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Witches & Space Travel: There is a Reason We Have Prohibitions Against Witchcraft
Malcolm and Simone explain how and why mysticism and witchcraft corrupt rational thinking, even though they can emotionally comfort people lacking perceived control. Practices like horoscopes hijack brains by providing alternate physical "truths" without logic or evidence. This is fine on Earth but would endanger space exploration, where physics understanding is essential. Allowing some controlled traditional mysticism can act as an "idiot trap" though, concentrating dangers.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] well, I mean, did I, did I tell you that when I was in high school, I was the anonymous horoscopes writer for my school's newspaper.
Malcolm Collins: No,
Simone Collins: people loved it.
Malcolm Collins: So why is mysticism so dangerous if you want to become a space fearing civilization? It is because
all mystical frameworks are fundamentally Alternate hypotheses without evidence or predictive capacity for how physics works. They are mundane in our world today, outside of how they affect a person's ability to think clearly,
they are not mundane if they are allowed to spread. on a spaceship where you need a life support system and you can immediately disintegrate if somebody's like, well, radiation has healing properties, or somebody's like, Oh, I don't believe that this is how our warp drive should work.
And in those capacities, it's literally life or death to not allow these heretical beliefs to spread
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: You look like a newscaster, and I look like some kind of [00:01:00] witch from the, like, Middle Ages.
Malcolm Collins: I thought I'd mix it up a lot. People are really surprised by our logo. Like, they think this is a new thing for us. I've had this for half a decade at this point. Maybe Almost, no, not a full decade, but yeah, we've been using it as our family logo for a long time.
Well,
Simone Collins: it's the logo of, no, our family logo is our monogram. This is the logo of the Pragmatist Foundation. Put that up. The Pragmatist Foundation has been around since 2016. And the gear has been a main part of that. And the Pragmatist Foundation is what technically owns and operates. This podcast. So,
Malcolm Collins: yeah, well, and the, the, the baby when we had Octavian, our first kid, his blankie has the pragmatist foundation logo on it.
And all of our books had the pragmatist foundation logo on it. And somebody was like, well, why this number of teeth in it? And the answer was. Actually it's a, it's a superimposed, you can think of it as a superimposed Latin cross and St. Andrew's cross. Is why it has this number of teeth in it for the, the religious element.
But also, you [00:02:00] know, we, we go over in the, the, the piece I posted a text as to why we decided to do the logo change. We'd been meaning to for ages. Might do a dedicated episode about it, actually. That would be interesting as to why we chose the gear as our logo here. But recently something happened.
So, Simone went to accept the Republican Party's sort of nomination, not nomination, but endorsement of her candidacy for the state house.
Simone Collins: From the Republican committee of our county in Pennsylvania.
Malcolm Collins: You said this is the first time in my entire life, you're like I'm here, 30 what years old and for the.
First time in my life I experienced real gender discrimination. It was amazing. I've never experienced it before. The That's possible thing. Yeah. So, so I, as we were walking around she was obviously the candidate, you know, she was on stage as a candidate and everything like that. But for whatever reason, there was a specific category of idiot.
Who had a lot of advice to give about [00:03:00] running
Published on 1 year, 10 months ago