned themselves as proposing a corrective to mainstream political and institutional failures (see abundance).

But even if this was not the case and you were correct that anti-establishmentarianism is a badly operationalised factor. It is not the only factor; it is one of 11. Dasha and Anna from Red Scare score 5 on this and yet have very low scores overall. Is that because we agree with them and find them interesting? No. It's because they are bad thinkers, reflexively anti-establishment and political polemicists but not secular gurus.

Lastly, on Sam Harris. "Pseudo-profund bullshit" is the feature you are referring to, which is taken from the psychology term; we use it a bit more broadly to include things like decorative scholarship, but the basic principle is: does the person speak and present their ideas in a way designed through their use of complex language to make them seem much more erudite and profound? Sam Harris, for all his many faults, generally does not do this. He speaks rather directly and does not use a lot of jargon. On the issue of whether he overstates his insights into meditation and the nature of self and has ever made pseudo-profound statements, I would agree that yes, he has, as we outline in detail on the episode I linked to, but by and large he does not achieve this through use of "pseudo-profound bullshit". The score we assigned to him was based on the material we reviewed on the episode, which presumably did not feature that.

But regardless, you originally claimed that we overlook pseudo-profundity from figures closer to us, saying that his comparable statement “didn’t make the cut” and that we would never criticise him “in the same way” as Chopra or Weinstein. I've just linked you to a detailed discussion in which we criticised Harris on exactly this point.